When you publish physics papers with quantum in the title, you get e-mail. Sometimes it’s from people who want to share their radical new theory of dark matter, consciousness and psychoflexitive powers. Other times, it’s from Nature, asking you to do their survey about the “interpretation” of quantum mechanics. Gentle Reader, I did their survey, and I have thoughts. In fact, I wrote in a freeform answer to say that their questions were badly designed, and I would be telling anyone who asked that the survey results should not be trusted.

I’ve heard on the grapevine that Nature consulted “experts” while making up their questions. I don’t know who these “experts” were, but I would be unsurprised if they are better at being loud than at being thoughtful, and more interested in imposing their own ideas of what counts as “respectable” than at actually paying attention to what people have written.

I figured I’d get a blog post up about this, so that I can point people to it and then not have to say anything else. And, in the interests of fairness, I’m posting this before the results are public, so that I will be telling people the survey is unsound even if positions I’d agree with turn out apparently popular.

Right away, we dive in with a first question about what the respondent’s preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics is. And right away, we have a problem.
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