"I reserve the right to play whatever I choose"

Moi aussi (no I'm not saying I'm antipodean). We can play this for fun in various ways, or contrariwise in some other way: if you want to talk abour science, fine, we'll talk about science. If you want to play word games, I like them too. But a self- proclaimed literary man, active in the 1950s, who doesn't know (and hasn't read) The Two Cultures? Tirez l'autre jambe as on probably doesn't dit en France. And the "authority" for "patronising" you? You ain't the bloomin' Queen Mother.

You say common sense is offended by the various interpretations of quantum effects. Not the first time science has overthrown common sense. Until the 16th century, it was obvious that the sun, moon, stars and planets went round the world. Just little niggling faults in the description, like Mars going backwards, eventually made that simple idea untenable. Just as little niggles, like black body radiation, falsified Newtonian physics, or rather "relegated" it to an incomplete description of the way things are*. And in sorting those little inconsistencies out, this whole thing about quantum indeterminacy came about (a bit like Kepler being forced, against his own will and everyone else's, into making orbits elliptical instead of circular). It's there; it's undeniable. What it means is another matter. Hawkings and the rest work on the assumption that there's SOMETHING out there (otherwise they wouldn't bother being scientists), but whatever they say about it, it has to fit the facts (the well- attested maths of quantum science). Both the Copenhagen interpretation and MWI fit the facts, and there are several other less fashionable metaphors that also fit. None of them are comfortable to common sense.

Though some a little more than others: someone said up there that he didn't notice the Universe doubling in mass every time a decision is made. Quite right, each multiple Universe is a completely different one with its own mass. We could discuss how we happened to end up in this... this.... this one (they must split at an alarming rate, and the set of them must make Borges' Library of Babel look like a bookshelf). Other pictures don't require such fecundity. The pilot wave idea starts from the observation that photons move at the speed of light, so they don't experience time. Hence they have "all the time in the world" to explore the possible paths, through, say, a pair of slits, and find that two have equally minimal action (the shortest physical route), so take both- and interfere with themselves (ooer missus).

As I said before, I can't say if it fits the facts, because my maths isn't up to it, but it sounds a bit less frightening than an infinity of Universes, and a bit less solipsistic than Copenhagen.

*It's still the most useful way to do sums about 99.999% of physical effects as experienced by humans.