Occam’s razor is to not multiply causes unnecessarily by preferring the simpler theory. A century ago, Bertrand Russell argued that life isn’t virtual by appealing to common sense and Occam’s razor:
“There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us. But although this is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us, whose action on us causes our sensations.” (Russell, 1912).
Does the same logic still apply today? It is still common sense that there is something out there apart from us, but that virtual particles pop out of nowhere to cause effects as physics claims isn’t common-sense at all, nor is it common sense that our universe came from a point of nothing. Today common-sense tells us that life isn’t a dream but could still be virtual if our universe began because it booted up.
In Russell’s time, there were few particles with mass, charge, and spin, but now forty-eight particles with twenty-four properties, five invisible fields, and fourteen virtual bosons, are needed just to explain the basics. To explain inflation, neutrinos, or dark matter, needs even more fields, particles, and parameters. And our best universal theory, string theory, needs eleven dimensions to work.
It’s hard to imagine anything more complex than physics today, so if it is preferred, it isn’t due to simplicity! In contrast, the following chapters explain the same facts using one fundamental process, one extra dimension, and one quantum field. Last century, physical realism was a simple theory but not today. Fast forward a hundred years and quantum realism is the simpler theory, so now Occam’s razor cuts the other way.