David Wallace

speaker

1,940 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard 20 Jul

David Wallace’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Emily Adlam & David Wallace: The Quantum Interpretation That Divides Physicists · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

I think it's much more likely we'll learn something about epistemology from resolving that than learn something about physics.

It's the representational tool in quantum mechanics that encodes the physical features systems have.

So there's a take on the wave function that just says it's epistemic, but the take I want to say is it's not a thing in itself, that's a category error, but it encodes the properties things have and the relations they stand in.

And for a given system, the wave function of that system just encodes all the properties that system has.

So there's a bunch of things mixed together there.

And I should say, incidentally, just to clarify where I'm coming from, I'm answering these questions flat out from the Everettian perspective, I think is probably right.

If I was teaching a general philosophy of quantum mechanics class, I'd be a lot more ecumenical about what I think the wave function is.

I'm a bit more dogmatic as to what I think the right interpretation is than Emily, so I'm probably willing to be a bit more committal there.

So I would say that to ask what the wave function is ontologically for everyone is kind of the wrong question to ask.

It's not a thing, or at least to suppose it's a thing is a big substantive extra step.

There's nothing in...

even very realist approaches to quantum mechanics to say that the wave function itself is a thing.

If a representational reading of it's right, then it encodes properties things have.

And to go to Emily's comment, if some more inferential reading of it's right, then it encodes something else.

But the point is, it's a tool we use in our theories either to represent or to predict or to infer or whatever.

So then the question is, the universal wave function is, can we talk about the universe as a whole as a quantum system with properties that can be represented?

And then I think the answer is probably yes, in the sense that we do so fairly effectively when we're doing quantum cosmology.

It's not what we normally do, but we can do it if we want to.

Yeah, I mean, in a certain sense, I agree with that, but I put the logic a little differently.

I mean, here's the thing about Everettian quantum mechanics.

Showing 1–20 of 1,940 · page 1 of 97