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.

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

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

However, again, in a certain sense, it sort of doesn't matter.

We're probably within 10 to 20 years of just being able to test this theory empirically.

I have money riding on the fact that it will fail the test and be eliminated.

I would be very happy to lose the bet because it would open an amazing vista of new physics.

We'd learn a ton of stuff.

I'm not expecting to learn those things, but the point is, the experiments to test these things are in the kind of prototyping and applying for grants level.

I'm not enough of an experimentalist to know the exact timing, but it probably isn't going to be 10 years, but it's not going to be 50 either.

No, no, it's just a friend of mine who believes in collapse theories, which one of us has to buy the other one.

I forget, a bottle of good wine, I think.

Sorry, let me adjust to the change.

Realism, very loosely, is the picture that our scientific theories are telling us things about what...

the world is like, or perhaps more mundanely, what the systems they describe is like.

Not just how they appear to be at the scales at which human senses can engage with them, but at the scales beyond those senses.

So, classically speaking, the anti-realist

doesn't believe in electrons or nuclei of atoms they don't think we have reason to think those things exist or maybe they think even talk of those things is just a fancy way of coding up predictions for experiments the realist thinks and again there's lots of gradations of this but loosely speaking yes there are electrons yes

There are atoms which do have nuclei.

The fact that we can't see them is a mundane fact about the fact that the wavelengths of light that our eyes detect are too wide to interact with them directly.

But we have perfectly good reason to think they still exist.

That term is used in such a tangle of ways.

I have a view on realism that is the view I came to from reading various people who at various points described themselves as ontic structural realists.

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