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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If you want to understand why helium-4 and helium-3 are superfluid at different temperatures...
cubism's got, which is an inherently quantum mechanical thing, cubism's got nothing.
So my basic requirement of interpretation of quantum mechanics, nothing much, it should just explain all of known physics.
And cubism is very badly short of that.
It tries to explain the abstract quantum formalism, but doesn't succeed or really try to explain any of the concrete realizations of that formalism.
That's my concern with it.
How good do you think that good idea really is?
I mean, yeah, sure, we came up with quantum mechanics as a formalism to describe observations, but we came up with classical mechanics too as well.
I mean, obviously, it's always an open possibility that whatever formalism we came up with encoded our experience.
And maybe the point is that there's somewhat more hints of that in quantum mechanics than classically.
I see.
I guess my worry is just, I'm reluctant to have this, I suppose, as any good inference just from the fact that something was designed from our standpoint to anything very much.
Again, I mean, general relativity was designed from our standpoint, but I don't feel desperately inclined to have an epistemic interpretation of gravity waves on those grounds.
Okay, and we may be more sympathetic than I am to the fact that we should indeed do that for classical mechanics, would we not?
Fair enough.
David?
My approach to philosophy of physics is really extremely conservative, is perhaps the right starting point.
A quite large fraction of philosophy of physics
is people coming in who for one reason or other are dissatisfied with various aspects of the mainstream in physics and in various ways want to push against it.
And you see that again and again and again.
Showing 301–320 of 1,940 · page 16 of 97
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