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

You see the widespread support for modifying quantum mechanics to solve the measurement problem.

or for minority approaches in quantum gravity or minority approaches in statistical mechanics or mathematical reformulations of quantum field theory or statistical mechanics or etc, etc, etc, etc.

I'm very keen on contemporary physics and very keen on trying to

approach it with a much stronger sense of trying extremely hard to make sense of it as is.

Partly just because I think that's ironically a somewhat niche activity in psychology.

I mean, this has changed a little bit, but I used to say that my specialty was the narrow niche area of mainstream physics.

And I'm also interested in exploring

If I say the messy practice of actual physics, then colleagues of mine who are closer to labs and experiments will object.

I guess I mean the messy practice of high theory.

So I'm interested in understanding physics very much at the abstract theoretical level rather than at the level of the lab practitioner.

But I'm interested in studying it at the level of mathematical rigor and approximation and tangle, if you like, that...

one finds in mainstream theoretical physics activity, whereas a lot of the trajectory in philosophy of physics has either been to go to the historical record and look at how these ideas developed historically, or to look at extremely pure, precise, rigorous, mathematical codifications of these things, or to explore sort of dissident programs.

I think all of those are

well modulate some of the distant programs most of those are extremely worthwhile things to do but they're not the style of how I am interested in doing things um

I mean, there's interest in interest, isn't there?

I mean, many things interest me.

I'm interested in American politics and dinosaurs and planetary science and computer role-playing games and so on.

In terms of my professional research interests...

Not a lot, but not nothing.

I mean, some of the stuff you were talking about, about scientific realism, goes a little bit beyond core physics, although it's still very physics-grounded.

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