David Wallace

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

The framework of unitary quantum mechanics, so the mathematical core of what Everett's using, which I'd say is the standard equations of quantum mechanics,

but also commitment to the fact that measurement is a physical process, commitment to the fact there's no epistemic role of what's going on, there's no special role of observation, the difference between the quantum and the classical is just a matter of dynamics and scales, that physical systems can be studied in isolation.

That kind of framework, I want to say, is robustly scientifically successful.

There's no internal problem inside physics practice in doing that.

And that's different, I'd say, from where we were in quantum mechanics in, say, prior to the 1980s, prior to a lot of development in decoherence and measurement theory.

And at a meta level, I'm just much more skeptical of the premises of any philosophical argument that says we have to reject that framework than I am of the result there.

I mean, I think we're...

We don't have a lot of precedent of situations in which we've got a completely successful scientific theory where we have some entirely external to it philosophical conceptual constraint.

I think if there is some kind of clash between deeply held principles of epistemology and the framework of quantum mechanics, I think it's much more likely we'll learn something about epistemology from resolving that than learn something about physics.

So, I mean, I'm entirely happy to get into the weeds of how I think we should think about the details of the probability problem inside Everett.

But that's my kind of starting point.

I think it's an important philosophical problem.

I think we can learn a lot about probability from thinking about it.

And dialectically, since a bunch of people are Everett sympathetic but worried about probability, insofar as there are things that can be said to assuage those worries, it's worth saying.

But I would...

need a hell of an argument to convince me that on sort of a priori philosophical grounds, we should reject Everett on the grounds it clashes with some epistemological principle we have, however compelling that principle might seem to be.

So interpretation of that formalism, so you wouldn't think something like an Adrian Kent's proposals for photon-based final state theories would be as attractive.

Just trying to get the parameters.

Yeah.

So it might be worth distinguishing between what you might call Everett Light.

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