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 · David Wallace: Why Many Worlds Is the Only Consistent Interpretation · 29 May 2025 podcast

It's not obvious what the route to make that work is or how the components fit together.

I mean it's not

This isn't a complete head scratching mystery about which we know nothing.

There's lots of kind of partial

answers to how that can be.

But the point is in in isolation, just saying, well, maybe the very early universe had low entropy

is the c yeah, it's logically possible that could solve the problem because it does break the symmetry.

But that's only the beginning of explaining how it solves the problem.

think about the question.

I mean as a practical matter in physics

Normally when we say the boundary conditions of a problem are contingent, we mean, well, you know, there's lots of ways we could set the problem up.

And you can tell there's lots of ways we could set the problem up 'cause look, over here in the lab we set it up this way and over here we set it up that way.

Or maybe in space, like one of the stars was this way round and another one was that way around.

So when we say it's like contingent which way stars are spinning, we we can kinda cache that out in things we can get our hands on.

We've only got one uh one universe, or at least the only one we can get at.

about even what we're saying when we say the initial state's contingent.

Um and e even though we can say formal things in the language of the philosophy of modality, it's not completely clear to me we understand what we're saying when we break away from the kind of intuitions we build up from sort of small duplicatable systems.

And then on top of that there's the fact that um

our current best physics of the early universe is certainly not the last word in the physics of the early universe.

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