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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Appearances
It it's representing physical properties.
In some ways that's just a philosopher's piece of headantry, but if you're if you're not careful, you go from the quantum state is real to, you know, there is a higher dimens the reality is really this high dimensional space and reality is this kind of waving complex field on it or something, and that's
That doesn't make any more sense than starting with classical mechanics and saying, well, the world is three N dimensional and there's only one thing in it and it moves through this complicated path.
a sort of philosophical
issue.
But the the the the substantive beef is that Sean doesn't think that to understand
what's going on in quantum mechanics, I need to bring in some understanding
of what those properties are that the quantum state is representing.
So if I try to do the ontology of a quantum field theory, for instance, I'm gonna I th I that ontology is gonna rely on rich spatio-temporal ideas about the symmetry structure of space-time, the locality of the interactions, whole bunch of stuff of that kind, um, which the dynamics encodes, and then the quantum state
tells me what those features are and how they change over time.
And those features are like weirdly quantum features.
They're superpositions of all sorts of stuff, of course.
But in any case, Sean wants to say, no, look, all you uh fundamentally all you've got is the Hilbert space and the Hamiltonian.
And all that stuff about space time geometry and locality, all of that is stuff you've got to
extract from a careful analysis of the dynamics of the theory.
So somehow the the detailed spectrum of the Hamiltonian
Sean is supposed to ultimately encode all of that locality data.
Um, and none of that is to be taken as the fundamental description of physical reality.
It's just a sort of
A convenient overlay.
Showing 741–760 of 1,940 · page 38 of 97
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