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

I couldn't be persuaded that was an equivalent way of talking.

I mean, you're right that the genuine use of a universal wave function, I don't think there are zero cases of use that in physics, but there are exceptionally few.

So I'm pretty relaxed if I'm lost there.

But I think for that very token, if one had that lighter form of relationism, then your sort of adamant versions about Everett are going to be just as bad there.

And then the worry is, is there a relationism there?

that is going to avoid the kind of concerns you've got that doesn't end up committed to the sort of thoroughgoing modification that, as you say, is going to run into a ton of technical problems.

I'm perfectly pro people working on things like that.

I'm perfectly pro people working on dynamical class.

I mean, if we're doing physics rather than philosophy, then absolutely, let's explore the theory space.

But then I'm separately interested in the question, well, okay, given the actual best theory we have at the moment, what are we going to do with it?

How do we think about it?

I mean, just to clarify what you have in mind for the sort of a very...

move.

My guess is we're doing something like the following.

I can be a relationist, but I can still say, okay, fine, you go and do the Schrodinger cat experiment and I retreat to Alpha Centauri because I'm distressed by violence to cats.

While I'm on Alpha Centauri and you do the experiment and you're outside my light cone, then even the relationist, if they're not going to be too sparse in the attributions of states, is going to say something like, well, your state relative to mine is something like a superposition of a live cat and a dead cat.

Well, I mean, after all, the Revellian relative state is perfectly definable inside the Everett interpretation.

And as you point out, the universal state is not doing a hell of a lot of work in that story, but the state relative to me may be enormously indefinite, which gets you the problems, yeah.

So just to push your priors on this, how committed are you to these epistemic things?

Suppose we prove some, frankly, fairly implausible no-go theorem that says that no minor tweak of the formalism of quantum mechanics is going to get you away from the Everett interpretation.

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