Emily Adlam
speaker
1,263 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 20 Jul
Emily Adlam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It doesn't make sense to believe an interpretation of quantum mechanics which says we shouldn't believe quantum mechanics.
To some extent.
I mean, I think there are two types of roles that a state tends to play in physics.
And one is to represent the sort of current properties of the system at a time.
And another is to encode predictions about how the system is going to behave in the future.
And at least in classical physics, we typically expect those things to kind of come together, that the predictions are just sort of...
given by the current properties at a given time.
I think there are reasons to think that in quantum mechanics that might not be the case.
And so we might want to make more of a distinction between the properties that a system currently has and the prediction we want to make about its future.
And so for that reason, I'm slightly skeptical about whether we should assume that the wave function represents properties or whether it just rather represents a sort of set of predictions.
Yeah, and I think the question, is there a universal wave function, is a good question, partly because I'm interested in relational approaches to quantum mechanics.
And one of the main commitments of the relational approaches is that there is not a universal wave function.
There could not be a universal wave function because wave functions always have to be attributed relative to something else.
So that, I guess, is one of the central points setting apart various relational approaches from theory of interpretation, for example.
Yeah.
I think one reason to be a bit skeptical about the use of a universal wave function is because the sort of central observation that the relational approaches want to make is that in practice, we do always use wave functions relationally, using them relative to some experimental setup or to some particular reference frame or what have you.
And so all the evidence we really have for wave functions is of the sort of relational use of them.
So there's somewhat of an extrapolation to step beyond that and say wave functions can be used in this kind of absolute way to describe the universe as a whole.
So that's one reason to have some skepticism there.
No, I mean, I don't know which interpretation is right.
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