Emily Adlam

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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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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 · Emily Adlam & David Wallace: The Quantum Interpretation That Divides Physicists · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

I also think that the relational approach as it is currently formulated can't be right.

I think it has a bunch of problems that need fixing.

I do think the sort of central core idea that there's something relational about quantum mechanics is promising, but I think more work needs to be done to develop what that should look like.

Do I even visit?

I have visited in the past, yes.

No, I could definitely see the appeal of the Everest approach, not least because I think it's the only approach which sort of

reliably works at all applications that we sort of know of.

And so that's obviously a very appealing feature.

The worries that I have about Everett are to do with the role of probabilities and empirical confirmations.

Obviously, there's sort of long-standing discussion about how to make sense of the probabilities in Everett, and there are various strategies you can sort of use to address that.

I'm not presumably convinced that any of those existing strategies give you probabilities that are robust enough to play the kind of role that I think probabilities need to play in confirmation to make sense of quantum mechanics.

So for that reason, I am doubtful and would like to see sort of a clear demonstration one way or the other that this can be done.

Yeah, well, the worry is that if there is no adequate solution to the Everettian probability problem, then if you believe that you are in an Everettian world, it would follow that you wouldn't be able to use relative frequencies and so on as empirical evidence for a theory in the way that we actually have used them to support quantum mechanics.

So it then looks like you shouldn't think that quantum mechanics is right, but it doesn't make sense to believe an interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says we shouldn't believe quantum mechanics.

So the whole thing looks a bit self-undermining if the probability problem can't be resolved.

So it comes down to, can it be resolved?

Yeah, well, I mean, I should say that I also am not keen to reject quantum mechanics or any large part of the framework of it.

You know, obviously, my ideal interpretation would be an interpretation that preserved quantum mechanics as is and yet was not the appropriate interpretation.

Yeah.

And obviously, I don't have a complete version of such interpretation to offer.

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