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

So that is a problem.

I mean, because I think that Everett has this very significant problem and because I nonetheless think that quantum mechanics as it currently exists is so well demonstrated, that gives me some faith that there must be another interpretation which would work.

But yeah, I think I agree that currently you don't have such a thing.

And so we should be looking for it.

I think...

Because the way in which quantum mechanics is put together is quite sensitive and quite difficult to alter successfully.

Ideal interpretation should either change nothing or change as little as possible.

So for that reason, I am quite sceptical about sort of Bohm-style interpretations or Collatt-style interpretations, which require changing a lot.

I'm hopeful that there might be ways to have other types of interpretations which are not Everett, but which nonetheless maintain...

very significant aspects of the existing formalism.

That's one of the reasons why I'm interested in the relational approaches, because as I understand it, one of their goals is to try to provide an alternative, which nonetheless preserves most of the formalism of quantum mechanics.

Yeah, no, I agree with that.

And there's been a discussion recently in the literature over relational quantum mechanics about how to define quantum events and whether this can be done in a precise way within the formalism of quantum mechanics.

Having thought about this for a while, it seems to be obvious that you can't.

This can't be done.

The only thing you can really do is what, as a recent paper by Rovelli and DiBiagio, just basically proposing a version of Everett, saying that you can look from the outside and you can see something that kind of looks like a measurement as the things become entangled and

discussed this with them and said isn't this just Everett and the conclusion is well yes essentially it has some different philosophical emphases but it is essentially the same thing and it's going to have the same problems so yeah I think the conclusion of this discussion for me is that there is no relational approach that's significantly distinct from Everett which

preserves the entire formalism of quantum mechanics and adds nothing to it um yeah i'm still hopeful that there are directions you could investigate which would be relatively minor modificatory strategies and which might would still leave quantum mechanics intact in the domains where it's successful um but that's obviously more a promissory note than a well-developed idea at the stage yeah i mean that's fair enough and it's worth saying i mean look um

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the question is being posed in the literature is about, you know, how do you say when and how a measurement has taken place in AQM?

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