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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Um, I guess I do wonder if if i the kind of view you have set out, uh I wonder sort of how much how much freedom there is, because you might think that there's there's this space in some sense for some set of choices to be free, but can we think that they're they're all free or i is there going to be too mu too much constraining to constraining that?
Do we have to have some kind of
Do we choose a subset of choices are free, or do we just adopt some kind of view on which they're all sort of perspectivally free in some sense?
There's a sort of interesting questions about if you're not gonna put the freedom in at the beginning of time, where do you put it in in st in instead?
And how do you sort of model the
the the sense in which there's some kind of arbitrariness or freedom and what the course of events.
I've been thinking quite a lot about emergence.
Uh uh I've I think we have this sort of aspiration in physics that we're going to write down a m microphysical theory and then we're just gonna see how the macroscopic world arises out of that and that's all gonna work very nicely.
Um
I think the more I think about that, the more worried I get because the microphysical theories that we have uh have been arrived at via measurements we have made using our microscopic instruments.
They certainly incorporate some features of our macroscopic perspective in ways that are quite hard to to tease apart from the microphysical theories.
Um and so when when I I think about how emergence works, I start to get worried that
There's something circular happening here where we're trying we're trying to write down a microphysical theory and see how the macroscopic stuff arises from it.
Um
But uh the microphysical theory we're using is building in all the stuff uh that f that we have from our macrosc macroscopic perspective.
And in some ways we're sort of already helping ourselves to the existence of the macroscopic world by using a theory that's formulated in this way.
So I looking at and emerges and thinking about the story we want to tell as physicists, I start to get worried about, you know, how how can we fully separate out our macroscopic perspective from this description so as to really be able
to tell this story this genuinely tell the story in which
we start from a purely microscopic description and the macroscopic world arises out of it without being presupposed at the start.
I I definitely think they are overcomable, but I think they are perhaps more difficult to overcome than we immediately think.
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