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: Reality Is a Completed Puzzle, Not a Flowing River · 11 Apr 2025 podcast

And that's really holding us back from making us progress on on further physics.

So I think that problem to me

demands a solution not just for intellectual curiosity, but also to be able to make real progress.

And what's the definition of observer?

Well, that's exactly the problem.

We don't we don't know clearly how to define observers in concrete physical terms.

We have, of course, an intuitive notion of what an observer is, and we know what what we expect observers to see, but uh it's still very unclear how to properly model observers within quantum mechanics.

All the interpretations of quantum mechanics say something different about how you should represent observers, and that has important knock-on effects for how.

how you're gonna think about observers in the context of further physics like quantum gravity.

So, I mean, one of the big problems we encounter in the formulation of quantum gravity is known as the problem of time, which refers to the fact that uh if you impose a sort of canonical quantization on gravity, the result is that time evolution seems to vanish.

You h end up with this sort of strained timeless model.

And so then one obvious problem you have is try to to try to understand

uh how the kinds of experiences that we have could possibly arise in this context.

Where does our sense of doing things in time and obtaining outcomes come from?

And so there are lots of interesting ideas around this, but a lot of a lot of this is still very focused on this question of how exactly should you represent an observer?

How can you make sense of sort of local observations in this setting?

Uh well, I mean, I I unfortunately I don't have a f uh complete answer to this question.

Uh I think you know, one thing that we can see clearly from both general relativity and quantum gravity is that making sense of observers is probably going to require understanding them in sort of relational terms, uh understanding observ observations as things that happen in some sense relative to our observers rather than being things that are out there in the world.

by themselves.

So that seems like an important insight, which I think is also relevant for standard quantum mechanics.

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