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
Uh this picture where you start at the beginning and evolve forwards in time.
Um
as I say, that's a very intuitive way of thinking about physics, but it is, I think,
very clearly not a good fit for what we are seeing in modern physics.
Uh and yet nonetheless many people I think are still drawn to try to think about things in those terms.
So for example, in quantum foundations, it's very common to be quite focused on trying to give causal accounts of things to to understand uh
either in classical terms or to move to a sort of quantum notion of causation where you can tell the story about one thing causing another thing, causing another thing.
And that I think is is not a good use use of our effort, um, because there are clear indications that that's not really the structure that physics actually has.
And so trying to force it into a causal structure is not likely to be a good way of understanding it.
Yeah.
When
Yes.
Uh so definitely the accounts of causation I favor.
other ones which suggest that causation needs to be understood as a essentially as a macroscopic phenomenon.
So causation I think clearly has something to do with thermodynamics and the thermodynamic arrow uh
In terms of entropy.
It's also, I think, clearly related to perspective, the perspective of macroscopic observers like us and what we can and can't achieve.
It's related to interventions and telling a story about what observers like us can achieve by intervening on certain uh types of variables.
Um so all of those things uh make it seem very macroscopic in nature, uh, which means that that for me it's incorrect to think, of course.
causation uh as being something that inheres uh in the microscopic world.
Showing 741–760 of 1,263 · page 38 of 64
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