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 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

Certainly there are, I think, important kinds of structure in the microscopic world that we need to think about, but I don't think those structures are causal in the ordinary sense.

And so it's not going to be particularly helpful to try to model them in causal terms.

Yes.

So the I mean the arrow of time usually refers to the fact that, you know, in the world as we experience it there are all these temporal asymmetries, you know.

Glasses break and don't usually recompose themselves, all of these kinds of obvious asymmetries that characterize our lives.

And the prob problem of the arrow of time is that the underlying physics mostly seems to be time-symmetric.

So, in that sense, it's not obvious where all of these asymmetries could come from.

You seem to have to impose them by just uh deciding by fiat that the initial state of the universe is some special kind of state.

which can explain those asymmetries, but for many people that's not super satisfying.

Uh, the problem of time and quantum gravity is a a distinct issue.

Uh it refers to to the fact that within a specific technical formalism for quantizing gravity, uh, when you uh perform that quantization, you find that

uh time evolution ends up being what's called a gauge transformation, which means that it's not physically real.

It's just kind of giving two different descriptions of the same thing.

So it looks like time evolution in the ordinary sense is not present at all.

So that that leads to a problem of trying to understand, you know, where do our experiences come from?

Why do we have uh the experiences that feel like they are temporal in nature.

Um so they are separate problems, but I think it's very likely they are linked.

I think certainly th the story about why we have experiences which are temporal in nature must have something to do with thermodynamics and the fact that we live in this very asymmetric regime.

Uh so you know there's still work to be done to flesh out the connections between these things, but but certainly I think uh those aren't they're not completely independent.

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