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

Such as

Yeah, so I mean relational quantum mechanics in its its standard formulation uh does have the problem that I've just described because it does imply that uh it is impossible in a sort of absolute sense to ever know anything about what's going on in anyone else's perspective.

Um but uh s the work uh that I did with Carla Rivelli recently was about uh thinking about how could you alter relational quantum mechanics to overcome this issue.

And so we did suggest um a possible way to address that by adding a postulate which allows communication between observers.

Yeah, I think the interpretation of probability is a very hard problem.

I think I'm not ho wholly uh satisfied with any of the approaches that we have available to us.

the uh sort of frequentist approaches are are useful in many cases, but have pretty significant philosophical problems for uh for us accounting for certain kinds of edge cases.

Uh subjective Bayesianism, I think, just just doesn't do justice to the fact that certain probabilities do seem to be out there in the world and not just in our minds.

The sort of disposition list accounts are quite mysterious and also very hard to reconcile with uh all-at-once style physics.

There are a couple of of recent approaches that I'm very interested in that as a view called uh gnomic frequentism, due to uh someone called John Roberts, which suggests that uh probabilities should be understood as a as in terms of laws which require that frequencies should look a certain way.

And there's some really nice work on this recently by uh Eddie Chin and John Barrett, uh looking at uh the ways in which you could potentially expand on that uh and uh think about probabilities as sort of sort of constraints on relative frequencies.

So while that's uh that that uh work is still ongoing, I think uh that's a really interesting direction and probably the most uh promising approach from my point of view.

So uh this is working within the sort of all at once style constraint-based view of laws.

Uh and the observation is that if you allow that laws are global constraints which apply to the whole of history, then you can formulate a probabilistic law as saying something like the relative frequency of occurrences of some outcome across all instances of this type of measurement across all of history must have some value or

Must fall in some range.

So you can think of the laws or probabilities as directly constraining the relative frequencies that actually occur.

So that's somewhat similar in spirit to the frequentist approaches, but I think avoids some of the more serious problems for frequentism because it's not just saying that probabilities are whatever the frequencies should happen to be.

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