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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Emily Adlam: Reality Is a Completed Puzzle, Not a Flowing River · 11 Apr 2025 podcast

I think the way to uh r resolve this is to uh is to appreciate that the description of the world relative to a qubit is not going to be

a full quantum Hilbert space, it's not going to be as complicated as that because a qubit just doesn't have the right enough physical resources to define that kind of relative description.

So I've been trying to think about what would be a sensible uh way of formulating what the world does look like relative to a qubit um and and thus of sort of understanding what the the range of observations that something like a qubit could make uh might look like.

Great.

Yeah, so process matrices are a tool developed within Quantum Foundations recently to study causal processes more general than those we would encounter in our ordinary space-time.

So the idea here is that we'll start with a set of laboratories in which agents can do various actions and we'll write down a description of the way in which these laboratories are related to each other, but we will not require that these laboratories have

Any sort of specific space-time location.

And so we won't require that their relationships are constrained by the causal structure of ordinary space-time.

The only constraint we'll put on them is that they have to be logically consistent.

So they have to be related to each other in ways that won't produce logical contradictions.

So what we can do then is uh end up with a description of a class of possible.

uh causal processes, which is much more general than what we would normally encounter in the world, uh, and that's m is potentially going to give us an idea of what kinds of processes might perhaps be possible, for example, in certain regimes of quantum gravity where space-time in the ordinary sense, you know, breaks down or is perhaps not present.

Yes.

So I mean process matrices are quantum in nature, but they are much more general than ordinary quantum mechanics, because you know, in ordinary quantum mechanics, we would tell a story in which you start with a state and just evolve forwards and produce everything in a well-defined temporal order.

Um process matrices retain aspects of the quantum formalism but get rid of that evolution story.

So we're not requiring that you can sort of tell a story about the

temporal unfolding of how one laboratory leads to the next laboratory and so on, uh, you allow um mu much more general possibilities for how those laboratories could be related to each other.

uh in the process matrix formalism uh

It's not clear that the the Bourne rule is even used.

Um I think certainly understanding where the Bourne rule fits into that picture is is is an ongoing project that hasn't yet been fully resolved.

Showing 1121–1140 of 1,263 · page 57 of 64