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 & David Wallace: The Quantum Interpretation That Divides Physicists · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

I think I would be inclined to think it has to be done in that case.

Yeah, I mean, I think that those styles of approaches which maintain sort of the classicality of space-time and gravity are appealing because there are a bunch of both conceptual and technical difficulties that come from trying to make sense of suppositions of space-time.

So I can see the appeal of avoiding them.

I think that the technical challenges of making such a thing work are strong and I would probably have low credence that it will work in the end.

But I think because it has such nice features, there's a good reason to explore it.

Um...

I try not to be too committed to any specific metaphysics, but definitely broadly speaking, I am a structural realist, I guess.

I think I was initially more attracted toward epistemic versions of structural realism, but more recently, partly as a result of thinking about relational approaches, actually, I have become, I've moved more towards the sort of ontic end of the scale.

So I guess broadly speaking, ontic structural realist, but I try to remain a bit open there.

Yes.

So the reason I became concerned about intersubjectivity was through thinking about the measurement problem, because there's a sort of general class of interpretations of quantum mechanics.

not necessarily including Everett, but adjacent to Everett, where there seem to be problems for intersubjectivity in the ordinary sense.

The most distinctive of those ones I've talked about the most is relational quantum mechanics, because the standard version of relational quantum mechanics says that there are no absolute observer independent facts.

And what that means is that there are no

absolute facts about the relations between different observers so it sort of can't be true in a non-relative sense that when I speak to you what you hear matches what I expect myself to be saying and so we can't sort of say that in any sort of observer independent sense we're really succeeding at communicating information to one another.

That I think is a problem for me because my understanding of the way in which we do science that involves a lot of processes that are

very significantly based on the expectation that we can share information in an absolute sense with other scientists that you know i can do observations and tell you about them and then you can really learn what i have really seen and then we can arrive at a sort of shared reality within which we're doing science and arriving at conclusions um relational quantum mechanics and various other sort of observer dependent approaches doesn't seem to allow that um the

There's no shared world which sort of really exists in a way that goes beyond the perspective of any observer.

It seems to me that I share a world with you.

It seems to you that you share a world with me, but neither is really right in an absolute sense.

Showing 101–120 of 1,263 · page 6 of 64