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

So my worry is that that is going to undermine

various kinds of roles that intersubjectivity plays in scientific practice, particularly the sort of special objectivity that comes to science in virtue of the fact that there's lots of people working together and sharing ideas and critiquing and so on and so forth.

So for that reason, I'm pretty skeptical about accepting any interpretation which says that we can't really share information in an absolute sense.

Yeah, I mean, I think part of this comes down to a sort of internal tension in the way that relational approaches are sometimes formulated.

Because, agreed, the kind of philosophical setup is supposed to be that all statements are assessed relative to a context.

But nonetheless...

in many settings, the picture that the relationalists seem to want to suggest does involve sort of making a non statement, which is not indexed to anything about the existence of a whole bunch of perspectives such that from each perspective, quantum mechanics is true.

And that is kind of the picture of the world, which is particularly motivated, for example, by the desire to make sense of what's going on in the witness friend scenario while allowing that everybody is right in what they have really seen.

Yeah.

My concern is that if that's the picture of the world that you're trying to promote, then there is an internal inconsistency there in supposing that we have all these different perspectives obeying quantum mechanics, and yet by construction, I can never find out anything about what's going on in any other perspective.

I've got no reason to believe they obey quantum mechanics.

So I think there is, I think, a consistent formulation of the relational approach, which really does commit to this view that you can't make that statement about the world as a whole.

You can't talk about all the different perspectives.

You can't talk about them being quantum mechanics.

That, it seems to me, is not what many of the relationalists want and is not what is primarily motivated by what's going on in quantum mechanics.

So while that's a possible way to make the view look consistent, I think that's not

There's a tension in the way they're formulated where they kind of want to have both things together.

I think they can't have both.

Yeah, right.

So I guess I see it as a sort of dilemma where on one route, they do have this kind of hybrid story.

Showing 121–140 of 1,263 · page 7 of 64