Sean Carroll

And if that's true, then we'll still learn something.

So let's go.

I want to start with two caveats or warnings, I suppose, which is never a good way to start your talk.

I know.

I always give that advice to never start with apologies, and then I always do it myself.

So, you know, do as I tell you to do, not as I actually do myself.

But the two apologies are this.

One is it will get a little technical at times.

In part, this solo episode grew out of –

the episode I had with Daniel Harlow, where we talked in a semi-technical way about quantum mechanics, then got totally technical at the end just for fun.

And some people like that, some people were mildly amused and put up with it, but didn't want to have too much of it.

I'm not going to try to get at that level of technicality.

I'm not just going to give you a lecture

that I would give to professional physicists about this kind of stuff.

I'm going to try my best to make everything as understandable as I can.

But the issues we're talking about are not about like Schrodinger's cat or not about things that you're familiar with from popular discussions of quantum mechanics or many worlds or anything like that.

They're very, very specific research level questions that I'm going to have to try to explain as best as I can, but I may or may not succeed at that.

So there you go.

The other thing is I want to be clear that there's a certain way of construing what I'm doing here, and people ask for it in the responses to the AMA and so forth, which is, okay, steel man the objections to many worlds because you've always been telling us how many worlds is great, but you've never really told us why it's not so great.

And I have to confess that the whole idea of steel manning is not really my vibe.