Sean Carroll

We like locality.

We want to try to preserve it or figure out some kind of dance we can do to keep it around.

I just don't think that way.

I think that if you stare quantum mechanics in the face and ask what it's trying to tell you, it's telling you locality is just not fundamental.

It's not that important.

And by the way, nothing that I said here involves like quantum gravity or string theory or emergent space or anything like that.

This is just undergraduate quantum mechanics.

I think already

In undergraduate quantum mechanics, you should know that locations in space are not fundamentally real.

So the game we're going to play today in this podcast, and you might think, you know, are we still just warming up?

But no, we actually made some important points here.

I'm not going to have to talk for 12 hours in this podcast because I'm going to be raising questions and gesturing vaguely toward the solution to them.

But these are research level questions to which we don't know the answers completely.

So I can't.

give you a series of lectures spelling out all the answers.

I'm still just trying to raise the questions and inform you a little bit about the progress we've made.

So the attitude we're going to take today is let's just stare reality in the eyeball, okay?

Let's not try

to take our precious notions of the world around us, what some people call folk physics, you know, the physics of, you know, stuff with locations moving around and things like that, that you would have pre-Aristotle, you would know that there was stuff and it had locations, right?

Or you might use Wilfred Sellers' terminology and call it the manifest image of the world.