Tim Maudlin
speaker
4,767 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Tim Maudlin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Any approach like that is called a hidden variables approach just because it denies the completeness of the wave function, which was Einstein's whole point, right?
Wave function isn't complete.
If it's not complete, there are additional variables.
Those additional variables were called hidden variables for bad reasons, but that's the name that's stuck.
Uh and so Bell himself also thought, well, why don't we add some additional variables here and and and make things more rational?
Now he he reports that when he was studying he raised this possibility with his professors, and actually he says he was reading Bourne's book.
Uh and he'd been told, actually in the quote, he says he read this in Born's book, that that possibility, the idea that you could add additional variables to the standard quantum formalism and still keep the same predictions, the same empirical predictions, had been ruled out mathematically by von Neumann.
You know, he I guess he even has a bit of a quote from Bourne's book.
Um, and that von Neumann had proven that no such theory could return the same predictions as standard quantum mechanics.
Oh, uh, so now this is in his paper on the impossible pilot wave, which is about the pilot wave theory.
I actually have the quote here.
When I was a student, I had much difficulty with quantum mechanics.
It was comforting.
to find even Einstein had such difficulties for a long time.
Indeed, they led him to the heretical conclusion that something was missing in the theory.
And this is now the quote, uh
From Einstein, I am in fact rather firmly convinced that the essentially statistical character of contemporary quantum theory is solely to be ascribed to the fact that this theory operates with an incomplete description of physical systems.
So we're back incompleteness.
More explicitly, in a complete physical description, the statistical quantum theory, this is again Einstein speaking, would take an approximately analogous position to the statistical mechanics within the framework of classical mechanics.
Einstein did not seem to know that this possibility of peaceful coexistence between quantum statistical predictions and a more complete theoretical description had been disposed of with great rigor by Jay von Neumann, right?
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