Episode 113: Tom Pashby discusses quantum mechanics
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Hello and welcome to hallucinations. I'm Matt Tykeman. And with me today is Tom Pashby, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. And he is here to discuss quantum mechanics. Tom Pashby, welcome. Thanks, Mats. All right, quantum mechanics. It's an interesting topic, I think, because it's very complicated. But it's also a topic that's made its way into popular culture to a certain extent. There's like people will talk about quantum theory in a way that they will not talk about other kind of obscure, difficult, detailed areas of research. So I thought maybe we could start just by saying what exactly quantum mechanics is, maybe what earlier physical theories were saying, how quantum mechanics is different, what's the difference between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, something like that.
Yes, well quantum mechanics is really a very general framework for formulating physical theories. Pretty much anything that you study, be it materials science or Chemistry for or even something quite esoteric like a black hole, we try to treat with quantum mechanics because we think it's somehow the right framework for articulating the physical rules of our our world.
Okay, right. So it's a theory that explains every single physical thing that happens to the entire universe. It's like a You know, there's nothing that it doesn't cover that's physical anyway.
Well that's the ambition. And I I should say here we're at an interesting moment in physics where we have two frameworks which are potentially incompatible, general relativity and quantum mechanics. And the and the hot question in theoretical physics is whether they can be unified somehow. And we have programs like string theory that aim to do that. But modulo those sort of worries. Yes, we tend to think of quantum mechanics as a sort of universal physical theory. In particular theories of physics.
What exactly is different about quantum mechanics from what came before? Like how is it a different way to look at the world?
Yeah, well when you go back and read what the physicists thought about the new physics they were uncovering in the twenties and thirties, there's this real sense of shock that something has been radically broken in their understanding of the physical world. And now when one of the first courses you take as an undergraduate is quantum mechanics, it's perhaps um hard to sort of recreate that shock. But What I see as being the break with classical physics, which is generally what we call all physics up to and including the early twentieth century, so essentially Newtonian physics and then physics that came after that, like electrodynamics and so on and so forth. That's all classical physics. So classical essentially means not quantum in this context.
So what I see as being The major difference is the involvement of probability at a fundamental level in quantum mechanics, in a way that it doesn't appear in classical physics. So that's not to say that probabilities don't appear in classical physics. One of the great innovations of the nineteenth century was statistical mechanics, which certainly does involve probabilities, but those were probabilities concerning what we know rather than what there is. So there's this appearance of probability in a sort of fundamental way in quantum mechanics where we can't get beyond the probabilities to say um what the world is really like. The theory gives us the probabilities. What are they probabilities of? Well that's one of the big interpretive questions.
Oh, interesting. Right. So I can flip a coin. And probability is applicable to that because I can think about well what are the chances it's gonna land heads?
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