Alyssa Ney, "The World in the Wave Function: A Metaphysics for Quantum Physics" (Oxford UP, 2021)
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What is the central claim of wave‑function realism that Alyssa Ney defends?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Alyssa Ney, professor of philosophy at the University of California at Davis. Her new book, The World in the Wave Function, is just out from Oxford University Press. Quantum mechanics is full of weird findings. For example, that systems widely separated can somehow still be correlated in their behavior, and that a system may be in two different possible states at the same time.
Entanglement and superposition, among other phenomena, have prompted debates since the inception of quantum mechanics about how exactly we should understand what it tells us about reality. In the world in the wave function, Ney defends wave function realism. the claim that the basic representation in quantum mechanics, the wave function, corresponds to a field in a high-dimensional space, and that this field and its space is the fundamental reality. Ney defends this controversial view by explaining how the particles of classical mechanics and the ordinary objects of familiar three-dimensional space can plausibly arise from it. She makes the complications of quantum mechanics accessible to non-physicists and clearly explains the motivations for her view, the opposing positions, and the challenges that face any interpretation of the ontological implications of quantum mechanics.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Alyssa Ney. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Hi, Carrie. Great
to talk to you.
Yeah, this is a super book which is going to tell us how we get sort of, you know, normal cats and normal houses and normal cars out of a very strange world of quantum mechanics. Before we get into the details of the book, maybe you can tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to study philosophy and how you came to write the book.
Yeah, sure. So I'm a professor of philosophy at UC Davis in Davis, California. And I work in philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. So the past decade or so, I've been focused probably more than half the time now on foundational issues in quantum mechanics. particular, uh, what, how do you understand what quantum theories are telling us about the fundamental nature of reality? So the metaphysical questions, quantum mechanics, and, um, the other kind of half of my research is on unity of science. So I'm interested in, uh, whether, and, um, in what sense it would be, uh, it's true to say that physics is a fundamental science. Uh, So, yeah, I was a philosophy major in college, but my primary major, at least the way I thought of myself at the time, was I was a physics major.
I planned to be a physicist, but I was always interested in philosophy from reading existentialists in high school. But I didn't learn about philosophy and physics being an area of research until my senior year. and I decided at the last minute to go to grad school in philosophy. So I realize now, looking back, I think I just always thought that I could be a physicist and be doing the kind of work that I do now. I didn't realize that that wasn't something physicists do, was think about what our physical theories tell us about the nature of reality. I just assumed that was something physicists do. you know, for meeting about Einstein and, you know, Schrodinger and Heisenberg when I was in college. But then, yeah, as I started to ask questions of my physics professors, I realized, well, they told me very bluntly, these aren't questions like that you should be asking us.
If you can do the problems, you're fine. Just move on. These aren't good questions. And so it took me, I got very lucky at my senior year at of college at one of my professors, Tulane Bruce Brower said, this is philosophy of physics.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the central claim of wave‑function realism that Alyssa Ney defends?
0:01–19:24
2
How did Ney’s academic background lead her to focus on the foundations of quantum mechanics?
19:24–39:03
3
What are the two main ‘weirdnesses’ of quantum mechanics that motivate a new metaphysics?
39:03–56:19
4
Why is the wave function considered a field in a high‑dimensional configuration space?
56:19–1:10:14
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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