Jacob Barandes: A New Era in Quantum Mechanics Has Arrived
episodePreviously titled “A New Era in Quantum Mechanics Is Here... | Jacob Barandes” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
Transcript
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How does the Indivisible Stochastic Process view eliminate wave‑function collapse and superposition?
There was no wave function. There was never a superposition. There's never a need to get anything to collapse. In this picture, some observable quantities are reflecting things that are really there. The people who gave us the biggest revolutions in modern physics, quantum theory and relativity, were all strongly connected to philosophy.
Physicists have grappled with the seemingly outlandish implications of quantum theory that particles are purportedly in multiple places simultaneously, and there's a mysterious wave function that collapses upon measurement and a framework that requires so-called imaginary numbers, etc. I traveled to the oldest physics laboratory in the United States to meet at Harvard with theoretical physicist and philosopher Jacob Barndes, who is the co-director of the Graduate Studies Department. There, where we go into technical depth into his innovative reformulation of quantum theory for more fundamental mechanics called Indivisible Stochastic Processes. My name is Kurt Jaimungle, and this was part of my three-day tour of Harvard, Tufts, and MIT, where I recorded five podcasts, one of them being with Jacob Barndis, that you're seeing now, which was actually over seven hours long, so we're splitting it into two.
The others are with Michael Levin, Anna Chaunica, and Minoas Kellis. Professor William Hahn, a computer scientist, and that was filmed live at the MIT Media Lab. Subscribe to get notified. Jacob's Breakthrough Theory raises new provocative questions such as what if quantum waves don't exist? Did physics lose its soul by abandoning philosophy? Does time flow differently in quantum physics? And was Einstein right all along? It's good to be here. It's really lovely to see you again. The last time we talked, I enjoyed it tremendously.
Yeah, me too.
So let's talk about physical philosophy versus the philosophy of physics. People have heard about the philosophy of physics. What is physical philosophy? Um
Yeah, so uh Uh My research has sort of two sides. There's the physical philosophy side and there's the philosophical physics side. Let me let me start with physical philosophy. So um the way I describe physical philosophy, it's the use of um results and and uh ideas and discoveries and and and theories from physics um to address uh uh traditional questions in philosophy, in particular in metaphysics. Um so the kinds of questions that we're interested here are questions about space and time, the philosophy of time, causation.
How did the hosts meet Jacob Barandes and what is his Indivisible Stochastic Processes reformulation of quantum theory?
Um there are very interesting connections between physics and causation, some of which we'll hopefully have a chance to talk about today. Uh also uh the philosophy of probability, which is a very subtle and very complicated area, um and and also the metaphysics of laws, which is a rich, very interesting area of inquiry. And so just thinking about what what do our best current physical theories bring to bear on these traditional questions? How do they constrain what we can say about about those sorts of things? So here's a good example, a concrete example. Uh Philosophers, metaphysicians have been thinking about the nature of time for a very, very long time. Right? You go back to Parmenides uh and Heraclitus and people thinking about, you know, is time uh something that flows, is time something that is just an illusion.
Um and there's this very famous Paper, which maybe you can link to because it's a beautiful paper and people should read it, uh by McTaggart, a philosopher about over a hundred years ago on the nature of time. And introduce he introduces this terminology, the the uh the A series, the B series, the C series, these different ways of thinking about time and how much structure it has. Right. The the A series is this idea that um i events that take place in time can be classified as past, present, and future. But that seems to like distinguish a notion of a present. And is that really a sensible notion? And there's the B series, which has less structure. This just says that events can only be classified in terms of earlier or later.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How does the Indivisible Stochastic Process view eliminate wave‑function collapse and superposition?
0:00–2:28
2
How did the hosts meet Jacob Barandes and what is his Indivisible Stochastic Processes reformulation of quantum theory?
2:28–8:56
3
What is the difference between physical philosophy and philosophical physics in the foundations of quantum mechanics?
8:56–18:31
4
How does the Wigner’s‑Friend thought experiment reveal inconsistencies in textbook quantum mechanics?
18:31–1:22:14
5
What is the parity‑grid game used to illustrate indivisible stochastic processes?
1:22:14–1:35:59
6
How do indivisible stochastic processes lead to quantum‑channel and unistochastic representations?
1:35:59–2:13:36
7
How does the coarse‑grained double‑slit example demonstrate interference without a wave function?
2:13:36–2:24:09
8
Why does the host argue that deep training in both physics and philosophy is essential for breakthroughs?
2:24:09–2:40:50
Speakers
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