Emily Adlam: Reality Is a Completed Puzzle, Not a Flowing River
episodePreviously titled “The "All At Once" Universe Shatters Our View of Time” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
Transcript
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What is the “all‑at‑once” view of physics and why does it challenge the usual time‑evolution picture?
The dogma I worry about is that we should think about physics in terms of time evolution. This picture where you start at the beginning and evolve forwards in time. That's a very intuitive way of thinking about physics, but it is very clearly not a good fit for what we are seeing. There's really good evidence coming from lots of different parts of physics that we shouldn't be thinking about time in those terms.
Imagine a completed Sudoku puzzle. The rules don't dictate that you start in one corner and then work systematically across the grid. Instead, they just constrain what patterns are valid for the entire puzzle. Professor Emily Adlam of Chapman University suggests that the fundamental laws of physics work similarly. You don't evolve the universe step by step from past to future. Instead, there are these constraints something that selects valid patterns across. Across all of space-time simultaneously. This quote unquote all-at-once perspective helps explain paradoxical quantum phenomena like delayed choice experiments and Bell non-locality. It also comports with Einstein's relativity, where the distinction between past and future depends on the observer's reference frame.
If correct, this paradigm shift would transform our understanding of causality, of observers, and of the nature of physical law itself. What's the largest unsolved problem in physics today that you're interested in?
Uh well this is not a very original answer, but I think the measurement problem uh of quantum mechanics for me still really stands out as an important unsolved problem. Um And not just because it's sort of intellectually interesting, but because I it seems to me that it's closely linked to a variety of concrete problems that we're working on in modern physics. So in particular, I think in the context of work on quantum gravity, a lot of the issues we're really sort of struggling with are ultimately to do with the nature of observers, the nature of observation. Uh so for example, solving the problem of time is all about trying to understand uh how to put the observers into their theories in the way that reproduces the kinds of observations we expect to see.
And so that makes me think that uh perhaps there's an issue here where we never really came to grips with how to think about observers in the context of ordinary quantum mechanics. And that's really holding us back from making us progress on on further physics. So I think that problem to me demands a solution not just for intellectual curiosity, but also to be able to make real progress. And what's the definition of observer?
Is it the same as a measuring device or what counts as a measurement?
Well, that's exactly the problem. We don't we don't know clearly how to define observers in concrete physical terms. We have, of course, an intuitive notion of what an observer is, and we know what what we expect observers to see, but uh it's still very unclear how to properly model observers within quantum mechanics. All the interpretations of quantum mechanics say something different about how you should represent observers, and that has important knock-on effects for how. how you're gonna think about observers in the context of further physics like quantum gravity.
How does the problem of observers or defining what observers are have anything to do with quantum gravity?
So, I mean, one of the big problems we encounter in the formulation of quantum gravity is known as the problem of time, which refers to the fact that uh if you impose a sort of canonical quantization on gravity, the result is that time evolution seems to vanish. You h end up with this sort of strained timeless model. And so then one obvious problem you have is try to to try to understand uh how the kinds of experiences that we have could possibly arise in this context. Where does our sense of doing things in time and obtaining outcomes come from? And so there are lots of interesting ideas around this, but a lot of a lot of this is still very focused on this question of how exactly should you represent an observer?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the “all‑at‑once” view of physics and why does it challenge the usual time‑evolution picture?
0:00–9:08
2
How does Emily define the measurement problem and why is it the biggest unsolved issue for her?
9:08–19:19
3
What are the dogmatic assumptions about time evolution in quantum foundations and how are they critiqued?
19:19–29:53
4
How does the “Sudoku universe” analogy illustrate constraints on the whole history of spacetime?
29:53–39:44
5
What is the difference between spatial and temporal non‑locality and why does relativity blur the line?
39:44–50:02
6
How does the all‑at‑once framework affect our understanding of causation and free will?
50:02–1:00:04
7
What is the proposed role of probabilities as global constraints on relative frequencies?
1:00:04–1:10:00
8
What advice does Emily give to early‑career researchers tackling foundational physics and philosophy?
1:10:00–1:18:42
Speakers
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Tanya Luhrmann: The Experience Is Real. But Is God?
Tim Maudlin: Quantum Nonlocality Explained FROM SCRATCH
Adrian Owen: Awake. Aware. Unable to Move.
Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds