The Problem With Local Theory in Quantum Mechanics

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Sid Hunt-Dass has been looking at something which amazingly people had not looked carefully at. When you add spin, okay, that's an additional physical degree of freedom. Sid: There is a very specific thing you can look at that standard quantum mechanics doesn't have an obvious way to even treat. He says there are reasons to believe you could signal faster than I. If Bob will suddenly start seeing a slightly different distribution of arrival times if it's 100% oriented in another way? It would essentially be a light switch and a kind of information clean up.

Last year's Nobel Prize for experimental tests of Bell's Theorem was the first Nobel in the foundations of quantum mechanics since Max Born in 1954. Quantum foundations is enjoying a bit of a resurgence, inspired in part by improving quantum technology but also by a realization that understanding quantum mechanics might help with other problems in physics (and be important in its own right). Tim Maudlin is a leading philosopher of physics and also a skeptic of the Everett interpretation. We discuss the logic behind hidden-variable approaches such as Bohmian mechanics, and also the broader question of the importance of the foundations of physics.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/06/26/241-tim-maudlin-on-locality-hidden-variables-and-quantum-foundations/

Tim Maudlin received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently a professor of philosophy at New York University. He is a member of the Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the founder and director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics in Croatia.

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