The Importance of Locality in Quantum Mechanics

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The Nobel Prize went to when to clouds or an asp a ensigner recently for doing the experiments that showed that the violation of Bell's inequality actually occurs. The intuition of causal locality basically says nothing that Alice does can have any actual influence or effect on what Bob sees, right? That doesn't mean there can't be correlations between what they see. It was a rough time for the philosophy of quantum mechanics in certain ways. But okay, so I think that there are any physicists out there who are not into the foundations of quantum mechanics and they're listening.

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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