The Sociological Reason Why Physicists Would Stop Asking What Is Going on at the Fundamental Nature of Reality

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The idea of the Copenhagen School was say some incomprehensible stuff and then calculate. And I think they eventually got to the point where they didn't want to say, yes, those are good questions, which we can't answer. That's my take on it. Bohr's background was in neo-contian philosophy. He actually said very, very, very mysterious things. The only reason you're puzzled is that you're trying to push some classical picture on the microscopic realm. And it doesn't belong there. Your confusion is arising from you having unjustified desires for comprehension.

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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