The Many World's Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

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There's going to be a whole conference about quantum mechanics in October. I think that at the end of the day, you can't make use of the way I understand probability. It's driven you rightly so to take probabilities out of the world and putting them entirely as indexicals. And when I'm told that the stuff of the world is what? What do you actually think thestuff of the universe is?"

The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics could be derived from the random motions of microscopic atoms. This insight turns out to be even more important than they realized: the emergence of patterns characterizing our macroscopic world relies crucially on the increase of entropy over time. Barry Loewer has (in collaboration with David Albert) been developing a theory of the Mentaculus — the probability map of the world — that connects microscopic physics to time, causation, and other familiar features of our experience.

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Barry Loewer received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University. He is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the foundations of physics and the metaphysics of laws and chance.

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