The Nobel Prize and the Misinterpreted Experiment on Bell's Inequality

50sec Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Key takeaways

Transcript

Episode notes

The Nobel Prize was awarded for the experiments that showed the violation of Bell's inequality actually occurs.
The Nobel committee made a mistake in their press release.
The experiments proved that von Neumann was right about hidden variables.
Bell became a strong advocate for theories with additional variables.
Non-locality is a characteristic of the world.

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.