Simon Saunders: The Unsettling Mysteries of Time

SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt and use the promo code "CURT" to get a Plaud device today - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories

This is a podcast all about time: depending on how you look at it, that's either unnerving or exhilarating. Professor Simon Saunders — Emeritus Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and one of the most celebrated philosophers of physics alive — goes deep on what time actually is, why special relativity demands a block universe, and what any of this has to do with the Many Worlds Interpretation. Why doesn't space inherit the paradoxes of time? What's really missing from the block universe picture (and is it the same thing missing from quantum probability?) Saunders argues that Bell inequality violations aren't evidence against locality but evidence for Many Worlds, presents a novel derivation of the Born rule from a single physical postulate, and sketches a quantum version of Leibniz's monadology as a possible path through the mind-body problem. I hope you enjoy.

FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE

TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Defining Temporal Passage - 00:05:03 - Block Universe and Relativity - 00:11:15 - The Timeless Viewpoint - 00:18:07 - CMB and Global Time - 00:23:19 - Persistence and Spatial Revisitability - 00:31:02 - Philosophy of Physics Foundations - 00:38:46 - Relativistic Localization Problems - 00:49:22 - Reeh-Schlieder and Vacuum States - 00:55:23 - Branching and Actuality - 01:05:41 - Interval Probabilities and Frequentism - 01:14:14 - Decoherent Histories Interpretation - 01:25:49 - Ontic Structural Realism - 01:32:15 - Deriving the Born Rule - 01:38:02 - Leibnizian Quantum Monadology

LINKS MENTIONED: - Simon's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=htEv3XIAAAAJ - Many Worlds? [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0199560560?tag=toe08-20 - A Brief History of Time [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0553380168?tag=toe08-20 - How Relativity Contradicts Presentism [Paper]: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~lina0174/kansas.pdf - Trouble With Quantum Mechanics [Article]: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quantum-mechanics/ - Locality, Complex Numbers, and Relativistic Quantum Theory [Paper]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/192768 - Bohmian Mechanics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ - Finite Frequentism Explains Quantum Probability [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12954 - Chance in the Everett Interpretation [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04720 - Reeh-Schlieder Defeats Newton-Wigner [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0007060 - Everett's Thesis [Paper]: https://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/everett_phd.pdf - Physics and Leibniz's Principles [Paper]: https://philpapers.org/rec/SAUPAL-2 - Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1605204536?tag=toe08-20 - Avshalom Elitzur [TOE]: https://youtu.be/pWRAaimQT1E - David Wallace [TOE]: https://youtu.be/4MjNuJK5RzM - Sechit Madra (Trainer): https://www.instagram.com/sechit_madra

More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com

Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices