355 | Solo: Looking Quantum Mechanics in the Eyeball
0
0
One of the major obstacles to understanding quantum mechanics is the difficulty we have in simply accepting what the theory itself is telling us. The problem is that we know what the everyday world looks like -- stuff, arranged in space, evolving through time. So we can't resist the temptation to impose that picture on the quantum description, even if it's not actually there. In this solo episode I talk about what it means to take quantum mechanics at face value, and the difficult work involved in understanding how the everyday world of our experience fits into the picture.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/05/25/355-solo-looking-quantum-mechanics-in-the-eyeball/
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Here is the survey on physicists' opinions about unsettled big-picture questions: Afshordi, Halper, Rini, and Schirber, "Big Mysteries Survey: Physicists' Views on Cosmology, Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Gravity."
And here is a short technical overview on the ideas described in this episode: Carroll, "Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space."
If you want further papers, look at the papers cited in this one.
Плейлист
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
The cosmological constant, as discussed last episode, provides a perfectly good (thus far) explanation for why we observe the universe to be accelerating. But it might not be the right explanation, an...
The most surprising discovery in fundamental physics during my career as a scientist was undoubtedly the acceleration of the universe, announced in 1998. The most straightforward explanation for these...
Messenger RNA (mRNA) plays a literally central role in the functioning of life as we know it, shuttling information back and forth between the DNA where it is stored to the ribosome where it is...
All ideas have a history, no matter how inevitable and well-entrenched they may seem to us today. The later Enlightenment was a heady time when people were exploring new conceptions of nature, h...
Welcome to the June 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...
One of the major obstacles to understanding quantum mechanics is the difficulty we have in simply accepting what the theory itself is telling us. The problem is that we know what the everyday wo...
Did I have any freedom in choosing this particular podcast guest? At the level of particles, fields, and the fundamental laws of physics; no. At the level of human agents navigating the world, y...
Economic markets are efficient ways of deciding fair prices, at least in ideal circumstances of perfect competition, information, and choice. But there is more to life than fair prices. Two peop...
Welcome to the May 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreon...
The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an important step to understanding how brains work, but a...
Peter Singer has been an influential philosopher for a number of decades. He was a significant early voice in animal rights, has been a leading thinker of utilitarianism, and helped inspire the...
We are more familiar with ourselves than with anything else in the universe, but we generally don't come very close to really understanding what our "self" is. That's not too surprising, as selv...
Welcome to the April 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by...
There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's theory of general relativity with the framework of quant...
"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristics (e.g., becoming stronger through exercise) that woul...
In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a single prison guard. Although his original id...
Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical tasks, but less good at understanding what...
Welcome to the March 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by...
Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncertain about the way the world is, but we can also b...
It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and individual rights -- "liberalism," in the political-ph...
For all that human beings spend a lot of their time thinking, it's far from obvious what that process actually entails. Part of it amounts to classical logical reasoning. But an even bigger part...
Welcome to the February 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...
Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There...
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty universal, ultimately due to the Second Law of Thermody...
At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for us to mat...
It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to thin...
Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full solo podcast. And hopefully something uplifting.This...
Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...
The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hypothesize new particles that could not be detected...
Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potential rewards. That's a pretty broad class of intere...