Tim Maudlin Quotes

[P]rior to Newton, Galileo sought to specify the "intertial" motion of terrestrial objects—...the motion they would display if subject to no forces—and he concluded that such motion would be uniform circular motion. He arrived at this conclusion from his experimental work with inclined planes.

General Relativity is... completely clear and precise. ...[W]hat the theory says is unambiguous. The more one works with it, the clearer it becomes, and there are no great debates... about how to use it. (The only bit of unclarity... to represent the distribution of matter... using the . Einstein remarked that that part... "is low grade wood," while the part describing the space-time structure... is "fine marble.")

The sparks which fly when quantum theory collides with Relativity ignite conceptual brushfires of particular interest... problems about causation, time, and holism. Unfortunately much of the work... presupposes a considerable amount of familiarity with the physics. This is particularly sad since the physics is not, in most cases, very complicated.

If one resolves the measurement problem by allowing a real physical process of wave collapse, it is the collapse dynamics which manifests the non-locality, and which resists the fully Relativistic formulation.

[N]o consensus... exists among physicists about how to understand quantum theory. There... is no precise, exact physical theory... Instead there is raging controversy. ...How can the manifest and overwhelming success ...be reconciled with complete uncertainty about what the theory claims about the nature of matter?

I hope... to have provided a framework sturdy enough and correct enough to serve both professional and amateur naval architects who propose to redesign the craft which carries us on our journey.

Perhaps the most vexing question confronting any study of Bell's inequality, and the experimental observation of violations of that... would never have been discovered if not for the existence of quantum formalism. On the other hand, the inequality... is derived without any mention of quantum theory and the violations are matters of plain experimental fact. So the explication and analysis of the importance of Bell's work can in principle proceed without mentioning quantum mechanics at all. Should an account of Bell's inequality emphasize its historical roots... or... sever those ties in the interest of clarity? ...I chose the second option ...the interpretation of quantum theory is troublesome enough ...to overshadow and confuse the relatively straightforward proof on non-locality.

The scientific realist maintains that in at least some cases, we have good evidential reasons to accept theories or theoretical claims as true, or approximately true, or on-the-road-to-truth. The scientific antirealist denies this. These attitudes come in degrees... [T]his is a question addressed by epistemology and confirmation theory...

The regrettably widespread opinion that there is no real non-locality inherent in the quantum theory is therefore deeply intertwined with the regrettably widespread opinion that the measurement problem can be painlessly solved without postulating either additional variables or any real collapse process.

Newton's First Law, the... Law of Inertia, refers only to bodies that are subject to no external forces. It is tempting to say that Newton postulates that such bodies "continue in the same state of motion," but such... would miss the revolutionary aspect... the First Law specifies exactly what counts as "the same state of motion." For Aristotle... a piece of aether in uniform circular motion about [earth,] the center of the universe is always in "the same state of motion," and so there would be no reason to seek out external causes... In Aristotle's physics, external causes are responsible for unnatural motion, such as a rock moving upward instead of down. So for Aristotle, the falling of a stone... requires no external cause, and the continued rotation of a sphere of fixed stars requires no external cause: this what these sorts of matter do by nature.

Unlike space-time theory, where there is substantial agreement about how to understand the best physics we have (General Relativity), quantum theory has always been a battleground of contention. Nothing one can say would command the assent of most physicists and philosophers.

I have often felt that whatever is of value in this book could be found in Bell's "The Theory of Local Beables" (1987, Ch. 7)... this book will have served a great purpose if it does no more than encourage people to read Bell with the care and attention that he deserves.

The Theory of Relativity has overthrown classical presumptions about the structure of space and time. The quantum theory has provided us with intimations of a new conception of physical reality. Classical notions of causality, of actuality, and of the role of the observer... have all come under attack.

Quantum theory... formalism... uses no more than linear algebra and vector spaces. ...A particularly nice and accessible presentation of the requisite mathematics can be found in 's Quantum Mechanics and Experience (1992, Ch. 2).

Physics aspires to a sort of universality that is unique among empirical sciences and holds, in that sense, a foundational position among them.