Tim Maudlin Quotes

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.")

[T]he need for a completely physical account of "measurement" procedures—are addressed in both volumes...

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.

If the correct solution to the measurement problem does not involve local beables, or if those beables have no nonrelativistic analogs, then starting with nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is counterproductive. But one has to start somewhere...

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.

John Stewart Bell made a proposal... which he called the theory of local beables. "Beables" refers to the ontology of a theory: what it postulates to exist. "Local" indicates a beable that exists in a small region of space-time... What one needs... is an inventory of local beables and an account of their dynamics: how they get distributed in space-time.

[P]roblems about the fundamental consistency of our two fundamental physical theories may appear. ...It arises from the remarkable results derived by John Stewart Bell in 1964 ...[C]ertain pairs of particles that are governed by quantum laws... appear to remain "connected" or "in communication" no matter how distantly separated... [T]he connection exists even when the observations carried out occupy positions... which cannot be connected by light rays. The particles communicate faster than light.

Many... would agree that Relativity prohibits something from going faster than light but disagree over just what something is.

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.

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.

If one resolves the measurement problem by postulating additional variables beside the wave function, it is the dynamics of these variables which manifests the non-locality and which resists a fully Relativistic formulation.

[S]pace and time... do not appear to our senses: they have no color or flavor or sound or smell or tangible shape. ...[They] seem rather to have is a geometrical structure.

[T]he science of thermodynamics... initially aimed at providing a precise account of how heat spreads through an object and from one object to another. But we can discover... detailed equations governing heat flow and still not have an account of what heat is. ...It is a characteristic of contemporary physics education that much more time is spent learning how to solve the equation and get a practical answer... than in... the nature of heat, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of matter. Physics students... fascinated by these foundational questions can find themselves frustrated by... classes that refuse to address them. This volume is dedicated to them as much as it is to philosophers...

Metaphysics is ontology. Ontology is the most generic study of what exists. Evidence for what exists, at least in the physical world, is provided solely by empirical research. Hence the proper object of most metaphysics is the careful analysis of our best scientific theories (and especially of fundamental physical theories) with the goal of determining what they imply about the constitution of the physical world.

The presentation of Bell's inequality needs no more than some algebra... Understanding Relativity also requires no more than algebraic manipulation... but would tax the patience of the average reader. So I have tried to present Relativity pictorially...