Tim Maudlin Quotes

[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?

Relativity is commonly taken to prohibit anything from traveling faster than light. ...[H]ow can the particles continue to display the... correlations..? The two pillars of modern physics seem to contradict one other.

The central problem facing attempts to understand a quantum theory is how it manages to model empirical phenomena in a principled way. This is often referred to as "the measurement problem"...

Any book which attempts to deal with quantum theory, Special Relativity and General Relativity courts various forms of disaster.

Non-locality appears at exactly the point where the "measurement problem" which infects standard quantum theory is resolved.

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.

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).

[A]nother interpretation holds that Relativity requires only thatTheories be Lorentz invarient.

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...

Although this book is not the place to thrash out those issues, I have thrashed them... in other places.

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...

Pictures of space-time look misleadingly like pictures of space, and the novice must unlearn some of the conventions...

Sometimes, accepting the Copenhagen Interpretation is understood... to use the quantum recipe without... question: Shut up and calculate. Such rejects the aspiration... defined above. Hence it is not even in the running...

Present physics elucidates the "motion" of an object as its trajectory through space-time. A precise understanding... requires a precise account of the structure of space-time. The nature of space-time itself... is the topic of the companion volume... Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time. The present volume addresses the question: What is matter? ...Our main task is to understand just what quantum theory claims about the nature of the material constituents of the world.

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.