Tim Maudlin Quotes

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...

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...

I believe that it is a fundamental, irreducible fact about the spatio-temporal structure of the world that time passes. ...The passage of time is an intrinsic asymmetry in the temporal structure of the world, an asymmetry that has no spatial counterpart. ...The belief that time passes ...has no bearing on the question of the 'reality' of the past or of the future. I believe that the past is real: there are facts about what happened in the past that are independent of the present state of the world and independent of all knowledge or beliefs about the past. I similarly believe that there is (i.e. will be) a single unique future. I know what it would be to believe that the past is unreal (i.e. nothing ever happened, everything was just created ex nihilo) and to believe that the future is unreal (i.e. all will end, I will not exist tomorrow, I have no future). I do not believe these things... Insofar as belief in the reality of the past and the future constitutes a belief in a 'block universe', I believe in a block universe. But I also believe that time passes, and see no contradiction or tension between these views.

[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.

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.

[T]he experimental verification of Bell's inequality constitutes the most significant event of the last half-century. ...[O]ur basic picture of space, time, and physical reality must change. These results, and the mysteries they engender, should be the common property of all who contemplate with wonder the universe we inhabit.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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...