Top 15 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?

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.")

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.

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

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...

[P]hysical theories are neither realist nor antirealist. That is... a . It is a person's attitude toward a physical theory that is either realist or antirealist. ...[T]he theory toward which Osiander was antirealist and Galileo realist is one and the same theory. The theory itself is neither.

It has become almost de rigueur in quantum foundations literature to misuse the terms "realist," "realistic," "antirealist," and "antirealistic." These terms have a precise meaning in the philosophy of science... that seems to be... unfamiliar to most physicists. ...[T]hey simply toss them around with no attached meaning ...[with] terrible consequences in foundations of quantum theory.

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...

A physical theory should clearly and forthrightly address two... questions: what there is, and what it does. The answer to the first... the ontology... to the second... its dynamics. The ontology should have a sharp mathematical description, and the dynamics... implemented by precise equations describing how the ontology... evolve[s]. ...All three of the theories we will examine meet these demands.

Starting from what we understand and seeing clearly its inadequacies can provide a path to conceptual progress.

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...

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.

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"...

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.

[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.