355 | Solo: Looking Quantum Mechanics in the Eyeball
5/24/20261 hr 44 min
One of the major obstacles to understanding quantum mechanics is the difficulty we have in simply accepting what the theory itself is telling us. The problem is that we know what the everyday world looks like -- stuff, arranged in space, evolving through time. So we can't resist the temptation to impose that picture on the quantum description, even if it's not actually there. In this solo episode I talk about what it means to take quantum mechanics at face value, and the difficult work involved in understanding how the everyday world of our experience fits into the picture.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/05/25/355-solo-looking-quantum-mechanics-in-the-eyeball/
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Here is the survey on physicists' opinions about unsettled big-picture questions:
- Afshordi, Halper, Rini, and Schirber, "Big Mysteries Survey: Physicists' Views on Cosmology, Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Gravity."
And here is a short technical overview on the ideas described in this episode:
- Carroll, "Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space."
If you want further papers, look at the papers cited in this one.
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsRyan Reynolds0:00
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Sean Carroll· Host1:00
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You might remember, uh, about a year ago, we had a podcast episode with Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Helper. Now, Niayesh is a, uh, well-known, respectable working cosmologist at Perimeter Institute, and Phil, uh, is a science communicator who makes YouTube videos trying to explain ideas in physics and so forth. And the two of them, the reason we had them on the podcast is because they had a book out, Battle of the Big Bang, which was