17. David Albert: On Quantum Mechanics (2013)

Mauricio Suárez

Francisco Flores, Robert K. Clifton

Atle Ottesen Søvik

Hilary Putnam

David Albert has proved an important theorem, a surprising one, which certainly has relevance to the way we will understand quantum mechanics in the future. Whether its moral is really the “non-narratibility” of the history of the quantum world is, however, dependent on interpretative questions about which philosophers and physicists – even philosophers and physicists who, like David Albert and myself, are looking for what the late, great, J. S. Bell called an “unromantic” interpretation of quantum mechanics – are sure to disagree. In this brief comment I want to say what Albert has certainly shown , and what depends on those interpretative questions (and, of course, what those questions are). By an “unromantic” interpretation, what Bell meant is an intelligible and mathematically precise interpretation in which there is no talk about “consciousness” reducing the wave packet, “measurements” are simply described as a subclass of physical interactions, and, of course, there is no loose talk about the world consisting of “information.”

David Z. Albert

Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”

Arnold Neumaier, Dennis Westra