323 | Jacob Barandes on Indivisible Stochastic Quantum Mechanics

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Quantum mechanics, one of our favorite topics here at Mindscape, continues to be in this weird situation where it's a wonderful theory that fits all the data. We can do spectacularly good calculations. compare them against experiment, achieve agreement to many significant figures, and yet it is very, very easy to ask questions about quantum mechanics that we don't know the answer to.

Not just what would happen questions, but what does the theory say? questions. And so we have the whole sub discipline of foundations of quantum mechanics, trying to figure out what the true theory is behind the successful quantum mechanical predictions. And as many of you know, there are different approaches here.

Ordinarily in quantum mechanics you have a wave function and then the first question you ask is, does the wave function represent reality or is it merely epistemic? Is it merely something about our ability to make predictions about things? But then if you do think that the wave function represents reality, then you still have choices. Is it the sole representative of reality or are there hidden variables or something like that? And if it is the sole representative of reality, does it always obey the famous Schrdinger equation, in which case you get the many worlds theory?

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