I asked Tim Maudlin if he wants to come on and take as much time as he needs to explain quantum mechanics / Bell’s theorem from scratch. The professor of philosophy at New York University, founder and director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics, did just that.
Super excited for this one.
These are Acts One and Two of a three-part arc, and they stand on their own: 1905, the 1927 Solvay Conference, the 1935 EPR paper, and the moment Schrödinger reaches for a new word and coins entanglement.
Bell’s theorem is Act Three, recorded separately, so you will not find the theorem itself here.
We cover:
How quantum theory actually started
What is EPR really
An objection from the 1927 Solvay Conference that even people who work on this rarely encounter
The God-does-not-play-dice story looks different afterward. On Tim’s reading, indeterminism was never Einstein’s deepest complaint, and Pauli said as much to Max Born in 1954, in a line Bell later quoted: It seemed to me as if you…
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