Let me try to explain why it's important to study the foundations of quantum mechanics. (1/n) (Have to do some breathing exercises, b/c to me it's blindingly obvious that "understanding the most important theory in physics" is something physicists should care about, but apparently opinions differ.)

Why The Quantum State Only Exists In Our Mind A metaphysical shift that’s happening in the foundations of physics: the wave function is no longer regarded as something real, but just as a description of what we know about the world. youtu.be/SgQdDD3SY84

Uhoh – looks like a few people on Reddit have started playing around with the central ideas in my latest arXiv preprint. Must be time to polish it up and actually submit the damn thing. (But still, always nice to read "it's kind of blown me away"...) www.reddit.com/r/QuantumPhy...

Heading to Alaska soon, where apparently even the landslides are beautiful.

Thanks to @mercurynews.com for covering the $55.9M in NIH cuts to Bay Area research funding. I appreciate that they didn't just focus on the elite institutions (a colleague and I are quoted) & want to share some key takeaways 🧪 1/ www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/05/b...

Unsolicited advice for making progress in quantum foundations: 1) If there were a gentle tweak or simple idea that would make clear sense of quantum theory, beyond the for-all-practical-purposes-level, it would certainly have been found by now.

A very good, wide-ranging interview with Emily Adlam -- most of it on quantum foundations, along with a strong case for retrocausal/all-at-once approaches. youtu.be/6I2OhmVWLMs?...

Latest version of my work on entanglement with @kenwharton.bsky.social. We propose that entanglement is a kind of selection artefact. This was a talk at @griffith.edu.au, and the slides are accessible here: bit.ly/4h9dMeo #philsky #PhilSci #quantum #entanglement

A little fun news for me... Apparently the last science fiction story I ever wrote, 20 years ago, is now being discussed in at least one Philosophy course! The story is called "Aloha", originally published in the magazine Analog.

Tonight I got to see the first-ever spacecraft image of Mars, from Mariner 4's flyby. Apparently, before the raw image was processed, people at JPL printed out paper strips of numerical pixel values and -- coloring by hand! -- used pastels to distinguish different brightness levels.

I actually shelled out 4 bucks so I could peek behind the Popular Mechanics paywall and see what they are saying about retrocausality in quantum foundations. Maybe I got about 40 cents worth? www.popularmechanics.com/science/a637...

Richard Feynman’s former house in Altadena burned to the ground last week in the Eaton Fire. So did thousands and thousands of others -- including mine. 1/

Why is it always "Last but not least"? Surely, every now and then, it should be: "Last, and -- coincidentally -- also least".

Starter pack! Philosophy and physics of time: go.bsky.app/QgoUzVr

We’ve started a tradition in our department where the faculty give 5-minute “silly talks” for the last physics seminar of the semester. Here was my contribution: The Hidden Tragedy of Back to the Future 1/7

Pro Tip: When you use ChatGPT to compose an email to your professor, it's a good idea to proofread it first...

Ok, #quantum #physics Bluesky people: how do you like your quantum foundations? Are states ontic, epistemic or a secret, more complex third thing? #philosophy #science #debate

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Sometimes, when I see how much popular attention and interest is given to quantum foundations (as in the below link), I wonder why more people don't go into the field. Even given all the obvious downsides, it still doesn't quite make sense to me. physics.stackexchange.com/questions/83...

Getting very close to a universal hidden variable model... Very promising results here in our new preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2412.05456 . Local weak values have been the key stepping stone, but don’t seem to be quite enough to wrangle quantum systems back into spacetime.