323 | Jacob Barandes on Indivisible Stochastic Quantum Mechanics
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2025
⏱️ 180 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The search for a foundational theory of quantum mechanics that all physicists can agree on remains active. Over the last century a number of contenders have emerged, including Many-Worlds, pilot-wave theories, and others, but all of them have aspects that many people object to. Jacob Barandes has taken up the challenge, proposing a new formulation of quantum theory in which there is no wave function, only real degrees of freedom with fundamentally stochastic dynamics. We talk about this new theory and the challenges facing it.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/07/28/323-jacob-barandes-on-indivisible-stochastic-quantum-mechanics/
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Jacob Barandes received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. He is currently Senior Preceptor in Physics and Associated Faculty in Philosophy at Harvard. He teaches both physics and philosophy courses at Harvard, where he has been the recipient of several teaching awards.
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| 1:30.6 | Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. |
| 1:34.6 | Quantum mechanics, one of our favorite topics here at Mindscape, continues to be in this weird |
| 1:40.7 | situation where it's a wonderful theory that fits all the data. We can do |
| 1:46.4 | spectacularly good calculations, compare them against experiment, achieve agreement to many |
| 1:52.6 | significant figures, and yet it is very, very easy to ask questions about quantum mechanics |
| 1:57.5 | 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 |
| 2:08.2 | quantum mechanics, trying to figure out what the true theory is behind the successful quantum |
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