355 | Solo: Looking Quantum Mechanics in the Eyeball
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2026
⏱️ 104 minutes
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Summary
One of the major obstacles to understanding quantum mechanics is the difficulty we have in simply accepting what the theory itself is telling us. The problem is that we know what the everyday world looks like -- stuff, arranged in space, evolving through time. So we can't resist the temptation to impose that picture on the quantum description, even if it's not actually there. In this solo episode I talk about what it means to take quantum mechanics at face value, and the difficult work involved in understanding how the everyday world of our experience fits into the picture.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/05/25/355-solo-looking-quantum-mechanics-in-the-eyeball/
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Here is the survey on physicists' opinions about unsettled big-picture questions:
- Afshordi, Halper, Rini, and Schirber, "Big Mysteries Survey: Physicists' Views on Cosmology, Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Gravity."
And here is a short technical overview on the ideas described in this episode:
- Carroll, "Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space."
If you want further papers, look at the papers cited in this one.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You might remember |
| 0:04.7 | about a year ago, we had a podcast episode with Niesh F. Shorty and Phil Helper. Now, Niesh is a well-known, |
| 0:14.1 | respectable working cosmologist at Primiter Institute, and Phil is a science communicator who makes |
| 0:20.7 | YouTube videos trying to explain ideas in physics and so forth. And Phil is a science communicator who makes YouTube videos trying to explain |
| 0:22.3 | ideas in physics and so forth. And the two of them, the reason we had on the podcast is because |
| 0:26.7 | they had a book out Battle of the Big Bang, which was in part based on surveys they did, |
| 0:33.4 | rather than trying to push their own view of what happened at the Big Bang, they surveyed all |
| 0:38.0 | sorts of scientists, all sorts of physicists, and came up with a sort of way of thinking about |
| 0:42.8 | all the possible methods that people have proposed to understand what happened at the Big Bang. |
| 0:48.7 | Now, more recently, in the last few weeks, I guess, Phil and the Ash have come out with another survey result. |
| 0:55.4 | They were asked by the American Physical Society, and they teamed up with some other people, |
| 0:59.5 | to survey physicists on a whole bunch of questions that can be considered not yet settled. |
| 1:06.1 | Let's put them that way. |
| 1:07.1 | You know, you want to say controversial or whatever, but science always has controversies. |
| 1:11.7 | It's not like some flaw in the system. Everything we understand is put in the bucket of things we |
| 1:17.1 | understand and everything we don't, which is what is interesting and we talk about, is somehow |
| 1:21.5 | controversial. So they were asking physicists about all these big questions like what is making |
| 1:26.6 | the universe accelerate, |
| 1:32.7 | what happened at the Big Bang. Of course, they're going to ask them about interpretations of quantum mechanics, right? That's one of the most famous unsolved issues in quantum mechanics. |
| 1:39.4 | And if you've hung around these sorts of surveys long enough, this is certainly not the first |
| 1:43.8 | one of its kind, |
| 1:45.2 | you'll not be surprised to hear that among physicists the Copenhagen interpretation gets more |
... |
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