Simon Saunders: The Unsettling Mysteries of Time

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal

Curt Jaimungal

Society & Culture, Physics, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 616 Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2026

⏱️ 105 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

SPONSORS: - Go to https://www.plaud.ai/curt and use the promo code "CURT" to get a Plaud device today - Accelerate your efficiency. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at http://shopify.com/theories - I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE This is a podcast all about time: depending on how you look at it, that's either unnerving or exhilarating. Professor Simon Saunders — Emeritus Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and one of the most celebrated philosophers of physics alive — goes deep on what time actually is, why special relativity demands a block universe, and what any of this has to do with the Many Worlds Interpretation. Why doesn't space inherit the paradoxes of time? What's really missing from the block universe picture (and is it the same thing missing from quantum probability?) Saunders argues that Bell inequality violations aren't evidence against locality but evidence for Many Worlds, presents a novel derivation of the Born rule from a single physical postulate, and sketches a quantum version of Leibniz's monadology as a possible path through the mind-body problem. I hope you enjoy. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://nowpayments.io/donation/TOE - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 - Defining Temporal Passage - 00:05:03 - Block Universe and Relativity - 00:11:15 - The Timeless Viewpoint - 00:18:07 - CMB and Global Time - 00:23:19 - Persistence and Spatial Revisitability - 00:31:02 - Philosophy of Physics Foundations - 00:38:46 - Relativistic Localization Problems - 00:49:22 - Reeh-Schlieder and Vacuum States - 00:55:23 - Branching and Actuality - 01:05:41 - Interval Probabilities and Frequentism - 01:14:14 - Decoherent Histories Interpretation - 01:25:49 - Ontic Structural Realism - 01:32:15 - Deriving the Born Rule - 01:38:02 - Leibnizian Quantum Monadology LINKS MENTIONED: - Simon's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=htEv3XIAAAAJ - Many Worlds? [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0199560560?tag=toe08-20 - A Brief History of Time [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/0553380168?tag=toe08-20 - How Relativity Contradicts Presentism [Paper]: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~lina0174/kansas.pdf - Trouble With Quantum Mechanics [Article]: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quantum-mechanics/ - Locality, Complex Numbers, and Relativistic Quantum Theory [Paper]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/192768 - Bohmian Mechanics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ - Finite Frequentism Explains Quantum Probability [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12954 - Chance in the Everett Interpretation [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04720 - Reeh-Schlieder Defeats Newton-Wigner [Paper]: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0007060 - Everett's Thesis [Paper]: https://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/everett_phd.pdf - Physics and Leibniz's Principles [Paper]: https://philpapers.org/rec/SAUPAL-2 - Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz [Book]: https://amazon.com/dp/1605204536?tag=toe08-20 - Avshalom Elitzur [TOE]: https://youtu.be/pWRAaimQT1E - David Wallace [TOE]: https://youtu.be/4MjNuJK5RzM - David Deutsch [TOE]: https://youtu.be/vKeWv-cdWkM - Sean Carroll [TOE]: https://youtu.be/9AoRxtYZrZo - Tim Maudlin [TOE]: https://youtu.be/fU1bs5o3nss - Sechit Madra (Trainer): https://www.instagram.com/sechit_madra More links at https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It doesn't feel as though time is passing.
0:02.2	Where is time passing?
0:03.8	Time remains the central concept in physics that is least understood.
0:10.2	There's lots of debates in the theology out there about whether God exists outside of time.
0:15.0	I think there's extremely interesting.
0:16.8	Professor Simon Saunders, Emeritus Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, is one of the most celebrated
0:22.9	philosophers of physics alive, working on what time actually is.
0:27.4	I find it almost insane, all of the minutiae of our present existence, with all its craziness
0:35.0	and insanity built in from the beginning of the world.
0:38.3	No, I cannot believe it. It is not necessary.
0:43.3	On this channel, I, Kirchaymongle, interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth.
0:50.3	Today, we go deep into the philosophy of time and what any of this has to do with the many
0:54.6	world's interpretation.
0:56.1	We go over the professor's boldest claim that the violation of Bell's inequalities
1:00.9	is not evidence against locality.
1:04.2	It's evidence for the many worlds.
1:06.6	We even touch on consciousness.
1:08.9	I am just in my Everettian branch.
1:11.9	You are in your Everettian branch.
1:14.1	We can coherently treat ourselves
1:15.8	as a sort of extended observer.
1:20.4	Professor, what is time?
	...

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