Welcome to the ninth episode of the Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast, the official podcast of the LSE Philosophy Society. In each episode, we take an important philosophical question and explore our best current attempts to answer it. For this episode, our question is “What is the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics?” and our guide to the topic is Professor Sean Carroll.

In this episode we discuss:

• Interpreting quantum mechanics: the measurement problem and the reality problem


• Schrödinger evolution and the Born rule


• A brief history of interpretations of quantum mechanics


• The many-worlds interpretation


• Entanglement, decoherence, and branching


• Many-worlds and probabilities: decision theory, self-locating uncertainty, and quantum immortality


• Other interpretations: hidden variables, objective collapse, and epistemic approaches


• The role of philosophy in the foundations of physics

About our guest:

Sean Carroll is a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on foundational questions in quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, emergence, entropy, and complexity, occasionally touching on issues of dark matter, dark energy, symmetry, and the origin of the universe. Professor Carroll is the author of numerous books, including From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture. His latest best-seller, Something Deeply Hidden, is about the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. He is also the host of the fantastic Mindscape podcast. Check out Sean's website here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/

Check out the Mindscape Podcast here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/

Link to Something Deeply Hidden (Carroll, 2019): https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/somethingdeeplyhidden/

About your host:

Eric Chen is an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics.