Tim Maudlin Quotes (1958-)

“Logical positivism is a very attractive view for people who do not want to worry about what they cannot observe. It is ultimately a theory about meaning, about the content of a theory. According to the positivists, a theory says no more than its observable consequences. Logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers. But no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart, it arises unbidden in the minds of scientists. For if the content of a theory goes beyond what you can observe, then you can never, in principle, be sure that any theory is right. And that means there can be interminable arguments about which theory is right that cannot be settled by observation.”

“The experimental verification of violations of Bell’s inequality for randomly set measurements at space-like separation is the most astonishing result in the history of physics. Theoretical physics has yet to come to terms with what these results mean for our fundamental account of the world. Experimentalists, from Freedman and Clauser and Aspect forward, deserve their share of the credit for producing the necessary experimental conditions and for steadily closing the experimental loopholes available to the persistent skeptic. But the great achievement was Bell’s. It was he who understood the profound significance of these phenomena, the prediction of which can be derived easily even by a freshman physics student. Unfortunately, many physicists have not properly appreciated what Bell proved: they take the target of his theorem— what the theorem rules out as impossible—to be much narrower and more parochial than it is. Early on, Bell’s result was often reported as ruling out determinism, or hidden variables. Nowadays, it is sometimes reported as ruling out, or at least calling in question, realism. But these are all mistakes. What Bell’s theorem, together with the experimental results, proves to be impossible (subject to a few caveats we will attend to) is not determinism or hidden variables or realism but locality, in a perfectly clear sense. What Bell proved, and what theoretical physics has not yet properly absorbed, is that the physical world itself is non-local.”

“What is the attraction of Kuhn’s account of science? It has its roots far back in time, with the biggest self-deluder of all, Immanuel Kant. The hand of Kant lies behind both Bohr and Kuhn. In his epic and epically incomprehensible masterpiece The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant pulled off the grandest intellectual hocus-pocus in scholarly history. […] Kant argued that what have been taken to be features of a mind-independent reality—the structure of space and time, the existence of cause and effect, the law of conservation of energy—are actually imposed upon our experience by the mind itself. We have no justification for thinking that reality is intrinsically spatiotemporal or causally structured. But we are nonetheless eternally destined to experience the world in those terms because those are the intellectual and perceptive structures we must bring to our experience. Kant’s argumentation for this Parmenidean thesis is famously obscure, and his writing forbiddingly impenetrable. But the moral he wanted to draw, which goes by the name of transcendental idealism, is easily summarized. I just did. And for whatever reason, this conclusion of Kant’s has been attracting people like a siren’s call ever since. Remarkably, many people just want Kant’s conclusion to be true.”

“I have never bumped into Tim Maudlin, but I have felt his gravitational tug. A Reddit discussion... called Maudlin "probably the most influential person in philosophy of physics." Someone chimed in that Maudlin... is "without a doubt an intellectual beast." Maudlin impresses even... Jim Holt... When I asked Holt "What’s your utopia?," he replied "arguing eternally about gauge theory" with Maudlin and a few other pals. ...Maudlin's ..."The Defeat of Reason"... ends by suggesting that we "shorten the dignified designation Homo sapiens to the pithier and more accurate Homo sap." Ouch.”

“Maudlin's book is likely to upset many physicists and metaphysicians, but in a positive, thought provoking way. Moreover, its plain presentation style makes it a good introductory book for students and non-specialists. In short, it is highly recommended for anybody interested in quantum theory, and especially in what "happens in between."”

“...Maudlin takes up the conceptual and ontological foundations of classical and modern physics and explains in a lucid manner how Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity emerged from Newtonian mechanics and Galilean relativity. ...revealing the foundations of physics to those with more interest in understanding the general philosophical concepts rather than merely understanding how to solve the equations.”