RESEARCH
Records of the past are a pervasive feature of our world which are referred to in many areas of both physics and philosophy, but there is no widespread consensus on what records are. I will present a new account of records in terms of robustness against noise. This account highlights previously over-looked features of records: their use of redundancy and that they must be treated macroscopically. These features have implications the use of records in quantum mechanics and thermodynamics and shows how the misuse of records has caused problems in the philosophy of physics literature
Quantum darwinism explains the emergence of classicality using records formed in the environment which allow multiple observers to verify the state of a system. However exactly what it aims to derive is unclear and it's use of observers is overemphasised, this has lead to a number of criticisms. I will show that focusing on what a record is in a general sense helps set a standard for classicality that quantum darwinism can aim for and that this need not involve any actual observers. This standard can also be used to show how emergence in quantum darwinism relates to philosophical accounts of emergence which focus on dynamical laws. Currently quantum darwinism's information theoretic framing make it difficult to apply these accounts of emergence.
Emergent Perspectives in Quantum Mechanics (work in progress)
Is there a difference between viewing the world from a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective? I argue that there is and that the way we interpret quantum mechanics should change based on perspective. The process of decoherence clearly lays out the connection between perspectives, and delineates how and when to switch between them. Perspectival thinking can shed light on a number of issues including quantum indeterminacy and different ways to be realist about quantum mechanics. To illustrate what each perspective offers I will focus on different ways to interpret the wavefunction. This can be split into two broad classes: state realism (where the wavefunction is primarily seen as a ray in Hilbert space) and operationalism (where the wavefunction is a superposition of classical measurable properties). The former is common in interpretations such as Everettian Many Worlds while the latter is favoured by interpretations like QBism and Relational Quantum Mechanics. Rather than being incompatible however, I argue that state realism is how we should view quantum mechanics from the third-person perspective; operationalism is the quantum state from the first-person perspective. I will show how decoherence theory connects the two by describing the emergence of the first-person perspective at a certain level of reality. This is made especially clear by recent work on decoherence using information theory that focuses on how the concept of measurement becomes well-defined.Â