Here's an honest question of mine, from deep in another thread.

Ken Wharton@kenwharton.bsky.social · 4w ago

Although, I think the more important question is this: If the eventual success of conventional quantum gravity research programs entirely depends on unresolved questions in quantum foundations, then why are so few physicists even marginally engaging with those foundational questions?

New preprint. Maybe, after a full century of trying to “interpret” the quantum wavefunction, we should spend a bit of effort looking at different variables that might better represent reality. Say, something that fully respects relativity, hidden inside a common representation of quantum systems.

Localized Covariant Quantities Appear To Underlie Quantum Circuits

Although entangled state vectors cannot be fully described in terms of variables localized in space and time, any given entanglement experiment can be built from basic quantum circuit components with ...

arxiv.org

"Bell's Theorem and Beyond" (June 26) One-day workshop at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. More info here: www.philosophie.lmu.de/mcmp/en/late... #philosophy #bellstheorem

Workshop on Bell’s Theorem and Beyond

Detail page of an event

philosophie.lmu.de

The video of my talk for World Quantum Day is now up; mine is the first one in the clip, starts at 3:30 after the intro. sciforum.net/event/MWQDW2... "Retrocausal Quantum Models: 10+ Reasons to take them Seriously"

New podcast series from Woodwell notaclimatescientist.woodwellclimate.org "Not a Climate Scientist is the podcast where we talk with everyday Americans about the very real ways climate change is showing up in our lives and livelihoods..."

Happening soon, in two hours! It looks like you might need to "register".

Ken Wharton@kenwharton.bsky.social · 4mo ago

For any ‘retrocurious’ people out there... I’m giving a free online talk next week, a new big-picture foundations talk I’ve been developing: “Retrocausal Quantum Models; 10 reasons to take them seriously.” Monday evening in the US; Tuesday late morning in Asia/Australia. sciforum.net/event/MWQDW2...

For any ‘retrocurious’ people out there... I’m giving a free online talk next week, a new big-picture foundations talk I’ve been developing: “Retrocausal Quantum Models; 10 reasons to take them seriously.” Monday evening in the US; Tuesday late morning in Asia/Australia. sciforum.net/event/MWQDW2...

Made it to Denver for APS. Only 1 quantum foundations session this year (down from 4 last year), but it looks like a very good one. I'll have to get up early Friday for @quantumaephraim.bsky.social 's invited talk, but it will be worth it! My own little talk is at 10am. summit.aps.org/events/MAR-Y18

Interesting new paper by Guido Bacciagaluppi and colleagues, raising some deep issues with Bell’s Theorem. On one level I think they’re right that there’s a connection between realistic violations of Bell inequalities and “nonlocal signaling in principle”. They seem to go together.

PhilSci-Archive@philsci-archive.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New on the Archive: Bacciagaluppi, Guido and Hermens, Ronnie and Leegwater, Gijs (2026) Extending Bell’s Theorem: Nonlocality via Measurement Dependence. [Preprint] https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28216/

The talks from a recent quantum foundations conference at Chapman U. are now online... Each day is its own 5-hour video, I guess. My talk, "A realistic alternative to the wavefunction", happened to be the first on day 1 (skip to the 10 minute mark). www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPwj...

john templeton foundation at chapman iqs conference day 1 720p

YouTube video by Institute for Quantum Studies

youtube.com

The CSU/OpenAI contract is set to expire June 30, 2026. Sign this petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/cancel-chatgpt-edu-invest-in-humans/ for the CSU NOT to renew the contract and to use the savings to protect jobs at CSU campuses facing layoffs.

Thanks for the nice "shout-outs" in the second half! And even more thanks for working up to a wonderfully clear account of how entanglement might be explained by a retrocausal hidden variable model, Bell's theorem notwithstanding. @danielwhiteson.bsky.social @weinersmith.bsky.social

Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe@dandkuniverse.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Can quantum measurements change the past? Daniel and Kelly talk about the problem of time in quantum mechanics and how the past might depend on the future. www.iheart.com/podcast/105-...

Here's the data:

Michael E. Mann@michaelemann.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Reminder: ocean heat content is a BETTER metric of global heating than surface temperatures (which are far more prone to fluctuations due to El Nino/La Nina), and unlike surface temperatures, it set a NEW RECORD THIS PAST YEAR:

Globally, no single day in 2025 was cooler than its 1991-2020 average. climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima...

A year after the Eaton fire, the loss of Altadena is still raw

A year after the Eaton fire, the loss of Altadena is still raw

A reporter reflects on the loss of her hometown, Altadena, remembering what it was and imagining what it will become.

latimes.com

Today I ran across my FQxI podcast interview from (gulp) nine years ago… Still holds up! But was I ever really that well-spoken? I suspect they must have cut out all the uhs and ums. qspace.fqxi.org/podcasts/dat...

This was actually very good! Only real complaint is that they missed the retrocausal option. And superdeterminism is always getting more attention than it deserves. But I liked the early focus on randomness, and they tried harder than most to motivate an explanation of the classical limit.

Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe@dandkuniverse.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Daniel and Kelly talk about the confusing aspects of quantum entanglement, and try to untangle the concepts. www.iheart.com/podcast/105-...

It’s really too bad that my sub-field of quantum foundations research doesn’t have any Halloween-related or spooky aspects, no way that anyone could ever use the season to drum up any... any fake-quoted, overdramatic… Oh. Oh dear. molotovsunsets.substack.com/p/the-univer...

The Universe Knows How You Die

Retrocausality and the Backward Reach of Time

molotovsunsets.substack.com

Great news for Michael Berry who has received the Isaac Newton medal of the IOP. What I absolutely love about his work is that it cuts across so many different areas of physics - from the foundations of quantum physics to understanding the rainbow. physicsworld.com/a/theoretica...

Theoretical physicist Michael Berry wins 2025 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize – Physics World

Berry recognized for his contributions in mathematics and theoretical physics over a 60-year career

physicsworld.com

Let me try to explain why it's important to study the foundations of quantum mechanics. (1/n) (Have to do some breathing exercises, b/c to me it's blindingly obvious that "understanding the most important theory in physics" is something physicists should care about, but apparently opinions differ.)

Sean Carroll@seanmcarroll.bsky.social · last yr.

Nature (and @lizziegibney.bsky.social) take a more-than-usually systematic look at the greatest failure of modern physics: the fact that we can't even agree on what quantum mechanics says. And the leader is an approach that is notoriously not well-defined. Ugh. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Why The Quantum State Only Exists In Our Mind A metaphysical shift that’s happening in the foundations of physics: the wave function is no longer regarded as something real, but just as a description of what we know about the world. youtu.be/SgQdDD3SY84

Why The Quantum State Only Exists In Our Mind

YouTube video by Essentia Foundation

youtu.be

Uhoh – looks like a few people on Reddit have started playing around with the central ideas in my latest arXiv preprint. Must be time to polish it up and actually submit the damn thing. (But still, always nice to read "it's kind of blown me away"...) www.reddit.com/r/QuantumPhy...

Heading to Alaska soon, where apparently even the landslides are beautiful.

Thanks to @mercurynews.com for covering the $55.9M in NIH cuts to Bay Area research funding. I appreciate that they didn't just focus on the elite institutions (a colleague and I are quoted) & want to share some key takeaways 🧪 1/ www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/05/b...

Bay Area universities in chaos amid research funding cuts

The Trump administration has canceled hundreds of research grants.

mercurynews.com

Unsolicited advice for making progress in quantum foundations: 1) If there were a gentle tweak or simple idea that would make clear sense of quantum theory, beyond the for-all-practical-purposes-level, it would certainly have been found by now.

A very good, wide-ranging interview with Emily Adlam -- most of it on quantum foundations, along with a strong case for retrocausal/all-at-once approaches. youtu.be/6I2OhmVWLMs?...

The "All At Once" Universe Shatters Our View of Time

YouTube video by Curt Jaimungal

youtu.be

Latest version of my work on entanglement with @kenwharton.bsky.social. We propose that entanglement is a kind of selection artefact. This was a talk at @griffith.edu.au, and the slides are accessible here: bit.ly/4h9dMeo #philsky #PhilSci #quantum #entanglement

A Mechanism for Entanglement?

YouTube video by The Quietist

youtube.com

A little fun news for me... Apparently the last science fiction story I ever wrote, 20 years ago, is now being discussed in at least one Philosophy course! The story is called "Aloha", originally published in the magazine Analog.

Utrecht History & Philosophy of Science@utrechthps.bsky.social · last yr.

Today in our course on the philosophy of space and time: subsystems with opposite arrows of time interacting; does a lone champagne bottle in an empty universe pop or unpop?; and Ken Wharton's tragic scifi love story on retrocausation www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6rV...

Tonight I got to see the first-ever spacecraft image of Mars, from Mariner 4's flyby. Apparently, before the raw image was processed, people at JPL printed out paper strips of numerical pixel values and -- coloring by hand! -- used pastels to distinguish different brightness levels.

I actually shelled out 4 bucks so I could peek behind the Popular Mechanics paywall and see what they are saying about retrocausality in quantum foundations. Maybe I got about 40 cents worth? www.popularmechanics.com/science/a637...

Your Consciousness Can Reach Back in Time to Shape the Past, a New Theory Suggests

In the quantum realm, the past, present, and future blur into a boundless structure. But consciousness may operate on a plane beyond this timeless mist.

popularmechanics.com