Dartmouth Events

Philosophy's Annual Gramlich Lecture
Monday, November 4, 2024
3:30pm
41 Haldeman

Huw Price, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

Lecture title: "Side-stepping the Rhinoceros: Copernican Pragmatism and Quantum Entanglement"

Lecture description: "In philosophy, as in science, it is often important to pay close attention to the peculiarities of our own perspective. This move is particularly congenial to pragmatists, keen to expose what William James called 'the trail of the human serpent'. A century earlier, it was at the heart of Kant’s Copernican Revolution.

This talk, based on joint work with the physicist Ken Wharton, applies this Copernican move to quantum entanglement. Entanglement is often regarded as the most puzzling feature of the quantum world. Writing about its mysteries, Roger Penrose puts the issue like this.

"The first mystery is the phenomenon itself. How are we to come to terms with quantum entanglement and to make sense of it in terms of ideas that we can comprehend, so that we can manage to accept it as something that forms an important part of the workings of our actual universe?" (Penrose 2004)

We propose a Copernican answer to Penrose’s question. The relevant peculiarity of our perspective on the world is the fact that we can often control it. Once we ‘side-step’ this perspective, and the contingent physical facts on which it depends, entanglement turns out to be explicable using notions familiar from causal modelling: it is a special sort of ‘selection artefact’, or 'collider bias'. This explanation seems to have been missed because the peculiarity of our ordinary standpoint has not previously been taken into account."

Funded by the Francis W. Gramlich Fund, established in memory of Dr. Gramlich through gifts from former students and colleagues (and Dartmouth matched all gifts on a one for two basis); the fund supports a public lecture in Philosophy and a student prize awarded annually by the philosophy faculty to the philosophy major who best exemplifies those qualities of mind and character that Professor Gramlich sought to develop in his students. For more information on the Gramlich lectures, please visit: https://philosophy.dartmouth.edu/news-events/francis-w-gramlich-lectures