{"id":12463,"date":"2015-04-21T06:32:13","date_gmt":"2015-04-21T13:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=12463"},"modified":"2015-04-21T06:32:29","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T13:32:29","slug":"quantum-field-theory-and-the-limits-of-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/21\/quantum-field-theory-and-the-limits-of-knowledge\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantum Field Theory and the Limits of Knowledge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I had the pleasure of giving a seminar to the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina. Ordinarily I would have talked about the only really philosophical work I’ve done recently (or arguably ever), deriving the Born Rule<\/a> in the Everett approach to quantum mechanics. But in this case I had just talked about that stuff the day before, at a gathering of local philosophers of science. <\/p>\n

So instead I decided to use the opportunity to get some feedback on another idea I had been thinking about — our old friend, the claim that The Laws of Physics Underlying Everyday Life Are Completely Understood<\/a> (also here<\/a>, here<\/a>). In particular, given that I was looking for feedback from a group of people that had expertise in philosophical matters, I homed in on the idea that quantum field theory has a unique property among physical theories: any successful QFT tells us very specifically what its domain of applicability is, allowing us to distinguish the regime where it should be accurate from the regime where we can’t make predictions.<\/p>\n

The talk wasn’t recorded, but here are the slides<\/a>. I recycled a couple of ones from previous talks, but mostly these were constructed from scratch.<\/p>\n