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What If the Wave Function Describes Knowledge?

Curt Jaimungal

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From Ancient Egypt to Leibniz... Brand‑new interview out with Robert Spekkens of the Perimeter Institute, one of the sharpest minds working on quantum foundations. In 2004, he constructed a classical toy theory where your maximum knowledge is always incomplete—and out popped the no-cloning theorem, teleportation, and interference effects Feynman deemed impossible to reproduce classically. Spekkens compares our situation to Egyptian hieroglyphs before Champollion: a category mistake where we treat quantum states as descriptions of reality when they actually describe knowledge of reality. If you’re interested in the topics above, you’ll love this podcast.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Defining Quantum Innovation
00:06:40 - Realism vs. Empiricism
00:12:12 - Leibnizian Methodological Principle
00:23:40 - Causal Explanations of Correlations
00:30:24 - Epistemic Quantum States
00:41:00 - Foil Theory Methodology
00:54:00 - Causal Influence vs. Signaling
01:07:27 - Thermodynamics and Ignorance
01:15:00 - Conceptual Understanding in Physics
01:21:00 - Philosophy of Physics Utility
01:30:00 - Speckins' Toy Theory Origins
01:40:13 - Perimeter Institute's Ambitious DNA
01:52:00 - PBR Theorem Implications
02:05:40 - Ontic Separability Assumptions
02:17:40 - Hieroglyphs and Category Mistakes
02:29:00 - Revolutionizing Modern Physics
02:37:20 - Unscrambling Causation and Inference

LINKS MENTIONED:
Journals, papers, books:
https://www.rwspekkens.com
https://pirsa.org/speaker/Robert-Spek...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01122
https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0401052
https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.2661
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0406166
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.11779
https://amazon.com/dp/1108066488?tag=...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/687269
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/id...
https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einst...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sp...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/...
https://www.nature.com/articles/299802a0
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.01286
https://link.springer.com/article/10....
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.07161
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/...
https://www.einstein-online.info/en/s...
https://perimeterinstitute.ca/
https://amazon.com/dp/9810241054?tag=...
https://journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.11...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3328
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
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20 Comments

@TheoriesofEverything Creator 7 months ago Pinned

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@0ptikGhost 7 months ago

I'm going to assert this is THE most important episode of TOE. Thank you for interviewing Robert Spekkens. This is my introduction to him and his work. I am not a trained philosopher nor physcist but his approach to science is not just well informed but also truly disciplined. PhDs are philosophers of a certain discipline but in name only. This individual truly deserves the title and uses that training to work on the truly important. Thank you for introducing me to this gem!

@amihartz 7 months ago

One thing I love about Spekkens' papers is that they are understandable even if you do not have a physics degree. He reduces everything he talks about to simple information science and gets rid of any unnecessary physics or jargon that is not essential to explain what he is trying to demonstrate. Even without a physics degree but merely a computer science degree, when I read his paper "Why interference phenomena do not capture the essence of quantum theory" I understood immediately what he was trying to demonstrate.

@VDHmain 7 months ago

I was not prepared for that "French and Redhead" study XD

@martifingers 7 months ago

"All observations are ultimately theory laden."
Absolutely key insight that would have Feyerabend cheering from his grave even if he might not agree with the rest of the argument!

@jonesybones13 7 months ago

I find scientists who are actually open-minded and thoughtful to be so refreshing: a change from the oppressive dogmatism that is holding science back.

@michaeltrotta3627 7 months ago

You should get Robert Spekkens and Jacob Barandes together in one episode.

@Straw-j8v 7 months ago

This guy is so good, seriously. So pleased you had him on. Thank you both.

@HarryKiralfyBroe 7 months ago

Its becoming clear, literally, after the Webb telescope, that modern cosmology and modern physics still got a lot of work to do, before we fully understand the cosmos.

@djmips 6 months ago

It feels great to almost feel like I'm there and that Mr. Spekkens is talking to us personally. You do a really good job of disarming your guests and making the very comfortable. Kudos to Curt. Super fun interview - easy almost 3 hour listen - just like most of your videos. 👍👍

@amihartz 7 months ago (edited)

I was literally permanently banned from /r/askphysics for posting a paper from Robert Spekkens. The moderator told me that Spekkens is a "pariah of the physics community" and that everyone in academia hates him and are "just waiting for him to die off" because he "promotes hidden variables" (the paper I was asking about wasn't even about hidden variables, it was just because Spekkens was one of the several coauthors of the paper).

@andrewgrow5711 7 months ago

i would love to hear him and Jacob Barandes discuss their thoughts

@SirajFlorida 7 months ago

Another great interview Curt! Keep the good stuff coming friend!

@Galizur-Raziel-777 7 months ago (edited)

I've been thinking for a while now that so much of modern physics concepts are likely just mistaking the map for the territory. Basically, we got to a point that direct observation wasn't possible but indirect observation via mathematical inference was. So, rather than maintaining intellectual humility, they came to view their mathematical abstractions used for those indirect observations as real, rather than merely useful conceptual approximations of something for the sake of prediction. The culmination of this is probably information theory, b/c there's nothing more "map for the territory" than deciding that all of reality is fundamentally constituted by just the purely descriptive concept of "information." Field theory is similar: What is the field? It's where a particle acts this way at this point or that way at this point. Why does the particle do that? Because of the field. What is the field? It's where the particle...etc. In other words, since they didn't have an answer to the "Yeah but what is it REALLY?" question, they just say, "Uhhh, think it might just be the math itself, actually."

It's a kind of psychological reaction to the boundary of perception among those whose identity is being the ones who know reality, probably. Perhaps ultimately because their disproval of religious ideas is bound up with having a complete explanation of reality without invoking the supernatural. As long as they acknowledge an unknown, they haven't really finished the "explaining God away" project, but there will always be an unknown simply by virtue of the nature of perception; we've never found an end to reality, so why would we assume there will eventually have to be one?

@auspiciouslywild 7 months ago

Why is Robert Spekkens name not in the title or the thumbnail? o_O

@andym6060 7 months ago

I definitely agree with him that we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. We need to invest in and test different hypotheses and theories. Many will be plain wrong, but maybe we can still learn something from them.

@ytilaeR_ 7 months ago

Every day I feel more and more lucky to have been born in Toronto, some really amazing stuff going on around here, and some really amazing people. I hope to study in a related field eventually, just working on my own understanding and fundamentals first. Much love and thank you for the awesome videos Curt!

@Crowcage 7 months ago

He has very interesting approach for sure. This was great!

@zemm9003 7 months ago

This guy is great. He is clearly on that upper echelon of Physics. With Penrose, Tim Maudlin, Jacob Barandes. They go to the maximum level of detail about reality (regardless of whether they agree or not). And most importantly they understand the foundational principles and theories to the deepest level.

@architrino 4 months ago

This was a useful discussion because it keeps separating three things that are often blended together: the data we actually record, the mathematical object we use to predict those records, and the physical story we tell about what exists.

One way I’d frame the issue is this: a state description can be indispensable without being the thing itself. In statistical mechanics, a probability distribution tracks what we can say about many inaccessible microdetails; it does not mean the gas is literally made of probabilities. Quantum theory may be forcing a more subtle version of that lesson. The hard part is then not to declare “it is knowledge” and stop, but to identify the physical process whose unresolved details make that state description work, and to show how measurement records, no-signaling, Bell constraints, and thermodynamic bookkeeping all come out of the same process.