Volume 6, Issue 1, pages 1-8
Huw Price [Show Biography] and Ken Wharton [Show Biography]
Huw Price is Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and was co-founder with Martin Rees and Jaan Tallinn of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. In January 2019 he joined the inaugural Board of the new Ada Lovelace Institute. Before moving to Cambridge in 2011 he was ARC Federation Fellow and Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where he was founding Director of the Centre for Time.
Educated at Stanford and UCLA, Ken Wharton has been a professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at San Jose State University since 2001. After getting tenure in 2006, he switched over from experimental laser-plasma physics to the more daring field of quantum foundations. His research is centered on developing locally-mediated models of quantum phenomena, including quantum entanglement, using future constraints as an explanatory resource.
Quantum weirdness has been in the news recently, thanks to an ingenious new experiment by a team led by Roland Hanson, at the Delft University of Technology. Much of the coverage presents the experiment as good (even conclusive) news for spooky action-at-a-distance, and bad news for local realism. We point out that this interpretation ignores an alternative, namely that the quantum world is retrocausal. We conjecture that this loophole is missed because it is confused for superdeterminism on one side, or action-at-a-distance itself on the other. We explain why it is different from these options, and why it has clear advantages, in both cases.
Full Text Download (117k)
