Spooky Action at a (Temporal) Distance

with Dr. Emily Adlam

Saturday February 25, 2023

9:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT  |  6:00pm CET

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Since the discovery of Bell’s theorem, the physics community has come to take seriously the possibility that the universe might contain physical processes which are spatially nonlocal, but there has been no such revolution with regard to the possibility of temporally nonlocal processes. In this talk, I will explore what temporal nonlocality might mean for physics. I will begin by arguing that temporal locality is incompatible with relativity and I will consider what kind of temporal nonlocality is suggested by relativistic considerations. I will introduce the temporal Bell inequalities, and discuss how temporal nonlocality is related to retrocausality. Finally, I will describe how accepting temporal nonlocality might change scientific explanations and open up new possibilities for research in physics. The talk will be followed by audience discussion of possible objections to temporal nonlocality and areas of science that might be affected by temporal nonlocality.

Emily Adlam is a postdoctoral associate at the Rotman Institute for Philosophy of Science, associated with the University of Western Ontario. Adlam received her PhD in relativistic quantum information from the University of Cambridge. Prior to that she completed the Perimeter Scholar’s International programme in theoretical physics, and she did her undergraduate degree in physics and philosophy at the Univeristy of Oxford. Adlam works on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related issues in the philosophy of physics. Adlam is particularly interested in approaches to physics which go beyond the time evolution paradigm – encompassing a range of possibilities like temporal non-locality, retrocausality, and all-at-once laws. 

To see the Full Entanglement program