Ruth Kastner, PhD, is a philosopher exploring the foundations of physics. She is on the faculty of the physics department at the State University of New York at Albany. She is also a research associate at the University of Maryland. She is author of The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: The Reality of Possibility and also Understanding Our Unseen World: Solving Quantum Riddles.

Here she points out that there are several interpretations of quantum mechanics that are very different from each other. She notes that there are many disagreements about the interpretation of the interpretations. She reviews the perspectives of great physicists such as Neils Bohr, Max Born, Ludwig Boltzmann, and David Bohm. She briefly describes the lesser known “transactional interpretation”. Then she focuses on the philosophical status of the crucial distinction between empirical and sub-empirical reality.

(Recorded on August 23, 2016)

Published on August 15, 2022