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Hello and welcome to this series on physics and philosophy from the University of Oxford.

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I am Ankita Anirban and in the series I'm trying to explore some of the fundamental questions we ask about the world.

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What is the nature of space and time? Can something be in two places at the same time?

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Is this the only world that is, or are the parallel ones just like this one?

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And perhaps most fundamentally of all, what makes us human?

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I speak to a number of physicists and philosophers who are addressing these very questions

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and their research today and who embody the intrinsic link between physics and philosophy.

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Physics is not just about prediction, it is about understanding.

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And as Dr. Christopher Palmer says, a true understanding in physics can be greatly enriched by an appreciation of philosophy.

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When you learn physics in school, you pick up a lot of fundamental physical ideas like mass and force position and acceleration and so on,

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which you take on board as something that you can use and put into equations and do calculations

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with without necessarily thinking carefully enough about the meaning of these terms.

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And a philosophical reflection shows that all of these things are actually quite a lot more interesting.

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And in some sense, theory laden than the initial engagement of the school pupil would lead you to suppose.

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And it's actually quite interesting, too, to look back on the things that you've learned from a more philosophically informed perspective,

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to understand things that you, in a sense, already knew but haven't really noticed about the theories that you're using.

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And that process of informing your physics from a philosophical perspective can

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be very fruitful and lead to new lines of inquiry at the research frontier.

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Or at least that's my hope.

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Dr. David Wallace explains the importance of using physics and philosophy to complement each other and answering the big questions.

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At least as I think about philosophy, it's less a particular subject matter, it's more a way of addressing problems.

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And in particular, I think it's a way of addressing situations which are conceptually confused or tangled.

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I think by and large, when any given bit of philosophy has become sufficiently untangled that it's completely clear what the questions are,

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then we largely stop calling it philosophy and start calling it something else.

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20 years ago, maths was part of philosophy. 400 years ago physics was part of philosophy.

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100 years ago psychology was part of philosophy and so on.

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And I think what that brings to the study of other subjects is that the philosopher isn't so much saying,

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Here's my specific philosophical knowledge that I can apply.

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He's moving here in my way of asking certain questions, exploring the structure of things,

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understanding what the arguments being used are and how they fit together and when they don't fit together.

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Now, in the case of physics, physics has gone through various phases and different bits of physics have gone through

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them at different times where the subject is more or less calculated with nature.

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So physicists are very successful in taking.

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Sometimes a relatively poorly understood conceptual speaking area of the subject.

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I'm trying to do tend to push as far as it goes, trying to generate new results, trying to make ideas, the tests and so forth.

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And then she that works very well as a method as long as the subject is quite experimentally connected.

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Because if you've made a mistake in the way you think about it, you can always be brought up short by the fact that you fail some experimental test.

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But there are various places in physics where just understanding how to do the calculation isn't enough either

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because we don't know how to do it or we haven't got the experimental check or because we do know how to do it.

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But we still want to understand what's going on at the deeper level.

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Since the idea of physics isn't just prediction is understanding. And there I think philosophical techniques can help to disentangle some of

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the the confusions that can be going on in how different ideas fit together.

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And I think in different ways in theory of space and time,

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the theory of statistical mechanics and thermal physics and perhaps above all, in quantum mechanics,

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if you have philosophers who are sufficiently serious about the physics and sufficiently humble to learn how the physics works,

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then philosophical ideas can really help us out there.

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Today, physics and philosophy seem to be disparate disciplines, often taught and studied separately and in isolation from each other.

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Yet as the scientist begins to delve into the foundations of physics,

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it seems that metaphysics is required to gain a deeper understanding of the subject.

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Similarly, the matter physicist needs the knowledge of modern science to develop philosophical ideas that are relevant to what we know today.

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Professor Frank Gonzalez tells me about his experiences with physics and philosophy.

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So I started out studying physics, and like many people that started to study physics,

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I basically studied physics because I had read some popular books by people like Feynman and Einstein,

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and those tend to be about the foundations of physics rather than anything particularly applied.

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And that was what I was interested in. But then as I was studying it, I had discovered that as I went on in third or fourth year,

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I was interested in asking questions that physicists were telling me, Oh, no, no, these things we're not interested in.

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You should go to a philosophy department to study those. I thought that was a little bit strange because it was, after all, foundations of physics.

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But I thought, okay, so I went to a philosophy department and in the philosophy department, this was in Holland.

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They weren't studying foundations of physics, they were studying German and continental philosophy.

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So I thought, Well, that's really strange. This is not helping me at all.

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So that I moved to England, where ultimately I studied in a philosophy department, foundations of physics.

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So intent on my view about what the relation is between philosophy and physics for the thing that I'm particularly interested in,

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foundations of physics is that it's just a historical accident, that foundations of physics is studied in philosophy departments.

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But I think for the general public, if you want to explain what I'm doing, it's much closer to physics than it is to philosophy.

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I also thought for a long time that you could study philosophy of physics.

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You have to have to do it in a philosophy department. You didn't really need to know any philosophy.

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I thought, No. You just need to be thinking clearly about the foundations of physics with all these stuff

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that philosophers study and philosophy department is by and large completely irrelevant.

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It's just a historical accident that we're doing it here.

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However, I think about 15 years ago or so I came to a philosophy department where there were some really good physicians,

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and it it's only then that I became convinced that some philosophical education and thinking

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about certain philosophical issues very deeply does actually affect your philosophy of physics.

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So the relation between the two is, roughly speaking,

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that philosophy becomes important when you want to do foundations of physics properly and simultaneously.

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I believe that a lot of metaphysician pyramid physicians who don't know any physics or are interested in the fundamental structure of reality

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are completely crazy if they think that they can say things interesting about the fundamental structure of reality without doing physics.

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So the ideas for at least a certain part of philosophy, namely metaphysics, physics, is absolutely fundamental.

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And for a particular part of physics, namely foundations of physics, philosophy is absolutely fundamental.

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This series explores a number of questions that require the strands of physics and

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philosophy to be brought together in order to gain a better understanding of the world.

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First, I speak to Dr. Christopher Popper about the historical links between physics and

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philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the pioneering scientists of the 20th century.

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Next, I explore the ongoing debate about the structure of space and time.

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Professor Frank Antonius.

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Professor Vlatko Vedral then explains some of the unexpected and mind boggling results that quantum mechanics provides us with.

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These include ideas about parallel worlds, which are discussed with Dr. David Wallace.

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Finally, I look towards ourselves and I speak to Professor Roger Penrose about consciousness,

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the mind, and how far science can take us towards understanding our own nature.

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I don't quite know whether I considered to be a philosopher or not.

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I'm interested in deeper questions, of course, but whether they're questions of physics or philosophy or sometimes mathematics, I don't know.

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I mean, I would like to call them philosophers just with the philosophers, except what I think or not.

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I mean, to me,

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it's just an extension of science because we there are some deep questions which are scientific questions such as what's the nature of consciousness,

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what's the nature of emotions and things that we think of.

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It's not exactly to do with physics that which nevertheless have to do with us.

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And we are parts of the physical world. And so these questions are things that you might think of as philosophy questions.

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I hope that you enjoy listening.