"I have never bumped into Tim Maudlin, but I have felt his gravitational tug. A Reddit discussion... called Maudlin "probably the most influential person in philosophy of physics." Someone chimed in that Maudlin... is "without a doubt an intellectual beast." Maudlin impresses even... Jim Holt... When I asked Holt "What’s your utopia?," he replied "arguing eternally about gauge theory" with Maudlin and a few other pals. ...Maudlins ..."The Defeat of Reason"... ends by suggesting that we "shorten the dignified designation Homo sapiens to the pithier and more accurate Homo sap." Ouch."
Tim William Eric Maudlin is an American philosopher of science who has done influential work on the metaphysical foundations of physics and logic.
"The sparks which fly when quantum theory collides with Relativity ignite conceptual brushfires of particular interest... problems about causation, time, and holism. Unfortunately much of the work... presupposes a considerable amount of familiarity with the physics. This is particularly sad since the physics is not, in most cases, very complicated."
"The presentation of Bells inequality needs no more than some algebra... Understanding Relativity also requires no more than algebraic manipulation... but would tax the patience of the average reader. So I have tried to present Relativity pictorially..."
"Metaphysics is ontology. Ontology is the most generic study of what exists. Evidence for what exists, at least in the physical world, is provided solely by empirical research. Hence the proper object of most metaphysics is the careful analysis of our best scientific theories (and especially of fundamental physical theories) with the goal of determining what they imply about the constitution of the physical world."
"At its most fundamental level, physics tells us about what there is, about the categories of being. And modern physics tells us that what there is aint nothing like what we thought there is."
"I have often felt that whatever is of value in this book could be found in Bells "The Theory of Local Beables" (1987, Ch. 7)... this book will have served a great purpose if it does no more than encourage people to read Bell with the care and attention that he deserves."
"Quantum theory... formalism... uses no more than linear algebra and vector spaces. ...A particularly nice and accessible presentation of the requisite mathematics can be found in s Quantum Mechanics and Experience (1992, Ch. 2)."