Live at 7.30pm, 8 November 2025
What would it mean for philosophers and political activists to take the implications of quantum theory seriously?
Self-described ‘moderately-conservative communist’ Slavoj Zizek has taken up the challenge. Rejecting the recent fashion for vaguely spiritualist takes on wave mechanics, and drawing on the latest thinking around holographic universes, he joins us to present a total reinvention of how we think about history that truly embraces the strangeness of the quantum realm.
He is joined by theoretical physicist and philosopher Emily Adlam, whose groundbreaking new approach to the measurement problem reveals why some of the most popular proposed solutions are unviable and sheds fresh light on how we might finally solve this seemingly intractable mystery at the heart of reality.
Weaving in classic Zizekian concerns including Lacan and Deleuze, opera, cinema, sex and war, this is an unmissable conversation for anyone concerned with the future of science, history, and reality itself.
Emily Adlam is a philosopher of physics working on the foundations of quantum mechanics and the philosophy of time. She has a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge, and was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Western Ontario.
Emily is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Chapman University. She is the author of a textbook, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and a philosophy monograph Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics.
