Invitation to a talk: Ian Durham, Friday, September 28, 2018, 4 pm at the IQOQI seminar room

Epistemic models of nature prove to be problematic in many settings, particularly in those for which measurement procedures are ill-defined. By contrast, in ontic models of nature, measurement results are independent of the procedure used to obtain them. If we assume that all measurement results can be expressed in terms of pointer readings, then any useful ontology would need to unambiguously specify the positions of things. Proposals for such ontologies have included the lattice fermion number density as proposed by Bell, and a relational specification of position as proposed by Smolin, both of which are problematic. By contrast, it is possible to develop an alternative set of ontologies based on the Wheeler-DeWitt equation that does not suffer from the same problems. It is also possible to provide a set of constraints for the geometry, matter field, and action for such a model in order for it to be deterministic. In this talk, we present such a model.