Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

In the first part of my talk, I discuss how precision measurements are transforming our understanding our universe, and the prospects of dramatically better measurements from mapping neutral hydrogen in a large fraction of our Hubble volume. I then describe how the standard cosmological model with an infinite and statistically uniform space, as predicted by many inflation models, suggests a "cosmological interpretation" of quantum mechanics in which the wave function describes the actual spatial collection of identical quantum systems, and quantum uncertainty is attributable to the observer's inability to self-locate in this collection. I show how the Born Rule can be derived from classical frequentist probabilities, and how the controversial question of whether the wavefunction collapses or not becomes irrelevant.