Sean Carroll: Why is Our World so Compressible into Simple Equations | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | - Again, an unanswerable question.
00:00:03.880 | Why do you think our world is so easily compressible
00:00:07.360 | into beautiful equations?
00:00:11.820 | - Yeah, I mean, like I just hinted at,
00:00:13.060 | I don't know if there's an answer to that question.
00:00:15.240 | There could be.
00:00:16.400 | - What would an answer look like?
00:00:18.160 | - Well, an answer could look like
00:00:19.720 | if you showed that there was something about our world
00:00:22.600 | that maximized something, you know,
00:00:25.120 | the mean of the simplicity and the powerfulness
00:00:29.440 | of the laws of physics, or, you know,
00:00:32.080 | maybe we're just generic,
00:00:33.080 | maybe in a set of all possible worlds,
00:00:34.640 | this is what the world would look like, right?
00:00:36.160 | Like, I don't really know.
00:00:37.960 | I tend to think not.
00:00:39.720 | I tend to think that there is something specific
00:00:42.160 | and rock bottom about the facts of our world
00:00:45.640 | that don't have further explanation.
00:00:47.320 | Like the fact that the world exists at all,
00:00:49.480 | and furthermore, the specific laws of physics that we have.
00:00:52.160 | I think that in some sense, we're just gonna,
00:00:53.920 | at some level, we're gonna say, and that's how it is,
00:00:56.720 | and, you know, we can't explain anything more.
00:00:58.720 | I don't know how, if we're anywhere close to that right now,
00:01:02.080 | but that seems plausible to me.
00:01:03.360 | - And speaking of rock bottom,
00:01:04.920 | one of the things sort of your book
00:01:06.760 | kind of reminded me or revealed to me
00:01:09.440 | is that what's fundamental and what's emergent,
00:01:13.320 | it just feels like I don't even know anymore
00:01:15.600 | what's fundamental in physics, if there's anything.
00:01:19.680 | It feels like everything,
00:01:21.440 | especially with quantum mechanics is revealing to us
00:01:24.120 | is that most interesting things that I would,
00:01:27.360 | as a limited human would think are fundamental
00:01:32.360 | can actually be explained as emergent
00:01:35.200 | from the more deeper laws.
00:01:40.200 | - I mean, we don't know, of course.
00:01:42.360 | You had to get that on the table.
00:01:43.760 | We don't know what is fundamental.
00:01:45.400 | We do know, we do have reason to say
00:01:47.720 | that certain things are more fundamental than others, right?
00:01:51.440 | Atoms and molecules are more fundamental
00:01:53.400 | than cells and organs.
00:01:55.000 | Quantum fields are more fundamental
00:01:56.500 | than atoms and molecules.
00:01:58.840 | We don't know if that ever bottoms out.
00:02:01.160 | I do think that there's sensible ways to think about this.
00:02:04.760 | If you describe something like this table as a table,
00:02:08.080 | it has a height and a width
00:02:09.440 | and it's made of a certain material
00:02:10.840 | and it has a certain solidity and weight and so forth,
00:02:13.800 | that's a very useful description as far as it goes.
00:02:16.200 | There's a whole nother description of this table
00:02:18.600 | in terms of a whole collection of atoms
00:02:20.760 | strung together in certain ways.
00:02:22.920 | The language of the atoms is more comprehensive
00:02:26.400 | than the language of the table.
00:02:27.640 | You could break apart the table, smash it to pieces,
00:02:30.520 | still talk about it as atoms,
00:02:32.380 | but you could no longer talk about it as a table, right?
00:02:35.180 | So I think of this comprehensiveness,
00:02:36.840 | the domain of validity of a theory
00:02:39.160 | gets broader and broader
00:02:40.320 | as the theory gets more and more fundamental.
00:02:43.000 | Okay.
00:02:43.840 | [END]
00:02:45.840 | [END]
00:02:47.840 | [END]
00:02:49.840 | [END]
00:02:51.840 | [END]
00:02:53.840 | [END]
00:02:55.840 | [END]
00:02:57.840 | [END]
00:02:59.840 | [BLANK_AUDIO]