YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Brown

lines on the record: 215
first: 2024-12-26
most recent: 2024-12-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Of information you can store measured in bits, the entropy of that region, is given by the area of that region divided by G Newton's constant and h bar Planck's constant. So that's how you know that this is something to do with quantum gravity because it involves both G and H bar.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this has been a big project, is trying to figure out how to do this. Einstein spent some years unsuccessfully doing this in the later less productive part of his career. And this project of trying to unite these is something that a lot of people have thought a lot about. The string theory comes out of this project, a number of other lines of thought. There is, however, one fact about that merger that we are most confident about and about anything about the merger, and that exactly returns to this question of how much information can you store in a given region of space-time. And in fact, how much region, and the answer to that involves black holes. So the answer is how much, if you have a region of a certain area, maybe a sphere of a certain area, and you said, how much information can you store in that region, the amount of”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most obvious ways to try and reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity break. You can't really shove them together. And this is a problem if you think that the world should be comprehensible, that there should be some theory that in fact is consistent, that describes the world. So this has been a big project in theoretical physics over the last few decades is trying to understand how we can take Einstein's general relativity and quantum mechanics and make them meld together in a mathematically and physically consistent manner. It's tricky in part because there's very little experimental guidance, because generativity tends to make itself felt at large scales, quantum mechanics at small scales. And so trying to find a place where they meet in the middle, and it must be that they do meet, but that trying to drag that out with experiment is very tricky.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It turns out that that's been an incredibly productive line of thought, A, and B, It also turns out that The main fact that we're most confident about quantum gravity. The two great theories of 20th century physics gravity, Einstein's theory of the curvature of spacetime, and gravity. The rest of it, the very tends to make itself felt at the very large scale. And on the other hand, quantum mechanics, the theory of the very small to do with Heisenberg's uncertainty principles and atom and atomic spectra, tends to make itself seen at the very small scale. These are the two most beautiful theories of 20th century physics, the two things that we should be most proud about that we discovered in the early 20th century. And it was noticed pretty early on that these two theories seem to be inconsistent with each other.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, as much information, that's a great question. That has been a very productive line of thought. And the answer to that question goes back to. Hawking and Penrose. So you could even ask another question, which is how much information can anything store? So actually, can we”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a lot of mass. On the other hand We also have plans for our future that involves exponential growth. And eventually, we will run low on that maths and not that many doublings before we're using up the whole galaxy. So you want to use it carefully.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could be super duper careful and throw in protons and neutrons and then get out photons. In principle, if you could capture everything that's emitted from the black hole, including the gravitons in the neutrinos, that gets rid of the baryon number conservation problem and allows you to build power plants that approach 100% efficiency. And by 100%, I mean not the way we measure gas turbine efficiency, where we talk about the total available chemical energy in the gas. I mean 100% of the embassy squared of the entire gas you're putting in”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Force of nature that will do that with a small caveat. The only force of nature that we know that will do that is the gravitational interaction. And so it is a property of black holes that you can stand outside the black hole and throw protons and neutrons into the black holes and then it'll process it and then spit out photons at the end in Hawking radiation and gravitons, which is going to be slightly annoying to have to capture and neutrinos, but like they're there in principle. And in principle, you could capture them. So one thing that black holes might be technologically useful for in the future is you start off with a much smaller black hole than Than what I've just done the size of the sun.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what you need to do to get that energy and try and get most of the MC squared out of the matter that you have, what you need to do is use a process that eats Carry on number in which you can start off with a proton and a neutron and end up with no proton or neutron and instead all of that energy unleashed in high energy radiation that you can use for your own purposes. Electromagnetic interactions won't do that. Strong interactions also won't do that. Weak interactions won't do that. The only”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Using where much more of the energy is stored, which is the strong and weak interactions between the protons and the neutrons, so much more is available to you. But still, at the end of whatever the process you finish with there, there's a number that will be conserved. And that is what's called the baryon number. So it's the total number of protons plus the total number of neutrons. You can transmute protons into neutrons or vice versa in nuclear processes, which is part of the reason they're so much more use much more better energy than things that just affect the chemistry. But still, most of the energy is stored in the rest mass of the protons and the neutrons. And you want to get that and nuclear processes conserve that. Beta decay will maybe turn a proton into a neutron or vice versa, but the total number of protons plus neutrons is not changing. And so therefore 99.9% of the energy is inaccessible to you.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Power plants like coal plants or gas plants because you're getting a much higher fraction. Best case scenario, you're getting one part in 10 to the 3 or 10 to the 4 of the rest mass of the uranium that you start with. You're extracting as energy. But even there, even in that process, it's still only absolute best one part in the thousand of the rest mass. And the reason is that you are...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that they only address the electromagnetic energy in the electrons and very small fraction of the electromagnetic energy in an electron in atoms is stored in the electromagnetic interaction between the electrons and between the nucleus and the electrons. Most of it is stored in the nucleus itself, in the strong nuclear forces, and particularly in the rest mass of the protons and neutrons that constitute it. You can do much better if instead of doing electromagnetic interactions you use nuclear interactions that can probe the energy in turning protons into neutrons. That's why nuclear power plants is so much more efficient on a per mass basis than chemical”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have a small black hole, you can get stuff out of them more rapidly. The temperature of a black hole is inversely proportionate size. So one thing that people have talked about with black holes is using them to extract all of the energy from matter. So as you know, Most chemical reactions are pretty inefficient. You burn gasoline and you extract as a function of the rest mass of the gasoline that you started with, you extract one part in 10 billion of energy from the gasoline that you started with. So that's bad from the point of view you have MC squared worth in a gallon of gasoline. You've got a full MC squared worth of energy in there and you can only get out one part in 10 to the 10. That's a pretty unsatisfactory situation Roughly speaking the reason that all chemical processes are so inefficient”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, good question. I started these investigations because it offended my intuition for various information theoretic reasons. The idea that black holes could be mined with parametric speeds ups. When I thought harder about it, the reasons why I thought that couldn't happen didn't really make sense. So in this particular case, maybe someone will come up with a reason. I don't actually have a particularly strong reason why they can't be mined anymore, except that they can't.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In, if you have a bound but you can't think how to get close to the bound, that's usually an indication that you need to think closer because often these bounds are Often these bounds, if you're clever enough, there's a way to get More ingenuity will take you up to the bound.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are other symmetry, there are other ways of thinking about it in which if you could make a string that was strong enough to actually do it, if you could make a rope that was stronger than this bound, that various other things would go wrong, there are various symmetry arguments that that can't happen. But yeah, usually often it turns out if we have these bounds that there's something that sort of saturates the bound or gets very close to the bound and that's a sign that you're on the right lines with some of these bounds.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, nothing is ever a coincidence. So, usually, from the perspective of the story I just told to do with mining black holes, it's not clear what exactly will be broken about the universe. If you could mine black holes somewhat faster than we can.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you just take a rope, stretch between you and me and ping it, there will be little vibrations that head over towards you. And those vibrations are subluminal if it's just a normal rope move at the speed of light for a string or something that saturates the knowledge addition and would be faster than the speed of light for some, you know, that would be an example of why you know there's something wrong with that proposal.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you can't. One example of a thing that goes wrong is the speed of sound in a rope goes up with the tension and down with the mass ponet length. And if you try and use a rope that's stronger than this or some hypothetical rope, you would find that the speed of sound is greater than the speed of light. And that's a pretty good indication.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possible tensile strength that any rope can have. Any rope, in fact, that has that example of a rope that has that is a string. So a string is a fundamental string from string theory is an example of a hypothetical rope that is just strong enough to saturate that bound, that strength bound. And then the problem is the following. The problem is that if you have a rope that saturates the bound as strong as any rope can be, it is just strong enough to support all of its own weight exactly on the edge there with exactly no strength left over to support any payload it might wish to carry. And that's ultimately what dooms these mining black holes, you know, these rapid mining black hole proposals.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Black holes. For black holes, you know, the critical material science property you need for this rope is the tensile strength to mass per unit length ratio. It needs to be strong, high tensile strength, but low weight, like light, low mass per unit length. And that's the critical ratio. And carbon nanotubes is 10 to the minus 12 or something on that scale. And that is simply not strong enough at all. In fact, what I showed in my paper is that you need a tensile strength to weight ratio that is as strong as is consistent with the laws of nature. So in fact, the laws of nature bound this quantity. The finiteness of the speed of light means you cannot have an arbitrarily strong rope with a given mass per unit length. There is a bound set by the c squared in some units that bounds the maximum.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we can make them long enough and pure enough Then they will be strong enough that we will be able to build a space elevator around Earth in maybe sometime in the next century that you only need a couple of doublings of the thickness of the carbon nanotubes along its entire length. So carbon nanotubes work great around Earth, but they are totally inadequate.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rope supporting its own weight, because each bit of the rope needs to support not only its own weight, but also the weight of all of the rope beneath it. So the tension that you require keeps getting more and more and more as you go up. At the bottom, there is no tension effect. It doesn't even touch the earth. It's not like a compression structure that's like a skyscraper that's pushed up from below. It's a tension structure that's held up from above. But as you go up, because the tent, you need more and more tension, you also need to make the rope thicker and thicker and thicker. And if you try and on earth or around Earth build a space elevator out of steel, say, it just doesn't work. Steel is not strong enough. You need to keep doubling the thickness until by the time you get to geostation reorbit, the thickness of the steel rope is more than the size of the earth. The whole thing just doesn't work at all. But carbon nanotubes are this material that we've discovered that are much stronger than steel. So in fact, around Earth, carbon nanotubes will just about...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The energy out of a black hole still scales like the mass cubed. And what goes wrong is ultimately a material science problem. So this scoop that comes down really close to the horizon. Now from one point of view, that's just like a space elevator, albeit a very high performance space elevator. Space elevators, you'll remember these ideas for how we might get things off the surface of the earth without using rockets. And the idea is that you have some massive orbiting object sort of a very long way away beyond geostationary orbit and then you dangle off that rope down to the surface of the earth and then you can essentially just climb up the rope to get out. That's the space elevator idea and already around Earth it's hitting pretty hard material science constraints. So if you want to make a space elevator, the trouble with making a space elevator isn't so much supporting the payload that you're trying to have climb up. It is merely just”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously not crossing the horizon because otherwise you've lost the claw and you're somewhat counterproductive. But just outside the horizon just grab some of that hawking radiation and just drag it along way away from the black hole and then feast on it or do whatever it is you want to do with it. And in that way you could, what's called mine a black hole, you could speed up the evaporation of a black hole by a huge factor. So in fact the lifetime would no longer go like the mass cubed like it does with just unaided Hawking radiation but would scale like just a mass, so considerably faster for a large black hole and so this was these proposals and what I had a somewhat sort of pessimistic contribution to this story which is that the existing proposals did not work. They didn't work to speed it up and in fact you can't speed it up you can't get down that m cube down to m you can't in fact get at anything less than m cubed it still scales like the mass cubed the length of time you need to wait to get”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Background, it leaches out incredibly slowly back into the universe. And that's bad news because it means the energy comes out super duper slowly. So the mining question is, can you speed that up? Solar mass black hole, if you don't help it, will take about 10 to the 55 times the current age of the universe to have given out all its energy back into the universe. Can you make that faster? And there were these proposals stretching back a few decades that you could, you could do what's called mining black holes where We see the Hawking radiation that escapes when we're a very long way away from the black hole”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Energy out of black holes at all. The old story pre 1970s is known. It's just a black hole is one way matter falls in. It never comes out. It's stuck. The thing that Hawking and Beckenstein discovered in the 70s is that once quantum mechanics is involved, that's not true anymore. Once quantum mechanics is involved, in fact, energy, even without you doing anything, starts to leave black holes. The problem, as far as our distant descendants will be concerned, is that it leaves black holes extremely slowly. So if you took a solar mass black hole, same mass as the sun just collapsed to form a black hole, there'll be this little quantum what's called hawking radiation nowadays, little quantum hawking radiation in which the energy will leach out again, very, very slowly. And the temperature of a solar mass black hole is measured in nano kelvins. So very low temperature. So the energy leaches out when something that cold, so cold you couldn't even see it in the cosmic”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. I read a paper about that. Very good. Yeah. Tell me about it. Okay. So what do you mean by mine, black hole? Mine black hole means take the energy out of a black hole that used to be in a black hole. Obviously, if our distant descendants have used up all of the energy and stars and Everything else, the black hole might be the last thing they turn their”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's basically right. I mean, the same is kind of true of in other domains of life as well, of course, startups, if you were properly calibrated about how likely your startups succeed would be, maybe you wouldn't do it, but it's good for the ecosystem that certain people are willing to give it a go. Yeah, I think it's good for the ecosystem and perhaps... Bad for the individual to be well calibrated”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Irrational optimism to write out the initial discouraging things that you'll discover as you go along. So I would say that typically theoretical physicists are not particularly well calibrated and tend to be in love with all their own theories and make highly confident predictions about their own theories before the LHC turned on there was certainly a lot of high energy theorists making extremely confident predictions about what we'd see at the LHC and it was typically their own favorite particle that we'd see and while I'd love to have found supersymmetry it would have in some sense felt somewhat unjust to reward the hubris of people making overconfident and poorly calibrated predictions so yeah that's definitely a thing that happens”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't necessarily pay to be well calibrated, and that incentive structure is perhaps reflected in the poor calibration of many of the best physicists. First of all, because physics is a sufficiently mature field, a lot of good ideas, all the good ideas that look like good ideas have already been had, or many of them where we're at now is the good ideas that look like bad ideas. So, in order to motivate yourself to get over the hump, get over the barrier and actually explore them, you need a little bit of”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet we look back on the golden era of physics from the 1900 through 1970s or something as a period when things happened. I do think there is a low hanging fruit aspect to it. I mean, we already talked about how the standard model is so successful in terms of particle colliders that it's just hard to make rapid progress thereafter. So I don't really see it as a dysfunction of the field so much as being a victim of our own success. Having said that, does physics have fads? Does physics have fashions? Does physics have any of these other things? Absolutely it does. But quite how much counterfactual progress we'd make if that weren't true? I don't know.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI research around the world, I don't know how many people are the matter, thousands and thousands and thousands of physics, it's 100, 200, 300, well in the narrow domain of high energy theoretical physics. I mean, there's many more physicists than that if you include people more generally, but they're sufficiently specialized. I mean, that's partly part of the reason is that it's much more specialized field. So in a very specialized field, the number of people who would actually write that paper is a much smaller number.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, partly there's just so many more people working on the problems in computer science than there are in physics. The number of people is part of what makes the counterfactual impact.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI, which moves just tremendously faster, and doing trying to contribute to the wholesale production of knowledge in that way. Yeah, and they have very different impacts in terms of counterfactual impact physics. Like you write some papers and had I not written that paper and no one would have written that paper for years or ever, perhaps. Computer science doesn't feel like that. It feels like if you didn't do it, someone else would do it pretty soon thereafter. On the other hand, Even a few days of impact in computer science, these things are going to change the world, hopefully for the better to such a large degree that that's much bigger than...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I don't impose narratives on it like that. It's certainly a big Very big contrast between doing physics and writing retail papers, as it were.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's nuclear insubordination in both directions. There's like the good kind where they sort of maybe should drop the bomb according to their orders and refuse to. And then there's the other kind.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them are some ways away from where the action is happening. There's the bombardier who says that he saw a hole in the clouds. There's the pilot who says something, but everyone has their own different perspective and some of the perspectives are just totally. This is something that I guess I'd always been told by my history teachers but never really appreciated until I'd done this 360 view of history that people can describe the same events and just they have flatly inconsistent memories of each other. Nobody who was on the plane said that they faked the hole in the cloud story. But some people who were on the plane said they were determined to drop the bomb no matter what. And they were highly incentivized to do this because if they had not done it, they'd have probably, as it was, they only barely made it back to their emergency landing spot in Okinawa, they would have definitely ended up in the drink, and certainly the bomb would have ended up in the drink had they not done it. So I don't know. I mean, I'm not a professional historian and maybe there'll be difference of opinions, but it's clear.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had decided in the cockpit on that final run that no matter what they were going to drop it. So even if there wasn't a hole in the hole in the clouds, wasn't a hole in the clouds, they had decided to drop the nuclear weapons against direct orders.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They said they saw a hole in the clouds. I don't think I believed them. So that was, I think, one of the hints. It was maybe reading his, you know, at some stage reading his autobiography was one of the big hints. The other people will insist there was. But what's super clear is that whether or not there was a hole in the clouds, and probably there was a hole in the clouds just because of some of the technical things to do with their discussion, though it's definitely not obvious. What's clear is that whether or not there was a hole in the clouds, they certainly”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Curtis LeMay was going to feel court-martial them and was like super mad, but then the war ended and they didn't want to do it for PR reasons. So I just ordered and found every account ever written by every person super fascinating to do that because all these different people had completely non-overlapping lives. Some of them were on the Manhattan Project and were there observers and waited later when Nobel Prizes of physics and some of them were just people who were just there for one moment. There was, yeah, on every, there was typically a physicist, a representative of Manhattan Project on the plane, just in case. So Louis Avalres was someone there. He actually wasn't on the Nagasaki mission. He was on the Hiroshima mission. But in his biography, he's like,”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this kind of suspicion is that they were doing a little bit of radar bombing against direct orders. So is it possible that 50% of all of the nuclear weapons ever dropped in combat were in fact dropped against direct orders, which is, you know, if true, that's a pretty striking fact about nuclear war since people are somewhat worried with nuclear war that someone will launch nuclear weapons without being ordered to do so. And it does kind of look like 50% of all the nuclear weapons ever dropped in combat were dropped against direct orders. When they got back...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they dropped it. And that story is a bit sus for if for no other reason than that they actually missed little known fact, they missed Nagasaki. They were aiming for one point and they hit another point that was on the other side of the hill such that the original thing they were aiming for was reasonably untouched by comparison for the fact that nuclear weapon had been dropped. They missed by much more than you would miss if you were doing visual bombing and they were being told to do”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'd made a number of mistakes, personal flying mistakes on their part that meant that they didn't have enough fuel once they got to Nagasaki to carry the bomb back to base, basically. And they probably have ended up in the ocean had they tried. So they were extremely motivated. At the time, this was the only nuclear weapon that existed in the world. We'd had two and then it went down to one. And now there was one, and they were just about to Drop it in the ocean and lose it. So according to the official account after having done all this, on the third and final paths of a Nagasaki, there was a miraculous hole in the cloud that suddenly opened up.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was never meant to be a mission to Nagasaki. It was meant to be a mission to Bomb Kokura, a different Japanese city, but they got there and it was clouded over and they had like very strict instructions. Do not bomb unless you can see the target. And that was the order. Do not bomb unless you can see the target. And they got to this other city and they passed over a bunch of times and they couldn't see the target. It was covered in clouds. So then they went to their secondary target Nagasaki. And it was again covered in clouds and they did a whole bunch of passes. And they'd made various mess-ups the bomber crew had beforehand, including getting lost and”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that wasn't the question I was looking at actually. The question I was looking at wasn't should they have ordered it to be done, but were the people who did it even following orders? And it's a pretty wild story that...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, um, you've got an appointment. I live in a house that used to belong to the chair of the English department at Stanford and then was terrified by grandson who runs it to me and it was... He has a very extensive library, very interesting. And I was like, you know, going through it during first lockdown and came across this super enigmatic statement in some book about the history of Japan. Was like super fascinated by it and started for reasons that I'll explain in a moment. Then just became obsessed for a few months on reading absolutely everything I could about the bombing of Nagasaki, which is the most recent nuclear weapon ever to be set off during wartime and was reasonably controversial because people questioned whether we should have done it or not.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, that was. Okay, so during the pandemic, my landlord has a big library and I just started reading during deep lockdown some books in the library. And there was just some sort of...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a ranch. He was seemingly a very successful rancher based on everything about him, but he had some prize high quality bulls that were some rare kind of high quality bulls. I can't exactly remember the details. But yeah, he just never really contemplated what the night sky meant for him”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was blown away by that fact. He was totally intellectually capable of understanding it. He just never in his 50 years of existence up to that moment ever Ever heard that fact, and his mind was just totally racing. This was reorienting his picture of his place in the universe must be so big. If there were stars out there and he phoned his wife, I think that's somewhat less excited and then took me to a gun store and brought me lunch. And, you know, it was a rancher.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source