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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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“Physics problems compared to maths problems tend to have two components. One is to sort of take this word question and turn it using your physics knowledge into a maths question and then solve the maths question. That tends to be the typical structure of these problems. So you need to be able to do both. The bit that's maybe... Only LLMs can do and wouldn't be so easy for other things is step one of that is like turning into a maths problem. I think if you ask them hard research problems, you certainly can come up with problems that they can't solve. That's for sure. But it's pretty noticeable as we have tried to develop evaluations for these models that”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I take an exam I gave years ago in my graduate generativity class at Stanford and give it to these models. And it's pretty extraordinary. Three years ago. A year ago they were doing pretty well maybe A weak student, but in the distribution. Test. In fact, that I'm retiring. That's just my own little private eval. It's not published anywhere, but I just give them this thing just to follow along how they're doing. And it's pretty strong. It may be easy by the standard of graduate courses, but a graduate course in generality, and they get pretty much everything right on the final exam. That's just in the last couple of months that these have been doing that.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know the answer. That is an interesting question. I think it might be able to debug even without that if you do much simpler things like give these language models code. It will successfully debug your code, even though presumably no one has made that exact bug in your code before. This is at a higher level abstraction than that, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's able to debug. What you say in that way.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last physics query, well, a recent one was I asked it to explain to me the use of squeezed light at LIGO, which is a topic that I always felt like I should understand and then try to explain it to somebody else and realize that I didn't understand it and went and asked the LLM. That blew me away that it was able to exactly explain to me why what I was thinking was incorrect. So, why do we use this particular form of quantum light in interferometer used to discover gravitational waves? The reason that's a good topic is perhaps because it's an advanced topic. Not many people. Know that, but it's not a super advanced topic. There are out of a physics literature of millions of papers, there have got to be at least a thousand on that topic. If there was just a handful of papers on a topic, it's typically not that strong at it.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they definitely have different strengths and weaknesses than humans, and obviously, one of their strengths is that they have read way more than any human will ever read in their entire life. I think maybe, again, the analogy with chess programs is a good one here. They will often consider way more. Possible positions. There's some Monte Carlo research than any human chess player ever would, and yet even at human level strength, if you fix human level strength, they're still doing way more search so that their ability to evaluate is maybe not quite as natural as a human. So the same, I think, would be true of physics. If you had a human who had read as much and retained as much as they had, you might expect them to be even stronger.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But by what you thought was wrong. And I think it'll be Pretty big deal, sort of analogous to the way that chess players today are much better, even when they're playing across the board without the benefit of a computer, just having been able to be tutored by chess machines off the board. And this is the same. You want to understand this thing about group theory, go and ask the machine and it'll explain it to you and it won't judge you while it's doing it.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the very best thing in the world for that would be to phone up a colleague and say, if you knew exactly who to phone, they'd probably be able to answer your question the best. But it's certainly, if you just ask a large language model, you get great answers, probably better than all but the very best person you could phone. And they know about a huge amount. They're non-judgmental. They will not only tell you what the right answer is, but debug your understanding on the wrong answer. So I think a lot of physics professors are using them just as personal tutors. And it fills a hole because there are personal, if you want to know how to do something basic, there is typically very well documented. If you want to know quite advanced topics, there are not often good resources for them. And talking to these language models will often help you debug and understand your understanding. And it'll explain to you not only why what the right answer is.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there is a huge amount of physics that a physicist would be expected to, that has already been done, and no human has ever read the whole literature or understands everything, or maybe there isn't even something that you feel you should understand or you once understood that you don't understand.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Physicists don't do or don't productively do is just say LLM please quantize gravity for me go. That doesn't get you anywhere. Physicists are starting to use them in a big way, but just not for that. More of an assistant rather than agent. Three years ago they were totally useless. No value whatsoever in them, like low hanging freight uses include doing literature search. So if you just say I have this idea, what are some relevant papers? They're great at that and it's semantically greater than any other kind of search. The other thing that they're extremely useful for now that they were useful for is just as a tutor.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These large language models get better, they come up with better representations, at least better representations for them that may not be the same as a good representation for us.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Breakthrough is just how you think about it, what representation you do. It is sometimes jokingly said that Einstein's greatest contribution to physics was his certain notation he invented called the Einstein Summation Convention, which allowed you to more easily express and think about these things in a more compact way that strips away some of the other things. Penrose, one of his great contributions, was just inventing a new notation for thinking about some of these space times and how they work that made certain other things clear. So clearly coming up with the right representation has been an incredibly powerful In the history of physics and many incredibly large developments, somewhat analogous to coming up with a new experimental technique in some of the more applied scientific domains. And yeah, one would hope that”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's certainly true that this is definitely seeing more examples than any of us will ever see in our life. And it is perhaps going to build more sophisticated representations than we have. Often in the history of physics,”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's any sense in which large language models naturally think in higher dimensions more than humans do. You could say, well, this large language models have billions of parameters. That's like a billion-dimensional space. But you could say the same about the human brain that it has all of these billions of parameters and is therefore billion dimensional. Whether that fact translates into thinking in billions of spatial dimensions, I don't really see that in the human and I don't think that applies to an adult either.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think maybe we need to back up to in what sense the humans do or don't think natively in high dimensions. Obviously, it's not our natural space. There was a technology that was invented to think about these things, which was... Notation, tensor notation, various other things that allows you to much using just even writing, as Einstein did 100 years ago, allows you to sort of naturally move between dimensions. And then you're thinking more about manipulating these mathematical objects than you are about thinking in higher dimensions.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the moment, these tend to be, these systems tend to be doing more elementary material than that. They tend to be doing undergraduate level material. Yes, I haven't seen anything that jumps out to me like inventing general editive TV or even a toy version of that. But there is in some sense creativity or interpolation required to answer any of these problems where you start with some science problem, you need to recognize that it's analogous to some other thing that you know and then sort of combine them and then make a mathematical problem out of it and solve that problem.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some sense general relativity was the greatest leap that humanity ever made. And once we can do that, perhaps in 10 years, then we will have fully encompassed human intelligence. Will it have the same, will it be of the same character as what Einstein did? Clearly, there are many disanalogies between human intelligence and these large language models. But I think at the right level of abstraction, it may be the same.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some sense are just interpolators, but the level of abstraction at which they're interpolating keeps going up and up and up. And we keep sort of writing up that chain of abstractions. And then presumably from a sufficiently elevated point of view, the invention of generativity from Newtonian physics is just interpolation at some sufficiently grandiose level of abstraction that perhaps tells us something about the nature of intelligence, human intelligence, as well as about these large language models. You ask me how many years until we can do that, that is not totally clear.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have heard it said, and I kind of agree with this, that maybe the very last thing that these systems will be able to do, these LLMs will be able to do, is given the laws of physics, as we understood them at the turn of the last century, invent generativity from that. So I think that's probably the terminal step. And then once it can do that, if it can do that, then there won't be much else to do as far as humans are concerned. It's pretty extraordinary. I mean, particularly coming from a physics background in which progress is pretty slow, to come to the AI field and see progress being so extraordinarily rapid day by day, week by week, year by year. Looking at it, it certainly looks like these LLMs and these AI systems.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speaks to the origin and fate of the universe and almost immediately achieves decisive experimental confirmation in the orbits of astronomical observations or the orbits of planets and the deflections of lights during eclipses and stuff like that. It's a pretty beautiful theory and it completely changed our idea of gravity from being a force to just being a artifact of the curvature of spacetime.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think generality is really an extraordinary story. It's pretty unusual in the history of physics that to first approximation just have one guy who sits down and thinks really, really hard with lots of thought experiments about jumping up and down in elevators and beetles moving on the surface of planets and all the rest of it. And at the end of that time writes down a theory that completely reconceptualizes nature's most familiar force and also speaks not just to that but is”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends. So we believe that these were generated during the period that we called inflation, very poorly understood very early in the universe. There were fluctuations made not just at one scale in those days, but at all scales, or many, many scales. So there were fluctuations made at a scale that nowadays corresponds to 10% of the distance across the visible universe, all the way down to structures that were inhomogeneities that were much, much smaller scale that correspond to a galaxy today, all the way down to, now this is speculation, but in some models of inflation, there were tiny inhomogeneities, very small scale inhomogeneities that would give rise to primordial black holes, like tiny little black holes left over from the Big Bang. There's no actual evidence in terms of observational evidence, no strong observational evidence for those, but those are a possibility that's allowed by our theory, and people think about them and look at them.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is where those small inhomogeneities come from? Like, why just after the Big Bang was the universe not perfectly inhomogeneous? Because if it was perfectly homogeneous, there's no opportunity for it to, for anything to grow. And we now understand with a high degree of confidence, something that we didn't understand, which is that those inhomogeneities were seeded by quantum fluctuations, that when the universe just after the Big Bang was considerably smaller than it is today, the effects of quantum mechanics were correspondingly more important. And those quantum fluctuations produced tiny little fluctuations in the density of matter in the universe. All of those tiny little one part in a million fluctuations grew into all of the structures you see in the universe, all the galaxies, UMI, everything else.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so then there's kind of an easy part on a hard part. The easy part is understanding how if you have Small inhomogeneities, how they grow into large inhomogeneities. That's already quite well understood by classical physics. Basically, the idea is this. If you have a place that's denser and a place that's less dense, then the gravitational force pulls stuff towards the high density stuff. So if you have a small inhomogeneity, they naturally grow under that effect where they just gravitationally fall towards the denser thing. If you start seeded with small inhomogeneities, that will grow large inhomogeneities. And that's well understood. The thing that we now understand much better than we did.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have sort of in the 2000s and before very carefully studied the cosmic microwave background, what's sometimes called the echo of the Big Bang and the inhomogeneity in it, the fact that it's not quite the same in every direction. And doing that discovered like a super interesting fact that was definitely not known in my lifetime anyway, which is the quantum origin of all of the structure we see in the universe. So if you look out in the universe The density is not the same everywhere. The density on Earth is much more than an interplanetary space, which is itself much more than an intergalactic space. And the central of the sun is all the more denser. It is inhomogeneous. It is not the same. And if you look back to the early universe, it was considerably more homogeneous. It was homogeneous to one part in 10 to the 5 or 10 to the six. Super almost everywhere. Every point had almost exactly the same density.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weird bacteria at the bottom of the sea or in nuclear reactors or in various other places, this kind of life will find a way philosophy seems to be adapted at least there where it's very different from the surface of the earth where we find ourselves and yet they're able to be certain Life is able to live in undersea fence and is able to adapt itself to those environments. I think I basically... That life is quite adaptable, but whether life is adaptable enough that a universe with a cosmosal constant that ripped it apart every microsecond, that seems implausible to me. Or even closer to home, the center of the sun, it's not clear exactly whether we could get intelligent life living at the center of the sun, even though it has the same laws of physics as us. It just has a different environmental variables.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a great question. And this line of thought starts to is a skeptical response to the anthropic principle An example that sometimes people use is a puzzle that's sitting in some depression in the ground reflects on how wonderful the universe is that this puddle seemed, this depression in the ground seemed to have maybe made the perfect shape for the puddle to exist and argue it and said, no, the reason the puddle has that shape is because it is itself adapted to the hole in the ground. So maybe no matter what the laws of physics There would be something that emerged there. And certainly, if you go to there's all these.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that there's three categories there's things like quantum mechanics and general relativity that are not logically inevitable but do seem to be attractives in some sense then there are things like the standard model has 20 fields and it has a mass of the neutrino why do those mass Before we discovered that the neutrinos have mass in the 1990s, and those just seem to be just totally kind of out of nowhere. Who ordered that was a famous Nobel Prize-winning physicist said about the muon. In fact. Longer ago than that. They just seem to be there, but without any particular reason. And then there are these quantities that are somewhere in the middle that are not logically necessary, but do seem to be necessary for life as we know it to exist.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, all you need is that there are different places in some larger possibility space where these quantities scan, where they take different values. Bubble universe is just one way to do that. We could just be different experiments, simulations in some meta universe somewhere.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the protons decay to neutrons rather than vice versa, and people just don't live there. So that, if you want to go down that road, you end up being naturally drawn to the existence of these variables scanning over space.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's going to depend on what quantity you're asking me about. So if you ask me. 99% of the matter in the solar system lives in the Sun or on Jupiter, and yet we seem to live in this really weird corner of the solar system. Why is that? I'm pretty confident that the answer to that is anthropic, that if we lived in the center of the sun, we'd be dead. And so one should expect intelligent life to live in this weird place in parameter space. That's perhaps my most confident answer to that question. Why do we live where we live? Then if we start talking about different concepts of nature, we start getting different answers to that question. Why is the universe tuned such that the proton is just a tiny bit more stable than the neutron? That seems like that's begging for a anthropic answer. Of course, if that's true, that demands that there be different places somewhere in the multiverse where, in fact, the neutron is slightly heavier than the...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you suggested one with an intelligent creator, but yeah, the usual one that people like to talk about is the Anthropocene.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is an interesting fact, everything that's just tuned just so that chemistry is possible. And perhaps in most places you would throw the dart in possibility space. Chemistry would be impossible. The universe as we look around us is incredibly rich. The structure at the scale of viruses all the way to structure at the scale of galaxies, this interesting structure at all levels. This is a very interesting fact. Now some people think that actually interesting structure is a very generic property and if we threw a dart somewhere in possibility space there would be interesting structure no matter where it hit. Maybe it wouldn't look like ours, but there'd be some different structure. But really, if you look at the laws of physics, it does seem like they're very well attuned for life. So in your scenario where there's an intelligent creator, then they would probably be, you'd have to say they'd optimized for that. It's also the case that you can imagine explanations.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you just throw a dart in laws of physics space in some sense, you would not, there are some properties of our universe that would be somewhat surprising. Including the fact that our life seems to be incredibly hospitable for complexity and Interestingness and the possibility of intelligent life.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The energy requirements are probably pretty small, much more than we can currently make in our particle colliders, but much. Smaller just in terms of mc squared than the energy in your body, for example, the energy is not going to be the heartbit. The heartbeat is going to be concentrating it together in a really small little bubble that's shaped exactly right in order that it doesn't form a black hole. Expands in just the way that you want it to expand and lands in the vacuum that you're aiming for. So it's more going to be a control issue than just a pure energy issue.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it just keeps changing. I mean, not just your idea, our idea, everybody's idea has changed a lot in my lifetime and maybe continue to change. And in some sense, it's because you have the lever arm, the long lever arm of asking about the very, very distant future that makes even small uncertainties today pan out to absolutely ginormous distances in the distant future.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But obviously the negative externality means that people really shouldn't do that. So I hope the laws of physics don't turn out that way, otherwise we're going to have to have some superarching control.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a different story. That is a big negative externality destroying your future light cone. In a world with big negative externalities, libertarian fantasies can't really happen. It has pretty good governance implications, is that if it is possible for people just to wipe out Entire future late cone, not only themselves, but everybody else who wishes to participate in that future lake cone, then we're going to need a government structure that prevents them from doing so. I mean, the worst case scenario is even worse than that, not just that they could do it, but that they in some sense be incentivized to do it. You could imagine really adverse laws of physics in which maybe you could speculatively build some power plant that just is like really makes use of just sort of sitting on that edge of instability and then each person.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people outside of the bubble. So the thing about these bubbles is that they tend to expand at the speed of light. So even if you start off outside, you're probably going to end up inside them in short order unless you run away very quickly. So this isn't something that we make in the lab and then just remains in a box in the lab. And then we use to do things. This would be something that we would do or maybe would just happen to us because of spontaneous vacuum decay. And it would engulf. Of our future late cone. And so it's not a box that you're using to do things. It's a new place that you live. You better hope that you've engineered stuff so that that new place is still hospitable for life”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A tricky question, but since you asked it, I'd say probably 50%. There's a lot we don't understand about any of these questions. They're all super speculative. It's an active area of research, how to combine quantum mechanics and expanding universes. On the other hand, it seems pretty natural when you do combine quantum mechanics and gravity and try and fit them all together in a consistent picture. If universes can expand a lot, then the At all, according to the gravitational theory, then quantum mechanics will naturally populate those bits that can expand a lot. And so you'll naturally end up with an expanding universe. So I would say probably in my heart, slightly higher than 50%, but I'm going to round it down to 50 out of epistemic humility.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The laws of physics are as we believe them to be, and if we do not blow ourselves up in some other way, this is an issue that our distant descendants will eventually have to confront.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Action that we might take. And as long as that Cosmoshal constant is non-negative, is zero or positive, that universe will not implode. If it goes negative, that universe will eventually implode. So you could imagine a cascade in which you go to lower and lower values of the Cosmos constant. There are a lot of engineering details to be worked out, but what I'm describing is a scenario that is not inconsistent with the known laws of physics.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rate at which the universe is exponentially increasing is set by the cosmonautual constant, which is the volume of the universe is exponentially increasing. So you could imagine a scenario in which there was a high cosmological constant, you have a bubble universe that has a lower value of the cosmological constant. It continues to expand. You could make new bubble universes or new regions in that universe that have a lower cosmosal constant, either naturally and spontaneously or due to...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in any of these scenarios in which our universe is a bubble that formed in a sort of bigger, what's called a multiverse or a... That's a loader term, but a sort of larger universe in which our universe is just one bubble, the higher The meta universe also has a cosmosal constant and it is higher than the value in R universe. That is the one sense in which there's some version of energy conservation is that you can go down from high to low. It is considerably harder to go from low to i.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a matter of extreme interest, I would say, to us. It won't be relevant for tens of billions of years, probably, because that's the timescale on which the cosmological constant operates. But if the cosmological constant is truly constant, And we've only known about it for 25 years, and there are astronomical observations that seem to be in tension with that. But if it is truly constant, then there is a finite amount of free energy in our universe. If it's not constant, if we can manipulate it, or even if it naturally decays on its own, then there is the possibility of an unbounded amount of free energy in our future, and we would avoid a heat death scenario.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Energy is conserved in a universe that's not expanding. A static universe. A universe that is expanding, energy is not conserved. It can just sort of appear. And generativity is quite clear on that. General activity, Einstein's theory of space and time, one of our most beautiful and best tested theories, is quite clear on that point. Energy is not conserved to ask what happened to the energy, you can ask at a local level what happened to the energy density, but at a global level, energy is simply not conserved.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Energy is not conserved in general relativity. Energy is not conserved. It's conserved locally at things you can do at a local level, but in an expanding universe, energy is not conserved globally. This is one of the big surprises. This is not some, that is not a speculative statement. That is a statement that goes all the way back to Einstein and general relativity, is energy is simply not conserved at the global level. It's conserved at the local level. You can't do something in your lab that will generate free energy, but if you can participate in the expansion of the entire universe, then energy is not conserved.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually people are thinking that's something just spontaneously happens in the same way that rain spontaneously happens in a cloud that somebody didn't go and seed it deliberately to make it happen. But you could more than free to speculate that somebody seeded it to make it happen as well.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They certainly can happen, and in our future, and indeed definitely will happen if they're permitted, according to our understanding of quantum mechanics, if they're permitted, they must eventually happen. Furthermore, there are, again, speculative but not wild theories of the early universe in which this happened in our past, in which we transitioned far, far in the past, maybe into what's called a bubble universe. So we started off in some other much higher vacuum long in the past. And then what we see as the Big Bang was in fact just a sort of local vacuum decay that then gave rise to our bubble in which we live everything we see around us.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Descendants may not wish to wait around for a quantum fluctuation to happen. They may wish to take the fate into their own hands, since a quantum fluctuations can take exponentially long times to happen. And if they even happen, you'd end up in an unfavorable vacuum, not hospitable for life, rather than trying to steer the cosmosal constant in a happy direction.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, absolutely, almost certainly, anything that humans can do can happen without humans. It's interesting to reflect on what... Aspects of human behavior, nature has a tough time doing without us and what it just does on its own. For example, we make colder things in our laboratories than really exist naturally in the universe, but the universe certainly could make anything colder just by chance. Vacuum decay is something that, if it is possible, will in our future definitely happen. That's just a feature of the world that eventually, in our distant future, if it's possible at all, it will happen due to a quantum fluctuation.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source