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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “There probably was spontaneous nuclear reactors, not nuclear. They've discovered a seam in Africa where it looks like there was a fission reaction that naturally happened. It didn't explode, but it did do the same thing that happens in our nuclear power plants.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “There is a meta law of physics, the true laws of physics, be it string theory or whatever else, that you're not changing. That's just the rules of the game. What I'm describing is changing the way that the universe looks around you, changing the cosmotic constant. So I think, again, changing water into water vapor into water is a great analogy here. There's nothing actually the laws of physics are still the laws of physics, but the way it feels to live in that universe, you know, the value of the electromagnetic constant is perhaps not an absolute fixed value. It can vary in different places. And one similarly, the density of water around you, the viscosity, would change. It'll be an environmental variable like that.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I'd say it's definitely substantially harder than Dyson Spheres as far as the tech tree goes, but it's not... What do we mean by changing the laws of physics? Like, that just sounds like magic. We're not actually changing the laws of physics. We're just changing the laws of physics, the sort of low energy laws of physics as they present to us. In this scenario, again, this is speculative, but it's not super duper crazy. It's a natural consequence of our best theories, or at least some of our best theories of quantum gravity that they allow for this possibility.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Of the Electromagnetic constant in your evolutionary environment, it will be very, very bad indeed if we changed those constant as well. We're really just trying to target the cosmosal constant and nothing else, and that would require a lot of engineering prowess.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Probably you'd want something that would look a bit like a particle accelerator, but it would be considerably more controlled. You'd need a very controlled way to sort of collapse a field and make a bubble of this new vacuum that was big enough that it would continue to expand rather than just reclapse under its own surface tension. You'd have to do that in a very careful way, both to make sure that you didn't accidentally make a black hole instead by the time you concentrated all those energies. And also worse than making a black hole would be ending up in a vacuum that you didn't want to end up in, would be ending up in a vacuum in which you would not only bled off the cosmological constant in some way, but that you had changed, let's say, the electromagnetic constant or the strong nuclear force or any of these other forces, which would be seriously bad news. Because if you did that, your life, as you know it, is extremely well attuned to the”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Engineer going from one member to another in a controlled way is a more speculative branch of physics speculation, but it seems totally consistent with everything we know that our distance attendants would try to attempt it.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “What comes out the other end good. Well, I'm happy to be your Claude. The loss function is the energy density. And so maybe a good analogy would be water. Water can exist in many phases. It can be steam. It can be water. It can be ice. And even if it's in a cloud, let's say, it would rather be water than be water vapor, but it's having a tough time getting there because in the middle there's a barrier. And so you know that just spontaneously, it can eventually due to a sort of thermal process turn from steam into water. Those will be like the two minima in this loss landscape. And or you can go and do cloud seeding to turn it from water, from water vapor into water. And so those would be the equivalent of the minima here. The existence of different minima in general is a”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Great question. A vacuum is like a possible, well, what we would perceive as a possible set of laws of physics as we see them. So what it really is is a minima in some higher dimensional abstract laws of physics space. In which you can find yourself in a minima, but these minima may just be local minima. In fact, according to our understanding, the minima which we live today that gives us all of the laws of physics that we see around us is in fact just a local minimum. And there's a lower minimum. In fact, there's many lower minima out there to which we can transition spontaneously or because of our own deliberate action.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Definitely proceed with caution. In these theories where there's lots and lots of vacuums out there and Most of those vacuums are incredibly inhospitable to life as we know it. In fact, seemingly, they're just completely inhospitable to all forms of intelligence. So you really, really don't want to end up in them. However, again, if our best theories are correct, it seems as though there should be some of them that are much like our own in many ways, but have a lower value of the cosmosal constant. And so what we'd want to do is engineer that we end up in one of those vacuums.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Tending towards zero asymptotically, or you could take matters into your own hand. Or you could imagine our descendants deciding that Not going to just suffer the heat death that they're going to try and trigger a vacuum decay event to get us from one the vacuum we're in to another vacuum with a lower cosmosh constant. And our distance descendants will be forced to basically to do that if they don't want to suffer a heat death.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Oh, okay. This obviously depends on physics that we're not totally sure about yet. But it seems pretty consistent with the known laws of physics that the cosmonauts constant, what we perceive it as being a constant, this dark energy quantity that's pushing the universe apart from each other. In many very natural extensions of the known laws of physics, that is something that we have the ability to change. In fact, it can change, can take different values. It is not just totally fixed once and for all. That in fact you have what's called different vacuum, different regions of parameter space that you can transition between in which the cosmos constant can take different values. And if that's true, then, well, you could either sort of wait around and hope to get lucky, hope that the universe just sort of spontaneously moves from one of these vacuums to another, one with a lower cosmotic constant.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It may be that the Cosmoshal concert is not constant, and you should hope with all your heart that it's not. It may be that it naturally bleeds away. It may be, in fact, that our fate is in our hands and that our distant descendants will go and bleed the cosmorical concept away, will force it to go to zero. They will be strongly incentivized to do it if they can because otherwise we're doomed to a heat death.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Vacation destinations or Computronium or in any other ways extract utility from them. And we can't if the Cosmoshel concert is really constant. If this picture is correct because anything close enough, we can go out and grab it, obviously. But if it's further away than about a dozen billion light years, the expansion of the universe is dragging it away sufficiently rapidly that even if we send probes out at almost the speed of light, they will never make it. They will never make it there and make it back. They'll never even make it there if it's sufficiently far away. And that means that there's a finite amount of free energy in our future. And that, I mean, that means we're doomed to a heat death if that's true. But is it true? I mean, that was the second ask for your question. And first of all, we keep changing our minds about these things over the last century or so. So on first principles grounds, you may be somewhat suspicious that we'll change our minds again. And none of this is settled physics. And indeed.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And it turns out the answer to that question is neither. Neither of them is correct. In possibly the worst day in human history, sometime in the 1990s, we discovered that in fact not only is the universe expanding, it's expanding faster and faster and faster. It's what we call dark energy or the cosmosal constant is this just a word for uncertainty is making the universe expand at an ever faster rate, accelerated expansion as the universe grows. So that's a radical change in our understanding of the fate of the universe and if true is super duper bad news. It's really bad news because the accelerated expansion of the universe is dragging away from us lots of distant galaxies and we really want to use those galaxies. We have big plans to go and grab them and turn them into”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The Ultimate Fate is a really long time in the future, so you probably shouldn't be that confident about the answer to that question. In fact, our idea or the answer to what the ultimate fate is has changed a lot in the last 100 years. About 100 years ago, we thought that the universe was just static, wasn't growing or shrinking, was just sitting there statically. And then in the late 20s, Hubble and friends looked up at massive telescopes in the sky and noticed that distant galaxies were moving away from us and the universe is expanding. So that's like big discovery number one. There was then a learned debate for many years about the universe is expanding, but is it expanding sufficiently slowly that it'll then re-collapse in a big crunch, like a time reverse of the Big Bang? And that'll be super bad for us? Or is it going to keep expanding forever, but just sort of ever more slowly, as gravity pulls it back? But it's fast enough that it keeps expanding. And there was a big debate around this question.”

    2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source