YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Wilczek

lines on the record: 145
first: 2021-05-29
most recent: 2021-05-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, quarks and gluons have the same relation basically to nuclear physics as electrons and photons have to atomic and molecular physics. So atoms and photons are the dynamic entities that really come into play in chemistry and atomic physics. Of course, you have to add the atomic nuclei, but those are small and relatively inert, really the dynamical part for most purposes of chemistry, you just say you have this tiny little nucleus, which QCD gives you. Don't worry about it. It's there. The real action is the electrons moving around and exchanging and things like that. But, okay, but we wanted to understand the nucleus too. So atoms are sort of quantum mechanical clouds of electrons held together by electrical forces, which is photons, and then this radiation, which is also another aspect of photons.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It becomes very obvious when we first did this work, it was frontiers of high energy physics at big international conferences. There would always be sessions on testing QCD and whether this proposed description of the strong interaction was in fact correct and so forth. And it was very exciting. Nowadays, the same kind of work, but much more precise with calculations to more accuracy and experiments that are much more precise in comparisons that are very precise. Now it's called calculating backgrounds because people take this for granted and want to see deviations from the theory, which would be the new discoveries.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the phenomenon that quarks and gluons interact very, very weakly when they're close together. That's connected through relativity with the fact that they also interact very, very weakly at high energies. So if at high energies the simplicity of the fundamental interaction gets revealed at the time we did our work, the clues were very subtle, but nowadays at what are now high energy accelerators, it's all obvious. So we would have had somebody would have had a much easier time 20 years later looking at the data. You can sort of see the quarks and gluons as I mentioned. They leave these short tracks that would have been much, much easier. But from indirect clues, we were able to piece together enough to make that behavior a prediction. Rather than a post diction, right?”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what asymptotic freedom is. It says that there's a very particular kind of fundamental force that involves special particles called gluons with very special properties that enables that kind of behavior. So there were experiments at the time we did our work, there were experimental indications that quarks and gluons did have this kind of property, but there were no equations that were capable of capturing it. And we found the equations and showed how they work and showed how that they were basically unique. And this led to a complete theory of how the strong interaction works, which is the quantum chromodynamics we mentioned earlier.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The results can be understood. I mean, we can state the results pretty simply, I think. So in everyday life, we do encounter some forces that increase with distance and kind of turn off at short distances. That's the way rubber bands work if you think about it. If you pull them hard, they resist, but they get flabby if the rubber band is not pulled. And so that can happen in the physical world. But what's really difficult is to see how that could be a fundamental force that's consistent with everything else we know. And that”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those same instruments can't also measure momentum because they're disturbing the momentum. And then the momentum brings in energy. So there's also the effect that asymptotic freedom comes from the possibility of spontaneously making quarks and gluons for short amounts of time that fluctuate into existence and out of existence. And the fact that that can be done with a very little amount of energy and uncertainty and energy translates into uncertainty in time. So if you do that for a short time, you can do that. Well, it all comes in a package. So I told you it would take a while to really explain. But”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relativity is important because when When we talk about Trying to think about short distances, we have to think about very large momenta and very large momenta are connected to very large energy in relativity. And so the connection between how things behave at short distances and how things behave at high energy really is connected through relativity in sort of a slightly backhanded way. Quantum mechanics indicates that to get to analyze short distances, you need to bring in probes that carry a lot of momentum. This again is related to uncertainty because it's the fact that you have to bring in a lot of momentum that interferes with the possibility of determining position and momentum at the same time. If you want to determine position, you have to use instruments that bring in A lot of momentum. And because of that,”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Must bring in quantum mechanics and relativity. So a proper description and equations. So a proper description really is probably more than we have time for and require quite a bit of patience on your part. How did you drill?”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use them theoretically as entities out of which you build tangible things that we actually do observe, but also you can add accelerators at high energy. You can liberate them for brief periods of time and study and get convincing evidence that they leave tracks and you can get convincing evidence that they were there and have the properties that we wanted them to have.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can propagate through space relatively freely for a while, and we can see their tracks. So ultimately they get recaptured into protons and other maesons and funny things. But for a short time, they propagate freely. And while that happens, we can take snapshots and see their manifestations. This is actually this kind of thing is exactly what I got the Nobel Prize for predicting that this would work. And similarly for gluons, although you can't isolate them as individual particles and study them in the same way that we study electrons, say you can”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And check out the equations in great detail. For quarks and gluons, which are the other two main ingredients of our model of matter that's so successful, it's a little more complicated because the quarks and gluons that appear in our equations don't appear directly as particles you can isolate and study individually. They always occur within what are called bound states or structures like protons or a proton roughly speaking is composed of three quarks and a lot of gluons. We can detect them in a remarkably direct way actually nowadays whereas at relatively low energies the behavior of quarks is complicated. At high energies”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We call electrons, and what an electron is is defined by the equations that it satisfies theoretically, and we find that there are many, many exemplars of that entity in the physical world. So in the case of electrons, we can isolate them and study them in individual ones in great detail. We can check that they all actually are identical. And that's why chemistry works. And yes, so that in that case, it's very tangible, similarly with photons. You can study them individually. The units of light. And nowadays it's very practical to study individual photons and determine their spin and their other basic properties.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so, well, the hard answer to that, the precise answer is that we construct the world out of equations that contain entities that are Reproducible that exist in vast numbers throughout the universe that have definite properties of mass, spin, and a few others that”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wave function in a way that accesses information about the precise position of things you have to apply a lot of energy. And that's not, you know, that's an idealization that you can apply infinite amount of energy to determine a precise position. But at the mathematical level, we build the world out of particles that are points.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As far as we know, the fundamental particles out of which we build our most successful description of nature are points. They have don't have any internal structure. So that's as small as can be. So what does that mean operationally? That means if they obey equations that describe entities that are singular concentrations of energy, momentum, angular momentum, the things that particles have, but localized at individual points. Now, that mathematical structure is only revealed partially in the world because to process the”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the same time, I think that mind emerges from matter and that there's an alternative Description of matter that's up to subtleties about quantum mechanics, which I don't think are relevant here really is deterministic.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, definitely. Yeah. I mean, they will be, how should I say? There'll be kind of a god's eye view which sees. Everything that's going on in the computer or the brain. And then there's the brain's own view or the central processor or whatever it is, what we call the self, the consciousness that's all only aware of a very small part of it. And those are very different. So the god's eye view can be deterministic while the self view. Sees free will. I'm pretty sure that's how it's going to work out, actually. But as it As it stands, free will is a concept that we definitely, at least I feel I definitely experience, I can choose to do one thing that another. And other people I think are sufficiently similar to me that I trust that they feel the same way. And it's an essential concept in psychology and law and so forth.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get, well, I think it is tied up. It will turn out to be tied up when we understand things better with these issues of self-awareness and where we perceive as making choices. What does that really mean and what's going on under the hood? But I'm speculating about a future understanding that's not in place at present.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is what I remember. There's a story about Dr. Johnson and he's talking with Boswell and Boswell was, they were discussing a sermon that they both heard and the sort of culmination of the sermon was the speaker saying, I accept the universe. And Dr. Johnson said, well, he damn well better. And there's a certain joy in accepting the universe because it's mind-expanding. And And to me complementarity also suggests tolerance, suggests opportunities for understanding things in different ways that add to rather than detract from understanding. So I think it's an opportunity for mind expansion. And demanding that there's only one way to think about things can be very limiting.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of many lessons in humility that we run into in profound understanding of the world. I mean, the Copernican Revolution was one that the earth is not the center of the universe. Darwinian evolution is another that humans are not the pinnacle of Of God's creation Apparent result of deep understanding of physical reality that mind emerges from matter and there's no call on special life forces or souls. These are all lessons in humility. And I actually find complementarity a liberating concept. It says, okay, you know, yeah, it is in a way.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Including Sumner Feinstein's attempts to challenge it with like the famous Einstein Podulski-Rosen experiment turned out to be confirmations of that have been useful in themselves. So thinking about these things was fruitful, but not in the way that Einstein hoped. Yeah, so as I said in the case of quantum mechanics and this Dilemma or dichotomy between processing the wave function in different ways, it's a theorem. They're mutually incompatible in that the physical correlate of that is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can't have position and momentum determined at once. But in other cases, like one that I like to think about or like to point as an example is free will and determinism. It's much less. A theorem and more a kind of”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, Einstein was very uncomfortable with complementarity. And in a broad sense, the famous Boer Einstein debates Revolved around this question of whether the complementarity that Is a foundational feature of quantum mechanics as we have it is a permanent feature of the universe and our description of nature. And so far. Quantum mechanics wins, it's gone from triumph to triumph whether complementarity is rock bottom, I guess you can never be sure. I mean, but it looks awfully good and it's been very successful and certainly its complementarity has been extremely useful and fruitful in that domain.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's an example of complementarity. But to answer different kinds of questions, you have to analyze the system in different ways that are mutually incompatible, but both valid to answer different kinds of questions. So in that case, it's a theorem, but I think it's a much more widespread phenomenon that applies to many cases where we can't prove it as a theorem, but it's a piece of wisdom, if you like, and appears to be a very important insight. And if you ignore it, you can get Confused and Misguided.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where it's going to be and with different, if you observe, it'll be in different places with different probabilities, or how fast it's moving. And it'll also be moving in different ways with different probabilities. That's what quantum mechanics says. And you can predict either set of probabilities, what's going to happen if I make an observation of the position or the velocity. So the wave function gives you ways of doing both of those, but to do it, to get those predictions, you have to process the wave function in different ways. You process it one way for position and in a different way for momentum. And those ways are mathematically incompatible. It's like you have a stone and you can sculpt it into a Venus de Milo where you can sculpt it into David, but you can't do both.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It works in many cases, and I think it's a deep fact about the world and how we should approach it. It's most rigorous form where it's actually a theorem if quantum mechanics is correct, occurs in quantum mechanics, where the primary description of the world is in terms of wave functions. But let's not talk about the world. Let's just talk about a particle, an electron. It's the primary description of that electron, its wave function. And the wave function can be used to predict”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The concept of the approach or the realization that it can be appropriate and useful and inevitable and unavoidable to use very different descriptions of the same object or the same system or the same situation to answer different kinds of questions that may be very different and even Mutually uninterpretable, immutually incomprehensible.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a wonderful, yeah. To me, it's well, it's the culminating chapter of the book. And I think since the whole book is about the big lessons or big takeaways from profound understanding of the physical world that we've achieved, including that it's mysterious in some ways, this was the final, the overarching lesson, complementarity. It's Approach. So, unlike some of these other things, which are just facts about the world, like the world is both big and small in different senses is big, but we're not small, things we talked about earlier, and the fact that the universe is comprehensible and how complexity could emerge from simplicity. And so those things are in the broad sense facts about the world. Complementarity is more an attitude towards the world encouraged by the facts about the world. And it's...”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm all for that, you know, and I kind of have even elevated it into a principle, which is of complementarity following Bohr that you need different ways of thinking, even about the same things, in order to do justice to their reality and answer different kinds of questions about them. I mean, we've several times alluded to the fact that human beings are hard to understand and the concepts that you use to understand human beings if you want to prescribe drugs for them or see You need entirely different concepts from psychology, and there's nothing wrong with that. You can have very different ways of addressing the same material that are useful for different purposes.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understand in terms of human concepts. We can't do the calculations, but our machines can do them. So with the help of what I like to call our Silicon friends and their descendants in the future, we can understand in a different way that allows us to understand more. But I don't think we'll ever no human is ever going to be able to solve those equations in the same way. But I think that when we find limitations to our natural abilities, we can try to find workarounds. And sometimes that's appropriate concepts. Sometimes it's appropriate instruments. Sometimes it's a combination of the two. But I think it's premature to get defeatist about it. I don't see any. Any logical contradiction or paradox or limitation that will bring this process to a halt?”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Built on quarks and gluons, which you don't observe actually produces protons and neutrons and the things you do observe. This is called the problem of confinement. So no one's been able to prove that analytically in a way that a human can understand. On the other hand, we can take these equations to a computer, to gigantic computers and compute. And by God, you get the world from it. So these equations, in a way that we don't”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quantum chromodynamics. So it's our theory of the strong interaction, the interaction that is responsible for nuclear physics. So it's the interaction that governs how quarks and gluons interact with each other and make protons and neutrons and all the strong related particles and many things in physics. That's one of the four basic forces of nature as we presently understand it. So we have beautiful equations which we can test in very special circumstances using at high energies at accelerators. So we're certain that these equations are correct. Prizes are given for it and people try to knock it down and they can't. But the situations in which we can calculate the consequences of these equations are very limited. So for instance, no one has been able to demonstrate that this theory, which is”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we can do that. I mean, you know, in fact, for practical purposes, most of our experience is two-dimensional. It's hard to move vertically. And yet we've produced conceptually a three-dimensional symmetry. And in fact, four-dimensional space-time. So by thinking in appropriate ways and using instruments and getting consistent accounts and rich accounts, we find out what concepts are. Necessary, and I don't see any end in sight of the process or any showstoppers because let me give you an example. I mean, for instance, QCD, our theory of the strong interaction, has nice equations which I helped to discover.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, yes, we do have limitations, of course, in the amount of information we can process. On the other hand, we can get help from our Silicon friends and we can get help from all kinds of instruments that make up for our perceptual deficits. And we can use at a conceptual level, we can use different kinds of concepts to address different kinds of questions. So I'm not sure exactly what problem she's talking about.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And working up from simple cases and also working up from engineering experience in trying to do efficient computation, including efficient management of social interactions, is going to really shed light on these questions. As I said, in a way that sort of musing abstractly about consciousness never would.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They require very active lifestyle, warm bloodedness and take away from the ability to support metabolism of digestion. So it comes at a high cost. It has to pay back.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there has to be a good why. And there's a reason and big brains are rare in evolution. And they come at a big cost. I mean, if they have high metabolic demands,”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is it useful? We've got a conscious eye watch here. Interesting question. Thank you, Siri. I'll get back to you later. And I think I'm morally certain that what's going to emerge from analyzing recurrent neural nets and robotic design and advanced computer design is that having this kind of Looking at the internal state In a structured way that doesn't look at everything, it's encapsulated, looks at highly processed information and very selective and makes choices without knowing how they're made. There will also be an unconscious. I think that that is going to turn out to be really essential to doing efficient information processing. And that's why it evolved, because it's helpful. brains come at a high cost.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely that it occurs in the science. I think we're on the same wavelength here. I think that, and let me just add one comment, which is, I think we should try to understand consciousness as we experience it in evolutionary terms and ask ourselves why does it happen? This thing seems to be...”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ability to conceptualize different levels of self awareness. What do you have to not know and what do you have to know? And when do you know that you don't know it? Or what do you think you know that you don't really know? These, I think, clarifying those issues, when we clarify those issues and get a rich theory around self-awareness, I think that will illuminate the questions about consciousness in a way that scratching your chin and talking about qualia and blah, blah, blah, blah, is never going to do.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That to study. I think I'm much more comfortable with the idea of studying self awareness as opposed to consciousness, because that sort of gets rid of the mystical aura of the thing. And self-awareness is, I think, contiguous at least with ideas about feedback. So if you have a system that looks at its own state and responds to it, that's a kind of self-awareness. More sophisticated versions could be like in information processing things, computers that look into their own internal state and do something about it. And I think That could also be done in neural nets. This is called recurrent neural nets, which are hard to understand and kind of a frontier. So I think understanding those and gradually building up a kind of profound”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very imprecise word and loaded with connotations that I think we should, we don't want to start a scientific analysis with that, I don't think. It's often been important in science to start with simple cases and work up consciousness. I think what most people think of when you talk about consciousness is, okay, what am I doing in the world? This is my experience. I have a rich inner life and experience of, and where is that in the equations? And I think that's a great question, a great, great question. And actually, I think. I'm gearing up to spend part of the try to address that in coming years.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sign the word life to this kind of matter. I agree with that completely. But that's, so it's not a disagreement. It's very frequent in physics that. In science, that words that are in common use get refined and reprocessed into scientific terms. That's happened for things like force and energy. And so we, in a way, we find out Or symmetry, for instance. And the common usage may be quite different from the scientific usage, but the scientific usage is special and takes on a life of its own, and we find out what the useful version of it is, or the fruitful version of it is. So I do think, so in that spirit, I think if we can identify states of matter or linked states of matter that can carry on processes of self-reproduction and development and information processing, we might be tempted to classify those things as life.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're talking about states of matter that are not static but that have dynamics, that have characteristic patterns not only in space but in time. These are called time crystals and that's been a development that's just in the last decade or so. It's really flourishing. Is there a state of matter that group of states of matter that corresponds to life? Maybe, but the answer can't be any more definite than the question.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The surface of different ways that are distinguishable, that matter can form into macroscopically different meaningful patterns that we call phases. And then there are precise definitions of what we mean by phases of matter that have been worked out fruitful over the decades. We were discovering new states of matter all the time and kind of having to work at what we mean by matter. We're discovering the capabilities of matter to organize in interesting ways. And some of them like liquid crystals are important ingredients of life. Our cell membranes, our liquid crystals, and that's very important to the way they work. Recently, there's been a development in where”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of I agree with you in a sense, but I think that's a dangerous question because the The answer can't be any more precise than the question. And the question, what is life Kind of assumes that we have a definition of life and that it's a natural phenomena that can be distinguished, but that really there are edge cases like viruses. And some people would like to say that electrons have consciousness. So you can't, if you really have fuzzy concepts, it's very hard to reach precise kinds of scientific answers. I think there's a very fruitful question that's adjacent to it, which has been pursued in different forms for quite a while and is now becoming very sophisticated in reaching in new directions. And that is what are the states of matter that are possible. In high school or grade school, you learn about solids, liquids, and gases, but that really just...”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I guess this is a long winded answer or justification of my feeling is that the conditions for life in some form are probably satisfied many, many places around the universe and even within our galaxy I'm not so sure about the emergence of intelligent life or the emergence of technological civilizations. That seems much more contingent and special. And we might, it's conceivable to me that we're the only example in the galaxy. Although, yeah, I don't know one way or the other. I have different opinions on different days of the week.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then intelligence is kind of a luxury. Many more kinds of creatures have big stomachs than big brains. In fact, most have no brains at all in any reasonable sense that then the dinosaurs ruled for a long, long time. And some of them were pretty smart, but they were at best bird brains because birds came from the dinosaurs and it could have stayed that way. And the emergence of humans was very contingent and kind of a very, very recent development on evolutionary timescales. And you can argue about the level of human intelligence, but it's, you know, I think it's pretty impressive. We're talking about. Can ask these kinds of questions and discuss them intelligently.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the other lesson I think that one can draw from this one example, it's dangerous to draw lessons from one example, but that's all we've got. And that the emergence of intelligent life is a different issue altogether. That took a long time. And seems to have been pretty contingent for a long time, well, for most of the history of life, it was single-celled things, even multicellular life only rose about 600 million years ago, so much after, you know, and”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we don't know for sure, but I. I have a strong suspicion that the answer is yes because the one case we do have at hand to study here on Earth, we sort of know what the conditions were that were helpful to life, the right kind of temperature, the right kind of star that keeps, maintains that temperature for a long time, the liquid environment of water. And once those conditions emerged on Earth, which was roughly four and a half billion years ago, it wasn't very long before what we call life started to leave relics. So we can find forms of life, primitive forms of life that are almost as old as the earth itself in the sense that once the earth became a very hot boiling thing and cooled off into a solid mass with water life emerged very, very quickly. So it seems that these general conditions for life”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right. So it's amazing to think that, you know, This is the modern answer to the. With a modern version of what the Hindu philosophers had, that art thou, if you ask what, okay, those little quantum fluctuations in the early universe are the seeds out of which complexity, including plausibly humans really evolve. You don't need anything else.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source