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

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

“Physics can tell you it's conceivable if you want to know what actually what really happened, what really can happen. Then you have to work to go to chemistry if you want to know what actually happened, then you really have to consult the fossil record and biologists. And so, but so these. Ways of addressing the issue are complementary in a sense. They use different kinds of concepts, they use different languages, and they address different kinds of questions, but they're not inconsistent. They're just complementary.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right kind of temperature and the right kind of stuff. So you need to be able to make chemical bonds that are reasonably stable and be able to make complex structures. And we're very fortunate that carbon has this ability to make backbones and elaborate branchings and things. So you can get complex things that we call biochemistry. And yet the bonds can be broken a little bit with the help of energetic injections from the sun. So you have to have both the possibility of changing, but also the useful degree of stability. And we know at that very, very broad level.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool down, form things like stars, form things like planets. And so in broad terms, there's no mystery. That's what That's what the equations tell you should happen. But because it's a process involving many, many individual units, The application of the laws that govern individual units to these things is Very delicate, computationally very difficult, and more profoundly the equations have this probability of chaos or sensitivity to initial conditions, which tells you tiny differences in the initial state can lead to enormous differences in the subsequent behavior. physics fundamental physics at some point says okay chemists, biologists, this is your problem. And then again, in broad terms, we know. How it's conceivable that the humans and things like that, how complex structure can emerge. It's a matter of having”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an instability which causes those density contrasts to increase, there's a gravitational instability where it's denser, the gravitational attractions are stronger, and so that brings in more matter and it gets even denser and so on and so on. So there's a natural tendency of matter to clump because of gravitational interactions. Then the equation gets complicated. You have lots of things clumping together. Then we know what the laws are, but we have to, to a certain extent, wave our hands about what happens. But basic understanding of chemistry says that if things and the physics of radiation tells us that as things start to clump together, they can radiate, give off some energy so they don't just, they slow down. As a result, they lose energy that can commemorate together.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we're understand in broad outlines how it could happen. We certainly don't understand why it happened exactly in the way it did or there are certainly open questions about the origins of life and how inevitable emergence of intelligence was and how that happened. The universe early on was quite homogeneous, but not completely homogeneous. They were part in 10,000 fluctuations in density within this primordial plasma. And as time goes on,”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be a fantastic, I mean, that would be a pinnacle artifact of human endeavor to me, it would be such an inspiring thing that just we want to know and we go to these extraordinary lengths of making gigantic things that are also very sophisticated because what you're trying to do, you have to understand how they move, you have to understand the properties of light that are being used, the interference between light. And you have to be able to make the light with lasers and understand the quantum theory and get the timing exactly right. It's an extraordinary endeavor involving all kinds of knowledge from the very strong, very small to the very large, and all in the service of curiosity and built on a grand scale. Yeah. It made me proud to be a human if we did that.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The photons, the microwave background radiation, that is our present way of seeing into the earliest universe. But those photons interact much more strongly with matter. They're much more strongly processed. So they don't give us directly such an unprocessed view of the early universe, of the very early universe. But if gravitational waves leave some imprint on that as they move through, we could detect that too. And people are, as we speak, working very hard towards that goal.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. But these gravitational waves from the early universe would probably be of a much longer wavelength than Lyco is capable of sensing. So there's a beautiful project that's contemplated to put lasers in different locations in the solar system. We really, really separated by solar system scale differences like artificial planets or moons in different places and see the tiny motions of those relative to one another as a signal of radiation, the Big Bang. We can also maybe indirectly see the imprint of gravitational waves from the early universe on”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm optimistic both that we'll be able to measure more, so observe more, and that we'll be able to figure out more. So they're very, very tangible prospects for observing the extremely early universe, even much earlier than we can observe now through looking at gravitational waves. Gravitational waves, since they interact so weakly with ordinary matter Sort of send a minimally processed signal from the Big Bang. It's a very weak signal because it's traveled a long way and diffused over long spaces. But people are gearing up to try to detect gravitational waves that could have come from the early universe.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get closer and closer to the beginning of things. What's revealed there is that, as I said, there undoubtedly was a period when everything in the universe that we have been able to look at and understand, and that's consistent with everything is. Was in a condition where it was much, much hotter and much, much denser, but still obeying the laws of physics as we know them today. And then you start with that. So all the matter is in equilibrium. And then with small quantum fluctuations and run it forward, and then it produces at least in broad strokes the universe we see around us today.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't get to visit there and do control experiments. Most of the record is very, very processed. And we have to use very subtle techniques and powerful instruments to get information that has survived.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, if you take the equations as they come, the prediction is that the temperature just goes to infinity, but then the equations break down. We don't really, there are various, the equations become infinity equals infinity, so they don't feel, that's called a singularity. We don't really know this is running the equations backwards, so you can't really get a sensible idea of what happened before the Big Bang. So we need different equations to address the very earliest moments. Things were hotter and denser. We don't really know why things started out that way. We have a lot of evidence that they did start out that way. But since most of the”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, yeah, as we understand it, it's the fact. that everywhere in the whole universe Early in the history, matter came together into a very hot, very dense. If you run it backwards in time, matter comes together into a very hot, very dense, and yet very homogeneous plasma of all the different kinds of elementary particles and quarks and antiquarks and gluons and photons and electrons and anti-electrons, all of that stuff, like really hot, really, really, really hot. We're talking about way, way hotter than the surface of the sun.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to be careful here because there's a common misconception that the Big Bang is like the explosion of a bomb in empty space that fills up the surrounding place. It is space.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Itself is beautiful. It's a happy situation, and I think that we can find General principles of sort of the operating system that are comprehensible, simple, extremely powerful, and let us control things very well and ask profound questions. And on the other hand, that the world is going to be inexhaustible. Once we start asking about relationships and how they evolve and social interactions and we'll never have a theory of everything in any meaningful sense.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can easily rapidly outstrip these billions of thoughts that we're talking about. So we definitely cannot by brute force master complex situations or think of all the possibilities in a complex situation. Even something as relatively simple as chess is still something that human beings can't comprehend completely even the best players lose, still sometimes lose and they consistently lose to computers these days. In computer science, there's a concept of NP complete. So large classes of problems when you scale them up beyond a few individuals become intractable. In that sense, the world is inexhaustible”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need the purpose. Once you bring in concepts of interactions and correlations and relations, then you have what's called a combinatorial explosion that the number of possibilities expands exponentially technically with the number of things you're considering.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of meaning, there's room for billions of meaningful thoughts. I won't argue exactly 2 billion versus 1.8 billion. It's not that kind of question, but I think any estimate that's reasonable will come out. Within, say, $100 billion and $100 million. So it's a lot.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slow, then you start to see that it's not a series of snapshots. And you can ask, what is the crossover? When does it change from being something that is matched to our processing speed versus too fast? And it turns out about 40 per second. And then if you take 40 per second as how fast we can process visual images, you get to several billions of thoughts. Similarly, if you ask what are some of the fastest things that people can do? Well, they can play video games. They can play the piano very fast if they're skilled at it. And again, you get to similar units or how fast can people talk. Within a couple of orders of magnitude, you get more or less to the same idea. So that's how you can say that there's billions.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rate of being able to have meaningful thoughts. For instance, the one that I think is maybe the most penetrating is how fast we can process visual images. How do we do that? If you've ever watched old movies, you can see that, well, any movie, in fact, that a motion picture is really not a motion picture, it's a series of snapshots that are playing one after the other. And it's because our brains also work that way. We take snapshots of the world, integrate over certain time, and then go on to the next one. And then by post-processing, create the illusion of continuity and flow, we can deal with that. And if the flicker rate is too...”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We calculate the number of thoughts, the number of thoughts, right? It's necessarily imprecise because a lot of things are going on in different ways. And what is a thought. But there are several things that point to more or less the same.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In those dimensions compared to the universe, where we're large compared to meaningful units of processing information and being able to conceptualize and understand things.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a lifetime. So it's a lot. We shouldn't think of ourselves as terribly small, either in space or in time because although we're a small”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grasp in terms of psychological time in a useful way, you have to think, you have to use exponential notation and abstract concepts to really get any hold on these vast times and spaces. On the other hand, let me hasten to add that that doesn't make us small or make the time that we have to us small. Because again, looking at those pictures of what our minds are in some sense, the components of our minds, these beautiful drawings of the cellular patterns inside the brain, you see that there are many, many, many processing units. And if you analyze how fast they operate, I tried to estimate how many thoughts a person can have in a lifetime. That's kind of a fuzzy question, but I'm very proud that I... I was able to define it pretty.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a big distance because compared to that the universe, the Earth is a fraction of a light second. So again, it's really, really big. And so if we want to think about the universe as a whole in space and time, we really need a different kind of imagination. It's not something you can”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting close to the end. And the extinction event that let the mammals and ultimately humans inherit the earth from From the dinosaurs occurred on December 30th. And all of human history is a small part of the last day. And so, yes, we're occupying only in a human lifetime is a very, very infinitesimal part of this interval of these gigantic cosmic reaches of time. In space, we can tell a very similar story. In fact, it's convenient to think that the size of the universe is the distance that light can travel in 13.8 billion years. So it's 13.8 billion light years. That's how far you can see out. That's how far things can signals can reach us.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big number kind of hard to think about. A nice way to think about it though is to map it onto one year. So let's say the universe just linearly map the time intervals from 13.8 billion years on to one year. So the Big Bang then is that on January 1st at 12 a.m. you wait for quite a long time before the dinosaurs emerge. The dinosaurs emerge on Christmas, it turns out almost.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or very big Easy to tell a brief history, but the details get very involved, of course. But one thing I like to say is that if you take a broad enough view, the history of the universe is simpler than the history of Sweden, say, because you don't, your standards are lower. But just to make it quantitative, I'll just give a few highlights. And it's a little bit easier to talk about time. So let's start with that. The Big Bang occurred, we think. The universe was much hotter and denser and more uniform. About 13.8 billion years ago, and that's what we call the Big Bang. And it's been expanding and cooling the matter in it has been expanding and cooling ever since. So in a real sense, the universe is 13.8 billion years old.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In many, many places. And if you look at, for instance, the beautiful drawings of Raman Ikahal, the great neuroanatomist who drew the structure of different organs like the hippocampus, you see it's very regular and very intricate. Its symmetry in that sense. It's many repeated units that you can take from one place to the other and see that they look more or less the same.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People remember it from the supermarket and you say, how did a vegetable get so intelligent to make such a beautiful object with all this fractal structure and the secret is stupidity? You just do the same thing over and over again. And in our brains also, we came out, we start from single cells and they reproduce and each one does roughly the same thing. The program evolves in time, of course, different modules get turned on and off genetic different regions of the genetic code get turned on and off. But basically a lot of the same things are going on and they're simple things and so you produce the same patterns over and over again and that's a recipe for producing symmetry because you're getting the same thing.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Symmetry is also a very important means of construction. So when you have, for instance, simple viruses that need to construct their coat, their protein coat, the coats often take the form of platonic solids. And the reason is that the viruses are really dumb and they really know how to do one thing. So they make a pentagon, then they make another pentagon and they make another pentagon and they all glue together in the same way and that makes a very symmetrical object sort of so the rules of development when you have simple rules and they go they work again and again you get symmetrical patterns that's kind of in fact it's a recipe also for generating fractals you know like the kind of broccoli that has all this internal structure and i wish i had a picture”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The guesses are kind of aesthetic, really. What would be a nice description that's consistent with what we know? And then you try it out and see if it works. And by gosh, it does in many profound cases. So there's that, but there's another source of symmetry, which I didn't talk so much about in a beautiful question, but does relate to your comments and I think very much relates to the source of symmetry that we find in biology and In our heads It is discussed a bit in a beautiful question and also in fundamentals is that when you have”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe as a I don't know if it saves the world, but it does turn out to be a tremendous source of insight into the world. When we investigate kind of the most fundamental interactions, things that are hard to access because they occur at very short distances between very special kinds of particles whose properties are only revealed at high energies We don't have much to go on from everyday life. When we guess what the, so we and the experiments are difficult to do so you can't really follow a very wholly empirical procedure to sort of in the baconian style figure out the laws kind of step by step just by accumulating a lot of data what we actually do is guess and”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That these things, these different concepts that humans find appealing also turn out to be the concepts that govern how the world actually works. I don't think that's an accident. I think the humans were evolved to be able to interact with the world in ways that are advantageous and to learn from it. And so we are naturally evolved or designed to enjoy beauty and to symmetry and the world has it. And that's why we resonate with it.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's certainly beautiful. So the idea of symmetry, which is a driving inspiration in much of human art, especially decorative art, like the Alhambra or in wallpaper designs or things you see around you everywhere also turns out to be the dominant theme in modern fundamental physics, symmetry, and its manifestations. The laws turn out to be to have these tremendous amounts of symmetry. You can change the symbols and move them around in different ways, and they still have the same consequences. That's beautiful.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a sense, we now have a lot of insight into what the laws are, the form they take that allow us to understand matter in great depth and control it, as we've discussed. And it's an extraordinary thing Mathematically ideal, those equations turn out to be. In the early days of Greek philosophy, Lord Plato had this model of atoms built out of the five perfectly symmetrical platonic solids, or somehow the idea that mathematical symmetry should govern the world. And we've outplayed old Plato by far in modern physics because we have symmetries that are much more extensive, much more powerful that turn out to be the ingredients out of which we construct our theory of the world. And it works. So”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I can say about that is that the laws themselves point out their limitations, that they kind of, their laws for dynamical evolution. So they tell you what happens if you have a certain starting point, but they don't tell you what the starting point should be. At least, and the other thing that emerges from the equations themselves is the phenomena of chaos and sensitivity to initial conditions, which tells us that There are intrinsic limitations on how well we can spell out the consequences of the laws if we try to apply them.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In practice, it's very challenging to solve them in all but very simple cases. And then there's the other thing, which is that a lot of what we're interested in is historically conditioned. It's not a matter of the fundamental equations, but about what has evolved or come out of the early universe and formed into people and frogs and societies and things. And the laws of physics, the basic laws of physics only take you so far in that. It kind of provides a foundation, but doesn't really, you need entirely different concepts to deal with those kind of systems.”
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 all based on the laws of quantum mechanics. And they really work. And they give us tremendous control of nature. On the other hand, as we get better answers, we can also ask more ambitious questions. And there are certainly things that have been observed even in what would be usually called the realm of physics that aren't understood. For instance, there seems to be another source of mass in the universe, the so-called dark matter, that we don't know what it is. And it's a very interesting question what it is. But also, as you were alluding to, it's one thing to know the basic equations. It's another thing to...”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, right? So in Certain areas of understanding reality we've made extraordinary progress, I would say, in understanding fundamental physical processes and getting very precise equations that really work and allow us to do profound sculpting of matter to make computers and iPhones and everything else. And they really work and they're extraordinary productions.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when we say the universe is comprehensible, we have to. Kind of draw a careful distinctions about or definitions about what we mean by that.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Articles and these different universes have to agree, or else we get very upset. And that's an amazing thing if you think about it. And it's telling us that we do understand a lot about nature at a very profound level. And there are still things we don't understand, of course. as we get better and better answers and better and better ability to address difficult questions we can ask more and more ambitious questions”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a fact. We can do, you can point to things like the rise of Gross national products per capita around the world as a result of the scientific revolution. You can see it all around you in recent developments with exponential production of wealth, control of nature at a very profound level where we do things like sendy, tiny, tiny, tiny vibrations to tell that there are black holes colliding far away or we test laws as I alluded to as part in a billion and do things and what appear on the surface to be entirely different conceptual universes. I mean, on the one hand, pencil and paper are nowadays computers that calculate abstractions and on the other hand magnets and accelerators and detectors that look at the behavior of fundamental parts.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so that's the most beautiful surprise that I think that really was the, to me, the most profound result of the scientific revolution of the 17th century with the shining example of Newtonian physics that you could aspire to completeness, precision, and a concise description of the operating system. And it's gotten better and better over the years. And that's the continuing miracle. Now, there are a lot of beautiful sub-miracles too. The form of the equations is governed by high degrees of symmetry, and they have very surprising kind of mind-expanding structure, especially in quantum mechanics. But if I had to say the single most beautiful revelation is that, in fact, The world is comprehensible.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most beautiful idea in physics is that we can get a compact description of the world that's very precise and very full at the level of the operating system of the world. That's an extraordinary gift. We get worried when we have fine discrepancies between our description of the world and what's actually observed at the level even of a part and a billion.”
2021-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #187 – Frank Wilczek: Physics of Quarks, Dark Matter, Complexity, Life & Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source