YouSaid · the spoken record

Lee Cronin

lines on the record: 276
first: 2022-03-11
most recent: 2022-03-11
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

“Exactly Fundamental, I don't need to add on a magical second law because the second law comes out of the fact the universe is actually there's more states available. I mean, we might even be able to do weird things like dark energy in the universe might actually just be time.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the physicists almost got everything right. I can't fault them at all. I just think there's a little bit of dogma. I'm just trying to play devil's advocate. I'm very happy to be entirely wrong on this, right? I'm not right on many things at all. But if I can make less assumptions about the universe with this, then potentially that's a more powerful way of looking at things.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we have to have an hour of time, we have to require that entropy increases. And we have to say, and then we can say, look, the universe is completely closed and there's no novelty. Or that novelty is predetermined. What I'm saying is very, very important, that time is fundamental, which means, if you think about it, the universe becomes more and more novel each step. It generates its more states in the next step than it was before. So that means a bigger search. So what I'm saying is that the universe wasn't capable of consciousness at day one. Actually, because I didn't have enough states. But today, the universe, so it's like”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experiment that shows how assembly theory kind of is the way that the universe produces selection and that selection gives rise to life and also to say, well, hang on, we could allow ourselves to have a theory that requires us to have these statements to be possible. Like, we need to have order in the past, or we can use the past hypothesis, which is order in the past as well. Okay.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could walk in both directions, but I don't think that makes any sense because the problem that I have with time being reversible is that I mean, I'm just a dumb experimental chemist, right? So I love burning stuff, burning stuff and building stuff. When I think of reversible phenomena, and I imagine in my head, I have to actually manufacture some time, I have to borrow time from the universe to do that. I can't, when anyone says, let's imagine that we can go back in time or reversibility, you can't do that. You can't step out of time. Time is non-negotiable. It's happening.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of like so, what did I use in my box to assemble in the environment, to assemble, to assemble? And I realized I could make a causal chain in my survival kit. So I guess that's probably why I've been obsessed with assembly theory for so long. And I was just pre-configured to find it somewhere. And when I saw it in molecules, I realized that the causal structure that we say emerges and the physics kind of gets really stuck because they're saying that time, you can go backwards in time. I mean, how do we let physicists get away with the notion that we can go back in time and meet ourselves? I mean, that's clearly a very hard thing. Physicists would not let other sciences get away with that kind of heresy, right? So why a physicist allowed to get away with it?”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go ahead. I'm sorry. That's very poetic. So, I think I came up with assembly theory with the following idea. When I was a kid, I was obsessed about survival kits. What is the minimum stuff I would need to basically replicate my reality? And I love computers and I love technology or what technology was going to become. So I imagined that I would have basically some really big truck full of stuff. And I thought, well, can I delete some of that stuff out? Can I have a blueprint? And in the end, I kept making it smaller. I got to maybe half a truck into a suitcase. And they went, okay, well, screw it. I want to carry my entire technology in my pocket. How do I do it? And I'm not like going to launch into Steve Jobian, you know, iPlayer. I came up with a matchbox survival kit. In that matchbox survival kit, I would have the minimum stuff that would allow me to interact with the environment to build my shelter, to build a fishing rod, to build water purification system.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But remember, the thing is, I invented assembly theory. I'll tell you I invented it. When I was a kid, I mean, the thing is, I keep making fun of myself to my research group, I've only ever had one idea. I keep exploring that idea over the 40 years or so since I had that idea.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's clearly incorrect. Because we wouldn't exist otherwise. So physicists have kind of got confused about time. Time is a real thing. Well, I mean, so look. I'm very happy with the current description of the universe's physics give me because I do a lot of stuff. I can go to the moon of Newtonian physics, I think, and I can understand the orbit of Mercury with relativity. And I can build transistors with quantum mechanics, right? And I can do all this stuff. So, I'm not saying the physics is wrong. I'm just saying if we say that time is fundamental, i.e. time is non-negotiable, there's a global clock. I don't neither I don't need to require that there's order been magically made in the past because that asymmetry is built into the way the universe is.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a minute, I'll recover my career in a second. Although, I think the only good thing about being in the Regious Chair means I think there has to be an act of parliament to fire me.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a really good discipline. It's reduced the number. Physics is about reducing the belief system. But they're down to some things in their belief system. Which is kind of really makes me kind of grumpy. Number one is requiring order at the beginning universe magically. We don't need that. The second is the second law. Well, we don't actually need that.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So suddenly you can put life on a scale. And then life doesn't exist, actually, in that kind. It's just how evolved you are. And you as an object, because you have incredible causal power, you could go and you can go and launch rockets or build cars or create drugs. You can do so many things. You can build stuff, build more artifacts that show that you have had causal power and that causal power was this kind of a lineage. And I think that over time, I mean, realizing that physics as a discipline has a number of problems associated with it, me as a chemist, it's kind of interesting that assembly theory, and I'm really, I want to maintain some credibility in the physicist's size, but I have to push them because they're physic.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is the definition of life, the only definition we need, right? Life is able to create objects in abundance that are so complex, his semi-number is so high they can't possibly form an environment where there's just random interactions.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, you're on average and your volume. Well, I mean, we're just working this out. But what's really cool is you're going to have a really high assembly. Sand will have a very low assembly. Your causal power is much higher. You get to make decisions. You're alive. You're aspiring. Assembly says something about causal power in the universe. And that's not supposed to exist. Because physicists don't accept that causation exists at the bottom”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's just talk about the molecules in use. So let's just take a pile of sand the same way as you. And I would take you and just cut up all the molecules. I mean, and look at the number of copies and assembly number. So in SAN, let's say there's probably going to be nothing more than an assembly number of two or three, but there might be trillions and trillions of sand grains. In your body, there might be the assembly number is going to be higher, but there might not be quite as many copies because the molecular weight is higher.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that will tell you the amount of assembly in the box. So basically, the assembly equation we come up with is like basically the sum of e to the power of the assembly index for molecule i times the number of copies of the molecule i and then you normalize so you sum them all up and then normalize so some boxes are going to be more assembled than others”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assembly index So there are three kind of fundamental labels we haven't. So there's the quantity of assembly. So, if you have a box We count the number of identical molecules, and then we chop each molecule up in individual molecule class and calculate the assembly number. So basically you then have a function that sums over all the molecules for each assembly, and then you divide through. So you make it divide through by the number of molecules.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say to start with, you just use molecules. I can say for sure if there are molecules of sufficient complexity on Earth, then I know that life has made them. And then go further and show technology. There are molecules that exist on Earth that are not possible even by biology. You need a technology and you needed microprocessors to get there. So that's really cool.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For molecules, it's easy. If you just keep low enough in molecular weight space, it's good enough, so it's a complete theory. When we start to think about objects, we can start to assign about things at different levels, different atoms. What do you assign as your atom? So in a molecule, the atom, this is really confusing because the word atom, I mean smallest breakable part. So in a molecule, the atom is the bond because you break bonds, not atoms, right? So in a car, the atom might be, I don't know, a small amount of iron or the smallest reusable part, a rivet, a piece of plastic or something. So you've got to be really careful in a micro processor, the atoms might be transistors. And so the amount of assembly, something as is a function, you have to look at the atom level. Where are your parts? What are you counting?”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And do them in every possible way. So we have a series of minimal operations that can move the sand together. But all that doesn't exist either. Now, because we have specific memory where we say, well, we're going to put three sand grains in a line or four and make a cross or a triangle or something unsymmetrical. And once we've made the triangle and the unsymmetrical thing, we remember that we can use it again because it's on that causal chain. So, what assembly theory allows you to do is go to the actual object that you find in space. And actually the way you get there is by disassembling it. So it's disassembly theory works by disassembling objects you have and understanding the steps to create them. And it works for molecules beautifully because you just break bonds.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there's some really interesting problems of where we coarse grain and we lose information. And all assembly theory does really assembly theory just explains weak emergence. And so what assembly theory says, look, going from the atoms that interact, those first replicators that build one another, assembly at the minimal level just tells you evidence that there's been replication and selection. And I think the more selected something is, the higher the assembly. And so we're able to start to know how to look for selection in the universe. If you go to the moon, there's nothing of very high assembly on the moon except the human artifacts we've left there. So again, let's go back to the sandbox. In assembly theory says if all the sand grains could stick together, that's the infinite combinatory explosion in the universe. That should be the default. We don't have that. Now that's the sandble sand grains together.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it can. And I think that the question is what's the benefit? Because there's plenty of, I mean, in computer science and mathematics and in physics, people have been really seriously studying complexity for a long time.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, it's not infinitely computable, gets mp hard very quickly. It's very hard problem, but it's computable enough tractable enough to be able to tell the difference between a molecule that's been formed by the random background and by causation. And I think that that's really interesting because until now, there's no way of measuring complexity objectively. Complexity is required algorithmic comparisons and programs and human beings to enlabel things. Assembly is label free, well, not entirely. We can talk about what that means in a minute.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So I would say that assembly allows you to do something that's statistical mechanics and people looking at entropy have got stuck with. So I'm making this pretty bold. I mean, I'm writing a paper with Sarah Walker on this at the moment. And we're realizing we don't want to get ahead of ourselves because I think that there's lots of ways where this is a really interesting idea. It works for molecules and it appears to work for any objects produced by causation. Because you can take a motor car, you can look at the assembly of the motor car, look at a book, look at the assembly of the book. Assembly theory tells you there's a way of compressing and reusing. And so when people I talk to information theorists, they say, oh, this is just logical depth. I say it is like logical depth, but it's experimentally measurable. They say, oh, it's a bit like Kamagolarov complexity. But it's computable.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think reusability is fundamental in the universe, not just for life and complex organisms, without causation. So I think assembly tells you if you find objects, because you can do this rejectories as well, you think about it, that the fact there are objects in the universe on Earth is weird. You think about it, we should just have a commentory explosion of stuff. The fact that not everything exists is really weird.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell you whether that has been produced by an informational process or not. And that's what assembly theory kind of does. But it goes a bit further. I then realized that this isn't just about life. It's about causation. So actually, it tells you about where there's a causal structure. So now I can look at objects in the universe, say again, this cup, and say, right, I'm going to look at how many independent parts it has. So that's the assembly number. I'll then look at the abundance, how many cups, there are two on this table. Maybe there's a few more you got stashed away. So assembly is a function of the complexity of the object times the number of copy numbers of that object or a function of the copy number normalized. So I realize there's a new quantity in the universe. You have energy, entropy, and assembly.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So basically all the other stuff that came from my abiotic origin was low. There was no complexity there. So we suddenly realized that on Earth at least there is a cutoff that natural phenomena cannot produce molecules that need more than 15 steps to make them. So I realized that this is a way to make a scale of life, a scale of technology as well. And literally you could just go sniffing from molecules orf on Titan on Mars. And when you find a molecule in the mass spectrometer that gives you more than 15 parts, you'll know pretty much for sure that it had to be produced by evolution. And this allows me to come up with a general definition of life based on assembly theory to say that if I find an object that has a large number of parts, say an iPhone or Boeing 747 or any complex object and I can find it in abundance and cut it up.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“NMR nuclear magnetic resonance, which uses radio frequency to basically jangle the molecules and get a signature out. And they also used infrared. And infrared and NMR almost gave us a one-to-one correlation. So what am I saying? Saying by taking a molecule and doing either infrared or NMR or mass spec, I can work out how many parts there are in that molecule and then put it on a scale. And what we did in the next part of the work is we took molecules randomly from the environment, from outer space, from all around Earth, from the sea, from Antarctica, and from fossils and so on. And even NASA, because they didn't believe us, blinded some samples. And that we found that all these samples that came from biology produced molecules that had a very high assembly number above a threshold of about 50%.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So we went through chemical space and we looked at the assembly numbers. We were able to classify it. Said, okay, let's test it. Let's go. So we're able to take a whole bunch of molecules and assign an assembly index to them. And it's just a function of the number of bonds in the molecule and how much symmetry. So literally assembly theory is a measure of how little symmetry a molecule has. So the more asymmetry, the more information, the more weird it is, like a Jackson Pollock of some description. So I then went and did a load of experiments and I basically took those molecules. I cut them up in the mass spec and measured the number of peaks without any knowledge of the molecule. And we found the assembly number there was almost not quite a one-to-one correlation, but almost because not all bonds are equal. They have different energies. I then did this using two other spectroscopic techniques.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It's like memory in the universe, right? I'm making lots of leaps here. Like, it's kind of weird. I'm saying, right, there's a process that can form the A and the B and the C, let's say. And then because we've formed A and B before, we can use A and B again with no extra cost except one unit. So that's the kind of chain of events.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you cut the molecule up into parts, and you can on the causal chain, and you basically start with the atoms and then bonds, and then you randomly add on those parts to make the A, make the B, and keep going all the way up. I found that literally assembly theory allows me to say how compressed a molecule is. So when there's some information in there, and I realized assembly theory isn't just confined to molecular space. It can apply to anything. But let me finish the molecular argument. So what I did is I had this theory. I, with one of my students, we wrote an algorithm. We basically took 20 million molecules from a database and we just calculated their assembly number. And that's the index. Like basically, if I take a molecule and I cut it up into bonds, what is the minimum number of steps I need to take to reform that molecule from atoms?”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Untyers, and you find one off Abrakadabra, no big deal. But if you find lots of recurrences of apricadabra, well, that means something weird is going on. But let's think about the assembly number of Abra Cadabra. So Abra Cadabra has a number of letters in it. You can break it down. So you just cut the letters up. But when you actually reassemble Abras Cadabra, the minimum number of ways of organizing those letters, so you have an A, a B, you know, and keep going up, there's just, when you cut Apracadabra up into parts, you can put it together again in seven steps. So what does that mean? That means if you basically, you're allowed to reuse things you make in the chain at the beginning, that's the memory of the universe, the process that makes APRA Cadabra. And because that causal chain, you can then get to Abra Cadabra quicker than the number of letters for having to specify only in seven. So if you take that to a molecule,”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm trying to convince NASA. I don't know if I'll be able to convince the Dragonfly team that they should apply this approach, but they will get data. And depending on how good their mass spectrometer is. But I had this thought experiment anyway. And I did this thought experiment. And for me, it seemed to work. I turned the thought experiment into an algorithm in assembly theory, and I basically assembly theory, if I take, let's just make it generic and let's just take the word abracadabra. Say, can I If you find the word So if you have a book with lots of words in it and you find abra cadabra one off and it's a book that's been written by in a random way, you know, set of monkeys in a room.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's dragonfly and it's going to be launched in a few years. I think it got pushed a year because of the pandemic. So I think three or four years.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But anyway, it's a complex molecule. So, what you do is you take this molecule in the mass spectrometer and you hit it with some electrons or an electric field and it breaks apart. And if the larger the number of different parts, you know, when it starts to get to refresh, my idea was that that molecule could not be created by chance probabilistically. So that was where assembly theory was born in an experiment, in a mass spec experiment. And I was thinking about this because NASA sending a mass spectrometer to Mars, to Titan, is going to send them to Europa. There's going to be a nuclear-powered.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I kept working this up because I invented an assembly theory in chemistry, first of all, with molecules. And so the thought experiment was. How complex does a molecule need to be when I find it that it couldn't possibly have risen by chance, probabilistically? And if I found this molecule able to detect it enough quantities in a same object like a machine like a mass spectrometer, so typically in a mass spectrometer, you weigh the molecules and electric field, you probably have to have all the order of 10,000 identical molecules to get a signal. So 10,000 identical molecules that are complex, what is the chance of them occurring by chance? Well, we can do the math. Let's take a molecule like strychnine or, yeah, so strychnine is a good molecule actually to take, or Viagra is a good molecule. I made jokes about Viagra because it's complex molecule. And one of my friends said, yeah, if we find Viagra on Mars in detectable quantities, we know something is up.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More likely it is that object has been created by an evolutionary or information process, especially if that object is not one-off. You've got an abundance of them. And that's really important. So because what I'm literally saying without the abundance, if you have a one-off object and you break it into parts and it has lots of parts, you'd say, well, that could be incredibly intricate and complex, but it could be just random. And I was troubled with this for years because I saw in reality that assembly theory worked. But when I talk to very good computational complexity computationalists, algorithmic complexity people, they said you haven't really done this properly, haven't thought about it. It's like this is the random problem.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“70 theory is a theory goes back a few years now in my struggle for maybe almost 10 years when I was going to origin of life conferences and artificial life conferences where I thought that everybody was dancing around the problem of what life is and what it does. But I'll tell you about what assembly theory is because I think it's easier. So assembly theory literally says if you take an object any given object and you are able to break that object into parts very gently. So just maybe let's say take a piece of very intricate Chinese porcelain and you tap it just with a hammer with a nail at some point and it will fragment into many parts. If that object is able to fragment into many and you count those parts the different parts so they're unsymmetrical assembly theory says the larger the number of parts unsymmetrical parts that object has”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I got kicked out of my own lab by my research team many years ago, and for good reason. I mean, my team is brilliant, and I used to go and just break things. So what I do do at home is I have a kind of electronics workshop and I prototype experiments there. Then I try and then I try and suggest to my team sometimes, maybe we can try this thing. And they would just say, oh, wow, that's not going to work because of this. And I'll say, aha, but actually I've tried. Here's some code and here's some hardware. Can we have a go? I'm doing that less and less now as I get even more busy. But that's quite fun because then they feel that we're in the experiment together.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“240 volts, yeah, AC Then had a couple of electrodes on it. So, what happens is a pickle. This is a classic thing you do. I mean, I shouldn't pranks you do. You put a pickle into the mains and just leave it run away and leave it. And what happens is it starts to decompose. It heats up and then explodes because the water turns to steam and it just violently explodes. But I wondered if I could cause the sodium potassium ions and the pickle to migrate. It'd been in a jar, right? So in a brine. That was not my That was not my best experiments. I've done far better experiments in my lab at home.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tried to make an electrochemical memory at home using a, and using a pickle, the only way I could get any traction with it was actually by plugging it into a very high voltage alternating current and then putting in a couple of electrodes. But my kids weren't impressed. They're not impressed with anything I do, any experiments I do at home. I think it's quite funny.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree with you. The challenge is to That people think the track they're on is so dogmatic, but there is this thing that they see, but they don't see. And it takes a bit of time. And you just have to keep reframing it. And my approach is to say, well, why can't this be right? Why must we accept that RNA is the only way into life? I mean, who said, does RNA have a special class of information that's encoded in the universe? No, of course it doesn't, right? RNA is not a special molecule in the space of all the other molecules.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always leads to a deeper understanding of the people I'm with, and particularly the arguments I have with all sorts of interesting minds, because I want to solve the problem or I want to understand more about why I exist. That's it, really. And I think we have to not dismiss science on that basis. I think we can work of science.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It allowed me to walk through the wall. So I think that people like to always imagine science is a bit like living in a Japanese house, the paper walls, and everyone sits in their room. And I annoy people because I walk straight through the wall, not because why should I be a chemist and not a mathematician? Why should I be a mathematician and not computer scientist? Because if the problem requires us to walk through those walls. But I like walking through the walls. But then I have to put up You know, I have to do good science. I have to win the people in those rooms across by good science, by taking their criticisms and addressing them head on. And I think we must do that. And I think that I try and do that in my own way. And I kind of love walking through the walls. And it gives me, it's difficult for me personally. It's quite painful. But it...”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes and no. I think that so I like to. Some people find me extremely annoying in science because I'm basically quite rude and disruptive, not in a rude, you know, to people and say they're ugly or stupid or anything like that. I just say you're wrong. Or why do you think this? Something, a gift I got given by society when I was very young because I was in the learning difficulties class at school is I was told I was stupid. And so I know I'm stupid, but I always wanted to be smart, right? I remember going to school going, maybe today they're going to tell me I'm not as stupid as I was yesterday. And it was always disappointed always. And so, when I went into academia and everyone said, You're wrong. I was like, join the queue.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That makes me sad because you've been interviewing what I would consider a lot of really good scientists. No, that's true.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is doubling down more and more and more, and say there are aliens, interdimensional aliens, and everything else, right? He's gone from space junk accelerating out of to interdimensional stuff in a very short space of time. I see. He's obviously bored Or he wants to tap into the psyche and understand. And, you know, he's playfully kind of trying to interact with society and his peers to say, Stop saying it's not possible, which I agree with, we shouldn't do that, but we should frame it statistically in the same way we should frame everything as good scientists statistically.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To really capture these anomalies. And we are circulating the planet with many more detection systems. We've got satellites everywhere. So there is, I do hope that we are going to discover more anomalies. And remember that the solar system isn't just static in space. It's moving through the universe. So there's just more and more chance. I'm not what with Avi Loeb and he's generating all sorts of kind of occult, I would say, with this. But I'm not against him. I think there is a finite chance if there are aliens in the universe that we're going to happen upon them because we're moving through the universe.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as the vacuum says that light traveling through the ether in the vacuum, there is something that we call the ether that basically mediates the movement of light, say. And I think that, and then the other one is cold fusion, which is more, so a few years ago that people observed that when they did some electrochemistry, when they were splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, that you got more energy out than you put in. And people got excited and they thought that this was a nuclear reaction. And in the end, it was kind of just credited because you didn't detect neutrons and all this stuff. But I'm pretty sure I'm a chemist, and I'm going telling you this on your podcast, but why not? I'm pretty sure there's interesting electric. That's not completely bottomed out yet, that there is something there. However, we lack the technology and the experimental design. So all I'm saying in your response about aliens is we lack the experimental design.”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree. I agree. Let me rephrase what I think on this. I haven't seen enough information. I haven't really actively sought it out. I must admit I'm with you in that I love the idea of anomaly detection in chemistry in particular. I want to make anomalies or not necessarily make anomalies. I want to understand an anomaly. Let me give you two from chemistry. Which are really quite interesting phlogiston going way back where people said this thing called phlogiston and for ages the alchemists got really this kind of this fire is the thing And that's one and we determined that phlogiston wasn't what we thought it is go to physics, the ether. The ether is a hard one because I think actually the ether might exist and I'll tell you what I think the ether is later”
2022-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #269 – Lee Cronin: Origin of Life, Aliens, Complexity, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source