YouSaid · the spoken record

Lee Smolin

lines on the record: 63
first: 2020-03-07
most recent: 2020-03-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's certainly the thing that I care about most. Let me say one thing. Among the young people that I work with, I hear very often and sense a total disinterest in these arguments that we older scientists have and an interest in why each other is doing. And this is starting to appear in conferences where the young people interested in quantum gravity make a conference, they invite loops and strings and causal dynamical triangulations and causal set people. And we're having a conference like this next week, a small workshop at Perimeter, and I guess I'm out of advertising this. And then in the summer, we're having a big full-on conference, which is just quantum gravity. It's not strings. It's not loops. But the organized... And the speakers will be from all the different communities. And this to me is very helpful.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I considered saying that explicitly. But to say that explicitly, since it's a small, intimate community, I would be telling stories and naming names of Making a kind of history that I have no right to write. So I stayed away from that but was misunderstood.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was very careful to be detailed to criticize papers and not people. You won't find me criticizing individuals. You'll find me criticizing certain writing. But in any case, here is what I regret let me make your program worthwhile As far as I know, with the exception of non-understanding how large the applications to condense matter, say ADMCF. ADS CFT would get. I think largely my diagnosis of string theory as it was then has stood up since 2006. What I regret is that the same critique I was using string theory as an example and the same critique applies to many other communities in science I know of, including, and this is where I regret my own community, that is a community of people working on quantum gravity outside string theory.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was interested in developing that notion of how science works based on a community and ethics that I told you about. And I wrote a draft of a book about that, which had several chapters on methodology of science. And it was rather academically oriented book. Those chapters were the first part of the book, the first third of it, and you can find their remnants in what's now the last part of the trouble with physics. And then I described a number of test cases, case studies, and one of them, which I knew was the search for quantum gravity and string theory and so forth. And I was unable to get that book published. So somebody made the suggestion of flipping it around and starting with a story of string theory, which was already controversial. This was 2004, 2005.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what got me, I worked on string theory. I also. Worked on Luxembourg, and I was one of the inventors of Lukanum gravity. And because of... My strong belief in some other principles which led to this notion of wanting a quantum theory of gravity to be what we call relational or background independent. I tried very hard to make string theory background independent and ended up developing a bunch of tools which then could apply directly to general relativity and that became Luquant gravity. So the things were very closely related and have always been very closely related in my mind. The idea that there were two communities, one devoted to strings and one devoted to loops is nuts and has always been nuts.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And I publish that. I wrote the paper in 8 or 89. The paper was published in 92. My first book in 1997, The Life of the Cosmos, was explicitly about that. And I was very clear that what was important is that because you would develop an ensemble of universes, but they were related by descent through natural selection. Almost every universe would share the property that it was its fitness was maximized to some extent, or at least close to maximal. And I could deduce predictions that could be tested from that. And I worked all of that out and I compared it to the anthropic principle where you weren't able to make tests or make falsifications. All of this was in the late 80s and early 90s.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I tried to solve the problem and I tried to solve the problem. I was reading at that time a lot of biology, a lot of evolutionary theory like Lindmar Goulis and Steve Gould and so forth. I could take your time to go through the things, but it occurred to me maybe physics was like evolutionary biology and maybe the laws evolved and there was the biologists talk about a landscape, a fitness landscape of DNA sequences or protein sequences or species or something like that. I took their concept and the word landscape from theoretical biology and made a scenario about how the universe as a whole could evolve to discover the parameters of the standard mono. And I'm happy to discuss that's called cosmological natural selection.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there were nobody was sure, but hundreds of thousands of different versions of string theory. And then Andy found there was a way to put a certain kind of mathematical curvature called torsion into the solutions. And he wrote a paper string theory with torsion. In which he discovered there was an. Not formally accountable, but he was unable to invent any way to count the number of solutions or classify the diverse solutions. And he wrote that this is worrying because doing phenomenology the old-fashioned way by solving the theory is not going to work because there's going to be loads of solutions for every proposed phenomenology for anything in the experiment. Now it hasn't quite worked out that way. But nonetheless, he took that word to me. We spoke at least once, maybe two or three times about that.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So Andy Strominger is a good friend of mine and has been for many, many years. Andy. So originally, there was this beautiful idea that there were five string theories, and maybe they would be unified into one. And we would discover a way to break that symmetries of one of those string theories and discover the standard model and predict all the properties of the standard model particles, like their masses and charges and so forth, coupling constants. And then there was a bunch of solutions. String theory found which led each of them to a different version of particle physics with a different phenomenology. These are called the Calabio manifolds, named after Yao, who is also here. Certainly we've been friends at some time in the past anyway.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I say how I read that book? And this, of course, has to be my fault because you can't as an author claim after all the work you put in that you misread. But I will say that many of the reviewers who were not personally involved and even many who were working on string theory or some other approach to quantum gravity told me, communicated with me and told me they thought that I was fair. And balance was the word that was usually used. So let me tell you what my purpose was in writing that book, which clearly got diverted by because there was already rather hot argument going on. And this is.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But my belief now is that those partially successful approaches. Are all models Which might describe indeed some quantum gravity, physics, in some domain, in some aspect Ultimately, it would be important because they model the principles. And the first job is to tie down those principles. So that's the approach that I'm taking.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I feel very frustrated about quantum gravity, I like to go back and read history. And of course, Einstein and his achievements are a huge lesson. And hopefully something like a role model. And it's very clear. Einstein thought that the first job when he wanted to enter a new domain of theoretical physics is to discover and invent principles and then make models of how those principles might be applied in some experimental situation, which is where the mathematics comes in. So for Einstein there was no unified space and time. Minkowski invented this idea of spacetime. Freinstein, it was a model of his principles or his postulates. And I have taken the view that we don't know the principles of quantum gravity. I can think about candidates and I have some papers where I discuss different candidates and I'm happy to discuss them.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when I checked in as I was finishing the book with some of those people like Simon, who's a good friend of mine, and David Wallace, they told me that they weren't sure that any of them was yet correct. So that's what I put in my book. Now to add to that, Sean has his own approach to that problem in what's called self-referencing or self-locating observers. And it doesn't. I try to read it and it didn't make sense to me, but I didn't study it hard. I didn't communicate with Sean. I didn't do the things that I would do. So I had nothing to say about it in the book. I don't know whether it's right or not.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simon Saunders, David Wallace, Harvey Brown, and a number of others. And of course there's David Deutsch who is there. And those people have developed and put a lot of work into a very sophisticated set of ideas designed to come back and answer that question. They have the flavor of there are really no probabilities, we admit that. But imagine if the Everett story was true and you were living in that multiverse, how would you make bets? And so they use decision theory from the theory of probability and gambling and so forth to shape a story of how you would bet if you were inside an Everett in universe and you knew that. And there is a debate among those experts as to whether they or somebody else has really succeeded.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so a number of people post Everett have tried to make versions of what you might call many worlds, quantum mechanics. And this is a big area and it's subtle and it's not the kind of thing that I do well. So I consulted. That's why there's two chapters on this in the book I wrote. Chapter 10, which is about Everett's version, chapter 11. There is a very good group of philosophers of physics in Oxford.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At first sight, you get very confused because there seems to be a real problem because in the many worlds interpretation, this talk about branches is not quite precise, but I'll use it. There's a branch in which everything that might happen does happen with probability one in that branch. You might think you could count the number of branches in which things do and don't happen and get numbers that you can define as something like frequentest probabilities. Everett did have an argument in that direction. But the argument gets very. And my understanding, although I'm not as much of an expert as some other people, is that Everett's own proposal failed did not work. It doesn't stop there. There is an important idea that Everett didn't know about, which is decoherence, and it is a phenomenon that might be very much relevant.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are several issues connected with the derivation of the Born Rule, which is the rule that gives probabilities to events. And the reasons why there is a problem with probability is that I mentioned the two ways that physical systems can evolve. The many worlds interpretation cuts off one, the one having to do with measurement and just has the other one, the Schr ⁇ dinger evolution, which is the smooth evolution of the quantum state. But the notion of probability is only in the second rule, which we've thrown away. So where does probability come from? And you have to answer the question because experimentalists use probabilities to check the theory. Now...”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me start with the easing obvious and then go to the scientific It doesn't appeal to me. It doesn't answer the questions that I want answered. And it does so to such a strong case that when Roberto Mangiber Angar and I began looking for principles, and I want to come back and talk about the use of principles in science, because that's the other thing I was going to say, and I don't want to lose that. When we started looking for principles, we made our first principle there is just one world, and it happens once. But so It's not helpful to my personal approach, to my personal agenda. But of course I'm part of a community My sense of the many worlds interpretation, I have thought a lot about it and struggled a lot with it, is the following. First of all, there's Everett himself, there's what's in Everett.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to tell you what it is, but there's something that Sean said to me in June of 2016 that changed my whole approach to a problem. But I have to tell him first”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love Sean. And he, no, I really He's articulate and he's a great representative or ambassador of science to the public for different fields of science to each other. Also, like I do, takes philosophy seriously. And Unlike what I do in all cases, he has really done the homework. He's read a lot. He knows the people. He talks to them. He exposes his arguments to them. And there's this mysterious thing that we so often end up on the opposite sides of with these issues.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the situation we're in. My reaction to that is twofold. One of them is to try to bring people. We evolved into this unfortunate sociological situation in which there are communities around some of these approaches. And to borrow again a metaphor from Eric, they sit on top of hills in the landscape of theories and throw rocks at each other. And as Eric says, we need two things. We need people to get off their hills and come down into the valleys and party and talk and become friendly and learn to say, Not know but yes and yes your idea goes this far but maybe if we put it together with my idea we can go further”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or maybe dumb. That's why. Who knows? But anyway. My view of the we've had some nice theories invented. There's a bunch of different ones, both related to quantum mechanics and related to quantum gravity. There's a lot to admire in many of these different approaches. But to my understanding, None of them completely solve the problems that I care about. And so we're in a situation which is either terrifying for a student or full of opportunity for the right student in which we've got more than a dozen attempts. And I never thought, I don't think anybody anticipated it would work out this way, which work partly and then at some point they have an issue that nobody can figure out how to go around or how to solve.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's been tested, of course. If you want to have hope for. Quantum mechanics being incomplete or wrong and corrected by something that changes this, it's been tested over a number of kilometers. I don't remember whether it's 25 kilometers or 100 and something kilometers.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that I stated, that is it's not true that whatever is real about particle B is unaffected by the choice that the observer makes as to what to measure in particle A, no matter how long they've been propagating at almost the speed of light or the speed of light away from each other.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can ask that whatever is the real reality of particle B it not be affected by the choice, the observed particle A makes about what to measure, not the outcome, just the choice of the different things they might measure. And that's the notion of locality because it assumes that these things are very far space like separated. And it's going to take a while for any information about the choice made by the people here at A to affect the reality at B. But you make that assumption that's called Bell locality and you derive a certain inequality that some correlations, functions of correlations have to satisfy. And then you can test that pretty directly in experiments which create pairs of photons or other particles. And it's wrong by many sigma.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a property of quantum field theory, and it's well tested. Unfortunately, there is another definition of local which was expressed by Einstein and expressed more precisely by John Bell, which has been tested experimentally and found to fail. And this setup is you take two particles. So one thing that's really weird about quantum mechanics is the property called entanglement Can have two particles interact and then share a property without it being a property of either one of the two particles. And if you take such a system and then you make a measurement on particle A, which is over here on my right side, and particle B which is over here on my, somebody else makes a measurement of particle B.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are several different definitions of locality when you come to talk about locality in physics. In quantum field theory, which is a mixture of special relativity and quantum mechanics, there is a precise definition of locality, field operators corresponding to events in spacetime, which are space-like separated, commute with each other as operators”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there is an emergent approximate description, and you asked me to define emergent I didn't. Emergent. Property is a property that arises at some level of complexity, larger than and more complex than the fundamental level, which requires some property to describe it, which is not directly. Explicable or derivable is the word I want from the properties of the fundamental.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's very good. There's a level of description in which there are events, events create other events. Is no space, they don't live in space. They have an order in which they caused each other. And that is part of the nature of time for us.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are certainly other people we've worked with, but those two people's thinking had a huge influence on my own thinking.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It involves, and that's why the version of Theory of events that I've developed with Marina Cortez. And by the way, I want to mention my collaborators because they have been at least as important in this work as I have. Marina Cortez in all the work since about 2013, 2012, 2013 about causality causal sets. And in the period before that, Roberta Mangibera Anga, who is a philosopher and a professor of law.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An event is where something changes or where It's hard to say because it's a primitive concept. An event is. A moment of time within space. This is the view in generality where two particles intersect in their paths or something changes in the path of a particle. Now, we are postulating theories at the fundamental level a notion which is an elementary notion, so it doesn't have a definition in terms of other things, but it is something elementary happening.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I believe the universe has a history. Which goes to the past? I believe the future does not exist. There's a notion of a present and a notion of the past. And the past Consists of is a story about events that took place to our past.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that time is fundamental, and quote goes all the way down, and space does not. And the combination of them we use in general relativity that we call space-time also does not.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Space-time, you talked about a construction. So I believe that space-time is intellectual construction that we make of the events in the universe. I believe the events are real and the relationships between the events which cause, which are real. But the idea that there is a four-dimensional smooth geometry which has a metric and a connection and satisfies the equations that Einstein wrote. Good description to some scale. It's a good approximation. It captures some of what's really going on in nature. But I don't believe it for a minute is fundamental.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and we either do that if we believe quantum mechanics as understood now is correct by bringing general relativity or some extension of general relativity that describes gravity and so forth into the quantum domain that's called quantized. Theory of gravity, or if you believe with Einstein that quantum kanks needs to be completed, and this is my view, then part of the job of finding the right completion or extension of quantum mechanics would be one that incorporated spacetime and gravity.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The basic formulation of quantum mechanics gives you two ways to evolve situations in time. One of them is explicitly when no observer is observing or no measurement is taking place, and the other is when a measurement or an observation is taking place. And they basically contradict each other. But there's another reason why the revolution was incomplete, which is we don't understand the relationship between these two parts. General relativity, which became our best theory of space and time and gravitation and cosmology and quantum theory.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he doesn't believe that the quantum mechanics as it was developed in the late 1920s was completely correct. At first he didn't believe it at all. Then he was convinced that it's consistent but incomplete. And that also is my view. It needs, for various reasons, I can elucidate to have additional Degrees of freedom, particles, forces, something to reach the stage where it gives a complete description of each phenomenon, as I was saying, realism demands.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's something I've been trying to do my whole life, but Einstein's unfinished revolution is the twin revolutions which invented relativity theory, special and especially general relativity, and quantum theory, which he was the first person to realize in 1905 that there would have to be a radically different theory which somehow realized or resolved the paradox of the duality of particles.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I mean I've contributed what I've contributed, whether if I had had more confidence in something, I would have gotten further. I don't know. Certainly I... I'm sitting here at this moment with very much my own approach to nearly everything. And I'm calm. I'm happy about that. But on the other hand, I know people. Who's self-confidence vastly exceeds mine? And sometimes I think it's justified and sometimes I think it's not justified.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I know all of these are doorways. If you go through them slightly at the wrong speed or in the wrong angle, they're ways to fail. But if you somehow have the right luck, the right confidence, the arrogance, caring, I think Einstein cared to understand nature with ferocity and commitment that exceeded other people of his time. So he asked more stubborn questions. He asked deeper questions. I think And there's a level of ability, and whether ability is born in or can be developed and extension, which can be developed, like any of these things like musical talent.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I doubt it. From my studying some cases, because I'm curious about that, obviously. And just in a more concrete way, when I started out in physics, because I started a long way from. Physics. So it took me a long time, but a lot of work to get to study it and get into it. So I did wonder about that. So I read the biographies, and in fact, I started with the autobiography of Einstein and Newton and Galileo. All those people. And I think there's a couple of things. Some of it is luck, being in the right place at the right time. Some of it is stubbornness and arrogance, which can easily go wrong.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are things which are right there in front of us, which we miss. And I'll quote my friend Eric Weinstein. In saying, look, Einstein carried his luggage, Freud carried his luggage, Marx carried his luggage, Martha Graham carried our luggage, etc. Edison carried his luggage. All these geniuses carried their luggage. Not once before, relatively recently did it occur to anybody to put a wheel on luggage and pull it. And it was right there waiting to be invented for centuries.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there is a universality here. I don't agree with David Deutsch about everything, but I admire the way he put things in his last book. And he talked about the role of explanation. And he talked about the universality of certain languages or the universality of mathematics Of computing and so forth. And he believed that universality, which is something real, which is somehow comes out of the fact that a symbolic system or a mathematical system can refer to itself and can, I forget what that's called, can reference back to itself. And build in which he argued for a universality of possibility for our understanding, whatever is out there. But I admire that argument, but it seems to me we're doing okay. So far, but we'll have to see.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they're useful to us and they carry some intuitive implication, but we shouldn't believe that they actually have to do with what nature would be like in our absence, which we have nothing to say about.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure I'm a good scholar and can talk about the different camps and analyze it, but many of the inventors of quantum physics were not realists, were anti-realist, and there are scholars, they lived in a very perilous time between the two world wars. And there were a lot of trends in culture which were going that way. But in any case, they said things like, The purvice of science is not to give an objective realist description of nature as it would be in our absence. This might be St. Niels Bohr. The purpose of science is as an extension of our conversations with each other to describe our interactions with nature. And we're free to invent and use terms like particle or wave or causality or time or space”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two ways you could be asking. Does our conscious mind, do our perceptions play a role in making things become, in making things real or things becoming? That's question one. Question two is, does this, we can call it a naturalist view of the world? That is based on realism. Allow a place to understand the existence of and the nature of perceptions and consciousness in mind. And that's question two. Question two, I do think a lot about my Answer, which is nine answers. I hope so. But it certainly doesn't yet. Question one, I don't think so. But of course, the answer to question one depends on question two. So I'm not up to question one yet.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people would say that I'm not that interested in determinism, but I could live with a fundamental world which had some chance in it.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Realism is Is the belief in an external world independent of our existence, our perception, our belief, our knowledge, a realistic As a physicist, he is somebody who believes that there should be possible some completely objective description of each and every process at the fundamental level, which describes and explains exactly what happens and why it happens.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's absolutely necessary. And the key things were all validated. key predictions of quantum mechanics and of the theory of electricity and magnetism.”
2020-03-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #79 – Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source