YouSaid · the spoken record

Sara Walker

lines on the record: 215
first: 2024-06-13
most recent: 2024-06-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Like a couple of them stuck together. And so what they see in this system is there's a few intermediate stages. So there's like some random events where the chemistry comes together, makes these structures. And then once you get to this very large one, it becomes a template for the smaller ones. And then the whole system just reinforces its own production.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These histories that make objects, it's kind of like the structure of the histories becomes collapses in such a way that these things are all in the same sort of causal structure and that causal structure actually loops back on itself to be able to generate some of the things that make the higher level structures. Lee has a beautiful example of this actually in molybdenum. It's like the first non organic autocatalytic set. It's a self-reproducing molybdenum ring, but it's like molybdenum and basically like if you look at the molybdenum, it makes a huge molybdenum ring. I don't remember exactly how big it is. It might be like 150 molybdenum atoms or something. But if you think about the configuration space of that object, you know, it's exponentially large how many possible molecules. So like why does the entire system collapse on just making that one structure? If you start from like, you know, molybdenum atoms that are maybe”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what we're trying to figure out what are the causal constraints that close the loop. So there is this idea that's been in the literature for a really long time that was originally proposed by Stuart Kaufman as really critical to the origin life called auto catalytic set. So autocatalytic set is exactly this property.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the randomness of soup. Right. But things that can copy themselves are very rare. And so what ends up happening is That you get structures that enable the existence of other things. And then somehow, only for some sets of objects, you get closed structures that are self-reinforcing and allow that entire structure to persist.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So self reproduction has this property, right? Like if the system can make itself, then it can persist in time, right? Because all objects decay. They all have a finite lifetime. So if you're able to make a copy of yourself before you die, before the second law eats you or whatever people think happens, then that structure can persist in time.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complex the assembly index increases, I can explain all these things. Sorry, you can tell me what you want to explain me to explain what people will want to hear. Sorry, I have like a very vivid visual in my brain and it's really hard to articulate it.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like just molecules basically recognizing each other and being able to catalyze certain reactions, there's this kind of transition point that happens where Unless you get a self reinforcing structure, something that can maintain its own existence, it actually can't cross this boundary to make any objects in high abundance without having this sort of past history that it's carrying with us and maintaining the existence of that past history. And that boundary point where objects can't exist unless they have this selection and history in them is what we call the original life. And pretty much everything beyond that boundary is holding on for dear life to all of the causation and causal structure that's basically put it there. And it's carving its way through this possibility space into generating more and more structure. And that's when you get the open-ended cascade of evolution. But that boundary point is really hard to cross. And then what happens when you cross that boundary point and the way objects come into existence is also like really fascinating dynamics because as things become more”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No causal contingency, no constraints of objects basically constraining the existence of other objects or allowing the existence of other objects. And so that sounds very abstract, but like you can just think of a chemical reaction can't happen if there's not a catalyst, for example, or a baby can't be born if there wasn't a parent. So there's a lot of causal contingency that's necessary for certain things to happen. You think about this sort of unconstrained random system. There's nothing that reinforces the existence of other things. So the sort of resources just get washed out and all of these different structures and none of them exist again or they just, you know, they're not very complicated if they're in high abundance. And some random events allow some things to start reinforcing the existence of a small subset of objects. And if they can do that,”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The original life is like this boundary that the universe can only cross if a structure that emerges can reinforce its own existence, which is self-reproduction, autocatalysis, things people traditionally talk about. But it has to be able to maintain its own existence against this sort of randomness that happens in chemistry and this randomness that happens in the quantum world. And like it's in some sense the emergence of like a deterministic structure that says, you know, I'm going to exist and I'm going to keep going. But pinning that down is really hard. We have ways of thinking about it in assembly theory that I think are pretty rigorous. And one of the things I'm really excited about is trying to actually quantify in an assembly theoretic way when the origin of life happens. But the basic process I have in mind is like a system that has”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I rely on other people to tell me. Actually, this is very funny because I have these conversations with my students often. They're worried about going crazy them that like one of the reasons they'll stay sane is by trying to work on concrete problems.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm trying to embody that because I think you have to live the physics to understand it. But there's a great quote about Einstein. I don't know if this is true or not that he once said that he could feel like the beam in his belly. And I think, but I think like, you got to think about it, though, right? Like if you're a really deep thinker and you're really thinking about reality that deeply and you are part of the reality that you're trying to describe, like you feel it, you really feel it.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to learn more. And then when we learn more at traumatizes us. You know, I never thought about it this before, but I think this is one of the reasons I love what I do is because it traumatizes me all the time. It was really bad. But what I mean is like I love the shock of like realizing that like coming to understand something in a way that you never understood it before. I think it seems to me when I see a lot of the ways other people react to new ideas that they don't feel that way intrinsically. But for me, that's like that's why I do what I do. I love that feeling.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While humans have always been afraid of our technologies, though, right? So it's kind of a fascinating thing that every time we”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, yeah. I think for me, the frontier in modern physics where the new physics lies is not in high energy particle physics. It's not in quantum gravity. It's not in any of these sort of traditionally sold. This is going to be the newest, deepest insight we have into the nature reality. It is going to be in studying the problems of life and intelligence and the things that are sort of also our current existential crises as a civilization or a culture that's going through an existential trauma of inventing technologies that we don't understand right now.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Objects. They're the ones that really exist, and you really understand their properties because you know how the universe constructed them because you can actually take them apart. You can understand the intrinsic laws that built them. But the things that the boundary are just at the boundary, they're evolving with us and we'll learn more about that structure as we go along. But really, if we want to talk about what's fundamental inside our universe, we have to talk about all these things that are traditionally considered emergent, but really just structures in time that have causal histories that constructed them. you know are really actually what our universe is about.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we realized atoms had substructure because we built better technology, which allowed us to quote unquote see the world better and resolve smaller features of it. And then we built even better technology, which allowed us to see even smaller structure and get down to the standard model particles. And we think that there might be structure below that, but we can't get there yet with our technology. So what's fundamental, the way we talk about it in current physics is not actually fundamental. It's the boundaries of what we can observe in our universe, what we can see with our technology. And so if you want to build a theory that's about us and about what's inside the universe that we can observe, not what's at the boundary of it, you need to talk about objects that are in the universe that you can actually break apart to smaller things. So I think the things that are fundamental are actually the constructed.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We typically define fundamental right now in terms of the smallest indivisible units of matter. So again, you have to have a definition of what you think material is and matter is. But right now, what's fundamental or elementary particles? And we think they're fundamental because we can't break them apart further. And obviously we have theories like string theory that if they're right would replace the current description of what's the most fundamental thing in our universe by replacing it with something smaller. But we can't get to those theories because we're technologically limited. And so if you look at this from a historical perspective and you think about explanations changing as physical systems like us learn more about the reality in which they live, we once considered atoms to be the most fundamental thing. And it literally comes from the word indivisibility.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think so. I mean, I don't think there's always going to be the paradox of another metal level you could build on the meta level, right? So like if you assume this is your universe and you're the observer outside of it, you have some meta description of that universe, but then you need a meta description of you describing that universe, right? So, you know, this is one of the biggest challenges that we face being observers inside our universe and also, you know, why the paradoxes and the foundations of mathematics and any place that we try to have observers in the system or a system describing itself show up. But I think it is possible to build a physics that builds in those things intrinsically without having them be paradoxical or have holes in the descriptions. And so one place I think about this quite a lot, which I think can give you sort of a more concrete example, is the nature of like what we call fundamental.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it's also weird because if a theory of everything explained everything, it should also explain the theory. So the theory has to be recursive. And none of our theories of physics are recursive. So it's just a weird concept.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, like in physics right now, it's really popular to talk about theories of everything. So string theory is supposed to be a theory of everything because it unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. And people have their different pet theories of everything. And the challenge with a theory of everything, I really love this quote from David Krakauer, which is a theory of everything is a theory of everything except those things that theorize.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More basal levels. I'm not saying there's a base. I don't think that reality has a ground. And I don't think there's a theory of everything. But I think there are better theories and I think there are more explanatory theories. And I think we can get to something that explains much more than the current laws of physics do.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything's deterministic, but I think that's probably an artifact of the way that we've written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics in his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws. And that's been sort of become the standard canon of how people think the universe works and how we need to describe any physical system is with an initial condition and a law of motion. And I think that's not actually the way the universe really works. I think it's a good approximation for the kind of systems that physicists have studied so far. And I think it will radically fail in the long term at describing reality at its”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's interesting, generations of physicists have thought about this problem. Oftentimes it's like when people are retiring, they're like, oh, now I can work on life. Or they're like more senior in their career and they worked on other more traditional problems. And there's still a lot of impetus in the physics community to think that non-equilibrium physics will explain life. But I think that's not the right approach. I don't think ultimately the solution to what life is is there. And I don't really think entropy has much to do with it unless it's entirely reformulated.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, showing I really tried to do what physicists try to do, which is explain things. And his attempt was to try to explain life in terms of non-equilibrium physics because he thought that was the best description that we could generate at the time. And so he did come up with something really insightful, which was to predict the structure of DNA as an aperiodic crystal. And that was for a very precise reason that, you know, that was the only kind of physical structure that could encode enough information to actually specify a cell. We knew some things about genes, but not about DNA and its actual structure when he proposed that. But in the book, he tried to explain life is kind of going against entropy. And so some people talked about it as like Schrodinger's paradox. How can life persist?”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is the hard thing about solving the problem of life, I think, is how many things you have to integrate into building a sort of a unified picture of this thing that we want to call life. And a lot of our theories of physics are built on building deep regularities that explain a really broad class of phenomena. And I think we haven't really traditionally thought about life that way. But I think to get it at some of these hardest questions, like looking for life on other planets or the origin of life, you really have to think about it that way. And so most of like my professional work is just trying to understand every single thing on this planet that might be an example of life, which is pretty much everything and then trying to figure out like what's the deeper structure underlying that.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so for me, it's just sort of the current boundary of how far life on our planet has pushed into the things that our universe can generate. And so it's the furthest thing. It's the biggest thing. And I think a lot about the nature of life across different scales. And so, you know, we have cells inside of us that are alive. And we feel like we're alive, but we don't often think about the societies that we're embedded in as alive or a global scale organization of us and our technology on the planet as alive. But I think if you have this deeper view into the nature of life, which I think is necessary also to solve the origin of life, then you have to include those things.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's creative, but with us, obviously, like not independently of us. And also because of this sort of lineage view of life. And I think about life often as a planetary scale phenomena, because that's sort of the natural boundary for all of this causation that's bundled in every object in our biosphere.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think life is very high dimensional. And in fact, I think you can be alive in some dimensions and not in others. Like if you could project all the causation that's in you in some features of you, you know, very little causation is required and like very little history. And in some features, a lot is. So it's quite difficult to take this really high dimensional, very deep structure and project it into things that we really can understand and say like this is the one thing that we're seeing because it's not one thing.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and this is why the definition of life cannot be the individual. It has to be these lineages because they're all connected. They're interwoven and they're exchanging parts all the time.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. And I think this is one of the reasons that we have such an ability to abstract as humans because we are so gigantic that like the space that we can go back into is really large. So like the more abstract you're going, like the deeper you're going in that space.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to use words to visualize what's in minds. I have such a hard time with this sometimes. I'm like, actually, I was thinking in the way over here. I was like, you know, you have pictures in your brain and then they're hard to put into words. But I realized I always say I have a visual, but it's not actually I have a visual. I have a feeling because oftentimes I cannot actually draw a picture in my mind for the things that I But sometimes they go through a picture before they get to words. But I like experimenting with words because I think they help paint pictures.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bundled up in the objects we observe today. And so you and I are close in this temporal structure, but we're also close because we're really big and we only are very different. And sort of like the most recent moments in the time that's like embedded in us.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't think of them as separate. They're like very integrated with the structure that generated them. So you can almost imagine it like time is constantly bifurcating and it's generating new structures and these new structures are locally constructing the future. And so things like you and I are very close together in time because we didn't diverge like very early in the history of the universe, very recent. And I think this is one of the reasons that we can understand each other so well and we can communicate effectively. And I might have some sense of what it feels like to be you. But other organisms bifurcated from us in time earlier. This is just the concept of phylogeny, right? But if you take that deeper and you really think about that as the structure of the physics that generates life and you take that very seriously, all of that causation is still.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like to try this, but I think I use language in certain ways that are non-canonical, and I do it very purposefully. And it would be interesting to me how AI would interpret it.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what? The trick is the reason they're hard to write is because it's compressing a very deep idea into a short amount of space. And I really like doing that intellectual exercise because I find it productive for me.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what I'm getting at with this is I think that living objects are actually huge. Like they're some of the biggest structures in the universe, but they are not big in space. They are big in time. And we actually can't resolve that feature. We don't interact with it on a regular basis. So we see them as these fleeting things that have this really short temporal clock time without seeing how large they are. When I'm saying time here, I really like the way that people could picture it is in terms of causal structure. So if you think about the history of the universe to get to you and you imagine that that entire history is you, that is the picture I have in my mind when I look at every living thing.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So the issue is we evolve perception to see reality a certain way, right? So for us, space is really important and time feels fleeting. And I, you know, I had a really wonderful mentor, Paul Davies, most of my career, and Paul's amazing because he gives these like little seed thought experiments all the time, like, you know, something he used to ask me all the time was when I was a postdoc. This is kind of a random tangent, but was like, you know, how much of the universe could be converted into technology. If you were thinking about like, you know, long-term futures and stuff like that. And it's like a weird thought experiment, but like there's a lot of deep things there. And I do think a lot about the fact that we're really limited in our interactions with reality by the particular architectures that we evolved. And so we're not seeing everything. And in fact, our technology tells us this all the time because it allows us to see the world in new ways by basically allowing us to perceive the world in ways that we couldn't otherwise.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think you're always on the edge of it, but I think what is amazing about being a scientist and trying to do things rigorously is it keeps your sanity. So I think if I wasn't a theoretical physicist, I would be probably not saying. But what it forces you to do is hold the five, like you have to hold yourself to the fire of these abstractions in my mind have to really correspond to reality. And I have to really test that all the time. And so I love building new abstractions and I love going to those like incredibly creative spaces that people don't see as part of the way that we understand the world now. But ultimately, I have to make sure that whatever I'm pulling from that space is something that's really usable and really like relates to the world outside of me. That's what science is.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we're missing most of what we are. So, one of the issues I've been thinking about this really viscerally lately, it's weird when you do theoretical physics, because I think it literally changes the structure of your brain and you see the world differently, especially when you're trying to build new abstractions.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aristotle focusing on, you know, heavy things falling because they're earth-like and, you know, things floating because they're air-like. It's the wrong thing to focus on.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Structured across time. And so we focus so much on these individuals that are these short temporal moments in this larger causal structure that actually is the life on our planet. And I think that's why these definitions break down because they're not general enough, they're not universal enough, they're not deep enough, they're not abstract enough to actually capture that regularity.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's mine But this again gets back to. So I think what all of the, you know, like we can nitpick at definitions, I don't think it's like incredibly helpful to do it. But the reason for me. Yeah, it is fun. It is really fun. And actually, I do think it's useful in the sense that when you see the ways that they all break down, you either have to keep forcing in your sort of conception of life you want to have, or you have to say, all these definitions are breaking down for a reason. Maybe I should adopt a more expansive definition that encompasses all the things that I think and our life. And so for me, I think life is the process of how information, structures matter over time and space. And an example of life is what emerges on a planet and yields an open-ended cascade of generation of structure and”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you're constructing yourself all the time. Assembly theory is about construction and how the universe selects for things to exist.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, specifically it's Darwinian evolution. And I think Darwinian evolution is a problem. But the reason that that definition is a problem is not because evolution is in the definition, but because the implication is that, you know, that most people would want to make is that an individual is alive. And the evolutionary process, at least the Darwinian evolutionary process, most evolutionary processes, they don't happen at the level of individuals. They happen at the level of population. So again, you would be saying something like what we saw with the self-sustaining definition, which is that populations are alive, but individuals aren't because populations evolve and individuals don't. And obviously, like maybe you're alive because, you know, your gut microbiome is evolving, but Lex is an entity right now is not evolving by canonical theories of evolution in assembly theory, which is attempting to explain life. Evolution is a much broader thing.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the fact that it's open-ended in some sense. It's another open-ended combinatorial space and the recursive properties of it allow creativity to happen, which is what you see with the revolution in the last century with Girdle's theorem and Turing. And there's clear places where mathematics notices holes in the universe.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life, maybe not maybe not alive, but I don't actually don't know where I stand exactly on that. I've been thinking about that a little bit more lately. But mathematics too. And it's interesting because people think that math has this platonic reality that exists outside of our universe. And I think it's a feature of our biosphere and it's telling us something about the structure of ourselves. And I find that really interesting because when you would sort of internalize all of these things that we notice about the world and you start asking, well, what do these look like if I was, you know, something outside of myself observing these systems that we're all embedded in, what would that structure look like? And I think we looked really different than the way that we talk about what we look like to each other.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, if it's not chemical. So I think some of the things that have evolved on our biosphere, I would call as much alive as chemistry, as a cell, but they seem much more abstract. So for example, I think language is alive. I think, or at least life, I think memes are.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Formula, it would fill 1.5 universes in volume. So with one unique molecule. That's just one molecule, so chemical space is huge. And I think it's really important to recognize that because if you want to ask a question of why does life emerge in chemistry, well, life emerges in chemistry because life is the physics of how the universe selects what gets to exist. And those things get created along historically contingent pathways and memory and all the other stuff that we can talk about. But the universe has to actually make historically contingent choices in chemistry because it can't exhaust all possible molecules.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the very precisely it's not the first thing it creates, obviously, like it has to make atoms first, but it's the first thing. Like if you think about, you know, the universe originated, atoms were made in Big Bang nuclear synthesis and then later in stars and then planets formed and planets become engines of chemistry. They start exploring what kind of chemistry is possible. The combinatorial space of chemistry is so large that even on every planet in the entire universe, you will never express every possible molecule. I like this example actually that Lee gave me, which is to think about taxol. It has a molecular weight of about 853. It's got, you know, a lot of atoms, but it's not astronomically large. And if you try to make one molecule with that molecular formula and every three-dimensional shape you could make with that molecular formula,”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that could be the case, but I still think we have some property associated with life. I mean, that's the thing that we're trying to describe. So that one's quite hard. And in general, you know, no organism is really self-sustaining. They always require an environment. So being self-sustaining is coupled in some sense to the world around you. We don't live in a vacuum. So that part's already challenging. And then you can go to chemical system. I don't think that's good either. I think there's a confusion because life emerges in chemistry, that life is chemical. I don't think life is chemical. I think life emerges in chemistry because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds where it cannot exhaust all the possibilities because the combinatorial space of chemistry is too large.”
2024-06-13 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source