The myth of matter | Robert Wright & Paul Davies [The Wright Show]

hi Paul hi Bob how are you doing I'm doing very well thanks here in sunny Arizona yeah I envy you I envy you it's not only sunny but dry yes nice time the other way this magic yeah it's hot well you don't after - it's kind of a humid day on the eastern seaboard here and hot for late September but let me introduce this I'm Robert right this is right show you or Paul Davies very well-known physicist you've taught at a lot of places including Cambridge you taught in Australia for a while University of Adelaide and then in Sydney at Macquarie University and Arizona State University right and you've won a lot of prizes named after eminent people the Kelvin medal the Faraday prize the Templeton Prize you've also want something called a Eureka Prize not once but twice which I'm sure is the source of chagrin to those of your colleagues who have only won the Eureka Prize once I've won in zero time so congratulations oh now you've also written a ton of books I mean you've written academic books technical books but a lot of popular books that you're very well known for I say a lot of popular books ends I'm a popular ones as well I'm not gonna I'm not in a position to make that distinction myself I'll leave that to you but um I did want it what I thought we could do you've written so many books that I just wanted to name some titles and do kind of free association because it seems to me I mean some was in my have read some of them I haven't but but but some of the titles are so suggestive that I thought if I just name a few titles we talk about what they mean we would by the end of the conversation have covered virtually every aspect of physics anyone could ever want although time it's time may run out but we're not for that constraint I think we could do the job good so I want to start with one I have not read called the matter of myth now is well you tell me is matter a myth is what did you mean by that title well I think so first of all was a book written many years ago so any of our viewers wanting to find it may be faced with a bit of a challenge but the overarching theme where there is that when we look at solid objects around us tables chairs and so on and then ask what's really going on there so you dig deeper and deeper into them you find that the concepts of matter as we understand it in daily life just dissolves away first of all it's a ghostly patterns of vibrating energy that we associated we associate with quantum mechanics then there's a lot of just empty space but then we find that empty space itself is filled with a sort of seething ferment of water known as virtual particles so this is something else that comes out of quantum physics these are particles are not quite real but they still have an effect and it goes on and on and on and even when you get right down to the the ultimate structure of space-time you find that that dissolves away into a sort of foam or riot-- of wormholes breaching space and time itself does or just everything that tells it no that's great even space and time we like to put them together since Einstein told us we must do that and so we talk about space-time and the there was a very nice metaphor used by John Wheeler one of the great physicists of the 20th century that we if we think of space-time just by analogy with the surface of the ocean this would be a two dimensional analog of four-dimensional space-time and if you're an aviator flying at 30,000 feet above the ocean it just looks like a sort of flat plane into or we may see the curvature of the earth or maybe slightly curved and then as we get down lower we begin to see there are waves and that's we get down even though we see that some of those waves have froth and he feels that that's a good way of looking at space-time you can get down to a scale about 20 pounds of ten smaller than under Tommy you guess the apparently continuous nature of space and time that we infer from daily life breaks up into complicated topological features and it's all shifting around these are virtual where I'm hold reaches and virtual black cockles virtual in the sense that they can pop into existence but only fleetingly and pop out of existence again so a whole notion of solid matter located in some sort of immutable void which is the way the ancient Greeks looked at it just dissolves away both the matter and the void dissolve before our very eyes when we peer closely now is this where quantum physics takes over because I know there is this fundamental problem that at very small scale quantum theory works right and it do I have this right and that larger scales relativity works is that related to what you just said that at very small scales the very fabric of yes sort of now the first thing I should say is that most physicists would say quantum mechanics works on every scale of size it's only that its effects are most manifest on the small scales atoms and molecules and below so that that's not completely settled but that should be stated and then when it comes to relativity of course we have to distinguish the special theory of relativity which really governs how objects behave when they move closer to the speed of light from general relativity that involves gravitational fields in addition and the point there is that unifying special relativity with quantum mechanics was already done at ground about 1930 by Paul Dirac and that really concerns the realm of fast-moving subatomic particles so for example the Large Hadron Collider at CERN very much in the news in these last few years with the discovery of the Higgs boson this is a world in which subatomic particles in their case protons hurled around a tube 27 kilometers in circumference very very close indeed to the speed of light and then they smash into each other and make all sorts of subatomic fragments and this world must be described by both special relativity and quantum mechanics so those two are unified in that type of experiment of that type of experience cosmic rays would be another one if we bring in gravitation then this gets much more problematic because then that is a theory that's often quantum gravity and this is famous for being one of the most picked over and least a green aspects of physics that remain unknown and something that wasn't intense energy the general rather theory of relativity the Einstein gave us enough okay before we get to that let's get back to this matter question the the thing we started with that you know the intuitive notion that ultimately there is this physical stuff called matter is in some ways misleading because if you get deep down enough it doesn't look very much like matter right I mean the and of course I think most people have something they're gonna do quantum physics where at that level it's not even clear whether you should call something a particle or a wave in some sense do you think you know there was a essay written in the magazine the online magazine ion recently by an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester named Adam Frank and and he was calling into question he's you know what whether materialism is really the right word for science of course we often use scientific materialism and and materialism is taken to be almost synonymous with a scientific worldview but do you think we should question terms like that at a fundamental level now yes absolutely because what we think of as material in in daily life and the word materialism really goes back to the 19th century maybe even earlier is that view of that sort of solid stuff that material particles and that I think when people use it pejoratively it's if we're talking about things like human emotions and if you're a materialist you want to reduce that to the activities of particles and then that sort of looks and so somehow you've lost something on the way or it's a sort of bleak view of nature but of course we do know as I've explained that the matter is not just little lumps it's a Greek sort see so the the Greek atomists had this notion that the world was nothing but particles moving in the void and that everything happens is just the rearrangement of those particles and there's really nothing more to be said so everything that happens including our finest thoughts and emotions just boil down to the rearrangements of particles and very few people who I think would be very satisfied with that whether it helps to say well these particles themselves are much more nebulous and the relationships between them are much more subtle I don't know there is still a huge disconnect an explanatory gap between the world of quantum physics where things are fuzzy and uncertain and it's in deterministic and the everyday world of experience when we make observations and see apparently a single concrete reality this is an unresolved issue at the foundations of physics it doesn't affect the power of quantum mechanics to give us things like the laser and the transistor it works brilliantly and explaining the world as a mathematical theory it makes very specific predictions and it's never let us down but in terms of what does it mean as the nature of reality that is still very much up at night and in a way it's not just a question of whether you know the stuff the ultimate you know stuff at a very fine grained level really feels like stuff I mean one could say well okay it's of course it's not matter in the sense of particles I mean we always knew it could be converted to energy which sounds more amorphous to begin with or but the main thing is that there is regularity and predictability but even that in a certain sense breaks down at the quantum level because the predictability becomes valid only in these aggregate statistical sense there are individual events you cannot in principle predict with scientific laws yes that's correct so are they I often say you can fire an electron at a target it bounces to the left you do the same thing again under identical circumstances and it bounces to the right quantum mechanics can predict what that ratio might be it might be 50/50 for example and you a large number of times to test that but in any individual case you cannot tell in advance which way it's going to go and we believe even nature doesn't know which way it's going to go that is this is an indeterminate um not born of ignorance like sauce of a Quine or that's enough about the factors many factors affecting its behavior but we're saying quantum mechanics is in determinism or uncertainty is intrinsic Rayleigh so this is right even mother nature does not know there are things there are things that happen that have no cause in the physical universe in a certain sense we could say that they are genuinely spontaneous I take again my favorite example is if you take the uranium atom take a chunk of uranium it's got a half-life of four and a half billion years or so which means if you have from out being uranium atoms is a good chance one of them will decay in the period of one year but if you spot that one decay and you say well why did that Athens okay I'm not the one next to it there is no answer to that is yes intrinsically spontaneous and in deterministic okay let me as long as we're deep levels were kind of I guess physics bumps up to metaphysics let me mention a more recent title of yours that is an academic book it's Cambridge University Press it's information and the nature of reality is the title the subtitle is from physics to metaphysics now I think almost anything you say about this book will be hard for people to understand I suspect but but what one thing I want to say is that let me prompt you with something that Brian Green said on this show recently we were talking about kind of what is the ultimate nature of stuff and he said well some people like to think of information as being the most fundamental stuff but he pointed out you know everything we know of is information in our world newsprint soundwaves and so on is made up of physical stuff so it's not that easy to imagine information being fundamental and yet some businesses like to talk this way is that right and maybe you're throwing it right no no no this is something that I'm very much involved with in my research here at Arizona State University and we have conversations like the ones we're embarking on now several times a week because I think the thing about information is that it is a fundamental and unifying concept we see it in physics one way you can think about that even in quantum physics we just discussed about an electron might bounce to the left it might bounce to the right you could do the experiment and not look and then you wouldn't know but if you decided to look you're asking nature of the question easy to the right or is it to the left and then you'll get an answer you know to say to the right so that's very much like one bit of information being acquired from interrogating nature and in the absence of that interrogation we can't say much about it so at that level but then as we go up through biology everybody knows that a gene is a set of instructions to build a protein so that's not only information it's information that has some sort of meaning to the system has some functionality and then we go all the way up to the operation of the brain which is surely an information processing system very much like that were associated with computation and so we see information at all these different levels entry technology oh please all right let me let me interrupt you again just cuz your voice is fading out a little here mentioning it may be the lucky charm that solves the problems who knows yes I was again hearing that weird sort of rushing cell well now he's now you sound that you sound fine so let me um let me pursue that a little bit further so I mean I'm the you know I mean again I guess what Brian Green would say is well yeah but at the level of the brain and the level of gene and so on that's information made of stuff when you when you get down to that lowest level and say when we interrogate nature we receive information that seems a little different although I guess on the other hand you could say that look infer the information is all we ever have immediate access to I mean what what lies beyond is always conjecture in a sense in other words the bit of information you get when you interrogate nature that's almost real err in a certain sense is more immediately perceptible to you and I already mentioned John Wheeler he's very famous for an aphorism it from bit right so what he meant by this is that if you look very carefully at least at the quantum world that we traditionally I thought where there are particles of matter electrons and so on and that information is a sort of secondary concept but he wanted to turn that around and say no ultimately we get all about information about all when we interrogate the world that's what we get bits of information we infer the existence of particles of matter from that information so it's really round the other way we start with the information abstracted into matter whereas I think in daily life we think matter is the real thing and the information is the abstract but the point I want to make is that information doesn't sort of float free in the ether it's always instantiated in matter right and so if you take good example information in your computer is in material degrees of freedom in the chip and so on but the interesting thing about it is the fact you can copy a file from your computer saying to a flash drive and then maybe send it in laser pulses up into space something like that means so this information is inter compatible so it's got a sort of life of its own it has a type of autonomous existence although it must always be tied in some way instantiated in some way into material degrees of freedom if we include light in the word material but you know physical physical degrees of freedom and so in some ways it's a bit analogous to energy we recognize that energy as a meaningful concept and we we know when we lack energy and when we need energy and there's an energy crisis and so on so it's a it's a sort of thing but we know that it's it's always got a beat again instantiated in physical objects but it can be traded it can be a gravitation and ingenuity the heat energy and chemical energy and so on it can be passed around and in a conserved way and in the same way information can be passed around and so I don't think we yet have a full grasp of how to put together the laws of matter and the laws of information in a way pretty takes into account the miracle of life and of mind and so on because we recognize that their information is somehow calling the shots it seems to have causal efficacy over the physical system yet we know ultimately the laws of physics will be respected is whether one day we'll be able to sort of unify these two without anything you or whether we really do need genuinely new laws and principles and I'm so person maybe find it in this yeah well it's interesting the way when you talk about information being fundamental and you you start talking about the relationship between the observer and the observed and that that has appeared elsewhere in in quantum physics in some explanations of like what's going on when you when you measure something and then it seems to assume clarity of resolution that it didn't have in the in the meanwhile the act of measurement seems you know some people there have been vocht I don't think most visitors is that but some people there have invoked the kind of witnessing being you know the entry into the consciousness of the observer right collapses the wavefunction is the term that has been used and this is very much a minority of physicists he began with John von Neumann it was most famously championed by Eugene Wigner back in the 50s I guess 60s it doesn't have many takers I have to say that there are other interpretations of this measurement process but they're all equally challenging so for example one that was very much on the fringe when I was a student but now seems to be the mainstream is the many universes interpretation so what's happening here is the electron it's going along it does he bounced to the left as he bounced to the right the answer is he does both that there are two universes one on the Left moving electron one with the right moving in front and each has their observers some the observers in the left moving once here moving to the left same with the right each thinks that they're unique but they're not that there are infinite number of observers packed in these parallel worlds now you might think this is very extravagant too wouldn't it be easier to invoke the mind in some way and that is the two seem about equally outlandish to me personally but I think am i right that more physicists or maybe more philosophers in physics these days take many worlds seriously then take seriously the idea that consciousness is in some sense influencing there yes the only big fight you'd be correct the men almost all of my physics colleagues would opt for the many universes interpretation they don't wouldn't like the idea of consciousness I have you know a little corner of my consciousness still would like to retain the option of embedding consciousness somehow in the quantum description of the world because it seems to me that we should take consciousness seriously not just try and explain it away or remove it entirely from the story of quantum mechanics because of quantum mechanics purports to explain the whole world in its entirety it needs to incorporate consciousness somehow in its description and it seems to by going to this opposite extreme of this many universes interpretation we've lost the opportunity to actually understand consciousness at the scientific level and incorporate it into some may be adapted description of quantum mechanics the monitor my colleagues have tried to do that but mostly they would just go down too many universes well they didn't when I was a student that was considered a bizarre interpretation but now it seems to be the party line and the main alternative to a non outlandish interpretation of quantum physics in other words so in many worlds our consciousness or something equally strange is to just decide not to think about it basically I mean the Copenhagen interpretation is kind of an agreement just not to worry about the philosophical implications right right so now I have to say the most physicists just get on with the job they don't run away by worrying about what is an observer and the hell does the wavefunction collapse they just solve the Schrodinger equation and might be interested in the properties of some material and there may be some commercial outcome and it all works brilliantly you don't need to get yourself into that but people like me do like and he it's there is another way out and that is to say you know quantum mechanics doesn't apply all the way up to the universe there is some point where the physics changes from the quantum world to the what we call the classical world the everyday world and the difficulty there is that we have to then introduce something new and so proponents of the many universes interpretations say well we just need quantum mechanics we don't have to invent any new physics we just take it as it is and it tells us sir all these different branches if you want to have something new then how about this there may be a system not sufficiently large in physical dimensions not sufficiently massive but sufficiently complex might have different rules different dynamical behavior from a simple system so a brain is certainly complex enough to maybe be you know a cat's brain is to use a famous example is probably good enough and maybe even a complicated bit of equipment but that it would be when you've got down at the level of you know the hydrogen item everybody agrees that it's quantum mechanics reigned supreme at the level of a brain you might want to think there's something different going on somewhere in between those two there would be a threshold of complexity which the rules of the game would change at the dynamical level that is the way the the wavefunction is the term we use or the state vector is the term we use for the actual description of how a constant system changes with time it changes according to Schrodinger's equation the trading it gave us equation in the 1920s that maybe that equation some additional features into that equation of the system sufficiently complex that's a very multi idea I think it probably is just me maybe one or two others but I slated as an alternative to some of these other to maybe answer question that may or may not be closely related to that depending on whether or not I'm understanding things and this question is also suggested by another book this one you edited called quantum aspects of life one thing I wondered is you know people wonder people have long wondered about free will and determinism and whether quantum physics could play a role in the free will question and I would think that would depend partly on whether there are quantum events in the brain undetermined quantum events in the brain that have you know important manifestation at the macro level right that actually yeah shape a behavioral path now what is what is the thinking on on that fresh well it says Percival there's no unanimity but secondly that there are a couple of things there that need to be said I think the classical argument against free will is if we live in a deterministic universe if you're made of atoms of the world around you is made of atoms and atoms do what atoms have got to do then everything is already determined right down to the smallest wiggle of your little finger in a bounce in fact forever determined backwards and forwards in time and that was famous statement by pierre laplace back in the 19th century so there seems to be no room for free well how how could you have a choice how could you steer your future if it's already laid down in the pattern of behavior of the atoms that make you up and you have around you and so determinism seemed to be the enemy of free will and then Along Came quantum mechanics some people say aha the world is actually in deterministic fundamental level so doesn't that open the door to free will well it's a two-edged sword because on the one hand yes you're not in this deterministic straitjacket but on the other hand you don't want an arbitrator's to enter you don't want to think to yourself I'd like to move my arm and your foot moves instead you would like to think your will determines your action so what have a hostage sort of loosens the cause-effect reins we it doesn't quite do the job although let me I'm gonna ask you a question it's kind of like when I asked Brian Greene but it's a little different but the premise is the same it begins with the the argument that these quantum fluctuations are only random so far as we know in other words like like we know that say we've got six events we know that three are going to turn out heads and three tails I mean the larger the number the more confidently you make the prediction but but the point is there there is a there is something confident you can say about how the ratio will wind up between the events yes you don't know I mean suppose just conjecture early that my will and I actually asked Brian it's a different question but about this but suppose that my will is the thing I mean maybe it matters I've got I've got these two outcomes one has to be heads one has to be tails let's say to over simplify and and my will gets to choose whether this one's going to be heads in this one tails or this one heads and this one tails and those two outcomes would lead to different behaviors now physicists would not be able to detect that anything is making that decision right that's right so what you're describing is certainly possible and there's nothing in experimental physics that would contradict that at this time it would not however be quantum mechanics because the response of mechanics requires that if you do the thing you know many many times you'll have a certain right but what I'm saying is it's like the analogy is like with a roulette wheel where you know that in the long run it has to hit to as many times as it hits three but if you can be under the table with a magnet deciding that this is the time it's going to hit three when somebody's got a lot of money bet on three and this is the time it's going to hit two that would be indiscernible to the physicists so to speak because the stats would come out the same way and yet it would be a decisive intervention right yes he would but now this it depends on your understanding of freewill but if that understanding is you are faced with the choice and you choose a over B I think most people will feel that it would be only meaningful to call that free well if when you were faced with the same choice again you would make the same choice because otherwise it would just be arbitrary you just think that you chose them but actually it was some you know just some fluctuation that concept and so if you were to literally do the experiment again and again and again you would contradict quantum mechanics because you'd find that you wouldn't comply with the probability yemassee I don't think I mean Brian actually agreed that this would not defy quantum except the question I asked him is suppose it's a god out there with the magnet under the table and again you're not changing the overall probability distribution you're just saying instead of this one being heads in this one tails I want this one to be tails in this one heads the aggregate numbers come out the same but but but it makes a difference if it's if these are unique events of course we can't distinguish between them and I think we would recognize that for example this conversation isn't going to be happening your second time in the you know it's not like we can say we're quantum mechanics led to me to say this so next time we'll leave me to say that so if you're dealing if you know if you don't have a distribution of identical system as well we meaningfully about provinces of outcomes then of course we there's nothing very much we can say and so you can invent other things that for unique circumstances right you can say yeah there's nothing that we no experiment we could do right you a unique intervention could be undetectable so long as it was kind of balanced out in the aggregate in a certain sense there's something I should say though in connection with this quantum brain stuff which is it's a whole different set of issues which is where the quantum mechanics is playing an effect in the brain in such a way as to explain some of the mental phenomena and there's a minority of scientists most famous Roger Penrose from Oxford University who have suggested that if you get right down through it you have to go down below the level of a neuron because that's way too big but in the microtubules that thread through the interiors of them that there may be non-trivial quantum processes going on and that could somehow explain consciousness or be involved in some way in consciousness and very very few scientists I think believe that for the simple reason that the brain is a sort of warm wet environment and that the thermal agitation of the surrounding particles are play havoc will have delicate quantum processes however we do know in biology there are four or five phenomena that really do seem to depend in a non-trivial way on on weird quantum effects one of these is photosynthesis and now there involves electrons tunneling through organic molecules and then there is some evidence that the old factories and makes use of quantum effects and so it could be the tip of an iceberg and it could be that we will need quantum mechanics there'll be a sort of life principle embedded in the small prints of quantum mechanics and that one day we'll discover that quantum physics is indispensable to understanding life that he don't actually incorporates life in some way we haven't found that yet right we have a few quirky cases whether the brain is part of those quirky cases I don't know I'm a little skeptical myself but I keep my mind open for that ok so keeping the conversation at a level of fundamental questions you started a controversy a few years ago with a piece of the New York Times called taking science on faith maybe the controversy started with the part where you said that scientists have a certain kind of faith in the kind of immutability of laws or or something but you also leaving aside the question I'm sure the standard reply was but this is faith based on experience or something but but leaving that question aside you also said let me quote this the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency the specifics of that explanation or matter of future research but until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe it's claimed to be free of faith is manifestly bogus now what is that what do you mean by that exactly well you can't be a scientist without making two assumptions about the world one is that it's at least in part intelligible to us if it was if you thought it's all just meaningless jumble out there you wouldn't embark on science you expect as you dig deeper and deeper you'll find some sort of meaningful connections and the classic example is the Large Hadron Collider they didn't spend eight billion dollars without some expectation that whether the Higgs boson was there or not what whatever was found what makes sense so you have to believe that we live in a rational intelligible ordered universe you've got to believe that this order is really up there and it's not just an artifact of our culture or something it's a really existing law like mathematical order in nature that is the founding assumption of science now we codify these laws of physics and if you ask physicists well where are these laws of physics come from how do they originate you're usually told well that's not a scientific question don't ask that question or that makes me feel uncomfortable or let's just get on with the job we write down our best guess of what these laws might be and then we just use them and do physics but I'm interested in where those laws came from because why they are as they are they could have been different they could have been no laws at all so we live in a universe is got these very special laws and it seems very natural to us where they come from but if you don't want to do that if you just want to get on with the job then you accept those laws on faith and I went by faith I'm not I didn't actually choose the title of that article but I'm prepared to defend the use of the word faith in the same sense as one might remain faithful to one spouse but what it really means is that you you you take your depend on them you depend on their veracity of these laws you can't prove they they have to be as they are can't even prove that they're the correct ones you can't disprove and so embarking on the scientific endeavor in the belief in a rational law like meaningful order is the founding assumption of science and he actually comes straight out of monotheism when you look at where it comes from Galileo Newton that these early scientists they were all Christians and some Jews but before that was the Muslim tradition that we have here a combination of Greek philosophy with its emphasis on humans can come to understand their world through reasoning combined with the notion of a creative world order that could have been otherwise but easy as it is because he's ordered that way by a law giving death and science simply adopted that view they killed off the deity but they adopted the view that the world could have been otherwise but he's arranged in this rational intelligible manner and so the purpose of that article was really I was wanting to call in question after three hundred years of this philosophy whether we should get away from the idea that the laws of physics are indeed immutable imprinted on the universe and are unchanging and we don't question where they come from actually say the laws and the universe somehow care evolve in a manner that I tried to tease out by a friendly grief among scientists trying to explain that and they were getting kind of too neat to the entropic principle as its called yes it said we look at the laws that we know and understand and we can ask why are they as they are and could there have been otherwise and if you think they could have been otherwise then you might wonder you're an expression is well supposing they've been different how would the world be different and we don't have the budget to do the real experiment but we can do the theoretical experiment by taking the laws of physics and changing some of the features in those and then exploring what the consequences of that would be and it's been known for many many years that some of our laws couldn't be changed by very much and without wrecking the universe in in the manner that we see it so what do i mean by that well suppose you don't like the laws of physics as they are you'd like all electrons to be a bit heavier or also that weak nuclear force to be a bit weaker or something like that what would happen and the answer is a lot of very dramatic things can happen right small changes in those and then the preferred explanation is well the reason that we live in a universe that looks like it's reaped in favor of life is because there's an infinite number of universes so we're back to that in but this time an infinite number of universes with each with different laws but only in a tiny tiny subset well they're all those features come out just right so life can imagine it's a surprise we find ourselves in a bio friendly universe we couldn't exist in a sterile right right now I know we're running up against the time constraint the yeren but I can't help it ask one more question because you talked about like where the laws come from and I know a colleague of yours at Arizona State is Lawrence Krauss and he and I have argued about the book in which I think he claimed to have settled the question of why there's something rather than nothing now you're probably familiar with this whole thing right yes you can I question is by any means settled I mean there's the trivial answer there are many ways for there to be something and only one way that's of nothing I think what Lawrence was anxious to do in his book universe from nothing was to talk about how the universe could come into being without there any prior existence of space-time or matter and he's absolutely right and I say exactly the same thing in the Goldilocks enigma in my other books however the big difference between us is that he's prepared to take the laws of physics on faith as an act of faith and the laws of physics can bring the universe into existence I would like to know where those laws of this was right I said to him if there are laws that can account for the emergence of anything then there wasn't nothing to begin with there were laws that's not nothing that's right that's where he and I were probably part company and and of course someone in his position could always say well asking where the laws come from is not a scientific question and I'm going to ignore that and so we're back to question but he purports to be addressing a philosophical question I actually think we can push the scientific agenda to the point where we can incorporate the origin of the laws in the scientific program but that's that's very ambitious no more people knocking at your door or do you have time for a very quick and one more very quick question we do and I should say also my battery's running low so okay okay so if you die in MIT then we won't promise people a sequel down the road if you die in MIT answer the questions just this one you know one question one could ask is what enforces the laws of physics right I mean in the real world everything we call a law has an enforcer laws of society have police enforcing them laws of software have you know we structure things such that we harness the laws of physics to make sure the electrons comply with the logic of the program and spit out the right answer isn't it kind of a valid question to say wait a second given that there are laws what makes matter and energy comply with them it's when you think about it it seems kind of magical yes again the traditional answer was that there is a timeless God who underpins the universe along all moments and upholds the lawfulness and so the laws are held into being by this deity that that's just pushes the problem off into some transcendent realm and so that's not very satisfactory I think your problem begins to be lessened if we get away from the idea that these laws are strictly immutable and again what I tried to do in the Goldilocks enigma was to come up with the idea of a theory of everything in which the laws were part of that theory of everything where laws and matter and observers and space-time all of these things were in an explanatory loop everything explains everything else that sounds a bit mysterious and it's not I didn't do any more than set it out as an agenda but I think your question is a very valid one and it won't go away so long as we have the idea that these laws are sort of absolutely fixed as john wieland love to say from everlasting to everlasting he liked the idea that you put the laws into the melting pot - so we really want some bigger vision that brings the laws into the picture and doesn't just assume they're there as a dependable background yeah okay thank you I wish we had more time the reason we don't is because I actually had tech issues at the beginning of this so I am the one to blame you know there you have a lot of books that we didn't mention I think you mentioned the goldilocks enigma which it also appears under another title cause it's by confusing the jackpot but how to build a time machine just you've written about the origin of life you you've written are we alone about extraterrestrial you know so recently the eerie silence which is efficient of SETI the surgery with intelligence celebration but also critique and call to arms to enlarge the vision of looking for life elsewhere in the universe and intelligent life in particular we could have a whole conversation I hope down the road you'll have time for another one because this was a lot of fun I'd very much enjoy it please invite me back okay yeah I I guarantee it then thank you so much Paul my pleasure and I'll say goodbye okay

Channel: MeaningofLife.tv

Views: 25,611

Rating: 4.8929439 out of 5

Keywords: buddhism, science, spirituality, physics, consciousness, quantum physics

Id: 2fJu9HdOePY

Length: 46min 26sec (2786 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2017