Videos by topic: UNIVERSE
Formulating Science in Terms of Possible and Impossible Tasks
It turns out that in the constructor theoretic view, humans, or knowledge creating systems, are quite central to fundamental physics in an objective way and not an anthropocentric way. This is a very deep change in perspective. One of the ideas that will be dropped if constructor theory turns out to be effective is that the only fundamental entities in physics are laws of motion and initial conditions. Of course they are, but in order for physics to accommodate more of physical reality, there needs to be a switch to this new mode of explanation, which accept is a scientific explanation more than predictions. The ideal prediction will be complemented with the idea of statements about what tasks are possible and impossible and why.
CHIARA MARLETTO is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College and Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Materials Department, University of Oxford. Chiara Marletto's Edge Bio Page
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Chiara Marletto on Extinction
There is a new fundamental theory of physics that’s called constructor theory, and was proposed by David Deutsch who pioneered the theory of the universe of quantum computer. David and I are working this theory together. The fundamental idea in this theory is that we formulate all laws of physics in terms of what tasks are possible, what are impossible, and why. In this theory we have an exact physical characterization of an object that has those properties, and we call that knowledge. Note that knowledge here means knowledge without knowing the subject, as in the theory of knowledge of the philosopher, Karl Popper.
We’ve just come to the conclusion that the fact that extinction is possible means that knowledge can be instantiated in our physical world. In fact, extinction is the very process by which that knowledge is disabled in its ability to remain instantiated in physical systems because there are problems that it cannot solve. With any luck that bit of knowledge can be replaced with a better one.
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What's New In The Universe
Direct Evidence Of Cosmic Inflation
[3.17.14]
Think about it this way: previously we thought that our universe was like a spherical balloon. In the new picture, it's like a balloon producing balloons, producing balloons. This is a big fractal. The Greeks were thinking about our universe as an ideal sphere, because this was the best image they had at their disposal. The 20th century idea is a fractal, the beauty of a fractal. Now, you have these fractals. We ask, how many different types of these elements of fractals are there, which are irreducible to each other? And the number will be exponentially large, and in the simplest models it is about 10 to the degree 10, to the degree 10, to the degree 7. It actually may be much more than that, even though nobody can see all of these universes at once.
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What's New In The Universe
Direct Evidence Of Cosmic Inflation
[3.17.14]
Inflationary theory itself is a twist on the conventional Big Bang theory. The shortcoming that inflation is intended to fill in is the basic fact that although the Big Bang theory is called the Big Bang theory it is, in fact, not really a theory of a bang at all; it never was.
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What's New In The Universe
Direct Evidence Of Cosmic Inflation
[3.17.14]
Even though cosmology doesn't have that much to do with information It certainly does have to do with revolution and phase transitions, in fact phase transitions in both the literal and the figurative sense of the word.
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THINK ABOUT NATURE
Feynman once told me, "Whatever you do—you're going to have to do crazy things to think about quantum gravity—but whatever you do, think about nature. If you think about the properties of a mathematical equation, you're doing mathematics and you're not going to get back to nature. Whatever you do, have a question that an experiment could resolve at the front of your thinking." So I always try to do that.
LEE SMOLIN is a founding and senior faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. He is also Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Waterloo and is a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Toronto. His is the author od Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Lee Smolin's Edge Bio Page
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CONSTRUCTOR THEORY
A Conversation with
[10.22.12]
There's a notorious problem with defining information within physics, namely that on the one hand information is purely abstract, and the original theory of computation as developed by Alan Turing and others regarded computers and the information they manipulate purely abstractly as mathematical objects. Many mathematicians to this day don't realize that information is physical and that there is no such thing as an abstract computer. Only a physical object can compute things.
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I think it's important to regard science not as an enterprise for the purpose of making predictions, but as an enterprise for the purpose of discovering what the world is really like, what is really there, how it behaves and why.
DAVID DEUTSCH is a Physicist at the University of Oxford. His research in quantum physics has been influential and highly acclaimed. He is the author of The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality. David Deutsch's Edge Bio Page
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A BALLOON PRODUCING BALLOONS, PRODUCING BALLOONS:A BIG FRACTAL
Think about it this way: previously we thought that our universe was like a spherical balloon. In the new picture, it's like a balloon producing balloons, producing balloons. This is a big fractal. The Greeks were thinking about our universe as an ideal sphere, because this was the best image they had at their disposal. The 20th century idea is a fractal, the beauty of a fractal. Now, you have these fractals. We ask, how many different types of these elements of fractals are there, which are irreducible to each other? And the number will be exponentially large, and in the simplest models it is about 10 to the degree 10, to the degree 10, to the degree 7. It actually may be much more than that, even though nobody can see all of these universes at once.
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SCIENCE IS NOT ABOUT CERTAINTY: A PHILOSOPHY OF PHYSICS
"I seem to be saying two things that contradict each other. On the one hand, we trust scientific knowledge, on the other hand, we are always ready to modify in-depth part of our conceptual structure about the world. But there is no contradiction, because the idea of a contradiction comes from what I see as the deepest misunderstanding about science: the idea that science is about certainty."
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Thinking About the Universe on the Larger Scales
"Andrei Linde had some ideas, Alan Guth had some ideas, Alex Vilenkin had some ideas. I thought I was coming in with this radically new idea that we shouldn't think of the universe as existing on this global scale that no one observer can actually see, that it's actually important to think about what can happen in the causally connected region to one observer, what can you do in any experiment that doesn't actually conflict with the laws of physics, and require superluminal propagation, that we have to ask questions in a way that conform to the laws of physics if we want to get sensible answers."
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