Episode 32: Unsolved Problems in Physics Part 3 - Symmetry and Novelty

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:09]  Bruce: Welcome back to The Theory of Anything podcast. I'm meeting with Sadia again, and we're continuing our discussion about physics and the mystery of time. How's it going, Sadia?

[00:00:18]  Sadia: Fine, thank you, Bruce. How are you doing?

[00:00:20]  Bruce: Good. So we've had a lot of interesting discussions so far. We're gonna get into some conclusions now.

[00:00:27]  Sadia: Yes, we're really gonna dive into what I call the hard problem of time. And interestingly, since I started doing this podcast with you, I've heard more and more people talk about this. So people are paying attention to this problem.

I think in the physics community, as well as people who are working on life, like understanding what is life, they're actually paying attention. So I was kind of excited to see, and sometimes you're like the same sort of ideas you're coming up with, and you see people thinking along the same lines, and you're like, hmm, okay, it's kind of interesting. So yeah, let's dive down.

I wanna start again with the physics aspect of it, and then we're gonna talk a little bit about life as well. Hopefully, I hope you'll have enough time to get into that as well. All right, so last time I introduced you to relationalism in physics.

This philosophy was pretty much, as far as I know, I mean, I'm sure these people weren't the first one, but it's associated with the philosopher Leibniz. And Mach also pushed towards more and more of a relational view, but Leibniz is pretty much, the name Leibniz pretty much stands out. And then people who really took it seriously, I think it would be worth mentioning their names.

It's Julian Barbour, Lee Smolin, and Carlo Rovelli. So they pushed quite a bit towards a relational view. And like I said, when I was a grad student, I was really kind of fascinated by this idea of the role that background of space and time plays in a theory.

And because personally, I felt like there shouldn't be some sort of a background. And I knew that in Newton's theory, Newton took an absolute background of space and time. That kind of got me interested in string theory as well, actually, because I was pretty much interested in this idea of background independence.

[00:02:26]  Sadia: So in other words, I was thinking along the lines of relationalism, which kind of brought me into this. And then I read Smolin and Barbour and kind of set me off in that particular direction. So last time, I kind of talked more about how clocks might emerge, right?

Dynamical theories. But the same can be said about space. It's not just time, but space, or one can say space-time can emerge out of a theory.

So that's what the relationalists are kind of, the space-time relationalists are pushing towards that. That there shouldn't really be any background structures of space-time. They should be part of our theory, and not just that.

The push is also that it should be part of the dynamics, so it should be dynamical in the sense that it shouldn't be rigid. It should be part of the theory. It should evolve with the theory.

[00:03:23]  Sadia: So that's where it has to be dynamical as well. Now, interestingly, and you might have heard me sometimes, maybe, I don't know, you haven't paid attention, or I've been kind of interested a little bit in non-locality as well. And I kind of want to just quickly mention why that's been the case, because obviously, when you look at the people who are into the many-worlds interpretation, it's pretty much local theory, right?

[00:03:47]  Bruce: Yes.

[00:03:48]  Sadia: So where I'm coming from, and I don't know how familiar they all are, but anyways, where I'm coming from is from a relational point of view and what I'm about to present that why we should take time as a serious concept. So the thing is, the emergence of space-time is what gives meaning to locality, okay, in special and general relativity.

[00:04:13]  Bruce: Okay, that makes sense.

[00:04:15]  Sadia: So if they are emergent, and if that's all there was to space-time, if they were just emergent and part of the theory, then yeah, sure. Locality, that's it, we've got everything we need, and now we build up, build our buildings on top of that, right? But as I'm about to present to you, I think the problem, the hard problem of time, is really has pushed, at least, and I'll present why I think we need to take this hard problem of time seriously.

And then that makes you question that, okay, if that's not our starting point, if our starting point isn't just the emergence of space-time with our current dynamical theories, then what are we looking at? So let's get into the hard problem of time. And as I'll show you, I think what we really need is an evolutionary theory of the universe.

This is just an overview of what I'm about to talk about. An evolutionary theory of the universe, where the universe is actually a novelty generating. When we talk about universe, this is one of the key features of the universe is that it's a novelty generator.

For that, we will need a notion of a global time, okay? And going back a little bit to Barbour's reformulation of general relativity from last time. Barbour's reformulation of general relativity has actually revealed a privileged kind of like a frame where, imagine if there were like observers scattered throughout the universe, there would be a privileged class of observers where you can give simultaneity an absolute sense.

But it's relational. It's not something, it's not an absolute space, you know.

[00:05:56]  Bruce: I remember you talking about this last time, yeah.

[00:05:58]  Sadia: So then the question is, how is that even possible? Because the way we do physics right now, we were always talking about in general relativity, local inertial frames. You basically take the local inertial frames and you kind of put them together to get the bigger picture, right?

So here we're talking about something global here. So there, that's where you start to wonder because you feel like non-locality at a certain level should play a part. And the other thing is that we cannot, even though we're saying here that according to Barbour's theory, and if that formulation, if there is something to it, that...

So how do those clocks, right? How do they remain synchronized if there is this global notion of time? So the non-locality might be a feature at some aspect of the world to give a global, to have this type of a global notion of time.

We might actually require this type of non-locality. It might have to be a feature of the world.

[00:07:01]  Bruce: So let me, let's talk about non-locality just for a second. And I don't know that this is quite what you're getting at. My initial impression of the idea of non-locality is the first, my first like thought that comes to my mind is, oh wow, that's very supernatural, right?

It seems so kind of out there. On the other hand, I guess if the laws of physics said non-locality existed, then they exist, right? It's, and I suppose that's where you're coming at this from, is that if that is necessary to solve some sort of problem in physics, and that forces us into a theory of physics that is non-local, then it clearly isn't supernatural at that point.

It's just the laws of physics at that point. So there's kind of this first level, it feels kind of supernatural. And then there's kind of a second level though.

Like I understand enough of Einstein's general relativity that the idea of non-locality doesn't make sense to me from a physics standpoint, because I understand that there is no simultaneity between things that are at a distance and it depends on your speed. And there's a number of factors there that seem like they make non-locality problematic. For one thing, like if you could travel faster than the speed of light, according to Einstein's physics, you would arrive before you left.

So you would literally be traveling backward in time under general relativity. And again, that seems like it almost eliminates any possibility of non-locality, but then again, you're talking about maybe future physics that undermine Einstein's physics at some point. So I can't really argue with that.

Kind of just thoughts on that, just from where you're going with this versus kind of my initial maybe negative impression of non-locality.

[00:08:48]  Sadia: Yeah, and I'm not even sure where this is going to lead us to, but like you said, that if that is what's required for the future progress of science, then we aren't just doing that just because this concept just tickles our fancy for whatever reason. It's really about whatever works, really. That's pretty much the principle.

I stick to whatever works. And then again, we're not saying that there aren't going to be rules and constraints on what we call classical objects. So we may not be able to travel faster than the speed of, we don't know, right?

I mean, as far as, again, we're saying that, you know, from what I'm thinking here is that locality, as well as non-locality, might be emerging features of the world. But there are certain layers of reality where the locality will still be the law of the land. And then there are other features of the world which where non-locality is doing its stuff.

And that might be the place where the global notion of time emerges. And I will talk about this later, but in a minute, as we go through it, in understanding, in saying that the world is a novelty creator, there is stuff that has really, really pushed me to evaluate how deterministic the world really is. I just, I'm having really tough time understanding where the novelty creeps into the world.

If, but to get into that, let's wait till I explain to you why I'm thinking along those lines. What's my chain of thought? Because I was pretty much all sold on locality, many worlds interpretation and stuff like that.

But I have recently kind of reevaluated. And hopefully, that'll be clear why I'm kind of thinking, looking in other places now. So first of all, even in relationalism, I would first say that there are some people who might, one could say that there is a type of relationalist, which is a more purist type relationalism.

[00:10:48]  Sadia: Where, whereby you think that all of physics could be done in a purely relational way. But, and then there is another impure, where I kind of lean towards the impure relationalism after having thought about it quite a bit, where I feel like that even though we may be able to remove the background structures, such as space and time and make it part of the theory, but we will still need to assume some intrinsic properties, which we add axiomatically. In other words, you can't just say that all the physics could just be done purely in somewhat purely relational way.

As we progress in science, there will always be some intrinsic properties that you have to assume and which may not be explained relationally. It is possible that as we progress, the ones we assumed intrinsic might turn out to be relational as well, but we have to kind of... So I'm kind of starting to lean...

I used to lean more towards the relational purist type, which is what I had in mind, but I'm starting to lean more on thinking about impure relationalism. So now let's dive into the hard problem of time. So as we discussed before, that the fundamental laws of physics are time-symmetric, invariant.

Right? That means that there really isn't any arrow of time. They really don't care about past or future, any of that.

Right? We arrive at those things as we experience the world, but it isn't all just experiential. There are actually objective other arrows, other asymmetries of the world that actually point to, which I would call the arrows of time.

All right. And we need to take them seriously. It isn't just about our experience.

It is something, there's something else going on here that we need to pay attention to. But the fundamental laws really do not give us any arrow. All right.

[00:12:41]  Sadia: They could care less if the world started just going, you know, backwards. If you run the video backwards, it's a little bit more complicated. You have to reverse the arrows of motion, momentum, but they don't really care.

Okay. Whatever you put in as the input data, they'll give you an output, but they're not going to say that output is the future or the past. Right.

They don't care.

[00:13:02]  Bruce: So one question on this, though, is that still true for quantum physics upon an observation?

[00:13:13]  Sadia: So interestingly, actually, last night when I was going in and out of consciousness, I was because I actually noticed that Sean Carroll did an interview with David Wallace, who is one of my favorite living philosophers of science, who is an Everettian. They kind of talked about it. And even there, the sense you get is that, okay, even if you have the many worlds, it seems like there is an asymmetry, but it's still pretty much based on time-symmetric, invariant.

[00:13:46]  Bruce: Okay, that's true.

If you're looking across the many worlds, then yes, their quantum physics is symmetrical.

[00:13:55]  Sadia: It's just improbable that the different branches may come together again, right? But it's still like, improbability doesn't mean that there is some. Okay, so we still need to explain this asymmetry.

So arrow of time, basically, when I say arrow of time, it's basically an asymmetry in the evolution of various processes that we see. Okay, nature seems to select. So when we solve our equations of motion, we get different solutions and some solutions, in some equations, you will have a solution that represents what we might recognize as moving forward in time, the other may be somewhat of a reverse process.

But it seems like nature is selecting out certain solutions and ignoring the others. And that's where, so we need to understand where that asymmetry is coming from. And I'll talk about the various arrows in a minute.

Okay, so let's identify these so-called arrows of time, which highlight the hard problem of time. The first one is the experiential arrow of time. We all remember the past, right?

But we don't have any access to the future. You know, so our memories are always of the past. So there is an asymmetry, at least in our experience, that we should, we need to explain that.

Okay, it might sound trivial, but I think, I don't think it is. It's really, we need to think about this thing. There's also an...

[00:15:19]  Bruce: You mean you don't remember your future like me?

[00:15:22]  Unidentified speaker: Nope.

[00:15:24]  Bruce: I'm different? All right, sorry, continue.

[00:15:29]  Sadia: No, that's okay. Yeah, that would be an interesting one if somebody comes up. Supposedly, Nostradamus might have remembered something.

That's another good question that I'm really not interested in. But anyway, so then there's the electromagnetic arrow of time. So anytime we look at an object, like when we look at the sun, right?

We're looking at the sun as it appeared eight minutes ago. So light always moves from the past into the future. That's how I'm putting that, okay?

So light entering our eyes only gives us the glimpses of the past, but never the future, right? I mean, even if it might be milliseconds for the objects that are really— but it's always the past and not the future. So even if you have a charge that's accelerating, you always see accelerating charges emit electromagnetic waves in the radio part of the spectrum.

But the thing is that you always see the waves spreading out of a charge. We never see the waves going into the charge, which could again be looked upon as a solution, another solution based on the laws of physics. So then there is another arrow, the cosmological arrow of time.

Universe is expanding and not contracting. So that's another arrow. Then there's also gravitational arrow of time, which is similar to the electromagnetic, except that it applies to gravitational waves.

So if you see two neutron stars colliding or some really catastrophic event that generates gravitational waves, you always see those coming to us from the past, right? Kind of like the electromagnetic waves. But you don't see any gravitational waves going into an event, and then the event which you're seeing as an explosion starts to, the two neutron stars that have collided start to uncollide, we don't see that.

And then there's also a black hole arrow of time. White holes, by the way, there are these objects that are solutions, time reverse solutions of general relativity that are predicted by general relativity. But we don't see white holes, we only see black holes.

[00:17:41]  Sadia: White holes are these objects where anything could literally just come out of a white hole. And I really don't know that much about white holes, I'll be honest. I haven't really explored them that much, even though it sounds kind of fascinating.

[00:17:51]  Bruce: Like literally anything, like a goldfish [could just come out of it—wording uncertain].

[00:17:56]  Sadia: [Opening words uncertain: A moving object could be] coming out and you're looking at it and yeah, they could surprise you. So yeah, that kind of doesn't even make sense. I don't know what to make of white holes.

But anyways, we only ever see black holes, right, in the universe. And not just that, I mean, as far as we can tell, the black holes came much later in the history of the universe. I mean, maybe there were micro black holes.

I know that, I think, I forget that I think whether there were some theories, particularly maybe in string theory, that that certain particles might be able to collide and create black holes too. But anyways, I'm not going to get into that. This is just taking us off topic.

But we see black holes much later. The type of black holes that are formed at the center of the galaxies are from supermassive stars in there later as they evolve. All right.

Now we get to the really interesting one because I want to talk a little bit about this, the thermodynamic arrow.

[00:18:54]  Bruce: That's the one I'm the most, I hadn't actually heard of these other asymmetries. This is the one that I knew about.

[00:19:01]  Sadia: Before we get into this and all sorts of other interesting things related to that, I want to point out that there are other types of asymmetries that we observe in the universe too that require an explanation that based on purely time-symmetric laws might seem problematic. There is the matter-antimatter asymmetry. I mean, we haven't really found any supersymmetric particles, which I think was supposed to solve this problem.

But basically, we look around us and obviously the universe, we see a lot of matter making up stuff. There is also antimatter, but it seems like, so basically if you think about the Big Bang, then obviously there must have been more matter than antimatter. Otherwise, it would all have annihilated, unless if there was some other process that separated it.

But there is a matter-antimatter asymmetry that we need to accept.

[00:19:51]  Bruce: The issue here being that matter and antimatter, when they meet, they turn into energy. And so the fact that we have very little antimatter and a whole lot of matter means that there could have been way more matter and antimatter sometime in the past, and they've eliminated themselves since then. So what we seem to be left with is a net positive of matter.

[00:20:10]  Sadia: Exactly. Yeah. So we really don't know what happened, right?

We need to understand that. And then there are also these processes, there's something called spontaneous symmetry breaking that I don't want to get into, but it seems like there are certain theories which have an overall symmetry, but have some solutions where there's an asymmetry. And it seems like as the universe has evolved, we've seen certain solutions, the theory, it's weird to say this, but I don't know how else to put it, like the theory is settling for a certain solution rather than another.

And we call it spontaneous symmetry breaking. In some cases, I really haven't been able to make sense of what breaks this symmetry. It's just something that literally it's kind of like the collapse of a wave function type thing.

Like suddenly, like over time, the theory settles for a certain vacuum or, and so we have that thing in physics, which always intrigued me, like I [could/couldn't—unclear, unfinished phrase] make—as much as the collapse of the wave function intrigued me. So I don't know if the many worlds will offer anything there, but we'll see. Okay, so those are some of the asymmetries.

Now let's get into the thermodynamic arrow of time. So the thermodynamic, that's related to the entropy. So the entropy, whenever you have an isolated subsystem of a universe, so if you have an isolated subsystem of the universe where matter or energy cannot flow in or out of that system, and if you leave it to naturally evolve, then either the entropy of that system will go up where it kind of reaches some sort of a maximal value or it will stay there, or it won't change if it's in a thermal equilibrium.

[00:21:55]  Sadia: So that's basically the second law of thermodynamics. So the entropy of isolated subsystems of the universe will either increase to some sort of a maximal value, the maximal value being where it's in thermal equilibrium. So entropy, a little bit about entropy, it's an emergent concept, which in statistical versus the classical, we're just going to focus on the statistical thermodynamics.

It's based on a comparison between we kind of think about it, sounds kind of almost subjective, but it doesn't have to be. I think it's fine. But you're basically comparing macrostate, a particular macrostate.

So for example, you may have a gas at a certain pressure temperature and has a certain density. And you ask yourself, because a gas is made up of some molecules or atoms, and you ask yourself how many different possible configurations, and here I'm talking a little bit more. It's not just the configuration in terms of position.

We're also talking about which direction they're moving. So momentum is part of that too. So you're saying that how many different possible microstates lead to the exact same macrostate.

And when you compare it to some other, that's how we kind of calculate. That's how we calculate entropy. So a macrostate which corresponds to more microstates would have a higher entropy.

[00:23:19]  Bruce: So I don't think I quite got that. See if you can explain that a bit further. The microstates.

Oh, so I'm familiar with the idea that at microstates it's unclear what entropy even means.

[00:23:30]  Sadia: Exactly. So it's an emergent process where you have to compare micro versus macrostate. You know, people, usually physicists will talk about fine graining and coarse graining, but you're looking at different levels, right?

At one level, you're looking at things like pressure, temperature, and density, which we talk about say, in classical thermodynamics. And you're trying to relate it to what's happening at the atomic or molecular level, right? So then you're asking yourself, so for example, so what I'm trying to say is that let's say you have a gas in thermal equilibrium, right?

So all these molecules are bouncing into each other and moving in all sorts of random directions. Because there is that much randomness, you know, you can imagine all sorts of positions of the different atoms and moving in different random directions, which would correspond to the same pressure, temperature, and density.

[00:24:25]  Unidentified speaker: Sure.

[00:24:26]  Sadia: But if you have a gas where there is a small region, where there may be a region, like let's say you have a gas in a jar, and somehow, you know, because of the way we initially set it up, there is a region in there which is at a lower density or maybe really cold region compared to the rest, then there will be fewer microstates that correspond to that thing. So it will have a lower entropy.

[00:24:50]  Bruce: Oh, I've always wondered about that. That makes sense, though. So, yes.

So there's a lot more that at the point of maximal entropy, there are many states that could make it up, but they would be indistinguishable from another because they all have the same pressure, they all have the same temperature.

[00:25:08]  Sadia: Exactly. So there is a kind of like what we say a degeneracy there, right? So there is one state corresponding to multiple different microstates, one macrostate.

And not just that, whenever, so before something reaches the thermal equilibrium or the maximal entropy, basically we can talk about the flow of heat, flow of energy, right? There is a flow of energy. Once something reaches thermal equilibrium, it's almost as if the whole concept of heat just falls apart.

It's like, you know, it's only meaningful when we're talking about this flow of energy and stuff. So then the thing becomes boring. Once you're in thermal equilibrium, nothing interesting is happening.

Okay, maybe, you know, just a random molecular motion. So here I'm sticking to just more of the molecular level. I'm not going to go into...

[00:25:54]  Bruce: And that's the same as heat death, right?

[00:25:56]  Sadia: Exactly. It's interesting that the heat death, you know, it sounds as if, you know, something, we're just going to super, you know, heat up or whatever. But it really, it's the death of heat, basically, is what the heat death is.

[00:26:09]  Bruce: Temperature is... Now, temperature becomes a meaningless concept. And for that matter, time becomes a meaningless concept.

[00:26:16]  Sadia: Exactly. Yes. So as a matter of fact, so if we look at the current paradigm, what we're really going towards based on second law of thermodynamics and time symmetric laws is we're going towards, if the entropy keeps increasing, eventually, we're just going to be timeless, right?

Or there will be no time. There will be no clocks, right?

[00:26:36]  Bruce: Right. It seems strange that time would be defined by clocks. And that's something that I've read that multiple times now.

But if you're just a layman listening to this show, that may not seem obvious at all that why time would be defined by clocks themselves, rather than clocks are measuring it.

[00:26:57]  Sadia: You bring up an interesting point, and sometimes I feel your laymen have a better intuition than most physicists, because we get so fixated on things, and we put them in boxes, and then we proclaim that everything in the universe is supposed to be like, you know, followed by these. But a layman is going to tell me that, look, are you trying to tell me, like, I'm experiencing these things. I don't see, you know, there are these asymmetric things that I'm experiencing, right?

So, but if you give them this view that I have given to you of how clocks emerge and what is a clock, most of the people will think we're crazy. But sometimes, you know, a layman's intuition is better.

[00:27:39]  Bruce: So what we could probably say here, though, is that physicists choose to define time in terms of clocks, because that makes it a meaningful physical concept to them. And therefore, heat death, you can't even build a clock in principle. Therefore, there's no time.

Would be probably the simplest way I've at least heard it explained by physicists trying to talk to layman. I don't know how accurate that is mathematically, but.

[00:28:04]  Sadia: And I think we should also be cautious that sometimes because it's only getting something meaningful, it's being defined meaningfully in physics, doesn't mean that we ditch any other. Like, I mean, I understand that, you know, like we should stick to, you know, there is something to be said about our best explanations, but then we shouldn't lose sight of what we can't explain and what sort of suggestions are we getting, at least, and at least have that mindset, right? I think sometimes we become a little too religious about our worldview and then somehow just, you know, proclaim that that's how, you know, just projected to the universe.

Oh, this is how the universe is.

[00:28:47]  Bruce: Yeah. Well, and you're talking about physicists and, you know, I don't know, I'm not a physicist, but if you spend any time around philosophers, people who have actually studied philosophy, like in school, they are almost guaranteed to be dumber than a layman.

[00:29:04]  Sadia: They're so difficult to talk to. Oh my god, sometimes. Like, it's like you feel like beyond a certain point, you can't even make progress because they have such a narrow lens through which they view things.

[00:29:17]  Bruce: That's right.

[00:29:17]  Sadia: They—then they [unclear verb] anything that just doesn't make sense through their lens as meaningless almost.

[00:29:25]  Bruce: Yes, and they're incredibly hard to talk to even about really simple things. And it's not because they're making good points.

[00:29:34]  Sadia: Not to get too sidetracked, but recently I had this discussion with somebody who was a physicist about morality, right and wrong. And after about an hour of discussion, we kept nudging that: “Define to me what is morality, what is right and wrong.” And I kept talking to him about those things.

And he, what he really, I don't even know what he was looking for. And I'm like, you know, part of me is like, what are you not getting? Like, do you want me to give you specific examples of what is right and wrong?

I'm trying to give you a general idea of what morality is about. You can't even do, you know, science without some ethical type of commitment, without some moral commitment to truth and integrity. So, you know, but anyways, I don't want to get too sidetracked, but it's kind of, those type of things are just so counterproductive that people get too stuck in just defining everything to the point that you just, things just disappear out of existence.

[00:30:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yep.

[00:30:33]  Bruce: And that's actually why Popper was so strongly against trying to worry about defining your terms.

[00:30:39]  Sadia: Yeah, yeah. All right. So anyways, going back to all the arrows we've talked about, the existence of these arrows and these asymmetries require an explanation.

And a timeless picture based on these time-symmetric invariant laws simply just doesn't explain these, right? So the current paradigm that we're in, you know, when they look at this thing and they look at all these asymmetries, it's pretty puzzling there, right? That how does that come about?

So the best we've done so far is what David Albert, the philosopher David Albert, called the past hypothesis. I don't want to trivialize it too much, but the basic idea is this, that, okay, so obviously we see that there are asymmetries in the world, but if all our laws are time-symmetric invariant, then I guess there must have been some very special asymmetric initial condition at the Big Bang that gave rise to all this asymmetry. Not just that, the thing that boggles my mind is, right, we are seeing it isn't just that there are asymmetries, there are levels of explanation, right?

There are levels, there are law-like behaviors and consistent things that you can see at the level of human phenomena, at the level of life. There are these different levels, and the universe didn't have to be this way. The universe didn't have to make sense of having any law-like phenomena at the level of humans, at the level of life, or whatever.

It could have just been the laws of physics. So to me, it seems like not only is there this asymmetric initial condition, it has to be really fine-tuned in the way to give rise to these layers of where there is law-like behavior. Like there are these things that we can call laws, laws of economics, laws.

[00:32:31]  Sadia: When we study political science or all sorts of things that we do, there is some, we're working. And the sad part is there are many people who just say, oh, well, that's just a human construct. But even if it's a human construct, why is it that there are certain things that lead to certain outcomes, whereas others lead to quite different ones, such as a progressive society where we're making progress, we're coming up with all sorts of new things, and the other society where they might just destroy each other and just have a violent death or something like that.

So we can't ignore these things. We are part of the universe, and we require an explanation for ourselves. We have to tie it in to this problem.

[00:33:15]  Bruce: Yeah. Now, can I do an aside here for a second? Roger Penrose, in his books, he points out that the Big Bang, the past hypothesis, but going back in time, it must have been that there was, at one point, a singularity based on our current understanding of cosmology.

That's where the whole idea of the Big Bang comes from. But he points out that the universe is in a very improbable state in terms of entropy, that the universe started off in an incredibly low entropy state. It's still in an incredibly low entropy state.

[00:33:52]  Sadia: We're actually going to talk about this in a minute.

[00:33:56]  Bruce: Anyhow, I'll wait till you bring it up. But I found that really fascinating. It had never even occurred to me before reading Penrose, that that is the case, that the universe happens to be in a really low entropy state.

[00:34:07]  Sadia: That's one of the great things Penrose has done. I think he's really pointed this out. And now physicists are starting to pay attention.

So first going back to this whole idea, hopefully by now from our last episode, you might have gotten an appreciation that, you know how when we start, when we think about things evolving under static laws, that type of a dichotomy that we're making, that here's the system, here are the laws, that govern the behavior, is a little bit artificial. It's something that we do. All that's really happening is that there are systems and they're evolving, right?

But in some cases, there are systems where their evolution can be understood in terms of static laws, like that don't change over time, right? But that's not the case everywhere, as I'll kind of talk about this. But the physics deals with those type of systems where we've been able to do that, where we've been able to study systems where you can kind of make that dichotomy.

And then the other thing is a little bit about symmetries, right? So all these symmetries we're talking about, the time asymmetry, symmetries only make sense. Symmetry seems to be one of the things that has been almost like a driving force for a lot of progress in physics over the last hundred or so years.

When you look at high-energy particle physics, they're looking for more and more symmetry, more and more unifications in our understanding of the world. But the thing that most people don't realize, you have to think a little bit more cosmologically, right? Symmetries actually only make sense for the subsystems of the universe.

And let me explain to you what I mean by that. They seem to lose meaning for the universe as a whole. So for example, if I, symmetries are very much related to what we call, or the conservation laws we have, like the law of conservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum.

[00:36:04]  Sadia: They're very much related to this idea of symmetry. So let me just quickly explain that. So if you have a small system, and you assume that there is some sort of background of space, and you take that system, maybe you have an experimental setup, assuming that experimental setup is isolated from the rest of the world, so there aren't any [unclear word, transcribed as ‘outs’] acting on it.

If you take that system and put it, you know, a little bit to the left or right, or, you know, in other words, you're translating into space, you're moving it around in space, that should not affect the results of your experiment. So this is to do with homogeneity of space. Like, and obviously the emphasis is it's an isolated system.

So I'm not saying like if you take the system somewhere where gravity is stronger, then obviously you're going to see some, you know, effects of gravity. I'm saying isolated. So in other words, we're just assuming that we're moving it around in a background space.

All right. So for that symmetry, and that leads to the law of conservation of momentum. So the law of conservation of momentum is basically an expression of that, that the space is homogeneous.

Law of conservation of energy actually follows from an invariance under translations in time. So time is homogeneous. But again, to make sense of the symmetry, you're kind of assuming like a background time in which you're translating.

And then there's also the conservation of angular momentum, which is to do with isotropy of space, which means that there isn't a privileged direction in space. So your experiment shouldn’t really deter—[unfinished phrase]. So the directionality shouldn't make any difference. So all of these symmetries do assume, they only make sense when you talk about the subsystems, isolated subsystems of the universe.

[00:37:54]  Sadia: And no system is perfectly isolated, but still we can make sense of it. Now let's talk about the universe as a whole. I mean, I don't even know if that's something that we should be doing, but we should try to extend this picture and say, okay, if we talk about the universe as a whole, the universe is supposed to be the totality of everything that exists.

We're not assuming, again, being a relationalist, we're not assuming any outside, absolute or whatever type of space-time, right? Then that whole concept of symmetry starts to become meaningless for the whole universe. But interestingly, this whole idea of symmetry has been one of the biggest driving forces in physics.

That should tell us something. That should tell us the type of lens that we've been looking at the world through. Then when we take that view and we try to extend it to the whole universe and try to make some statements about the universe, we're bound to miss something out there.

If you look at the universe around us, we know we're missing out something. There are asymmetries in the world. Again, going back to this whole idea of laws of nature, as we discussed last time, these laws of nature are like these differential equations.

If you do an experiment and you have an initial setup, you look at that as some initial conditions, you put that differential equation, which could be written as a program. Take the initial conditions, put it in a program, and then you get some output that corresponds to some other state. So the output is logically implied by the input plus the program, right?

[00:39:31]  Bruce: Yes.

[00:39:32]  Sadia: This has led to kind of like that whole view, if you want to think about it even to the whole computational universe, to view the universe as kind of like computational.

[00:39:43]  Bruce: Yes. And is related to the concept of computational universality.

[00:39:49]  Sadia: Yes, exactly. But as we've noticed that there is so much outside of like these time-symmetric laws, which are just, you know, and we're also assuming that they remain the same throughout, you know, like they don't change over time. So if that was the case, yes, then this would be a really nice picture and, you know, and then we just keep working on this.

But there are these asymmetries of the world that are pushing us to understand, like pushing us, like, you know, we want to understand these. So in this current framework, it seems to me that there isn't really that much wiggle room. It's strictly, so when I say something is strictly deterministic, this is how I mean it from the physicist's viewpoint.

[00:40:34]  Sadia: So now that's your laws of physics. There are principles, as we discussed, like the, you know, sometimes we call it the law of conservation of energy, but it's more of a principle, which is more to do with what are the sort of things that are allowed or forbidden, and constructor theory kind of talks about that too. But those are different.

So now you know when I say something is a law of nature to a physicist, what that means. It's kind of like you have to think in terms of differential equations and what I just mentioned, basically. Any comments or any questions?

So basically, this whole way of viewing things has been so successful, and the success goes back all the way to the ancient astronomers, which were also astrologers, because they were predicting astronomical phenomena such as eclipses. They wanted to keep up with the seasons. So this whole paradigm has been so successful, and not to mention the success of general relativity, Einstein's theory.

I mean, our GPS, our phones, our modern technology is inconceivable without knowing those. So I think that is what strengthened this view and this particular worldview. We think that this is what the universe is all about, right?

That's why the physicist is so confident and proud that, look, we are the one who's given you the most successful theories in this world. The quantum mechanics, general relativity, and so guess what? We get to tell you what the world is like.

[00:42:00]  Bruce: So let me ask some questions around that. So from a certain point of view, I would agree with you. And putting it that way, it almost sounds inductive, right?

We've been so successful in the past using this approach of looking at static laws and regularities, that therefore that's why we think that's going to continue to be a successful approach. But I don't think you have to take it in an inductive way like that, even though people may intend it that way at times. You could almost say that this is a conjecture, right?

That we've got this sort of conjecture about reality that may or may not be true. But the conjecture is that there are regularities, that there are static laws. And that's been a very successful conjecture up to this point.

It's been highly corroborated by the fact that that's all the successful theories at this point. We've never actually needed dynamical laws to be able to solve any problems up to this point. Obviously, you're talking about a problem that may require it.

But based on that, you could look at that in a more Popperian way. You could think of it not as inductive, but you could think of it as that is our best theory at the moment. Thoughts on that?

[00:43:21]  Sadia: No, I totally agree with you. It's just that when something has been so successful, there comes a point sometimes people take certain elements of that framework or what I'm calling the paradigm as almost given to the point that most of your working physicists don't question that. They're more interested in working stuff out within that framework.

And I think that's gone on too long. And not just that, it has been pretty successful. And there is something to be said about it.

It has taught us about a certain aspect of reality, that there are these type of, you know, there are systems which can be studied in that way, where you can look at it as if there is some sort of a static law. But it fails miserably. It just fails miserably when you actually look at the overall asymmetry of the world.

So we have to be open to that. We have to, you know, for science to progress. The problem is, you know, when you're a working physicist, unfortunately, as much as, you know, people may want to look into it, you got to have a job, even as a physicist, you know, you got to earn your living from that, too.

And not just that, you want to publish and you want to maintain, you know, keep doing what you enjoy. And unfortunately, a lot of times you don't get that much, you know, when you venture out into ideas, which are so hard, like where you're literally looking at the entire framework and questioning. The chances of making progress start to go down because it's such a joint activity, like a lot more physicists were working on it.

[00:44:53]  Sadia: You know, then together the community could make a lot of progress just because the sheer numbers and people coming up with all sorts of different ideas. But it's really hard to do something like that. If, you know, I mean, you can come under ridicule by your department, wherever you're working, if you're a postdoc, you know, you may not get a job if you want to work on something.

[00:45:15]  Bruce: Do you know, I have to mention Kuhn here. I really enjoy Kuhn's book. I can't remember the title now, but about Scientific Revolutions.

[00:45:27]  Bruce: And I know that he's at odds with Popper. And insofar as he is at odds with Popper, he's wrong, in my opinion. He actually does make a few good points against Popper, but that's a different story.

But he makes so many valid points, right? I mean, like, you really can, even as a Popperian, learn a lot from Kuhn. And one of the things that Kuhn points out, and remember, this is quite a while ago now.

So this isn't merely a matter of big science has made it this way. But he points out the degree to which scientists just can't accept new ideas and really struggle with that. And he tries to explain everything in terms of that, which I think is a mistake.

[00:46:10]  Sadia: This is the sociology, right?

[00:46:11]  Bruce: Yeah. Well, science is a sociological phenomenon. He's not wrong about that, right?

All the prejudices that come out of any other sociological phenomenon that you have to deal with with human beings, those are all part of the scientific community. And they matter, right? They're an important part of the scientific community that you're not going to just overcome, right?

The thing that Kuhn gets wrong is that he therefore concludes that is all that matters, that reality in no way impinges upon what happens. And that's ridiculous.

[00:46:48]  Sadia: And the idea of how revolutions take place is kind of weird. It would almost sound like, you know, how Popper says that we should let our ideas die in our place? Kuhn's thing would be we should let the scientists die so that the idea dies with the scientists.

[00:47:05]  Bruce: Well, and again, he's not entirely wrong there. If you were to go back in time and look at what had happened up to that point, he's sort of right that scientists dying out was how we made scientific progress back in the early 20th century. I don't think, and that's still true today in some cases.

[00:47:23]  Sadia: I'm not sure about that.

Look at what Einstein did.

[00:47:27]  Bruce: Yes, and I agree. And so that's the problem, though, is that we've seen it become less and less of a problem. The standard model got accepted very quickly by the scientific community, right?

I mean, we're actually getting better at not waiting for the old scientists to die out. And I don't think it's ever been 100% true, but we're getting better at it. The acceptance of new ideas is starting to come faster.

Some things are still taking way too long. I personally think that it's taking way too long to accept many worlds interpretation, for example. But I think that the problem is, is that he's kind of assuming it's a static thing, that it will always be that way, just because in the past, it has sometimes been that way.

[00:48:12]  Sadia: I think the biggest mistake he makes is that he literally doesn't understand how knowledge is actually created. The biggest thing that Popper did was literally he shows how creation takes place. I mean, I'm just going to literally just call it how creation happens.

Yeah, I mean, it's in knowledge, but it's much more deeper than knowledge, I think, overall. You know, in the case of knowledge, we understand what are the elements that are varied. But then, you know, you look at a special case, not a special case, but you see that the evolutionary, the Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, as a matter of fact, I'm going to actually talk about that.

I think we need to push that idea and take it to a different level now. So I'm kind of getting back into Popper in a little bit.

[00:48:50]  Bruce: But I just have to throw that out because this is, you're right. We should accept that scientists are always going to be a little closed minded. Maybe not always, but up to this point, I've always been a little bit closed minded.

That they do have a hard time breaking out of the paradigms at times. And so you're right about that. And there are sociological reasons why people tend to be that way, you know, and there may even be good reasons why people tend to be that way.

[00:49:19]  Sadia: And there's a value in that too. Like if we forget about science in a minute and we think about society for a little bit, sometimes if you bring about a change really fast, that could actually destroy that platform which is giving us this opportunity to build the building. Right.

There's this fine type of it's kind of hard to know how to strike. I mean, I hate to use the word balance. Like, I don't know what else to say.

But to find that right place between the two things where we don't lose the platform on which we're building our building. So, yeah, so anyways.

[00:49:54]  Bruce: You know, Popper actually did come to, he says this in one of his books, he came to realize the value of being dogmatic, of having a dogmatic attitude. And I think that that can't be overlooked either. The fact that scientists are a bit dogmatic, that's not entirely bad, right?

There are some positives to that.

[00:50:17]  Sadia: Actually, I read what you wrote on that.

[00:50:21]  Bruce: I'm trying to find the actual quote so that I could read it. But yeah, he actually does say that. And clearly, when I wrote that on Facebook, I didn't have the quote handy.

So I went and looked it up later. But here's the actual quote, I'm pulling it up right now. He says, “I also later realized the opposite, the value of the dogmatic attitude.

Somebody had to defend a theory against criticism, or it would succumb too easily, and before it had been able to make its contributions to the growth of science.” There is value in having scientists hold too strongly, even dogmatically to their ideas, so that the idea stays alive long enough to find, so that we don't kill it before it's had a chance to survive criticism, right? And there's value in even having people defend ideas that will turn wrong, because you don't know which ideas are going to be right and which ones are going to be wrong.

So there is value in the fact that scientists are a bit dogmatic, and there's even value in the fact that they're dogmatic towards things that are too far outside the current paradigm, that they become suspicious of it. If you were to go look at how often do ideas come along that they reject, we kind of keep track of the ones that they reject that then turn out to be true. But you just forget about the ones that they reject that turn out to be false.

And there's probably a huge number of those that exist that we just don't have any memory of.

[00:51:53]  Sadia: Oh, yeah. I mean, I was actually today, I was talking to my husband. I was like, you know, isn't that interesting that if some idea, some crazy idea turns out to be true, we call this person a genius.

But if it doesn't, then they get to be known as a crackpot, right? I mean, yes, but before the genius and crackpot differentiation, you know, before one before we know what whether the person is a genius or crackpot, there is no way to know what it's going to turn out.

[00:52:20]  Bruce: You know, that's the way it is in economics, too. Right. If somebody has an idea for a business and they go off and they make a bunch of money, we consider them a genius, you know, with business.

But if they don't go off and they go off and they don't make a bunch of money, we don't say, well, they tried really hard. That was a good idea. It just didn't happen to work or something like that.

We tell them they're fools. Right. We say, wow, how did you lose all that money?

That's horrible. Horrifying. You know, you should have went and gotten a regular job.

So we kind of do the same thing for everything. I think. Right.

We determine things by based on the outcome. We don't really look at the fact that it's necessary for people to go out economically and try ideas and have them fail to have the economic system work.

[00:53:07]  Sadia: Yeah. But I think the problem is, even though I totally agree with you on the dogma part, the only thing is that the part where the new ideas come in, it seems to me that right as of now, I mean, there are some grants that are available, whether it's the Templeton Foundation, you know, which will fund you if you have an idea. The problem is that those of us who are kind of thinking about these deep problems, like, for example, you know, I'm interested in some of these problems, but I really don't feel like at any point I have something so concrete to offer that, you know, these things take time.

And then, you know, and then then there are those people who have the luxury of having that time, but some of us were tied up with our jobs and other things, you know, so it seems to me that there is that struggle for those of us who really do, you know, sometimes come up with those ideas because of not knowing whether you're going to be the genius or the crackpot. And most of the time, you know, it probably is the crackpot. But it's kind of like a hard fact of the way things work.

I mean, I don't know how else we could go around that. Unless maybe in the future, as we get the machines to do more and more of this stuff that we need to get done in our society, maybe we could give more time to the individuals overall for them to be whatever they want to be, you know, whatever they pursue, rather than having such a tight thing where we just have to work our nine to five or longer jobs. So yeah, so we need to flourish.

[00:54:38]  Bruce: This is this is an example of how economics does determine a lot of these things, right? It's the fact that we have to we have to survive. You know, I had someone on Twitter, some some lady on Twitter, she she said, I hate the fact that capitalism, you know, forces me to go and have to work a job instead of doing what I enjoy or something like that.

And I responded back and said, maybe not so much capitalism as entropy. But anyhow, it's, you know, it's there are things that we have to solve. We have multiple problems.

And sometimes you solve those by giving up your time, you know, just to go do the nine to five job.

[00:55:20]  Unidentified speaker: [Brief overlapping exchange unclear.]

[00:55:21]  Sadia: We need that platform too, right? On which we can keep building, so we have a need for people to be filling in all sorts of different niches to do that. But hopefully, maybe in the future, we could start to free up more time as we have already. I think in the olden days, if you look at, you know, farming communities and stuff, I mean, life was pretty tough back then.

So we do seem to have more free time, I think, than in the past. But hopefully, we'll improve on that.

[00:55:55]  Bruce: All right. That was a bit of an aside. Sorry for that.

That was kind of interesting discussion, though.

[00:56:01]  Sadia: I think it ties into my topic because I'm about to talk about creativity and not just human creativity. I think the universe itself has a creative expression like this. Again, I'm using anthropomorphic terms.

I don't want anybody to think that in any way I'm thinking there is some mind of the universe or anything like that. It's just that because right now I don't know how else to talk about it. So I'm using the terms that I'm familiar with, but hopefully I'll make it clear what I mean by that.

[00:56:32]  Sadia: So going back to this, again, talking about the systems where we've seen the progress for physics to progress, you know, I would make a differentiation. So there are some systems that I'll say are simple systems, and I'll try to make that distinction as to what I mean by simple versus complex systems. So simple systems are understood by simple rules or correlations.

But as systems get more complicated, then they can have, you know, some more complicated systems have parts which may be governed by different rules, okay, such as life, for example, an organism. You know, organism is made up of atoms and molecules. But at the same time, there are what people call, you know, some people call it the emergent level.

There are rules that govern, you know, like if an organism is trying to get food and what sort of things govern whether the organism survives or not, you know, that has nothing to do with the laws of physics. It's a different level of, you know, rules operating at a different level. So and then it seems like it becomes particularly problematic for, you know, right now I think there is a push or even if there isn't a push, a lot of there are people who are thinking as if these rules ought to be unified in some sort of one big rule.

So let me just tell you where this is coming from. This kind of goes into the whole idea of reductionism. So in physics, one of the things that I mentioned before that has worked beautifully is that we've been able to unify previously known phenomena, whether it was electric versus, you know, electric phenomena, magnetic.

And then we realized, well, it's actually like the two sides of the same coin. We called it electromagnetic. So that was one unification and then electric and weak, electroweak unification.

[00:58:26]  Sadia: So again, there has been a push and there's been a lot of success in going towards unifying previously. The phenomena that we thought were previously unrelated into a unified theory where a simple single rule explains, you know, those rules. So that type of a mindset has now taken physicists and not just physicists, people who would call themselves science lovers, to think that somehow, you know, there should be some sort of a unified way of thinking using maybe physics, or maybe there is some sort of an underlying rule that just governs the behavior of everything.

And then when you look at life or human creativity, those are looked upon as I talked, I think, in the first episode, that those are defined as emergent. So emergence would be pretty much same as when I said clocks emerge. So we're looking at these things that emerge.

But these rules aren't looked upon as fundamental. These are just kind of looked upon as, oh, it's kind of like we have building blocks of physics, which could be quantum fields or whatever. And we make, we start to build.

And then at a certain point, there is a level where now we've got something we recognize another layer of building blocks. And then using that, we build another layer. But really, it is all following through some sort of a strict determinism down to the level of physics.

The world is pretty much all based on where the physics is the most fundamental level. So quantum fields, for example, as of now, many would say is the most fundamental stuff of the world. And everything is just built up from that.

[01:00:11]  Sadia: The emergence is more often when we think that there are some new laws here. That's just an illusion from our point of view. It's really pretty much all.

In practice, it may—it's not reducible, but in principle, at least we have some sort of an idea that, oh, well, it all follows from physics.

[01:00:31]  Bruce: So let me talk about this just for a second. Reductionism, I sometimes don't know if when I think of that word, I'm thinking of the same concept that you're thinking of. But the way you just described it, that's pretty close to what I had in mind.

The issue here, though, is that we can even take what you just said and we can split it into two things, one of which is actually true and one of which isn't. So reductionism is the true side, is that it's been very successful to explain things by reducing them and to try to figure out what are the parts that make it up and can we explain it to those parts. And there's even something to be said about the idea that in principle, if not in practice, you could theoretically explain everything through reductionism, right?

But I'm not sure that that in any way really implies the second part of reductionism, which is not true, which is that in some way that means emergent phenomena are second class citizens. The most obvious example of this is computational universality, right? There's something really interesting there in computation universality, which allows you to talk about programs and logic without reference to any physics at all, because it's an emergent phenomenon.

You can literally talk about multiple different substrates that would produce a computer. That doesn't really mean reductionism in the first part is wrong, though. You probably could, in principle, explain a program by reducing it to the parts of the computer.

That wouldn't be a very efficient way to explain things, and you would lose something in the process, because emergent phenomena are just as real as physics, right? It doesn't seem like you have to have that extra philosophical baggage with reductionism. And when we talk about reductionism in a negative way, we're really referring to the extra philosophical baggage, the idea that emergent phenomena are second class citizens, when in fact they're not second class citizens.

They're something absolutely as important to explaining the world as physics is.

[01:02:49]  Sadia: So I would say that as long as you're sticking to the computational universality, you are still assuming that there are static laws. That's kind of like how I talked about the logic of the whole thing. Because if you weren't, then you would also be open to the fact that there might be certain things that may not fit in that type of a framework.

Then you would have an openness if you're really thinking that there might actually be, which the word I'm using is novel phenomena, which aren't in any way. I feel like computational universality does take kind of like almost like an underlying, unified type of view, even if we can't access it in any sort of way.

[01:03:33]  Bruce: You're right, it does.

[01:03:35]  Sadia: So it's more timeless, universal. And as I've shown you how the physics right now, as we do it, has led, rightly so, to the view that we live in a static, timeless reality. That all change in motion and everything is just illusory.

And we just need to explain that illusion. And but it's...

[01:03:56]  Bruce: And I guess that's the part I'm disagreeing with. I'm not disagreeing with the idea that the current implications of our current theories is that we live in a... That there's a way to view the universe as timeless.

It's really... I don't see time as... I don't see novelty as illusory.

I understand what you mean when you say that, but I think that that's in some ways making the emerging phenomena a second class citizen, and that's unnecessary.

[01:04:27]  Sadia: I don't see it as a second class, but I'll tell you why not. But at the same time, let me take you back to where I talked about non-locality. What if there is a layer of the world which operates in a non-local realm?

I don't know how else to put it. Like the non-locality is a feature at a certain level layer of the world. How would computational universality deal with it?

And what if all of that is playing some sort of a vital role in the evolution of the universe where the novelty arises, right? I think at that point, I would feel that computational universality would fail. Because I think computational universality, I may be mistaken on this.

I haven't really thought about this clearly, but I think is based on kind of locality would be an important aspect.

[01:05:17]  Bruce: Yes, I would think so too. So, and I agree with you, right? If we're talking about new laws of physics, computational universality is challenged, right?

I mean, it is based on our current understanding of the laws of physics.

[01:05:33]  Sadia: Basically, the paradigm that I've given you, that is what it's based on, right?

[01:05:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:05:38]  Sadia: But if that paradigm is, which I think there are good reasons to challenge it, then we don't know what we're in for. And I really don't know. At least my hope is that in this podcast, I will try to actually point out what the problem is.

And I think where the current paradigm is failing as even in doing science and what I feel like the science should be doing, if we hope to have something that is actually explaining and not merely going into some sort of almost like a religious type belief, which I feel like the current paradigm right now is kind of going in that direction. All right. So yeah, in the current paradigm, as I've kind of discussed that when I use the word emergence, I'm using it in the sense again that it's somehow, you know, as in the current paradigm, there is strict determinism, even though we are recognizing, oh, there are these higher level laws, you know, but there is something underneath it that assumes this type of a static type of a reality, timeless laws.

Okay. So in this view, I feel like what I'm about to describe, that there is no room for novelty, for newness, for surprise. There just isn't.

It's all pretty much, in a way, if you really took this paradigm seriously, as some have, like Julian Barbour, and I think Sean Carroll has kind of been thinking about it, and then there are people like Max Tegmark. When you start to really take this seriously and you dive down into the sort of metaphysical implication, you really arrive at the sort of reality, those multiverses, not just many worlds, but the sort of stuff that's been, I mean, yeah, some of those could be thrown out even on the base of bad explanations even within the current paradigm. But this idea of where anything that logic implies, it doesn't even have to have any consistency like could exist.

[01:07:30]  Sadia: There's a crazy type of multiverse, which is much bigger than this, or that we live in a timeless reality, which is basically a mathematical reality, right? Because this would go nicely with that, that maybe everything could be explained by some sort of a mathematical object, or even if there isn't an ultimate theory, that it would always be some mathematical things that underlie reality. In this case, math would rule the world rather than physics or physical reality.

[01:08:01]  Bruce: One math to rule the world? Yeah.

[01:08:04]  Sadia: So math would be the underlying, the reality of abstraction would be primary in a weird way, which is another topic I would love to get into that, actually, the difference.

[01:08:13]  Bruce: Yeah, that's like mind-blowing. I know what you're talking about. Max Tegmark talks about that.

[01:08:18]  Sadia: I mean, to me, when I look at the world, I always see physicality as always being prior to abstractions. Abstractions always require some sort of a physical substrate to be instantiated, right? So, I mean, one can make the case that, oh, well, isn't everything that is instantiating can also be thought of abstractly?

Yes, you can. But in this world, it seems like no matter what, if you do this exercise, you will always find physicality always coming before. So in this case, yeah, physicality to me always comes before the abstractions.

So having mentioned that, so what I would say that when I'm talking about emergence, so the way I would define the difference between the current paradigm and what I'm talking about would be a difference between the universe, where the current paradigm would see the universe as being. It's just being as it is. It's set, you know, whatever, whether it's for eternity, who knows, but it's all laid out, and somehow either our consciousness is maneuvering through it on who knows what, like, but it's set.

But the idea that I'm going to talk about is that I think the universe is actually becoming. We don't know what the universe's future is going to be, and the future is open, and it's in no way anywhere, like, there isn't any math that kind of somehow lays it out for us, which we're just uncovering, but it's genuinely becoming, and it's tied to this asymmetry in the world. So being versus becoming.

This isn't something new. People have talked about being and becoming. I've heard philosophers talk about it.

[01:10:02]  Sadia: Okay, so now one of the things that I've seen, why I've, one of the things that I've seen with the current paradigm is, I think the current paradigm has been pretty successful. And I think it has revealed to us something about the world, which will hopefully, which will, you know, a big part of it is going to be carried into the next paradigm. But I think we've reached a point where it's starting to lose its explanatory power.

Because, you know, we're trying to, we're extending this current paradigm into the domains where it wasn't originally designed. And not just that, it actually is failing miserably. This whole idea of all sorts of multiverses popping up, you know, mathematical universes, these are all these side effects that should, you know, there's a good reason to think that, the reason why, I feel like whenever some sort of theory starts to fail, kind of like how instrumentalism in quantum theory, when that failed, guess what happened?

All sorts of new age religions started to emerge, right? Sorry, new age spirituality. People were using quantum physics to tap into this reality.

All sorts of weird stuff came out.

[01:11:10]  Bruce: Well, that's a natural consequence of the lack of explanatory power, right? The fact that they're trying to not make quantum physics an explanation means that every explanation is equally viable.

[01:11:27]  Sadia: Exactly. But the thing is then, yeah, you could fill in those gaps. Those people were filling in the gaps with their own explanations, right?

Because the people who were actually seriously taking this theory should have actually done that themselves. They should have explained, they should have taken it seriously because they knew quantum theory better than anybody else. So I think that in this case, what we're seeing is that the physicists themselves are taking this kind of a paradigm, and actually what they're extrapolating now should actually reveal to us that how it's actually losing its explanatory power.

It's not even your lay people who are filling in their gaps. It's just that they are actually taking it to their logical, I guess, some sort of, you know, what sort of logical conclusions can they draw from it? And that should make us think that we need to do something.

So why do I say we're losing explanatory power? Because look, if I look around the universe, I see these asymmetries. If I'm trying to explain the world, it doesn't help that if somebody just gave me a past hypothesis that I have to live with, that there was this special initial condition.

It's not enough for me to know that, oh, well, anytime you discover, anytime humans come up with something new, or anytime life and life originated, all of these novelties that I'm calling novelties, well, they are in some way, we're already there, existing in a timeless realm, and we are just kind of somehow, it's almost like there was a landscape that was already there, that's always been there, and we are just the travelers through the landscape in some sort of way. To me, that is not very good of an explanation. What I expect is, a good explanation would be something that should open up new research programs into asking the question that, why is there asymmetry?

[01:13:13]  Sadia: We need to address the question of why, this whole thing of special initial conditions, we need to address that question, we need to ask these questions and not just kind of push them under the rug and keep going. So then the next question is, is there something that could actually explain, which is also testable, which could also lead to new research programs? And I think there is such a thing, and the conjecture being, which I'm kind of borrowing from Lee Smolin, it actually kind of occurred to me when I was thinking about Popper's theory and then I actually returned to Lee Smolin's work and all the stuff that I had ignored suddenly just lit up in my head, and I ended up reading his papers.

What occurred to me from Popper was Popper said that all life is problem-solving. And it occurred to me when I was thinking about this whole asymmetry issue and the initial conditions, and I was like, you know, what... And people have talked about it.

David Deutsch talked about it briefly, you know, that what we really need is an evolutionary theory. We, you know, an evolutionary... When I say we need that, is that if we have a theory of evolution, that it could explain all this kind of appearance of design that we see in this world, right?

Isn't that what happened in the theory of evolution, right? The Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution? All this appearance of design was explained through a theory, you know, which shows how systems evolve.

[01:14:37]  Bruce: So this is what Lee Smolin, this is what led him to come up with his... I know he doesn't really believe this anymore, but he came up with this kind of initial theory about the idea of universes evolving as a way of trying to explain the appearance of design of the universe itself, right? Just as we explain the appearance of design of biological organisms through evolution, he tried to have this idea of variation and selection of universes that would explain the appearance of design of the universe that we're in.

[01:15:13]  Sadia: That's right. And in that case, you would just have these universes come up with different laws and stuff, and then there is the selection criteria, which is based on the generation of black holes, not to go into get too sidetracked. But the recent idea that he's proposed is that he's actually looking at the world itself.

He's very much focused on the singular universe view, which I don't want to get into whether there is a multiverse or not. But the idea is that whether it's a multiverse or singular universe as what Smolin is going for the singular, that creation is an ongoing process. It isn't something that only happens when black holes arise and new universes pop out.

That it's actually the universe itself is a creative phenomenon. So new laws, you know, so you would think that he used the word laws are evolving, but then he also talks about when there are these some, that novel things come about. And I kind of started thinking along those lines, thinking about Popper's theory, because it occurred to me that, you know, maybe it's not just the life that is problem solving.

Maybe the universe is problem solving. And then it occurred to me that, okay, look, you know, life, human beings, you know, all sorts of, we see all sorts of novel phenomena, like, you know, I mean, one of the obvious ones being life and and then the emergence of humans with thought. You know, to keep thinking that somehow all that information, somehow all of that stuff was already there in this landscape that we're exploring, to me, that just doesn't explain things.

[01:16:52]  Sadia: So if I want to explain the world, I want to come up with a mechanism of how the universe generates it and then hope that I can actually test the idea in some shape or form. I think this is why I think Smolin's idea is interesting because I think it gives us hope to further progress science rather than just settle for some sort of metaphysical crazy idea where anytime we discover anything novel, which we might think, oh, emergence, then we're like, oh, well, we've just explored more of that same landscape, you know, which already exists. We just didn't know about it, you know.

And not just that, I think the asymmetry of the world really does push us. In that type of a direction. So what I'm going to say is that, you know, right now, the physics only deals with what we call effective approximate theories.

And that is, you know, very much compatible with a deterministic view, which has led to this whole idea of reductionism. And what we really need is a theory. When we extend it to cosmos to the entire universe, we need a theory that explains what we call that past hypothesis, special initial condition that we see in the current paradigm.

That problem vanishes away if you have an evolutionary theory. Because if the universe is an ongoing process, then we're not really relying on some very special fine-tuned initial condition to explain the richness of the world.

[01:18:18]  Bruce: I agree with that. I actually do believe that the universe has the appearance of design. I believe that we don't have an explanation for why that is.

Any current existing good explanation for why that is. And so I can completely understand why trying to explain it in terms of evolutionary theory, which is the only theory we have, for how something like appearance of design can come about, makes a great deal of sense.

[01:18:48]  Sadia: Yeah, because that allows for testability. So even in, like, theory of Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, we can't really test it in the sense that, okay, you know, in the sense of like, okay, like, you know, it's not like we could make some predictions of what the theory, what the evolution of the life would have led all the way, like, you know, with certain thing coming about. But I think there are other ways of testing that theory.

I mean, it is the best explanation we have. But at the same time, we know the mechanism, right? We know how it operates through the variation, on what elements does that variation and selection occurs.

In the case of life, we know that it's DNA, right?

[01:19:31]  Bruce: Although we didn't know that at the time.

[01:19:33]  Sadia: Yeah, exactly. We didn't know it at the time. So it isn't just the best explanation.

In a sense, it is kind of testable. Not in the sense that, so the testability isn't that, oh, you need to tell me what's going to evolve next out of a certain organism. That's not what I mean.

Testability is in the sense that do we have elements? Do we see mutations? Do we see, does all of that fit together?

And I think in the same way, the Smolin's Theory should also be testable. Because if there is novelty being generated, I mean, this is really preliminary, right? This idea and looking in this direction so preliminary that, you know, we're really, I feel like, scratching the surface right now.

Some of the things he suggested is that, look, as we push more and more towards creating more and more novel phenomena, like whether it's higher qubit states, and I'm also thinking myself that what if in condensed matter physics and some sort of a combination of condensed matter physics and quantum theory, like we sort of come up with some sort of new novel states, could we test the ideas of how the universe might be learning? Because right now, to me, the biggest puzzle is in my conjecture, or which is also the same as Smolin, that the universe is actually learning. We want to really, I think this is the time, I mean, it's always been an important question, but more so than ever before now, because of the different places where it's applicable, we need to ask the question, what is learning?

I listened to your podcast about machine learning, right? So you're asking those questions. We're asking the questions that what sort of things are required for something to learn?

[01:21:09]  Bruce: Yeah, right. It turns out it's not necessarily an easy question.

[01:21:15]  Sadia: Exactly. So in terms of life, right now we have a restricted view that is, to the random mutation of genes. But is it possible the life, excluding the humans for a second, that it's actually learning at different levels?

Because at least in humans, we know that we're learning at a different level too.

[01:21:30]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:21:32]  Sadia: Could it be that there are some other places? Kind of like one of your podcasts you mentioned, you talked about that or that little... Maybe you can explain that worm with the...

[01:21:43]  Bruce: Yes, the worm. So, yeah, let me just explain that. I have mentioned this in past podcasts, but people jump between podcasts, so I should make it a little bit self-contained.

So, Neo-Darwinian theory is based along, based around learning inside of genes in DNA. And then we accept the fact that humans are able to learn. We also accept the fact that animals can learn, although we think it's like really limited, you know, classical conditioning type things.

So these would be like three kinds of evolution that are widely understood and accepted. There's this idea, and I don't know if Donald Campbell came up with it. He's just the first one I read it about it from, where he talks about this hierarchy of evolution.

He's really suggesting that there's a lot more than just these three, right? That all throughout nature, there is ubiquitous learning algorithms that exist all over the place, that exist at many different levels that interact with each other. And then Levant, I can't remember the guy's name, but with the guy who discovered the worm where you can, he has the operating system that happens between the cells, and that it looked like there was learning at the level of the cells, so that they could communicate and they could figure out how to error correct where the eye is supposed to go as the tadpole turns into a frog, things like that, right?

This would be one of those levels, but they went on to that whole line of thought, and then the Nobles is another one that I've mentioned. They're suggesting that it's not a straight hierarchy like Campbell suggested that's top down, but there's actually interactions that happen between the levels that allow for an almost purposive evolution where one level determines how the other level is going to go about doing its evolution. And they gave the example of the immune system, which is actually a well-known example, so we know at least in that case, they're right.

[01:23:43]  Bruce: So there's a lot that we just don't know about evolution, and we probably are looking at it too narrowly. And then, of course, there's this Lee Smolin idea that the laws of physics themselves, sorry, that the universe itself has evolved based on the laws of physics. And you're actually doing one more level now, getting this from Smolin also, where the laws of physics themselves may be evolving.

[01:24:06]  Sadia: That is what Smolin is saying, actually. Yeah. So, I mean, I have taken that idea seriously, but kind of, you know, I started thinking about that actually after reading that Popper's thing and just thinking about some of the current issues.

But Smolin is, of course, saying the same thing. Yeah. But I think to the biggest right now, if you really ask me, thinking along this line, what really boggles my mind, where is the novelty creeping in from?

Right? I mean, you know, some people, again, if you're in the current paradigm, you might think of, you know, like, exploring the landscape of possibilities, where the possibilities are somehow like they are constrained. But the thing is, at any time, yes, the possibilities that life may explore are constrained.

But if you look at overall the history of life, all the way up to even humans, there is something, it seems to me that the landscape of possibilities is expanding. It's not a static thing. Again, we have to go away from this view.

So the question is, what leads to this expansion? There is some place, and honestly, I never thought I would think of this way. But I'm also wondering if even though I think in physics right now or in science in general, we're too fixated in law-like phenomena.

Somewhere there has to be something, there's some sort of, again, this is going to be really skeptical and I'm kind of skeptical. I'm really thinking about these things right now. Some lawless type thing, there is something lawless that's operating, maybe, in the universe.

[01:25:45]  Sadia: There is some openness to the universe and we don't understand how it's generating this novelty. We can't just simply ignore it and keep saying that every time something happens, that it just exists somehow in a timeless way and somehow, I think we really need to take this seriously. As a matter of fact, having taken the current paradigm seriously, I also want to point out why it's actually a bad explanation.

I'm going to point out a few failures. I don't think that's always a good way to make your own point to show the failures of the other, because everything somewhere has some errors, every viewpoint. But I think we should realize a little bit, we should take this current paradigm a little bit more seriously.

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