Science

There goes my solution for Zeno’s paradox, which says before you can get all the way somewhere, you have to get halfway there. And before you can get halfway there, you have to get a quarter of the way there, and therefore, you’ll never get there. One way to get past that is to say even a series of infinite things can have a finite sum. More

You said that we went from atoms in the time of Democrates, down to nuclei, and from there to protons and neutrons, and then to quarks. It’s particles all the way down, to paraphrase Feynman. We can keep going forever. But it’s not quite forever, right? At some point you run into the Planck length. More

All knowledge is conjectural. It’s always being guessed. It’s our best understanding at any given time. You’re right to say that the axioms might be incorrect. How do we know that an axiom is incorrect? Traditionally the answer has been, “Because it’s clearly and obviously the case.” How can you prove that x plus zero must equal x?  You just have to accept that it’s true. More

If I compare math to physics: We have this domain called particle physics, and the deepest theory we have in particle physics is called the standard model. This describes all of the fundamental particles that exist and the interactions between them, the forces that exist between them, and the gauge bosons, which mediate the force between particles like electrons, protons and neutrons. More

There are two other scientific thinkers who I like who come to similar conclusions as Deutsch.  One is Nassim Taleb, who popularized the idea of the black swan, which is that no number of white swans disproves the existence of a black swan. You can never conclusively say all swans are white. More

Eddington’s experiment is an excellent example of what’s called a crucial test, which is sort of the pinnacle of what science is all about. If we do a test and it doesn’t agree with a particular theory that we have, that’s problematic. But that doesn’t mean that it refutes the theory. More

Brett, would you say that a scientific theory is a subset of a good explanation? Yes. They’re the testable kinds of good explanations. Falsifiable theories are actually a dime a dozen. This doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the explanation you’re being given. The example that’s used in The Fabric of Reality is the grass cure for the common cold. More

There’s a phrase you’ll hear Brett and I use over and over again: “good explanations.” Good explanations are Deutsch’s improvement upon the scientific method. At the same time, it’s beyond science. It’s not just true in science but in all of life. We navigate our way through life, and we do it successfully by creating good explanations. More

The value is in the knowledge, and the knowledge is inside the observer and the creator, in other words, a human. It’s not inside the thing itself. For example, oil is useless unless you know how to refine it, burn it, and use it for combustion. Information is useless unless there’s a brain there to receive it.  There could be a signal broadcasting English into outer space, but if there isn’t a creature capable of understanding what that language is, how it works, and who’s conveying it, then it’s just modulated electromagnetic frequencies that don’t mean anything. More

Stephen Hawking famously said, “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.” More