CONTINUED 1:18:44: Jannis Funk In chapter 8 of The Biggest Ideas on general relativity, you suggest that all kinds of energy, including things like pressure and stress, contribute to the curvature of spacetime. After reluctantly wrapping my head around the fact that planets in orbit have negative potential energy, as do electrons in atoms, I found myself wondering if this negative potential energy does then also contribute a negative amount to the curvature of spacetime and thus effectively acts like the presence of some negative mass. 1:22:31 Jim Watson: For gravity waves, is it a wave in the sense of a harmonic oscillator, whereby there is some restorative force in the spacetime fabric (presumably to flatness) and abrupt perturbances of curvature cause transitory underdamped fluctuations with more and less curvature? Or is it more like an over-damped (or critically damped) oscillator, and the "wave" isn't from the restorative energy in the fabric itself, but rather the orbital motion of the mass making periodic changes to the curvature each orbit? 1:24:36:Rue Phillips What is your perspective on "Christian Nationalism" and its impact on US politics? Is it to be respected as an expression of American ideals, a credible threat to democracy, something else? Igor Vilotic: I've recently stumbled upon some conversations including Chomsky, in which he said that science currently recognizes only 2 concepts - determinacy and randomness - and does not go "beyond" that. The context was regarding human ability to grasp the world around, and about our (current) limits. Could you even grasp the possibility that there is anything that goes beyond determinacy and randomness or is this something you wouldn’t generally waste your time contemplating? 1:30:42 Humberto Nanni: I read the following in your book "The Big Picture": The máximum entropy a region of space can contain is higher when the vacuum energy is lower . May you please explain why it is so? 1:31:54 Tom B. Night: I write science fiction, and Mindscape is a constant source of inspiration. I'm working on a new novel and want to know what are the implications of recent advances in nuclear fusion for creating a pure fusion bomb, i.e. one that doesn't require a fission reaction to trigger the larger fusion reaction. 1:34:00 anonymous: In episode 219, with Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, you discussed the idea of spotlighting gaps in your knowledge base to stimulate curiosity and discovery. Asking the right question creates a vacuum that curious minds can't help but try to fill. Are there any lesser known historical examples you could share from physics or elsewhere? 1:35:50: Matt Grinder: The experiment where you send a single photon through a beamsplitter and half the waves go to one detector, and half go to another detector, seems to show that quantum waves cannot carry energy, since you get a full photon worth of energy at one detector, not half. Hence quantum waves must be only probability waves. 1:37:39 Andrew Goldstein: I’m reading Karen Bakker’s recent book, “The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.” Given your pursuit of physics and natural philosophy, and having read The Big Picture where you discuss at some length, consciousness and sentience, I am curious how you think the growing knowledge of animal and even plant communication might affect our understanding and definition of consciousness. 1:40:46 Sandra Stuckey I recently re-listened to Mindscape episode with David Wallace and noticed that you promised to record an extra discussion with him as a bonus for Patreons. Did that ever happen? I liked that episode a lot, so I'd love to hear the bonus. 😊 1:44:55 Douglas Long: When i was much younger I remember reading a book that discussed the two types of people in the world; competitive and cooperative. In a nutshell being the latter and being in a position to tangle with the former I added this to the back of my business card: There are two types of people in the world, competitive and cooperative. Competitive people push cooperative people until they become competitive. Therefore competitive people think all people are competitive. \ 1:45:47 Sean Corum: I’ve read in a few different popular science articles that say that while dark matter doesn’t clump in the modern cosmological era, back in the era of protogalaxies (at length scales of say 30 to 100 light years and at times of 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang) dark matter was much more clumped up and mixed in with ordinary matter. 1:46:50 Joshua Hiller: From my understanding there's ways to use General Relativity as an effective field theory with the standard model, and we haven't done any experiments that contradict what that would predict. Does that approach also make consistent predictions of what would happen with observing a tiny black hole evaporate into nothing? 1:48:45 Robert Ruxandrescu Suppose the Higgs field would turn off (go to zero value) - all the quarks that comprise protons and neutron would then have zero mass. Considering that zero mass particles travel necessarily at the speed of light, would all the protons and neutrons “explode”? 1:51:45 Polheim: When Malaysian Airlines 370 went missing, what accompanied my sadness was a sense of hope and mystery that it is still possible for something as large and well-monitored as an airliner to be lost on Earth. As a devotee of the age of polar exploration, I've aways wondered if something was lost from the human spirit once the poles were visited. The Space Race kicked off a world in which the remaining frontiers are predominantly, perhaps almost entirely, of the technological variety. That's not to say these feats are any less impressive or momentous, or to say that earlier explorers didn't exploit the technology of their day, but they strike me as fundamentally different. Do you have any thoughts on what might have been lost as a result of this transition? 1:53:33 Anonymous: There are many animals that follow sensible survival strategies because they do certain behaviors by instinct, and not because they're thinking things through and making plans. For example, bears hibernating, birds migrating, beavers building dams, and so on. Squirrels burying nuts, from a recent example on a podcast episode. 1:56:55 Jarrett Uriegas: As a lifelong San Antonio Spurs fan I was spoiled by many good years in the past, but now find my team actively trying to underperform and “tank” for a better chance to draft a generational talent. I was curious your feelings on tanking in sports and in general the morality of gaming systems and choosing shortcuts. I can’t help but feel this questions pertains to everyday life as well. Do we owe it to others sometimes to choose a harder path against our own self interests?

CONTINUED 2:03:33 Liam Emtom Apart from their epistemological role, science and philosophy have a psychological impact in our lives reinforcing our sense of optimism and wonderment. Do you ever see science this way in your daily life, e.g. do you listen to science podcasts outside your field of expertise after a long stressful day ? 2:04:55 Nalita S: What is the most mind blowing physics discovery that you lived through in your opinion ? What about one before you were born ? And why ? 2:07:23 FLYBACK: You and other quantum physicists talk often of particles being entangled with their “environment” while often referencing domains that are relative to our scale (ie. the scientist’s lab, etc). Is an atom also considered an electron’s “environment”? Do electrons within atoms necessarily become entangled with each other? Generally speaking, I am curious about the philosophical concept of “environment”, it’s boundaries and the effects of scale upon it 2:09:48 Francois Vachon: In the solo episode ‘Why is there something, rather than nothing ?’ you mention that the answer could simply be a brute fact that require no further explanation. Do you have any examples of other questions that can be answered with a similar brute fact explanation ? If possible one question that is more down-to-earth / less intimidating that the question of the existence of everything. 2:11:26 Siddhartha Since you mentioned having already answered many questions in all the AMAs you have done, I finished extracting the questions and answers for all AMAs (that have a transcript) into a table format for handy reference and searching 2:15:43 Euan Mackay I've started my PhD in theoretical biophysics this year and I'm attending my first conference soon (with a poster). As someone who has presumably been to a lot of physics conferences do you have any advice on getting the most out of it? 2:19:12 Keith: In theoretical neuroscience, I have recently had to become more familiar with renormalization groups and coarse-graining methods when investigating potential power law and criticality behavior in neural systems. 2:24:14 Lars Krüger: As far as I know, we can't get any information about the internal structure of a black hole. But why can't we draw conclusions about it by observing the exact shape of its event horizon? Shouldn't the event horizon have valleys and mountains due to the uneven distribution of matter inside? 2:26:17.7 SC: Dutch Cheese says, "A sociology and an economics professor in a discussion remarked that they didn't understand why people were smoking and why younger people took sometimes so much risk, while older people were so much more careful, but having much less life ahead of them. It was all simply not rational. But I just see it as behavior that could potentially lead to more offspring. 2:28:06 Moshe Feder Your discussion with Chiara Mingarelli in Mindscape 212 about using pulsars for detecting black holes got me thinking about the extreme frame dragging that a massive object spinning at 100 Hz or more must be doing and all the more so for any spinning black holes. 2:31:00 lothian53: When black holes collide, they give off a huge amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves. When this happens, does it affect the information contained in the black holes? Do the gravitational waves carry the information from inside the black holes? 2:32:41 Schleyer: I’ve come to believe that I am 99% nonsentient zombie. My only evidence of consciousness occurs when I am thinking about consciousness, which is not often. All I am is this brief instance of introspection occurring in this brain at this place and time. I will cease to exist in a moment when my mind’s attention wanders, and it’s back to zombie status. Do you think you are conscious when you are not thinking about being conscious? Is this even a meaningful question? 2:34:05 James Swift: What dish or meal that you prepare and cook yourselves at home do you feel gives the best return on investment? Investment meaning effort/time/cost or whatever you think is the most interesting definition of investment and return. 2:36:35 krathorlucca: In a recent podcast you brought up ‘the argument from evolution against moral realism/objectivism’. Is this something you believe in? To me this is just an argument that we need to do philosophy to create moral progress, rather than relying on our instincts. Just as we have to do science to create better theories of the physical world, rather than relying on our instincts. 2:39:20 James Mahoney PRIORITY QUESTION: I sent you a copy of my book, THE LOGIC OF SOCIAL SCIENCE (Princeton University Press) at your philosophy department address. I think you will like it. Did you receive it? If so, would you be able to glance through the beginning parts and let me know what you think? 2:40:50 Jeremy Dittman Your fascinating discussion with Johanna Hoffman on designing future cities and the strategy of employing a story-telling narrative space made me think about your previous MindScape guest Thi Nguyen and our human tendency to construct simple narratives that are false and ultimately unhelpful for understanding what’s going on. 2:43:40 Heikki Laukkanen: If consciousness is the ability to think of an internal self, and theory of mind is (more or less) the same but for other people, which do you think developed first? Our ability to attribute thoughts, desires and intentions to others, or to ourselves? 2:46:06 Rad Antonov: Is there a past guest you would like to write a paper with? What would it be about? 2:50:36: Steve Wood PRIORITY QUESTION: I’m genuinely curious about how you see your audience and what you honestly expect them to understand. I’ve been wrestling with this question since WAY back in ep 36 with David Albert. I fully accept that I may not be informed enough in many of the “physics” categories you discuss. But how many of us do you think are? Is the kind of conversation and the kind of abstraction going on in that Albert podcast meant to tease us? Baffle us? Motivate us to reboot our entire education? Or just impress us? What do you really expect to achieve with these discussions, beyond anything like social status-building? I don’t ask that to be rude. I just wonder who benefits? 2:52:15 Gregory Kusnick: Nikki Haley thinks we should have competency tests for older politicians. My feeling is that if we're going to have such tests, they should apply to everyone, not just the old. What do you think? 2:54:04 Nick Gall: I'm fascinated by the issue of how Hilbert Space is carved up into classical macroscopic objects (aka systems, entities) and environments, but I'm confused by the lack of any unified terminology. There seems to be so many different names for this issue in different contexts

Wow, thank you for posting these! 🙂

You dropped this 👑

You can follow his podcast through any podcast platform of your preference for a more convenient listening experience. And he has a patrion, if you want to support the podcast that way. For like a dolar a month you get to ask questions in these AMAs.

it wasn´t dicovered just now, it has been theoretically known for almost 100 years and obersavationally verified for almost 50. so i´m not sure what you´re talking about there

I’m with you on alot of these, I was corrected in 2004 about gravitational waves, that they hadn’t been discovered yet! I was like…. Are you sure?! Lol lo and behold 2013?

​​@Symmetrie Bruch I think what he most likely mean is that when he found out about Black hole he thought they could grow! now there's a difference between who knew about black hole and who didn't, like the people who proved they could grow they already had a knowledge about black hole they were studying it but this person didn't. When he first heard about it he must have thought about it like any other thing in the universe, hence a gut feeling not knowledge of actually what it is And it's doesn't matter if people had already proved it because he was completely unrelated to the topic until he discovered and the thought that they could grow was his own discovery.

I always envisioned it as if our universe initially fell into a blackhole. The speed of light is our acceleration inward. The expansion is the growth from feeding. Anyway, both ideas that tie in blackholes.

There is no obligation for every process to act in a way that maximizes its entropy. Instead, it's better to think in terms of minimizing free energy. For example consider the Helmholtz free energy H which is equal to U - TS where U is potential energy, T is temperature, and S is entropy. Processes will act to minimize free energy by EITHER minimizing U (by minimizing, say, hydrophobic interactions with water) or by maximizing entropy S. But maximizing entropy S becomes more important for minimizing H as the temperature of the system, T, gets higher. The result is that you have phase transitions as temperature increases, at low temperatures it's important to minimize U while at high temperatures it's important to maximize S. Hope that helps a bit

You wouldn’t know. That’s sort of why entanglement can’t be used as a communication method, sadly.

I think that's how things worked originally but the patrons voted to share the AMAs with the public. I could be misremembering though.

1. "Black hole complementarity" is only a hypothesis, a speculation. It has been proposed as an attempt to resolve the black hole information loss problem with not much success. It does not fit well both with quantum mechanics ( e.g. with the no cloning theorem) and with general Relativity and it has some absurd implications, like the infamous "firewall" issue. Some physicists still believe it, but others don't. 2.White holes are very improbable to exist, as they're (a) at odds with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, (b) unstable when surrounded by matter and (c) there's no physically conceivable process that could have created them in our universe.

Why not just look in an encyclopedia?

@Mark W I have been looking in physics textbooks, encyclopaedias and books in my own area of expertise -- mathematics -- for more years than I care to remember, but no one seems to have a clear or consistent definition of energy. If you know of one, don't, be shy, please share it.

@Jay x Oh dear, another numpty who blames me for the fact that physicists can't tell us what energy is: "You are trolling though and not serious? It would be like me telling you to show me thoughts, define them, and being mad they aren't actually visible inside a head. So, I am assuming this is a joke." (1) No, I am dead serious. (2) I deny thoughts are 'in the head', so I for one wouldn't ask such a stupid question. "Energy is an abstract thing like time or thoughts." So, everything is made of an abstraction, is it? "It is a unit of measurement that we use to explain interaction with particles. It doesn't comprise them." It's not a physical explanation if energy is an abstraction, and hence it has no place in physical theory. So, if energy is to has a role to play in physics it can't be an abstraction.

What I was saying is most physicists do not claim that everything is made of energy. I am not saying none do. Some believe everything equates down to energy, but those are the specific ones you need to ask.

Low effort comment is low effort

The branching would be more fundamental than regular general relativity. I ignore if the question even makes sense per se, but if it were to mean something, the possibility of it being faster than the speed of light wouldn't be as revolutionary.

what does that question even mean? are you imagining branches as tree branches that are made of matter and move through space?

@Tonio Kettner Well, regardless of how you picture it, it is a process. I assume that it having a change rate is not actually crazy.

@Tonio Kettner What? I shouldn't assume it has a change rate but it is actually fast? You do understand this makes no sense, right?

@Andres Dubon oops, i misstook this conversation with another with a climate change denier.

Do the waves at least move - go up and down?

@Agimaso Schandir noup

@Cpasa • To quote Galileo " E pur si muove"🤓

As far as I can tell, we are still looking on the seashore and have just noticed the ocean of truth. (See Issac Newton quote)

But the problem is that it definitely isn't as bad as it could be. Droughts man, droughts. Food needs water to grow, and people need water to drink. There is only so much arable land, what happens if climate change cuts off rainfall to a large portion of that land? Wars have been fought for things much less important than fresh water.

We set the snowfall total here in Boston within the last 5 years . But regardless the grift is going to continue .

""debate""

Yeeass, PLEASE! I keep saying that too. Lol

That seems like a big ask

Then you will cherry pick only what you like and not learn as much..

@Michael Steven i’m more than fine cherrypicking from somebody who is an Everettian, don’t worry about me.

I second this

unfortunately, the key distinction is vagueness. people tend to have an idea of a personal god, witth their own properties that they can "mold" to fit their worldviews. santa claus is too well defined

you guys are really impressionable when it comes to self proclaimed "contrarians"

Same

There have been shifts in seasons and monsoons, extreme events like too much rain in Europe and USA even as well as searing hit temperature in many of their places not known for it. So yes in India being as diverse and big as it is, we all do routinely make the comments he made

@Rajeev Gangal The IPCC disagrees.

Sean’s become a woke cultist unfortunately over the past few years. He uses his legit scientific credentials in one field for a completely unrelated field despite him knowing the dribble he spews is completely unscientific. Shame

@Roland Summers And you say this because your field of expertise is youTube trolling dribble?

@Roland Summers Better to be woke cultist than anti-woke sheep.

your comment makes exactly 0 sense

The problem is changing precipitation. Stronger, more frequent storms are bad, but the biggest problem that people just hand wave away is droughts. We already can't grow enough food to feed the world, and we're already running out of fresh water. Throw in some severe droughts, and suddenly food will double in price, and countries will start invading each other to get access to fresh water. Lake mead is already lower than it's ever been, and the droughts will only get worse.

I don't think that claim, that cats don't have self-consiousness, is at all equivalent or even similar to the claim that cats or animals are automatons.

@James C. That’s just a phrase. It doesn’t matter if he sees them as automatons. Cats and most high-functioning animals have self-consciousness and think of and are fully aware of their own desires and intentions. People who put humans on this weird high pedestal end up doing a lot of damage to animals-particularly to any pets they may have.

@Video-Game OST HQ Not to be annoying but could you link your source? I'd be interested to see.

How do bacteria see themselves?

@James C. he doesn’t have one. He is only making a guess and pretending that it’s a fact

And you can show the "first day" was longer then "24 hours"? A day on Earth? Jupiter? What did Darwin have to do with Big Bang theory?

You're saying the gods lacked a better word? Odd, considering Genesis does use the word 'years'. So, it seems like they knew what years were at the time...

have you considered the mere possibility of your 2000 year old book ot being right on 100%?

Billy Carson, a modern day Erich von Daeniken. Cute

if only there was a consensus about whether anthropogenic climate change is real...

Since Sean will not answer this question for technical reasons, I will try to channel him: "We don't know".

Sean literally has an earlier episode titled "Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing" within the offerings on this channel. It's really great, check it out.

1.That's certainly a very original question: I have heard it only several hundreds of thousand times before ( at least) ☺️. 2. "Why" do you think that *some* of the answers that you mentioned are goofy? 3. What counts as a non goofy answer to such a question ( that begins with a 'why')? 4. What is the definition of ' something ' and of ' nothing '?

@Dimitris Papadimitriou The problem I see here is a problem of object. The question who refer to an idealist object or idealist perspective will find goofy any answer considering a realistic object or a realistic perspective. An endless source of confusions and incomprehensions then occur when each part can just consider its own perspective. To be fair, it's a really hard topic to discuss properly. I mean when both camp exit the discussion with a positive learning experience.

​​​​@francis bélanger My fourth question ( about definitions) was not ironic or rhetoric. Defining "existence" is tricky and ambiguous, as it may has to do either with the Physical world or with the abstract " platonic" realm. Just consider the case of a Schwarzschild black hole in General Relativity. The spacelike singularity that lurks in the future of any infalling object/ observer means that after a finite amount of time an object inside the black hole horizon will be destroyed completely by the immense tidal forces. There's no proper time afterwards, no future, no physical existence. If you're familiar with Penrose diagrams, you already know that above the jagged line that represents the singularity in the diagram there is no spacetime, no "afterwards", there is nothing! For external observers, though, the world may have no end, both spatially and temporally.

you are stretching the parable to fit what you observe

I would like to remind one that science and religion are not the same in explanation, perhaps you could say they are both yearnings for explanation

explain the context please

To answer your question, look up the video "Why God is Not A Good Theory" by Sean Carroll.

@Aaron Hadley I am familiar with the thought of Sean, for about a decade now, he is clearly wrong on the existence of God, some of his arguments have more weight than others, sadly he can't come to the realization, that God reveals himself to those who diligently seek him, trying to prove anything as to origins, without God as the first presupposition will forever be flawed, period.

@Eric Day "clearly wrong" is clearly just your opinion. Which is fine, just don't try to make it seem objective. In any case, the video still answers your question, which was all I was attempting

@Aaron Hadley You know, how does a seemingly intelligent person look you in the eye, and say that they don't have a soul, or that all they are is their physical body, then when presented with evidence to the contrary, like nde or people clearly telling someone that they have been attacked by demonic spirits and the like, only to have these experiences chalked up to those people being crazy, or just misguided. Can you imagine spending your entire life saying there is no afterlife, only to realize, " oh shit I made a terrible mistake" seconds after you die. Remember it is the fool who says there is no God.

@Sean All anyone has to do is believe first, then it will be given, or shown, for lack of better term. And I get it that believers are not to get into screaming matches with, mockers .

yeah, buddy. nobody thought about accounting for fluctuations and looking at a general trend with statistical methods. silly climate scientists.

TARDIS

Sean got a little sloppy about anthropogenic climate change and the warm winter in Baltimore in the intro, and climate denyers went ballistic lol. He talks about it in the April AMA (and has a good laugh about it too) - he knows perfectly well that a warm winter is nothing more than a single data point and doesn't constitute proof (but the IPCC reports do).

You can see dislikes?

​@Agimaso Schandir Right?! Lol

​@Agimaso Schandir yes you can with extension

The motion of you pushing the stick would actually travel at the speed of sound through the stick. So it would take quite a long time for the bell to ring

What if the stick was long enough to reach the moon?

@Agimaso Schandir The stick is long enough to reach the moon.

@mrcleanisin On Quora there are similar questions, such as "Imagine a rigid rod between the earth and the moon. If it is pushed from the earth, will it be felt on the moon at the same time?"

@Agimaso Schandir I have seen those, but still no one has addressed my puzzle.

You missed one and included another that should not have been included

LOL!! Finally a question I understand!! 🙂

What about those that take it for their home?

@Agimaso Schandir Statistically insignificant 😉

What about those who leave the cart near the cart corral but not quite in there? Those who take their groceries in hand before leaving the cart at the exit? Those who not only put the cart back properly but also fix the other carts so they all fit nicely? The world is very rarely a binary system 😊

OK. Now what? 😬

Ok but Sean lives in Baltimore

It would have been kinda nice then? What about the other states?

If the coin had two faces on one side, and there was no other side

there is only one gender

What kind of materials?

@Agimaso Schandir, Quantum Foam called Virtual Particles or Quantum Fluctuations in Space. And Dark Matter.

"Allllrightythen"

that's not how it works.

@Tonio Kettner which part?

@brettofil grammar

Black holes are not made of matter

@Nick Wilcox if they have mass then they have to have matter.

It is how the change may be to radical for human society - even as we do not know it

Wow! So, how is it using 1950 free energy? You have been using it, right?

You say this as there is currently a race to fusion power

We have a larger sample size of climate

what does your sentence even mean?

The entire history of the Earth is not a small sample size

@Nick Wilcox We only have exact details of what is normal for the past 100 years out of billions.

possibly see "New riddle of induction"

Black holes do not exist as an object, so, yes, you're correct in saying black holes do not exist in that sense. A black hole is a region (point) in space. It is not an object.

@Nick Wilcox does it 'is' though?

AND?

@Kyle Adams idk, US needs them for military

@Tonio Kettner to fight space aliens, I don't think so! P.S. Isn't that what the Space Force is for?

@Kyle Adams do you have any clue what nasa does?

Why? You are accepting the fact that they are experts but nevertheless you shouldn't believe their expert opinion? How could you, a non expert, suggest that your opinion is "more" valid than an expert on the topic?

yes. instead trust experts, without quotation marks.

"expert"? His entire life is dedicated to this stuff. He is certainly an expert.

Just curious, what do you see the solution to this would be?

@Alan Glauber Still sounds like something that powerful entities could abuse or game - which I think we’re going to find is the case for every form of gov’t other than anarchy (in which case, it’s not abuse, “it’s a feature”). In any system where resources can be exchanged by entities (how’s that for generic?) the system will tend towards a distribution like what we see in wealth distribution nowadays. The only way around this is that wonderful process: “redistribution” or “wealth redistribution”. Income tax is a form of this, so the next time you hear someone complaining about the 1% or 0.1%, what they’re really complaining about is tax loopholes. I think anarchy could work if the intelligence of the average person was around 140 (relative to what we call 100 IQ today) - but it would be a much harsher world, no safety nets.

@Alan Glauber good job, you invented democracy

Its a datapoint. Skiing in the Alps is getting worse every winter. Not conclusive evidence on its own but part of an overwhelming set of evidence.