Alex O'Connor

speaker

2,073 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 25 May

Alex O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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On Purpose with Jay Shetty · Alex O’Connor: #1 Shift That Stops Endless Overthinking (FINALLY Get Unstuck) · 25 May 2026 podcast

This thing, gravity, which science will describe, but never explain why it's occurring.

And Feynman sort of comes back to magnets and says, so for now, it will have to be enough just to say that they are repelling each other.

And that's fair enough, but I think that's what's going on.

Science describes, like physics is the description of and the theory of...

physical matter and its relations.

It therefore presupposes the existence of matter and its relations.

One of the foundational questions I don't think science will answer is where that physical matter came from.

It seems plausible.

We say, look at the progress we've made.

We used to think that we couldn't explain biological complexity, but now we have.

We used to think that we couldn't explain why objects fall, but now we have.

I want to point out that firstly, what we've actually done is describe those processes.

But also, I think there's a categorical difference between explaining some kind of physical interaction at a deeper level and explaining the origin of physical matter and its interactions.

I don't think you will mathematically describe the origin of the stuff which the mathematical descriptions apply to.

Mm-hmm.

given what I've just said about what scientific laws are, are observations of stuff that happens in the universe and then mathematically describing how they regularly occur.

I've sometimes compared this, it's a bit of a crude analogy, but it gets across the point, to discovering a book of Shakespeare's sonnets.

If we came across a book of Shakespeare's sonnets and we didn't know what they were,

then we might start studying them.

And suppose that you were really, really smart and you said, okay, well, I've noticed that each of these letters comes in two kinds, there's a big one and a small one.

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