David Wallace
speaker
1,940 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Jul
David Wallace’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I I do physics, physics is nice and simple.
But you say to even other scientists, let alone lay people, uh that the physics isn't complicated and they look at you as if you've gone mad.
So yeah, that's probably my biggest example.
I think partly it's just the math is difficult.
Um I think partly because f just be precisely because physics is studying
quite simple systems, we've penetrated much more deeply into physics than really into any of the other sciences.
I mean our level of understanding of the systems physicists study
Is incredibly accurate and precise and comparatively complete compared to what any other science has managed.
Again, not because physicists are wonderful, though some of them are, but because the systems they're choosing are f are these easiest systems to study.
And if you think about how how good are we at doing detailed quantitative predictions of what humans do, and the answer is basically we're terrible.
We might we could make reasonable guesses that are better than chance.
That's perhaps the best you could say.
Uh how accurately can we measure the magnetic moment of the electron?
ten significant figures last time I checked.
So the very fact that these are systems where we our tools are more tractable than in the complexities of the life science or the social sciences mean
We've learned.
vastly more and that means that to go further from where we are now requires this kind of
very sophisticated mathematical technology.
You know, physics is ambitious in that sense.
It wants to make these
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