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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
detailed, precise statements of what's going on.
Plus physics is alien.
I mean all of science is a bit alien.
Every science has places where you have to put aside intuitions you kind of learned in the ordinary world, but physics is further from the ordinary world than most of science.
you know, your instincts about e about living things.
will get you into trouble sometimes, but your instincts about quantum mechanical systems are almost useless.
Well, Simon's talking about the quantum measurement problem and the specific weirdnesses of quantum mechanics.
That's a whole other story.
Um and that, to be fair, is not irrelevant to why physics is weird and difficult.
Uh but I think if you if for the moment you think about something
separate from the measurement problem, though I'm sure we'll loop back to it, if you think out outside those specific weirdnesses of quantum mechanics, if you think how well do we understand, you know, the physics in the middle of the sum or the physics of wire
you know, a a beaker of helium four behaves like a superfluid at very low temperatures or something like that.
Those are things that we just understand really well.
And I I think Feynman would have agreed with that.
Okay, that's a really good question.
I mean sometimes to understand is to make intuitive, but I don't think that's a great model of e explanation and understanding
even elsewhere in the sciences.
I mean you can you can get your head round Darwinian natural selection, but I'm not sure you ever find it intuitive.
It sort of relies on ideas about space and time and timescales and things that human intuitions don't connect with well.
So I think
Showing 381–400 of 1,940 · page 20 of 97
← Previous
Next →