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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
a better model Well, you're right that to some extent can you model something?
Can you construct a description of it that's predictively effective?
That's part of understanding, but I think it's not you you need to move beyond having
just a formal mathematical model, you won't be able to understand what the sort of bits in the mathematics mean.
But that's a slightly delicate game because you want to avoid saying what they mean is just their translation into our sort of everyday categories, because maybe strange things at the microscopic scale or the galactic scale don't translate very well into our ordinary categories.
So I think understanding in physics is a bit of a bootstrap process.
You
you kind of understand things initially sort of badly and partially in terms of metaphors and analogies with things you already understand.
And after a while you get enough practice in using those tools that you understand them in their own right.
And then you kind of go back and you reinterpret your
um your your ordinary understanding in terms of your sort of deeper grasp of what's going on.
But it's a it's a subtle question.
It's it's not it's not completely obvious and there are lots of controversies in philosophy of science as to just what explanation and understanding mean.
Uh well I don't know about no progress, but in terms of things I still find mysterious, uh I mean let me give you two that are connected.
Uh one is why do we
get interesting sort of large scale physics?
Why isn't everything like some atomic particle physics?
Why can we say stable things about fluids and solids and chairs and tables?
You know, why do we why why are there special sciences at all?
Why are there
Showing 401–420 of 1,940 · page 21 of 97
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