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
Let me really strongly object to the idea that because something's an approximation, we shouldn't rely on it conceptually.
I mean, everything's an approximation.
Natural selection is an approximation.
I still want to use it to explain adaptive complexity.
How do you think that goes?
I mean, that's not obvious to me.
If I take an isolated system, I put it in a box.
I idealize the box in certain respects.
I do quantum gravity inside the box and I look up the degree.
In some regimes, I get a big black hole and I get interesting quantum mechanical stuff on the surface of the black hole.
In other regimes, I'll get perturbations of flat space time and I can just do QFT.
I mean, that's the regime in which we recover low energy quantum gravity and quantum field theory from, well, as it were, string theory is the place where that's been most concretely successful.
I mean, I wouldn't faintly want to suggest that's the end of the story.
I'm just not sure why the cosmological versus non-cosmological and strong gravity versus non-strong gravity bits don't commute together.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, I can believe that.
That might depend a bit on how much of the relationism you're using.
And I suppose I'm just concerned that we do...
In some ways, I'm reiterating my sort of general complacency move here that we do seem to have models of isolated systems.
And we do actually seem to make quite a lot of progress in getting out low energy from high energy, even while recognizing that the cosmological situation is still much more opaque.
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