Donald Hoffman

speaker

2,139 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 26 Jun

Donald Hoffman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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And it's hard for us to understand what the limits are.

And in good cases, the math will come back and tell us what those limits are.

So for example, Einstein's theory of gravity together with quantum field theory tell us 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and space time is over.

It has no operational meaning.

Who could have guessed?

Could you have guessed?

Could Einstein have guessed?

Oh, yeah, I have an idea about space-time, but at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, it's going to fall apart.

Not even an Einstein could guess that.

That would only come through taking your ideas, making them, doing the travail.

I mean, Einstein really, it was a birthing process.

It was very, apparently, very, very hard.

to give birth to general relativity.

And many mathematicians working in physics and so forth say the same thing.

You're working in the dark, it's hard, you're struggling, and then all of a sudden, if you're lucky, you get that breakthrough and you see things.

But then it comes back and you learn the limits of the basic concepts that you started with.

And then you reboot from a new set of assumptions.

That's right.

And we've been shaped basically by our headset to think that way.

And if I ask you to imagine a new color that you've never seen before...

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