Edward Frenkel

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2,304 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2023 last heard Apr 2023

Edward Frenkel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love · 10 Apr 2023 podcast

Turing was, Alan Turing, who is considered as the father of modern computing, right?

So he actually did something very similar.

So he had this halting problem.

that he proved that halting problem cannot be solved algorithmically.

That you cannot, out of all computer programs, roughly speaking, you cannot have an algorithm of choosing out of all possible computer programs, which ones are meaningful, which ones will halt.

Or, on the contrary, life-affirming.

Depends on your point of view.

So that means, so you're right, it's depressing if we are sold on a certain idea from the outset and then suddenly this doesn't pan out.

But okay, to which I retort, what if he proved that actually, you know, everything can be proved?

So then what?

What is left to do if you're a mathematician?

So that would be depressing to me.

And here there is an opportunity to do something new, to discover something new, which maybe a computer will not be able to.

Again, with a caveat, according to our current understanding, maybe some new technology, some new ideas will be brought into the subject.

And the meaning of the word computation, like now we think of computation in a particular framework, Turing machines or Church theses and stuff like that.

But what if in the future another genius like Alan Turing will come and propose something else?

The theory will evolve the way we went from Newton's gravity to Einstein's gravity.

Maybe in the framework of that concept, some other things will become possible.

To me, it's not so much about deciding once and for all how it is or how it should be, but accepting it as an open-ended process.

I think that's much more valuable in some sense than deciding things one way or another.

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