Jacob Barandes
speaker
7,673 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Jacob Barandes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
something like control, and I'm not sure that you can.
But I would actually even go farther.
You see, the laws of nature aren't all that you have.
The laws of nature need to be combined with initial conditions.
And I think there's not enough attention paid to the role the role of initial conditions and how we think about our best physical theories.
Without initial conditions, the laws don't tell you anything.
David Albert has this really lovely example in his book, After Physics.
He says there is absolutely nothing.
In the laws of Newtonian mechanics.
Good old Newtonian mechanics.
Nothing in the laws of Newtonian mechanics that would prevent a collection of rocks from spontaneously assembling into the a complete set of statuettes of the British Royal Family.
You might go, well, of course Newtonian mechanics doesn't allow that.
Really?
Well, if you started with a bunch of statuettes and drop them, they would shatter into lots of little rocks.
Newtonian mechanics is time reversible, so there exists a well-defined process in which a bunch of rocks assemble themselves into the statuettes.
Um
We think that's unlikely, but that's not a statement of the laws, it's a statement about the initial conditions.
We think the initial conditions of the universe were very generic in some way, very random or boring, uninteresting, typical in some way that would make it very unlikely they'd be precisely fine-tuned to give you this particular outcome.
But in a world in which
I sound like a movie director, in a world in which in a world in which the only laws are logic the microphysical laws are logically reversible.
Showing 741–760 of 7,673 · page 38 of 384
← Previous
Next →