Lee Cronin
speaker
545 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Jun 2024
Lee Cronin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It produced that.
And that I think is like completely amazing. And then that should allow people on Earth to think about, well, probably we should try and get causal chains off Earth onto Mars, onto the moon, wherever. Yeah. Whether it's human life or Martian life that we create, it doesn't matter. But I think this commentorial space tells us something very important about the universe.
I realized in assembly theory that the universe is too big to contain itself. And I think this is, and I'm coming back and I want to, I want to kind of change your mind about time. Cause I'm, I'm guessing that your time is just a coordinate.
So I'm going to, I'm going to change them. I'm guessing you're one of those. I'm going to change your mind in real time, or at least attempt.
But you can just add an arrow of time onto it, right?
Or erase it a bit. And the argument that I think is really most interesting is people say the initial conditions specify the future of the universe. Okay, fine. Let's say that's the case for a moment. Now let's go back to Newtonian mechanics. Now, the uncertainty principle in Newtonian mechanics is this.
If I give you the coordinates of an object moving in space and the coordinates of another object and they collide in space, and you know those initial conditions, you should know exactly what's going to happen. However... you cannot specify these coordinates to infinite precision. Now everyone said, you know, oh, this is kind of like, you know, the chaos theory argument.
No, no, it's deeper than that. Here's a problem with numbers. This is where Hilbert and Brouwer fell out. To have the coordinates of this object, a given object, as they're colliding, you have to have them to infinite precision. That's what Hilbert says. He says, no problem, infinite precision is fine. Let's just take that for granted. But when the object...
It's finite and it can't store its own coordinates. What do you do? So in principle, if a finite object cannot be specified to infinite precision, in principle, the initial conditions don't apply. Well, how do you know it can't store its... Well, how do you store an infinitely long number in a finite size? Well...
No, no.
Well, let's take the object. Let's say the object is a golf ball. Golf ball is a few centimeters in diameter. We can work out how many atoms are on the golf ball. And let's say we can store numbers down to atomic dislocations. So we can work out how many atoms there are in the golf ball, and we can store the coordinates in that golf ball down to that number. But beyond that, we can't.
Let's make the golf ball smaller. And this is where I think that we think that we get randomness in quantum mechanics. And some people say, you can't get randomness in quantum mechanics to be deterministic. But aha, this is where we realize that classical mechanics and quantum mechanics suffer from the same uncertainty principle.
And that is the inability to specify the initial conditions to a precise enough degree to give you determinism. The universe is intrinsically too big, and that's why time exists. It's non-deterministic. Looking back into the past, you can use logical arguments because you can say, was it true or false? You already know.
But the fact we are unable to predict the future with the precision is not evidence of lack of knowledge. It's evidence the universe is generating new things.
Statistically, but sure, I can say statistically what's going to happen, but then when they do happen, and you keep nesting it together, I mean, it goes almost back to, let's think about entropy in the universe. So how do we understand entropy change? Well, we could do the process. We can use the Agurdic hypothesis.
We can also have the counterfactuals, where we have all the different states, and we can even put that in the multiverse, right? But both those are kind of... They're non-physical. The multiverse kind of collapses back to the same problem about the precision. So all the... What you... If you accept you don't have to have true and false going forward into the future, the real numbers are real.
They're observables.
Do you believe or do you accept you have free will?
So then you have to believe that time is fundamental. I understand that's a statement you've made. Well, no, that we can logically follow, because if you don't have free will... So, like, if you're in a universe that has no time, the universe is deterministic. If it's deterministic, then you have no free will.
No, it logically follows. No, no, I don't disagree. I'm not saying any... I mean, it's deep and it's important. All I'm saying, and it's actually different to what I've said before, is that if you don't require Platonistic mathematics...
Showing 341–360 of 545 · page 18 of 28
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