Neil Gershenfeld
speaker
1,202 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2023
last heard May 2023
Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So physics is written in terms of partial differential equations.
That is an information technology from two centuries ago.
The equations of physics are not...
this will sound very strange to say, but the equations of physics, Schrodinger's equations and Maxwell's equations and all of them are not fundamental.
They're a representation of physics that was accessible to us in the era of having a pencil and a piece of paper.
They have a fundamental problem, which is if you make a dot on a piece of paper,
In traditional physics theory, there's infinite information in that dot.
A point has infinite information.
That can't be true because
information is a fundamental resource that's connected to energy.
And in fact, one of my favorite questions you can ask a cosmologist to trip them up is ask, is information a conserved quantity in the universe?
Was all the information created in the Big Bang or can the universe create information?
And I've yet to meet a cosmologist who doesn't stutter and
not clearly know how to handle that existential question.
But sort of putting that to a side, in physics theory, the way it's taught, information comes late.
You're taught about X, a variable, which can contain infinite information, but physically that's unrealistic.
And so physics theories have to find ways to cut that off.
So instead, there are a number of people
who start with a theory of the universe should start with information and computation as the fundamental resources that explain nature.
And then you build up from that to something that looks like throwing baseballs down a slope.
Showing 1041–1060 of 1,202 · page 53 of 61
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