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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And so in that sense, the work on physics and computation
has many applications that we've been talking about, but more deeply, it's really getting at new ways to think about how the universe works.
And there are a number of things that are hard to do in traditional physics that make more sense when you start with information and computation as the root of physical theory.
Right.
That information is a resource.
You can't have infinite information in finite space.
Information propagates and interacts, and from there you erect the scaffolding of physics.
Now it happens, the words I just said look a lot like quantum field theories.
but there's an interesting way where instead of starting with different differential equations to get to quantum field theories and quantum field theories, you get to quantization.
If you start from computation information, you begin sort of quantized and you build up from there.
And so that's the sense in which absolutely I think about the universe as a computer.
The easy way to understand that is
just almost anything is computationally universal, but the deep way is it's a real fundamental way to understand how the universe works.
One important one is
if you look at junior faculty trying to get tenure at a place like MIT, the ones who try to figure out how to get tenure are miserable and don't get tenure.
And the ones who don't try to figure it out are happy and do get it.
I mean, you have to love what you're doing and believe in it and
nothing else could possibly be what you want to be doing with your life and it gets you out of bed in the morning.
And again, it sounds naive, but within like the limited domain I'm describing now of getting tenure at MIT, that's a key attribute to it.
And then same sense, if you take the sort of outliers students were talking about, 99 out of 100 come to me and say, your work is very fascinating.
Showing 1061–1080 of 1,202 · page 54 of 61
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