Sara Imari Walker

So the past is rolled up in the present.

Like I think that they're like the past structure exists in the present and the present is now constructing the next moment.

Right.

And so but the space like the future is expanding.

It's getting larger and larger and larger because there's so much combinatorial structure like all these past histories now entwined in the modern structure that they can now intertwine to make the future bigger and bigger.

Yeah.

So it's interesting you say that because most theories of physics are actually constructed with the observer living outside the universe.

So like Newton had this conception of, you know, like you could take a God's eye view, literal God's eye view of the universe and describe it objectively from the outside.

And all of our theories of physics have this problem.

This is why quantum mechanics is so existentially hard because it confronts us with the fact that like if you have a physics where the observer is not part of the physics, it leads to really like really big problems with how we structure theories of physics.

And this is why there's no one quantum theory.

There's a whole bunch of interpretations of physics.

quantum experiments, and people call those different theories of quantum mechanics.

But there's no accepted standard interpretation that people would point to and say, this is the theory of quantum mechanics.

There's interpretations.

And I think there's great theories.

It's great, amazing, insightful stuff.

But it's not quite on the same footing as general relativity, which is a widely accepted theory that describes a set of observations.

So, but it's because quantum mechanics has observers and people don't know how to interpret the observer.

And we don't have a physics that was built from starting from observers like us, things like us that are constructing theories of physics.