Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I mean, I think you're always on the edge of it, but I think what is amazing about being a scientist and trying to do things rigorously is it keeps your sanity. So I think if I wasn't a theoretical physicist, I would be probably not sane. But what it forces you to do is hold the fire, like you have to hold yourself to the fire of like,
these abstractions in my mind have to really correspond to reality. And I have to really test that all the time. And so I love building new abstractions and I love going to those like incredibly creative, you know, spaces that people don't see as part of the way that we understand the world now.
But ultimately I have to make sure that whatever I'm pulling from that space is something that's really usable and really like relates to the world outside of me. That's what science is.
Yeah. So the issue is we evolve perception to see reality a certain way, right? So for us, space is really important and time feels fleeting. And I had a really wonderful mentor, Paul Davies, most of my career. And Paul's amazing because he gives these like little seed thought experiments all the time.
Like, you know, something he used to ask me all the time was when I was a postdoc, this is kind of a random tangent, but was like, you know, how much of the universe could be converted into technology if you were thinking about like, you know, long-term futures and stuff like that. And it's like a weird thought experiment, but like there's a lot of deep things there.
And I do think a lot about the fact that We're really limited in our interactions with reality by the particular architectures that we evolved. And so we're not seeing everything. And in fact, our technology tells us this all the time because it allows us to see the world in new ways by basically allowing us to perceive the world in ways that we couldn't otherwise.
And so what I'm getting at with this is I think that living objects are actually huge. Like they're some of the biggest structures in the universe, but but they are not big in space, they are big in time. And we actually can't resolve that feature. We don't interact with it on a regular basis.
So we see them as these fleeting things that have this really short temporal clock time without seeing how large they are. When I'm saying time here, I really like the way that people could picture it is in terms of causal structure.
So if you think about the history of the universe to get to you and you imagine that that entire history is you, that is the picture I have in my mind when I look at every living thing.
Doesn't everyone?
Well, you know what the trick is? The reason they're hard to write is because it's compressing a very deep idea into a short amount of space. And I really like doing that intellectual exercise because I find it productive for me.
Yeah, I like language. I think it's really fun to play with.
I would like to try this, but I think I use language in certain ways that are non-canonical, and I do it very purposefully. And it would be interesting to me how AI would interpret it.
The universe is far larger in time than it is in space.
And this planet is one of the biggest things in the universe.
Technosphere. I think the modern technosphere is the largest object in time in the universe that we know about.
I mean the global integration of life and technology on this planet.
But I don't think of them as separate. They're like very integrated with the structure that generated them. So you can almost imagine it like time is constantly bifurcating and it's generating new structures. And these new structures are, you know, locally constructing the future.
And so things like you and I are very close together in time because we didn't diverge like very early in the history universe. It's very recent. And I think this is one of the reasons that we can understand each other so well and we can communicate effectively.
And I might have some sense of what it feels like to be you, but other organisms bifurcated from us in time earlier, this is just the concept of phylogeny, right? But if you take that deeper and you really think about that as the structure of the physics that generates life, and you take that very seriously, all of that causation is still bundled up Uh, yeah.
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