Sean Carroll

And I think over time, it's become the power, the responsibility to become more and more concentrated in the national level, in the larger level.

And I don't know if there's an inevitability to that.

That's a good physics of democracy kind of question.

Is there a reason why?

Is there an instability to an arrangement that starts off by giving equal amounts of responsibility to different levels?

Is there a sort of natural concentration of power?

After all, there's plenty of systems in the world that don't naturally take on scale-free or fractal geometries.

So maybe governance is like that.

And maybe that makes it less effective.

I can imagine an argument that says it would be more effective if things were more spread out.

But, you know, you can see kind of why it happens.

Like there are you have this idea, this utopian idea in the United States that states are the laboratories of democracy.

OK, so different states can try different things.

And if they're successful in other states can catch on.

And that's something that gives us more flexibility than if we just did everything at the national level.

But, of course, if you do that and every state is trying different things and then people do decide that something is better, they will often turn to the national level to say, OK, implement this and make sure everyone does it, whether they like it or not.

And sort of there's a natural tendency to sort of appeal to the highest level of authority and make it impose what you want to be imposed as widely as possible.

Again, that's not saying that's what it should be, but I think you can see why that would happen.

Stan Manilov says, you sometimes say that in black holes the singularity is not a place but a moment of time in the future, or that space and time switch roles inside a black hole.

Is there actual physics behind these statements, or are they just different ways of describing the fact that classical general relativity breaks down at the singularity?