Sean Carroll

I mean given any –

universe, I can take the universe and I can sort of stop it at one moment of time and then just have complete random nonsense after that moment, right?

There's no reliability of what's going to happen from one moment to another if you don't have these laws of physics that are always obeyed.

That to me is sort of an interesting tension for people who are Humean about the laws of physics, like myself.

People who think that there's no separate ontological existence for laws of physics.

There's just the world that falls into the patterns that it falls into.

And then you can ask why.

Why are the patterns so rigidly enforced?

What is the enforcement mechanism, et cetera?

But anyway, I do think that there wouldn't be observers in most of the possible universes that we can think about.

Now, if you mean, would it still be useful for external observers, not in that universe, to use math to describe what goes on in the universe, then yes.

I mean, even if there's just random numbers, we use math to describe random numbers, right?

We have probability distributions, we calculate means, all sorts of things.

So I think that math is just very flexible.

It's something that would exist, would be useful in just about any circumstance.

It might be more or less useful depending on the circumstances, but it would definitely be there.

Chris Rogers says, occasionally I think about how complexity can arise as entropy increases.

As I was swirling milk into my coffee, it got me thinking.

What are your caffeine habits?

Are you a coffee or tea man, and how many cups a day?