Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein's Unfinished Revolution | AI Podcast #79 with Lex Fridman

50 thoughts on “Lee Smolin: Quantum Gravity and Einstein's Unfinished Revolution | AI Podcast #79 with Lex Fridman”

1. I really enjoyed this conversation with Lee. Here's the outline:
   0:00 – Introduction
   3:03 – What is real?
   5:03 – Scientific method and scientific progress
   24:57 – Eric Weinstein and radical ideas in science
   29:32 – Quantum mechanics and general relativity
   47:24 – Sean Carroll and many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
   55:33 – Principles in science
   57:24 – String theory

2. Fascinating thx

3. local 41:15

4. What about the breakthroughs in thermodynamics that took place from the late-18th to the 19th centuries that enabled developments/ applications in chemistry, states of matter, and inventions such as the steam engine?

5. Smolin: 'Don't lie and report all your results, regardless of whether they agree or disagree with your hypothesis.' Well, this disqualifies 90% of published, NIH-funded life-science research…

6. Yo, I'm a scientist.

7. When he said there is no future. I tried to get some intuition for that statement . Please indulge me and point me to some other ways of seeing it. Is the "present" the place where the wave function collapses? Is the past then a continuous record of collapsed (and therefore causally related) events/states, and the future doesn't exist because it has not collapsed yet and is just a fuzz of probability?

   Then what collapses the wave function and what sets the probabilities?

   Obviously I'm just a layman trying to understand reality, it hurts to imagine these things.

8. This man is a CRANK

9. Get me on the podcast and I'll give you a quantifiable model of physics that will change your life forever.

   This is your only chance. I'll not offer it again.

10. Very interesting talk, but does he ever explain loop quantum gravity?

11. “…the theoretical physics community. This community has its respected academics,its naked emperors, it’s outcasts and its revolutionaries, it’s madmen and it’s dreamers.” — What a beautiful description!

12. great podcast

13. Why is time so heavily focused in a discussion of reality? Time is not real. If it was Einstein would not have gone with relativity. It is a perception by our very limited experience of what is real along some chaotic number paths (NOT strings ok) in space. You can benchmark reality with time all you guys want, but it is just another means by which our consciousnesses can make reference to movement in space. It's like stating that the markings on a ruler are fundamental components of existence. They are just bookmarks along the path of events. I feel like science acknowledges that time is not a crucial component of all this there will be significant progress made.

14. did he say a pure scientific method doesn't exist? if so, i agree with that. i think it is impossible to rid ourselves of the infinite assumptions that make up our gestalt. i do think that some scientists are pretty good at finding a lot of assumptions and developing relatively better tests, but ultimately it's like trying to stop breathing.

15. that's right action at a distance…entanglement seems to defy time…

16. Also please have a talk with John Seely Brown. I desperately want to hear him long-form exposition the World of Warcraft guild model for idea generation. I think society critically needs to hear that and the lessons derived from World of Warcraft. The symbols run deep.

17. 36:08 I believe "linger" is the word you were looking for there Lex

18. you really need to bring sir roger penrose in your podcast.

19. Physicist Paul Davies would be great!

20. Lex-it would be wonderful if you could get theoretical physicist Neil Turok on

21. Lex-please ask a theoretical physicist, such as Lee Smolin, more interesting and in-depth physics questions-so we can learn much more about physics

22. Lee is such a valuable influence to the physics community! ❤️

23. high quality as usual, thanks.

24. we want terence tao Lex, MAKE IT HAPPEN!!!!

25. This is a very good podcast in general. Lex raises the level of difficulty understanding the material, but still unwraps it into form for someone who wants to know more about a subject, but still lacks the technical understanding one would gain from studying the subject.

26. You are doing grate a lots of great jobs

27. Everything is alive. Systems within systems overlapping each other.

28. Yet another fascinating talk. Thank you for the great content!

29. Lex has a nice humility about him.

30. the reason nobody wanted wheels on luggage in the past was that you didn't have smoothly paved walkways everywhere until quite recently. Rolling luggage on mud, gravel or at best cobblestone is terrible. I do love Lee though!

31. Smolin's idea of evolution of universes was a big inspiration for my theory of entropy being literally evolution, with the two part process of natural selection being a contraction process of reality (space?) fitting together like neighboring puzzle pieces, and random mutation, the expansion process of those two puzzle pieces procreating an entirely new "baby" puzzle piece from the combination. Natural selection is what we observe as matter, and random mutation is what we observe as energy (change). If reality repeats this process in a family tree genealogy process that looks a bit like Pascal's triangle (but more dimensional in the detailed branches), or Quincunx/Galton Board, we end up with all possible patterns of matter and energy, for a complete puzzle of all possible realities. This is both the single universe as seen from all different perspectives, or just "the multiverse". (They are the same thing, essentially.)

32. I wish this was four times in long… in part because I feel like Lex repeatedly distracted him as soon as he started to flesh out a given idea by asking him to dig into some clarification, and that these ideas never got completed.

33. It'd be super nice if Lex can get to talk with Donald Hoffman!!

34. Part of realism is that humans (or life in general) have themselves added a new world, which really exists, on top of the other one: matter particles: waves. So when you refer to an underlying real world, what world are you talking about, when a new one emerged which could not have existed before?

35. I’m intently listening at the gun trying to understand what this incredible geek knows🤓

36. Awesome…

37. I don't believe it was necessarily an "a ha!" moment to put wheels on luggage but more just one of either laziness, or weak arms or just one of many many ideas that usually don't catch on (or didn't catch on in the past) that do catch on one day and that guy/gal is praised as a genius when it's really just an accident or a necessity for someone (or laziness). Even at one time that idea would of been ridiculed and therefore those that thought of it just didn't try it. I think it's too easy to look at someone who thought of something as a genius when it might of been simply a borrowed idea or an old idea.

38. As I watch this one morning it brings an old question in my mind. Something that I can only describe as crystilazation. Is there some force arriving from a quantum level. That sort of makes one point in space the same as that which is around it. Like if you had a ton of sticks on a plane all formed in the shape of a plus all about a foot long. If there is one set of sticks in the shape of a v that will snap to a plus given a big enough plane? I mean it may not work like that but I have always wondered if it happens and under what conditions it would occur.

39. 299K subscribers, 36K views, 1.2K likes. 😕

    Well, I for one thought it was a brilliant interview. I've been a fan of Lee Smolin for years, Lex is one of my favourite interviewers. What more could you ask for? Maybe people just want to watch you get stoned with Elon Musk.

40. Already looking forward to seeing the second appearance of Lee on your podcast. Great interview!

41. I like Lee Smolin, but I subscribed because the intro by Lex totally reminds me of Rod Serling.

42. Did he say Marx was a genius?

43. He has a really clear categorization of his beliefs, assumptions, and level of expertise. It is refreshing to hear statements like "I haven't studied that theory sufficiently to comment on it".

44. 650 miles for entanglement record done by the Chinese using a satellite

45. The luggage thing is awesome

46. Einstein asked deep questions but if you ask questions that are too deep you better get over to philosophy if you want a job.

47. Lex is the perfect AI podcaster. Joe Rogan regular, cool, actually teaches and works on AI.

48. This interview has explosive information in it.

49. Such a good discussion

50. Give us David Deutsch, please 🙂

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