00:00:11.760 Welcome to Topcast, an episode two in the fabric of reality series. During which the preparation
00:00:18.080 thereof, I figured out we're going to need at least one more episode. So this is going to be a
00:00:22.880 three part series on chapter one, which is the theory of everything from the fabric of reality.
00:00:28.480 And today we're absolutely going to see all the ways in which the beginning of infinity
00:00:33.760 appears there in seed-like form in the fabric of reality. So two parts of the science of can
00:00:41.120 and can't, parts of constructive theory are absolutely here as well. So I'm part way through
00:00:47.280 after part one, I only got through a few pages. I'm only part way through the chapter right now.
00:00:53.200 And I'm on page seven for anyone who's reading along, right down the bottom of page seven.
00:00:57.360 We're David Wright's quote, to say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory
00:01:04.480 is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel.
00:01:11.520 In fact, burning fuel is only one of many things a spaceship has to do to accomplish its real
00:01:15.760 purpose, which is to transport its payload from one point in space to another. Parsi experimental
00:01:22.000 tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science,
00:01:28.320 which is to explain the world. As I have said, explanations are inevitably frame partly in terms
00:01:35.120 of things we do not observe directly, atoms and forces, the interiors of stars and the rotation
00:01:41.040 of galaxies, the past and the future, the laws of nature. The deeper an explanation is, the more
00:01:46.880 remote from immediate experience are the entities to which it must refer, but these entities are
00:01:52.240 not fictional on the contrary. They are part of the very fabric of reality, pausing there,
00:01:58.160 just reflecting on this. Today, I've made a couple of other podcasts as well and now I'll be coming
00:02:04.400 out, coincident with this within sort of a week or so. It takes that long to edit these things.
00:02:10.880 One is about quasars, and so I'm sure you can find that in the YouTube feed or in the podcast
00:02:15.360 feed somewhere or other, it's just called quasars. It's been talking about quasars, the history of
00:02:19.440 their discovery and the physics behind what causes them to do what they do. Almost everything of
00:02:26.000 interest there is unobserved. Almost everything of interest about what causes a quasar to do what a
00:02:33.040 quasar does. Much less to speak of, the history of quasar discovery is unobserved and also
00:02:43.200 released with this episode is a series on the Science of Canon Can't by Chiara Marletto. Again,
00:02:50.240 I was talking about this very same issue. It just comes up again and again, that the
00:02:56.960 main content of an explanation is the unseen parts of it. David just listed a few things there,
00:03:05.040 the things that we don't observe directly, atoms and forces, the interiors of stars and
00:03:09.040 rotations of galaxies to pass in the future, the laws of nature. In fact, not only not observed
00:03:13.920 directly, not observe at all, in the case of the core of stars. I was saying in another episode
00:03:20.960 that there's no possible way that we know of. It appears to be impossible to observe the
00:03:26.480 core of a star directly or at all. You can't send a probe there. There's no way in which you could
00:03:33.920 get to the center of the star. It's optically opaque anyway, so you can't get radiation through
00:03:42.480 there. I suppose in some distant future, theoretically, some sort of hugely sensitive gravity
00:03:48.480 meter or some other kind of device beyond which we have no conception right now,
00:03:54.800 might be able to image the center of a star, but at the moment, no chance, no chance. What
00:03:59.840 about going on there is going on at 15 million Kelvin. Nothing can survive 15 million Kelvin,
00:04:05.360 and very little information survives at 15 million Kelvin. The only way we have to figure out what's
00:04:11.600 going on there is to observe the photons that arrive at Earth, and we can see some of the surface
00:04:16.880 of the Sun and infer, therefore, what the explanation that produces the effects that we do observe
00:04:24.640 must be. What the causes of the effects that we do observe must be. Namely, stellar fusion,
00:04:32.480 fusion in the core of the Sun, the combining of hydrogen nuclei to form helium, and in the process
00:04:38.640 producing heat and light. Thinking of history, we observe documents, don't we? We observe
00:04:47.440 newspaper clippings, and these days, of course, video records, but we don't observe right now
00:04:53.200 as a matter of our experience, our immediate experience here and now. We don't observe the past,
00:04:58.240 and so when I talked about the history of quasars in that episode, I don't observe those particular
00:05:05.840 physicists that were involved in creating the knowledge about quasars, discovering the problem
00:05:10.800 to begin with, and then slowly resolving the problem with this theory of quasars. All I've got
00:05:16.960 access to is documents, articles, online, and textbooks and so on, but that's hardly observing the
00:05:23.840 past directly. It's not observing the past at all, it's observing documents, interpreting them,
00:05:29.920 and then constructing an explanation. A historical explanation about how it is that this theory
00:05:35.840 arose all in the first place, interested in that, just look for the quasars episode.
00:05:41.280 Okay, so I'm skipping there because David is distinguishing between the importance of explanations
00:05:48.320 and how in physics we do have the capacity to make certain kinds of predictions, but that is hardly
00:05:54.320 the main point of a scientific theory. But this is a point of belay, but often in the various
00:06:01.120 podcasts I've made. So I won't do it again here now more than I've already done, so I'm skipping to
00:06:06.000 the part where David says, quote, most people would say, and this is in effect what was being said
00:06:11.440 to me on the occasional record from my childhood, that it is not only recorded facts which have been
00:06:16.560 increasing at an overwhelming rate, but also the number and complexity of theories through which
00:06:21.520 we understand the world. Consequently, they say, whether or not it was ever possible for one person
00:06:27.280 to understand everything that was understood at the time, it is certainly not possible now,
00:06:32.080 and it is becoming less and less possible as our knowledge grows. It might seem that every time
00:06:36.640 a new explanation or technique is discovered that is relevant to a given subject, another theory must
00:06:41.840 be added to the list that anyone wishing to understand that subject must learn, and that when the
00:06:46.880 number of such theories and anyone subject becomes too great, specializations develop. Physics,
00:06:52.080 for example, has split into the sciences of astrophysics, thermodynamics, particle physics,
00:06:57.040 quantum field theory, and many others. Each of these is based on a theoretical framework
00:07:01.600 at least as rich as the whole of physics was 100 years ago, and many are already fragmenting into
00:07:06.720 subspecializations. The more we discover it seems, the further and more irrevocably we are
00:07:12.640 propelled into the age of the specialist, and the more remote is that hypothetical ancient time,
00:07:17.440 when a single person's standing might have encompassed all that was understood,
00:07:20.960 confronted with this vast and rapidly growing menu of the collected theories of the human race,
00:07:25.680 one may be forgiven for doubting that an individual could so much just taste every
00:07:29.680 additional lifetime that alone, as might once have been possible, appreciate all known recipes.
00:07:35.840 Yet explanation is a strange sort of food, a large proportion is not necessarily harder to swallow,
00:07:41.440 a theory may be superseded by a new theory, which explains more, and is more accurate,
00:07:46.640 but is also easier to understand, in which case the old theory becomes redundant,
00:07:51.280 and we gain more understanding while needing to learn less than before. This is what happened when
00:07:56.080 Nicholas Copernicus's theory of the Earth traveling around the Sun superseded the complex
00:08:00.960 telemax system, which had placed the Earth at the center of the universe, or a new theory
00:08:05.680 may be a simplification of an existing one, such as when the Arabic decimal notation for numbers
00:08:10.560 superseded Roman numerals, the theory here is an implicit one, each notation renders certain
00:08:15.920 operations, statements and thoughts of that numbers simpler than others, and hence it embodies
00:08:20.720 a theory about which relationships between numbers are useful or interesting, or a theory may be
00:08:26.880 a unification of two old ones, giving us more understanding than using the old ones side by side,
00:08:32.160 as happened when Michael Faraday and James Clark Maxwell unified the theories of electricity
00:08:37.200 and magnetism into a single theory of electromagnetism, more indirectly better explanations in any
00:08:43.280 subject, tend to improve the techniques, concepts and language with which we are trying to understand
00:08:48.960 other subjects, and so our knowledge as a whole while increasing can become structurally
00:08:53.920 more amenable to being understood, pausing there, and just skipping a very substantial piece
00:09:00.240 on the Roman numeral system and its redundancy in the light of a better idea, namely Arabic numerals,
00:09:08.240 and then we get into a section which really preface so much that is in the beginning of infinity,
00:09:14.880 and motivates the underlying worldview of David Deutsch and is kind of an
00:09:21.280 improvement upon the work of Karl Popper, a sharpening up of what Karl Popper said. Here it is,
00:09:29.920 quote David says, it is hard to give a precise definition of explanation or understanding,
00:09:38.560 roughly speaking there about why, rather than what, about the inner workings of things,
00:09:44.160 about how things really are, not just how they appear to be, about what must be so,
00:09:49.200 rather than what merely appears to be so, about laws of nature, rather than rules of thumb,
00:09:53.680 just pausing there. It's also hard and this I get straight from David Deutsch,
00:09:58.640 and I don't know if it's mentioned here in the fabric of reality, I don't recall it being mentioned
00:10:02.880 in the fabric of reality, but one reason why we cannot give a precise definition of what an explanation
00:10:12.160 is, and why we cannot give a precise definition of what hard to very means. David Deutsch has
00:10:20.080 given us the idea that what we're seeking in knowledge creation are good explanations,
00:10:26.480 and by good he means hard to vary, and people say, oh what's hard to vary, and he tries to give
00:10:31.440 an explanation of what hard to vary is, namely that all the parts of the explanation
00:10:35.440 so they purpose, such that none of them are arbitrary, and if you were to try and change any one of them,
00:10:42.560 you would break the explanation, and that's my understanding of hard to vary more or less.
00:10:48.400 And then people object and they want to say well, but that's not definitive. There are options
00:10:54.560 here, there's a certain looseness, there's a certain hazy character to these definitions,
00:10:59.520 and one wants to say, in the Papurian view, absolutely there is, absolutely there is, we're not
00:11:06.240 going to get hung up on definitions, we're not Wittgensteinian, okay, Ludwig Wittgenstein infected
00:11:11.440 philosophy with the notion that we should argue about words and terminology, we need to sharpen
00:11:15.760 up our understanding of words and terminology, and if we don't, then we're not doing proper philosophy,
00:11:21.200 this is wrong, this is false, what we're trying to do in philosophy, on Karl Popper's view,
00:11:27.440 on the Papurian view, and now us who inherit the Papurian view, is to solve problems,
00:11:33.680 problems in philosophy. Namely, things like, what are we after when we're trying to create
00:11:39.520 trying to create knowledge, we're after explanations, we're after trying to explain the world,
00:11:43.440 what's an explanation? Well, you know, it's an account of why rather than what, it's an account of
00:11:49.040 what is really out there, how things, not just how things appear to be, but what must be so,
00:11:55.680 this kind of thing, but that's not a strict definition, no, and one reason why, an important reason
00:12:02.240 why we can't sharpen this up, is because we have to allow for new modes of explanation,
00:12:08.400 we have to allow our definition, so to speak, our understanding of explanation, to be sufficiently
00:12:14.080 elastic, to allow for new kinds of explanation to be invented in the future. They didn't
00:12:19.920 used to be a mode of explanation called the Darwinian understanding of evolution by natural selection,
00:12:26.640 evolution by natural selection, this way in which genes can be selected for us, selected against
00:12:33.920 the selfish gene ideas, new mode of explanation, nothing like that existed before, but if you tried
00:12:37.840 to say that explanations could only consist of, let's say, as I've been talking about in physics
00:12:43.920 recently, and Kiaramaa Leto's book, that if the only explanation that's permitted is an explanation
00:12:50.560 terms of dynamical laws and initial conditions, then that would also rule out something like
00:12:57.600 evolution by natural selection, which is not of that kind, it's not an explanation of that kind,
00:13:03.120 much less all of constructive theory, we need to allow for explanations that don't necessarily
00:13:10.080 comport with our conception of explanations right now. Okay, so the best that we can do is to give
00:13:15.920 broad brushstrokes about what explanations are. We know it when we see it to a large extent,
00:13:22.000 an explanation is an account of what exists out there, how it works, why it works, and all that
00:13:29.200 kind of stuff, but we can't be too sharp about it. In fact, this is true, I should just say,
00:13:35.760 as a by the by, for any area of science or philosophical interests, we're not after definitions.
00:13:43.520 If you're after definitions, pick up a dictionary, read the dictionary definition,
00:13:47.760 and if you think that gives you a deep understanding of the phenomena you're interested in,
00:13:51.920 good luck. But the rest of us who are interested in actually
00:13:56.080 are comprehending the world in which we find ourselves using the best explanations that have thus
00:14:01.840 far been found. We want more than just definitions. And so, for example, when people get caught up
00:14:08.480 on let's say, well, tell me what an electron really is? Well, we can give you an
00:14:13.760 under-best understanding we have right now, but a definition of an electron, like learning it,
00:14:17.760 like supposedly, you know, a good student in high school does or something or other, we write
00:14:21.920 down your glossary at the back of your science book, and you write down the definitions of
00:14:25.200 words so that you can regurgitate them during a test, sounds have orange, and in fact, it's
00:14:29.760 anti-prepirian, of course, like I'm saying. We want an understanding. What's our best understanding
00:14:33.600 of electrons right now? Well, they're particles and they exist in multiple universes,
00:14:38.400 their excitations of the quantum field to some extent. There's these ways of conceptualizing
00:14:44.640 what an electron is to give us an image, both mathematical and visual of what these objects
00:14:50.160 called electrons happen to be. That solves our problem. That solves our problem of what
00:14:54.320 our understanding of electrons is, what they are, what these objects are. Doesn't mean it's a final
00:15:00.960 definitive forever definition of an electron. No, absolutely not. And there can be no such definition.
00:15:08.160 So forget definitions. We should also say, beyond things like that, something like a more controversial
00:15:15.120 concept like free will, people get caught up in defining what free will is, and this is a perfect
00:15:22.560 way for it to go off the rails. And so recently when people talk about free will, they'll say,
00:15:30.080 well, what you have to find as free will isn't free will, and there's no point in trying to talk
00:15:34.880 about something that isn't what everyone else regards as guards free will is being. And I just
00:15:39.760 think to myself, well, just because everyone else defines free will in this particular way, just
00:15:43.520 because the dictionary does, has no bearing whatsoever on the true nature of free will. In the same
00:15:48.960 way, the overwhelming majority of people, if asked to define what a species is, will get it wrong,
00:15:54.000 that has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on our best understanding of what a species is,
00:15:58.240 or what an electron is, most people would get it wrong, okay, would be, would deviate from
00:16:02.800 our best understanding of that. And when we encounter a problem with a concept like let's say free
00:16:09.040 will, which is useful, because it's useful in trying to understand what a person is, that a person
00:16:15.440 can generate explanations, can create explanations. Those explanations allow for a greater repertoire
00:16:21.520 of choices to exist, choices that didn't exist before. Namely, if you create an explanation like
00:16:27.520 general relativity, it gives you a choice at some point in the future, which you could never have
00:16:31.200 possibly had before it. Namely, the existence of a really precise GPS system. So that choice now
00:16:36.720 exists, that choice took build or not to build that thing. You can build it or not build it. That's
00:16:41.760 free will. It's a very hard to avoid this word. But if people insist on saying, well, free will
00:16:45.280 is that supernatural thing that you can't possibly have in a deterministic universe. And that's that
00:16:50.000 or something similar to that. Then of course, there is no progress to be made with fixated
00:16:54.800 on definitions. And anyone can argue that nothing exists based upon a definition. So for example,
00:17:02.800 you can quite easily say that atoms don't exist. I can sit back with my arms crossed and say,
00:17:07.520 no, I don't believe in atoms. Why? Because the Greeks said that the atoms are
00:17:12.080 indivisible little spheres. I don't believe they exist. In fact, science tells us those things don't
00:17:16.160 exist. What we have instead are particles called electrons and protons. And that's it. And the
00:17:22.480 atoms don't exist. And if I come along and say, but hold on, our understanding of atoms has
00:17:26.960 moved on. It's evolved. It is that object where you've got a nucleus consisting of the protons and
00:17:31.600 the neutrons orbited by electrons. That's what we understand atoms to be. If you're still
00:17:35.360 then insist on saying, no, I'm not calling that an atom. The Greeks invented the word,
00:17:39.600 atom, and that's it. Well, then there's no possibility for consensus learning. We're just arguing
00:17:45.840 about words. And you can keep that word atom, if you want. And let's call that object something else
00:17:50.960 for the purpose of making progress. Let's call it George. I'm happy to call it George and move on.
00:17:55.440 But that's rather strange, isn't it? Like insisting that we have to adhere to certain definitions of
00:18:01.680 words, rather than making progress on scientific and philosophical concepts, especially where
00:18:06.320 there's open-ended questions, especially in an area like consciousness, creativity.
00:18:10.960 And I would say free will belongs there as well, insisting that these things cannot possibly
00:18:16.800 obtame to use the philosophical jargon in a universe which is deterministic is, again,
00:18:22.240 falling into the Wittgensteinian trap that philosophy is about linguistics and words and that we
00:18:27.200 can define out of existence certain things. This is not to say, it's not to say that there are
00:18:32.960 certain other things that we want to suggest don't exist, that our best understanding of them
00:18:39.520 suggest they don't exist. For example, ghosts, okay, there's a way in which we can talk about
00:18:47.200 ghosts, that's supernatural thing. By our understanding of science, there's no reason, there's no
00:18:53.280 explanation that requires ghosts to exist, or unicorns to exist, or Gandalf the Gray, the wizard,
00:19:00.960 to really exist in physical reality. No explanation is required for those things, and this is where
00:19:06.480 something may exist or may not exist, but something like free will is where we can have a reasonable
00:19:12.080 debate about things, but insisting on a particular definition to rule out something, to rule out
00:19:17.440 free will in the same way that we rule out Gandalf the Gray, or fairies, or something else like that,
00:19:23.920 is simply to ignore the fact that we don't understand how it is, that people, different to
00:19:31.840 all other creatures in the universe, all other systems in the universe, create knowledge, and then
00:19:35.440 make choices in a way that is utterly different to any other species that exist in the universe,
00:19:42.720 that we know of, any other system that exists in the universe that we know of, we create knowledge,
00:19:46.960 it's mysterious, and part of that mystery is free will, and trying to define it out of existence,
00:19:52.160 I don't buy it, and I don't think it's useful either, yet again another tirade on free will,
00:19:57.200 I should ban myself from talking about that again for a while, I've done an episode after episode
00:20:05.120 on it, but it keeps coming up, and so I can't fully blame myself, react against people who
00:20:11.760 keep on saying that they have the final once and for all explanation of free will.
00:20:17.040 I think I have an explanation of free will, and I think it's the once and for all one,
00:20:20.240 I think it's just better than anything that I've heard so far, and it's certainly better than
00:20:23.920 ones that say, well, by definition, free will can't exist in a deterministic universe.
00:20:30.400 And again, we'll have something more to say about that, that idea in the science of kind of
00:20:34.160 cut, because this whole idea of deterministic universe based upon deterministic physical laws,
00:20:39.760 laws of motion with initial conditions, well, constructed theory is going to have something to say
00:20:43.920 about that as well, but that's a whole other story. We're going to come here in the fabric of reality
00:20:48.880 to part of the mystery about that. Explanations, as David says, quote going back to the book,
00:20:55.760 they are also about coherence, elegance, and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity,
00:21:01.920 though none of those things is easy to define either, but in any case, understanding is one of the
00:21:06.480 higher functions of the human mind and brain and a unique one, many other physical systems,
00:21:12.080 such as animals brains, computers, and other machines can assimilate facts and act upon them,
00:21:18.000 but at present, we know of nothing that is capable of understanding and explanation or of wanting
00:21:22.560 one in the first place, other than a human mind, every discovery of a new explanation and every
00:21:28.560 act of grasp and explanation depends on the uniquely human faculty of creative thought,
00:21:33.600 pausing their my reflection. Well, right there, we see the seed of the explanation of what I
00:21:41.920 person is. And in the beginning of infinity, we sharpen this up to be a person is a universal
00:21:49.360 explanation, creator, a universal explainer. And that all comes straight from here, it's
00:21:54.720 there's a prelude here to it, you know, only human mind that the human mind is the only thing
00:22:01.280 that we know already in physical reality, capable of understanding and explanation or grasping
00:22:05.600 explanation, all of which is equivalent to creating an explanation in the first place, this uniquely human
00:22:12.000 faculty of creative thought. Now, we say uniquely human at the moment, if we have artificial
00:22:17.520 general intelligence, and we know it must be physically possible, then the artificial general
00:22:21.200 intelligence will also be part of these creatures that have this unique ability to create
00:22:27.520 explanations. The only other thing that I can think of really would be alien intelligence out
00:22:31.920 there somewhere other, that could also be able to create explanations in their own mind,
00:22:37.920 the mind of the aliens, and that would make them people. And just skipping a section here again
00:22:44.960 and going to a part where David writes, quote, it is possible to understand something without
00:22:49.520 knowing the one understands it, or even without having specifically heard of it. This may sound
00:22:55.040 paradoxical, but of course, the whole point of deep general explanations is that they cover
00:22:59.680 unfamiliar situations, as well as familiar ones. If you were a modern mathematician
00:23:04.480 and counting Roman numerals for the first time, you might not instantly realize that you've
00:23:07.600 already understood them, you would have to learn the facts about what they are. And then think
00:23:12.480 about those facts in light of your existing understanding of mathematics. But once you had done that,
00:23:16.800 you'll be able to say in retrospect, yes, there's nothing new in the Roman numerals system
00:23:20.560 beyond me effects. And that is what it means to say that Roman numerals in their explanatory
00:23:25.040 role are fully obsolete. Similarly, when I say I understand how the curvature of space and time
00:23:30.480 affects the motion of planets, even though the solar systems I may never have heard of,
00:23:33.840 I'm not claiming that I can call to mind without further thought the explanation of every detail
00:23:38.320 of the loops and wobbles of any planetary orbit. What I mean is that I understand the theory that
00:23:42.640 contains all those explanations, and that I could therefore produce any of them in due course,
00:23:48.000 given some facts about a particular planet having done so, I should be able to say in retrospect.
00:23:52.720 Yes, I say nothing in the motion of that planet, other than me effects, which is not explained
00:23:56.480 by the general theory of relativity. We understand the fabric of reality, only by understanding
00:24:01.440 theories that explain it. And since they explain more than we are immediately aware of,
00:24:06.160 we can understand more than we are immediately aware that we understand,
00:24:09.760 pausing their more reflection. This is in part the concept of in explicit knowledge,
00:24:14.400 or at least implicit knowledge, implicit knowledge. So if I have an understanding to take a
00:24:19.760 simpler case of Newton's law of gravity, okay, the formula is f equals gm1m2 over r squared,
00:24:27.680 at least one formulation of it, then although I might not be able to call to mind to remember
00:24:34.960 exactly how Neptune, for example, orbits the sun, using this law I can quite readily predict how
00:24:41.840 fast Neptune will orbit the sun, given a few details about the mass of the sun and the distance
00:24:46.080 Neptune, let's say. And so the one law contains within it, implicitly explanations, predictions,
00:24:53.360 and descriptions of the orbits of all the planets in the source. In fact, all the orbits of
00:25:00.240 planets that exist in solar systems yet to be discovered. So it's that that's the
00:25:06.160 sense in which it's implicit and my understanding of those things is implicit, as well in David's
00:25:12.240 understanding of these things is implicitly contained within those things. Continuing, David writes,
00:25:18.400 I am not saying that when we understand a theory it necessarily follows that we understand
00:25:22.560 everything it can explain, with a very deep theory. The recognition that it explains a given
00:25:27.680 phenomenon may itself be a significant discovery or acquiring independent explanation.
00:25:32.400 For example, quasars, extremely bright sources of radiation at the center of some galaxies,
00:25:37.920 were for many years one of the mysteries of astrophysics. It was once thought that new physics
00:25:43.360 would be needed to explain them, but now we believe that they are explained by the general theory
00:25:47.520 of relativity. And other theories that were already known before quasars were discovered.
00:25:52.320 We believe that quasars consist of hot matter and the process of falling into black holes,
00:25:58.000 collapsed stars as gravitational field is so intense that nothing can escape from them.
00:26:02.240 Yet reaching that conclusion is required years of research, both observational and theoretical,
00:26:07.120 now that we believe we have gained a measure of understanding of quasars,
00:26:10.480 we do not think that this understanding is something we already had before,
00:26:13.920 explaining quasars. Screw existing theories has given us genuinely new understanding.
00:26:19.200 Just as it is hard to define what an explanation is, it is hard to define when a subsidiary
00:26:24.160 explanation should count as an independent component of what is being understood. And when it should
00:26:28.480 be considered as being subsumed in the deeper theory, it is hard to define, but not so hard to
00:26:33.200 recognize in practice we know a new explanation when we are given one. The difference has something
00:26:37.680 to do with creativity, explaining the motion of a particular planet when one already understands
00:26:42.320 the general explanation of gravity is a mechanical task, though it may be a very complex one.
00:26:47.040 But using existing theory to account for quasars requires creative thought,
00:26:50.880 thus to understand everything that is understood in astrophysics today,
00:26:54.080 you would have to know the theory of quasars explicitly, but you would not have to know the
00:26:57.920 orbit of any specific planet, pausing their my reflection. And just because this is online
00:27:02.880 right now, so what David's saying there is, okay, here's the situation with quasars and the sense
00:27:08.320 in which they weren't already contained within existing knowledge of astrophysics, because it was a
00:27:15.040 problem. Here's in short what my episode about quasars is all about. And it's just fortuitous
00:27:21.040 that I happen to have made a thing about quasars, which was a response to something I said in an
00:27:26.960 episode called The Nexus, which is basically about people, but I talked about quasars. And the
00:27:31.200 reason I talk about quasars is because David has used it in the beginning of infinity and in his
00:27:35.120 TED talks to talk about this concept of self-similarity, how our theories of quasars over time come
00:27:41.920 to more accurately resemble actual quasars out there on the other side of the universe.
00:27:46.400 Anyway, the history of the discovery of quasars is that at first they were found to be extremely
00:27:52.720 distant, okay, long story short. They were found to have higher edge shifts, so therefore they are
00:27:58.000 typically billions of light years away, billions of light years away. That was found looking
00:28:03.600 at the spectra of these things, fine very well. However, although the spectra told us that they
00:28:09.360 were a long way off, receding at a very high velocity, other telescopes and other measurements
00:28:14.640 were able to reveal what their luminosity was, how bright they were, and they were just too bright.
00:28:19.200 They were too bright for any existing theory of physics to account for. They were small,
00:28:25.920 smaller than, you know, basically, well, on the order of maybe a little bit bigger than a solar
00:28:32.240 system, but certainly not as big as a galaxy, and yet thousands of times brighter than a galaxy,
00:28:37.280 many thousands of times brighter than a typical galaxy. So distant, brighter than a galaxy,
00:28:42.800 much smaller than a galaxy. How would this be possible? Well, it's not possible if you assume
00:28:50.000 that the quasar is truly a quasi-stellar radio source, a quasi, a somewhat like a star source of light.
00:28:58.000 A star puts out light from all points on its surface, roughly evenly. It's a big sphere, roughly speaking,
00:29:06.640 of plasma, of hot gas, and it's putting out radiation equally in all directions. Now,
00:29:12.240 this is true of objects in space generally, and this is what astronomers
00:29:17.280 reasonably thought that a quasar should be. It should be a spherical object putting out
00:29:22.880 light in all directions equally. Now, if you make that assumption, then the physics just
00:29:28.720 doesn't work. It's not possible for something that small to be that bright. It exceeds something
00:29:33.440 called the editing to limit and violates laws of physics. So they thought they needed new physics,
00:29:38.240 as David says there. They don't, and this is why, although you could have a full understanding
00:29:44.000 of general relativity and a full understanding of quantum theory and nuclear physics and all that
00:29:48.320 sort of stuff. And still not be able to explain what a quasar is, even though a quasar obeys all
00:29:53.520 those laws. And the reason is all the problem of how it could be so bright whilst being so distant
00:30:00.880 is it's not putting out light in all directions evenly. It's putting out light in beams. It's
00:30:07.840 putting out light in very narrow beams. And we can see just that part of the beam. And so it appears
00:30:16.240 super bright. And that's fine if you notice and assume that it's not putting out that energy in
00:30:23.200 all directions, but just a few privilege directions too, typically. And so we're getting a very
00:30:29.120 concentrated part of that beam. At least part in that, see my episode on quasar's for more about
00:30:35.440 exactly what's going on. Sometimes we're in the beam, in which case it's called a blazer.
00:30:40.400 And sometimes we can see the lobes of gas produced by the beam being illuminated by the
00:30:46.000 beam. And so it's sort of a complicated process. But quasars are absolutely fascinating objects,
00:30:50.400 because they are so distant, they allow us to understand what the universe was like in the deep
00:30:56.000 dark past. In fact, the deep bright past turns out because there are many more of these things
00:31:01.360 in the early universe. And therefore we see them at very high redshifts, at very distant parts
00:31:06.160 of the universe. Okay, skipping a section where David talks about other kinds of explanation,
00:31:13.280 in explicit explanations, which people in bygone eras needed to rely on. So they weren't
00:31:21.200 proper explanations. But rather rules of thumb, rules of thumb, things that appear to have worked
00:31:27.440 probably by some process of evolution by natural selection. You use this rule of thumb to build a
00:31:32.560 bridge. And it's worked because all previous attempts to use it have worked and the ones that
00:31:38.160 didn't work while the bridge fell down. But you don't know why. You don't know the engineering
00:31:42.400 principles that underlie why this bridge stayed up and this bridge fell down. But you use certain
00:31:48.000 rules of thumb. And lucky for you, those rules of thumb happen to be able to be derived from
00:31:56.800 deeper physical theories. But you don't know the physical theories. You just guessed the right
00:32:01.360 a bit of the theory without knowing what it is, if that makes sense. That's why it's in explicit
00:32:06.560 you haven't been able to put it into words, been able to explain it in any way. As David says
00:32:11.760 over this, when admiring centuries old structures, people often forget that we see only the surviving
00:32:17.120 ones. The overwhelming majority of structures built in medieval and earlier times have collapsed
00:32:21.600 long ago, often soon after they were built. People get very excited about the pyramids.
00:32:27.760 They say, wow, the pyramids, the Egyptians built these big pile of rocks. They must have had alien
00:32:33.280 help. They're so impressive. Putting aside then not that impressive, they are literally a pile of
00:32:38.400 rocks. In so far as there's any architectural ingenuity there that we can sort of think is
00:32:47.360 impressive. If you give a typical person with moderate amount of engineering understanding,
00:32:56.960 sufficient amount of human labor, cheaply paid human labor, under the threat of a tyrant.
00:33:04.480 Well, you can probably get a pretty impressive pile of rocks going as well with little chambers inside.
00:33:09.120 But how many pyramids were there that didn't survive that fell down?
00:33:14.160 Don't know. It's hard for a pile of rocks to fall down, but collapse in some way or other,
00:33:18.880 and needed to be rebuilt. We don't know if there's no records of those. We're impressed by the
00:33:22.720 ones that survived. So too with bridges, so too with cathedrals and so on. So I'm skipping all of that.
00:33:29.280 And David returns to this concept of specialization versus generalizing. And whether or not
00:33:37.360 this constant apparent, apparent fragmenting of our knowledge means that we can't understand
00:33:43.200 everything that could be understood. David writes, quote, I'm not of course denying that specialization
00:33:48.960 is occurring in many subjects in which knowledge is growing, including architecture. This is not
00:33:53.520 a one-way process for specializations often disappear too. Wheels are no longer designed or made
00:33:58.400 by wheel rights, nor plows by plow rights, nor a letter written by scribes. It is nevertheless
00:34:04.480 quite evident that the deepening, unifying tendency I've been describing is not the only one at work.
00:34:10.400 A continual broadening is going on at the same time. That is, new ideas often do more than just
00:34:15.680 supersede, simplify, or unify existing ones. They also extend human understanding into areas that
00:34:21.600 were previously not understood at all, or whose very existence was not guessed at. They may open up
00:34:27.920 new opportunities, new problems, new specializations, and even new subjects. And when that happens,
00:34:33.120 it may give us at least temporarily more to learn in order to understand it all.
00:34:37.440 The science of medicine is perhaps the most frequently cited case of increasing
00:34:40.880 specialization, seeming to follow inevitably from increasing knowledge.
00:34:45.520 As new cures and better treatments for more diseases are discovered, but even in medicine,
00:34:49.440 the opposite, unifying tendency is also present, and is becoming stronger. Admittedly,
00:34:54.480 many functions of the body are still poorly understood, and so are the mechanisms of many diseases.
00:34:59.200 Consequently, some areas of medical knowledge still consist mainly of collections of recorded
00:35:03.600 facts together with the skills and intuitions of doctors who have experience of particular
00:35:07.360 diseases and particular treatments and who pass on these skills and intuitions from one
00:35:11.360 generation to the next. Much of medicine, in other words, is still in the rule of thumb era.
00:35:17.120 And when new rules of thumb are discovered, there is indeed more incentive for specialization.
00:35:22.480 But as medicine and biochemical research comes up with deeper explanations of disease processes
00:35:27.760 and healthy processes in the body. Understanding is also on the increase.
00:35:31.920 More general concepts are replacing more specific ones as common.
00:35:35.360 Underlying molecular mechanisms are found for the similar diseases in different parts of the body.
00:35:39.840 Once a disease can be understood as fitting into a general framework, the role of the specialist diminishes.
00:35:45.840 Instead, physicians coming across an unfamiliar disease or a rare complication can rely increasingly
00:35:51.760 on explanatory theories. They can look up such facts as are known, but then they may be able to
00:35:57.200 apply a general theory to work out the required treatment and expect it to be effective,
00:36:02.400 even if it never has been used before. Thus, the issue of whether it is becoming harder or easier
00:36:08.240 to understand everything that is understood depends on the overall balance between these two
00:36:13.120 opposing effects of the growth of knowledge, the increasing breadth of our theories,
00:36:17.920 and the increasing depth. Brett makes it harder, depth makes it easier.
00:36:22.720 One thesis of this book is that slowly, but surely, depth is winning.
00:36:26.560 In other words, the proposition that I refuse to believe as a child is indeed false and
00:36:30.720 practically the opposite is true. We are not heading away from a state in which everyone could
00:36:34.640 understand everything that is understood, but towards it. It is not that we shall soon understand
00:36:39.600 everything. That is a completely different issue. I do not believe that we are now.
00:36:43.600 Nor ever shall be close to understanding everything there is. What I am discussing is the possibility
00:36:49.360 of understanding everything that is understood. That depends more on the structure of our knowledge
00:36:54.640 than on its content, but of course, the structure of our knowledge, whether it is expressible
00:36:58.720 in theories that fit together as a comprehensible whole, does depend on what the fabric of reality
00:37:03.520 as a whole is like. If knowledge is to continue its open-ended growth, and if we are nevertheless
00:37:09.360 heading towards a state in which one person could understand everything that is understood,
00:37:13.040 then the depth of our theories must continue to grow fast enough to make this possible.
00:37:17.120 This can happen only if the fabric of reality itself is highly unified, so that more and more of
00:37:21.920 it can become understood as our knowledge grows. If that happens, then eventually our theories will
00:37:27.040 become so general, deep and integrated with one another that they will effectively become a single
00:37:32.080 theory of a unified fabric of reality. This theory will still not explain every aspect of reality.
00:37:37.600 That is unattainable, but it will encompass all known explanations, and it will apply to the whole
00:37:42.480 fabric of reality in so far as it is understood. Whereas all previous theories related to particular
00:37:47.760 subjects, this will be a theory of all subjects, a theory of everything, pausing their
00:37:53.120 my reflection. Let's just notice that David Deutsch lives this philosophy. Not only is this notion
00:37:59.600 expressed in the beginning of Findi, but David Deutsch's life has, in some sense, been an
00:38:06.640 outworking of this, and if only the rest of us could contribute to this in some way, shape or form,
00:38:15.280 because as he says there, once we have these deeper theories, then it enables us to solve
00:38:23.760 problems in far more disparate areas. But in terms of David's life, academic life,
00:38:32.000 let's consider what's happened, my version. He was interested in physics, quantum physics,
00:38:39.440 and theory of computation, and he was the first one to properly unite the theory of quantum
00:38:46.480 physics with computation. Computation prior to which was a part of pure mathematics invented
00:38:53.840 by Alan Turing, let's say. That's one history of it. Alan Turing invents the theory of
00:38:59.760 computation. It's just a mathematical thing. He's trying to solve problems in mathematics,
00:39:06.560 not until later they build physical computers, but even then people still think the theory of
00:39:10.880 computation is just a part of mathematics. David Deutsch then applies quantum physics to the
00:39:17.520 mathematical theory of computation, recognizing that computers are made out of matter. So he
00:39:23.600 unifies, brings together the theory of computation and theory of quantum physics, so we now have a
00:39:29.440 theory of quantum computation. That's the first thing. Next, construct a theory. Construct a theory
00:39:37.840 is a deeper generalization of the theory of quantum computation. And so now it appears as though,
00:39:46.080 not all the work has been done yet, but it appears as though this construct a theory being a
00:39:52.640 deeper version of quantum computation about what is possible and impossible might be able to provide
00:39:59.680 a physics of knowledge, a physics of epistemology, unifying epistemology and physics.
00:40:07.600 How could this be possible at all? Well, because it's got to be possible to know some things
00:40:13.040 and impossible to know other things. And if construct a theory is a fundamental theory of physics,
00:40:18.240 and in fact, what knowledge creation is about, is about trying to construct knowledge about
00:40:25.440 what is possible to know about, and figuring out what's not possible to know about, and so we can
00:40:30.640 forget about those useless, uninteresting things. Then we have a physics of knowledge as well,
00:40:35.360 and so now we've brought part of philosophy into this worldview. So David Deutsch is doing this. He
00:40:41.120 is unifying our various deep theories of reality. In fact, the fabric of reality is being united,
00:40:50.880 specifically by him to a large extent. Nukyara has done some work on biology as well, and so
00:40:59.600 it could be within his lifetime. We hope that this fabric of reality might actually end up
00:41:06.720 being a single theory of biology. Physics and computation already united, really. They deserve to
00:41:14.240 be considered as one theory, and the theory of epistemology as well, which might very well be just
00:41:20.720 subsumed by construct a theory of physics. David then goes on to say, quote, it will not of
00:41:28.080 course be the last such theory, but only the first. In science we take it for granted that even
00:41:32.960 our best theories are bound to be imperfect and problematic in some ways, and we expect them to
00:41:37.200 be superseded in due course by deeper, more accurate theories. Such progress is not brought to
00:41:42.800 a halt when we discover a universal theory. For example, Newton gave us the first universal
00:41:47.280 theory of gravity, and a unification of, among other things, celestial and terrestrial mechanics.
00:41:52.800 But his theories have been superseded by Einstein's general theory of relativity, which
00:41:56.640 additionally incorporates geometry, formerly regarded as a branch of mathematics, into physics,
00:42:01.280 and in doing so provides far deeper explanations as well as being more accurate. The first fully
00:42:06.320 universal theory, which I shall call the theory of everything, will, like all our theories before
00:42:10.560 and after it, be neither perfectly true nor infinitely deep, and so will eventually be superseded,
00:42:16.400 but it will not be superseded through unification with theories about other subjects, for it will
00:42:20.960 already be a theory of all subjects, pausing there, and skipping a substantial part here again,
00:42:27.680 and moving on, David writes, quote, I must stress immediately that I am not referring merely to
00:42:34.560 the theory of everything, which some particle physicists hope they will soon discover,
00:42:39.520 their theory of everything would be a unified theory of all the basic forces known to physics,
00:42:44.400 namely gravity, not a force, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces. It would also describe all the
00:42:51.200 types of subatomic particles that exist, their masses, spins, electric charges, and other properties,
00:42:56.400 and how they interact. Given a sufficiently precise description of the initial state of any
00:43:01.200 isolated physical system, it would, in principle, predict the future behavior of the system,
00:43:06.480 where the exact behavior of a system was intrinsically unpredictable, it would describe
00:43:10.400 all possible behaviors and predict their probabilities. In practice, the initial states of
00:43:15.120 interesting systems often cannot be ascertained very accurately, and in any case, the calculation
00:43:19.920 of the predictions will be too complicated to be carried out in all but the simplest cases,
00:43:23.520 nevertheless, such a unified theory of particles and forces, together with a
00:43:27.280 specification of the initial state of the universe, at the Big Bang, the violent explosion
00:43:31.280 with which the universe began, when in principle contain all the information necessary to predict
00:43:35.520 everything that can be predicted, but prediction is not explanation. The hoped-for theory of
00:43:43.200 everything, even if combined with a theory of the initial state, will it best provide only a
00:43:48.640 tiny facet of the real theory of everything? It may predict everything in principle,
00:43:54.480 but it cannot be expected to explain much more than the existing theories to accept for a few
00:43:58.960 phenomena that are dominated by the nuances of subatomic particle interactions, such as collisions
00:44:04.160 inside particle accelerators, and the exotic history of particle transmutations in the Big Bang.
00:44:09.040 What motivates the term, theory of everything for such a narrow, albeit fascinating piece of knowledge?
00:44:13.760 It is, I think, another mistaken view of the nature of science held disapprovingly by many
00:44:18.400 critics of science and alas, approvingly by many scientists. Namely, that science is essentially
00:44:24.240 a reductionist. That is to say, science allegedly explains things reductively by analysing
00:44:29.200 them into components. For example, the resistance of a wall being penetrated or knocked down
00:44:33.920 is explained by regarding the walls of vast aggregation of interacting molecules,
00:44:37.520 the properties of these molecules are themselves explained in terms of their constituent
00:44:41.040 atoms and the interactions of these atoms with one another, and so on, down to the smallest
00:44:45.200 particles and the most basic forces. Reductionists think that all scientific explanations
00:44:50.080 and perhaps all sufficiently deep explanations of any kind take that form.
00:44:53.840 The reductionist conception leads naturally to a classification of subjects,
00:44:58.400 and theories in a hierarchy, according to how close they are to the lowest level,
00:45:02.880 predictive theories that are known. In this hierarchy, logic and mathematics form the
00:45:06.960 immovable bedrock on which the edifice of science is built. The foundation stone would be a
00:45:12.400 reductive theory of everything, a universal theory of particles, forces, space and time,
00:45:17.040 together with some theory of what the initial state of the universe was. The rest of physics
00:45:21.040 forms the first few stories. Astrophysics and chemistry are at a higher level. Geology even
00:45:26.080 higher and so on. The edifice branches into many towers have increasingly high level subjects
00:45:31.040 like biochemistry, biology, and genetics. Perched to the tottering stratospheric tops are subjects
00:45:35.680 like the theory of evolution, economics, psychology, and computer science, which in this picture
00:45:40.880 are almost inconceivably derivative, pausing their just my reflection on this. Yes, this is just the
00:45:47.280 common way that people talk about our knowledge. David's going to come to the idea that
00:45:54.640 even more than that, you have this conception that at the base and the most important
00:46:01.760 immovable thing is mathematics or logic. But above that, slightly, you have science,
00:46:08.160 all the sciences, because they're based on evidence, whereas mathematics is absolutely certain.
00:46:13.840 And then, well, science isn't quite certain, but it's empirically testable or provable,
00:46:19.680 if you like. And then above that, you've got philosophy, which is mere matter of opinion. This
00:46:24.160 misconception arises out of the same kind of ideas. It's a denial of the reality of emergence.
00:46:30.320 Now, I'm skipping a little bit more where David talks about the reductionist theory of everything.
00:46:38.240 And I'm just going to read a part which apparently, you know, because my Kindle tells me
00:46:43.440 when people have highlighted certain passages. And this particular passage has been highlighted
00:46:49.120 100 times. And the couple of sentences before the highlighted passage reads like this.
00:46:55.920 For higher-level sciences, the reductionist program is a matter of principle only. No one expects
00:47:03.200 actually to deduce the many principles of biology, psychology, or politics from those of physics.
00:47:09.600 Next part has been highlighted 100 times. The reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at
00:47:15.360 all is that under special circumstances this tremendously complex behavior of vast numbers of particles
00:47:22.720 resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility. This is called emergence.
00:47:29.600 High-level simplicity emerges from low-level complexity. High-level phenomena
00:47:35.040 are about which there are comprehensible facts that are not simply deducible from lower-level
00:47:40.640 theories are called emergent phenomena. Okay, just pausing there. My reflection, yes. And so almost
00:47:46.640 everything of interest outside of theoretical physics is of this kind. It's emergent phenomena.
00:47:52.400 It comes out of the lower-level theories, but it's not deducible from them. Okay, and so
00:47:58.000 that's why I regard lots of the stuff that is mysterious about human beings, our ability to create
00:48:03.760 knowledge and so on, as emergent and real and needs to be understood in its own terms at that level,
00:48:10.720 not at the level of physics or any other level like the operation of neurons in a brain.
00:48:15.680 It's the wrong level of analysis. I'm skipping a whole part again. David goes into a critique of
00:48:22.240 the opposite of reductionism, which is holism, the idea that we shouldn't be looking for
00:48:27.040 explanations at the lowest level, but rather at the highest level and in both cases these are just
00:48:32.080 misconceptions that we should privilege any particular level of explanation. All the explanations
00:48:38.640 are needed. We should want to understand everything at every level of emergence. David mentions
00:48:43.920 that a reductionist thinks that science is about analyzing things into components, instrumentalist
00:48:48.720 thinks that it's about predicting things, to either of them, sciences at the higher level are
00:48:54.240 justified for convenience. They don't correspond to anything real, and this is all a misconception
00:48:59.760 that we are quite familiar with. Now, I can't let this go. I cannot let this chapter go,
00:49:05.680 but it is where I'll finish it. Without reading and giving Jew respect to a story that has had
00:49:16.560 a great impact on me and a great impact on this podcast as well. And that is, of course,
00:49:23.360 the Winston Churchill Copperatum argument. And so I am going to read it. I don't know if David
00:49:31.360 knew when he wrote this, that it would be referred to so frequently thereafter. Not just by me,
00:49:39.200 by me a fair bit, but by a lot of people who try to explain the importance of
00:49:45.920 emerging explanations and how reductionism has just a poverty of content when applied in
00:49:51.680 certain contexts, that you can't use reductionism in anything outside of theoretical physics.
00:49:57.120 And in fact, it's absurd to even try. How absurd? Let's see. David writes, quote,
00:50:03.920 For example, consider one particular Copperatum at the tip of the nose of the statue of
00:50:09.200 Sir Winston Churchill that stands in Parliament Square in London. Let me try to explain why
00:50:15.360 that Copperatum is there. It is because Churchill served as prime minister in the House of
00:50:20.320 Commons nearby, and because his ideas and leadership contributed to the allied victory in the
00:50:25.680 Second World War, and because it is customary to honor such people by putting up statues of them,
00:50:31.600 and because bronze, a traditional material for such statues contains Copper and so on.
00:50:37.120 Thus we explain a low-level physical observation, the presence of a Copperatum at a particular
00:50:43.040 location, through extremely high-level theories about emerging phenomena such as ideas,
00:50:48.560 leadership, war, and tradition. There is no reason why there should exist, even in principle,
00:50:53.840 any lower-level explanation of the presence of that Copperatum than the one I have just given.
00:51:00.800 Presumably a reductive theory of everything would in principle make a low-level prediction
00:51:06.320 of the probability that such a statue will exist given the condition of, say, the solar system
00:51:12.000 at some earlier stage. It would also, in principle, describe how the statue probably got there,
00:51:18.000 but such descriptions and predictions, loudly and feasible of course, would explain nothing.
00:51:24.720 They would merely describe the trajectory that each Copperatum followed from the Copper
00:51:30.080 mine, through the smelter and the sculptor's studio, and so on. They could also state
00:51:35.360 how those trajectories were influenced by forces exerted by surrounding atoms,
00:51:40.320 such as those comprising the miners and sculptor's bodies, and so predict the existence
00:51:44.960 and shape of the statue. In fact, such a prediction would have to refer to atoms all over the planet,
00:51:49.840 engage in the complex motion we call the Second World War, among other things. But even if you
00:51:54.960 had the superhuman capacity to follow such lengthy predictions of the Copperatum's being there,
00:51:59.840 you would still not be able to say, oh yes, now I understand why it's there, you would merely
00:52:04.560 know that it's a rival there in that way was inevitable or likely or whatever. Given all the
00:52:10.480 atoms initial configurations and the laws of physics, if you wanted to understand why, you would
00:52:15.520 still have no option but to take a further step, you would have to inquire into what it was about
00:52:20.480 the configuration of atoms and those trajectories that gave them the propensity to deposit a Copperatum
00:52:25.920 at this location, pursuing this inquiry would be a creative task as discovering new explanations
00:52:31.680 always is. You would have to discover that certain atomic configurations support emergent phenomena,
00:52:37.200 such as leadership and war, which are related to one another by high-level explanatory theories,
00:52:42.480 only when you knew those theories could you fully understand why that Copperatum is where it is.
00:52:48.560 Well, there we go, that's why I'll end it today. That is a that is a little story,
00:52:54.080 a parable, a parable of the Copperatum that I must have referred to, gosh, more than dozens,
00:53:01.040 it's got to be hundreds of times by now in attempting to just explain why physics isn't the
00:53:09.440 only game in town. Not only that this idea of, well, there's no choice in the matter,
00:53:17.200 the universe is just the unfolding of atoms moving in the void under deterministic laws
00:53:22.640 and that that somehow is an explanation of things, it's not. It shows you the value of all other
00:53:29.920 subjects, including physics, including history, for example, something that some scientists,
00:53:36.880 traditionally, over the years, have kind of dismissed as not so important, but physics and science
00:53:44.880 broadly cannot possibly do everything. Now, of course, I love science. I'm passionate about the
00:53:50.800 sciences. History is something I would do just merely as a hobby, but that's not to say that I don't
00:53:56.320 think the historians aren't doing a job as equally important as the scientists, let's say,
00:54:02.080 and so too for every other area of human knowledge. Not to say, they're not filled with misconceptions,
00:54:07.680 and I wouldn't think that historians sometimes are going down terribly blind alleys and
00:54:12.320 can be biased and all that sort of stuff. The subject itself is as important as chemistry,
00:54:19.120 as physics, as medicine. All these things form a coherent whole, and we need to understand that
00:54:27.280 explanations at the different levels are required at those different levels, are absolutely
00:54:32.560 appropriate those different levels. The only way we can make sense of things at those levels,
00:54:37.040 history is required because it's the only way to understand matters of history,
00:54:41.200 applying physics to that is ridiculous, as we have just seen, and applying theoretical physics
00:54:49.040 to any other domain outside of theoretical physics is going to be a fool's errand. Unless, of course,
00:54:56.240 it somehow subsumes those areas as we have said before, like computation, for example, was brought
00:55:01.520 into physics, into quantum physics, and so now maybe epistemology, we are brought into that
00:55:06.880 area as well, but only once it becomes a good explanation. Applying theoretical physics to things like
00:55:14.960 why Winston Churchill statue is there is silly. Okay, so part two, done and dusted, we are on to part
