Richard Dawkins gives one of my favorite talks on how our minds reason about the physical universe. We’ve evolved to reason about a middle-sized world, or “middle world” as he puts it, that creates useful fictions like matter and solidity that are really only relevant to our perception of the universe. For example, a water strider likely doesn’t need to reason in three dimensions the way we do. Or the fact that atoms are mostly empty space, yet a rock is solid to us.
Most of the universe exists at scales that simply don’t make sense to our “middle world” minds. In this way it makes sense that exploration towards the edges of our middle world reality in relativity theory or quantum physics are not just extremely odd, but even incompatible with each other. Unless we can train ourselves to intuitively reason and perceive our universe at those scales, we will always be limited to reasoning about them with our extremely limited model of the middle world.
Dawkins also touches on how mechanistically our academic and scientific class think, and how poorly it tends to work with complex purposeful systems, such as people.
This famous video is one of the first popular visualizations of the scope of our relative universe. If our universe really is infinite, then even all this is nothing. Yet we can’t even intuitively reason about global scale systems, let alone most of what’s presented here.
Arguably the farther we go from our “middle world,” the more static or random the universe gets. Perhaps we are at the center of the universe, at least in terms of scale, where static nothingness meets random somethingness, giving way to complexity rich “living” systems.
I was immediately drawn to the ideas in the huge book known as A New Kind of Science. Although I could never read it all the way through, I’d skimmed through it enough times to get the genius of it. Luckily, and surprising to me at the time, it aligned with my worldview quite well. But it is a huge book. Luckily, this talk, by Wolfram himself, summarizes it quite well!
I chopped it down to the first 20 minutes, which covers the basic concepts that the book builds on. It’s pretty insightful on it’s own, though it doesn’t get to the real meat of the book and the results of his 10 year exploration writing it. So I do highly recommend watching the full 90 minute talk. In that, if it gets a little too deep into physics towards the middle, just keep going and it’ll get a bit lighter.
Also, it turns out that yesterday’s Alan Watts video is a strangely relevant introduction to the beginning of this talk, so you should watch it again.
Here’s a Friday treat: a 50 minute long piece talking with Richard Feynman in 1981. I strung the five 10 minute YouTube clips into a playlist and embedded it here.
You get a good sense of his character as he talks about his father, growing up, teaching, working on the bomb, and what he was working on in 1981. Feynman was a true scientist, a great teacher, and to me a prototypical hacker.
Living systems are the most complex and diverse systems in the known universe. To try and come up with a “physics” of biology seems impossible with all the variability in living systems. However, it turns out there are very straightforward commonalities in all living systems relating to the way they scale, which allows us to literally “sovle for” any dynamical aspect of a living system.
This is the best 25 minutes of this 1 hour talk, which you can continue watching here.
