Tim Maudlin Λ Palmer: Fractal Geometry, Non-locality, Bell

Tim Palmer is a Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Physics at Oxford. Tim Maudlin is a Professor of Philosophy at New York University, specializing in the philosophy of physics. We discuss superdeterminism, chaos theory, and free variables.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:04 Explaining Superdeterminism & Fractal Cosmology
00:05:06 What is Tim Palmer working on
00:09:24 What is Tim Maudlin working on
00:11:47 Assumptions of Bell's inequality / theorem
00:22:40 Locality and Superdeterminism
00:28:33 Summary of disagreement + why do we care what Bell said?
00:32:54 Counterfactuals & Counterfactual definiteness
00:59:38 Chaos theory, attractors, and fractals
01:26:32 Free variables and ensembles
01:36:30 Invariant set theory
01:48:21 Relevant links and teaser for Part 2

[TheoriesofEverything]

Timestamps, Links, & Sponsors:

LINKS MENTIONED:

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:04 Explaining Superdeterminism & Fractal Cosmology
00:05:06 What is Tim Palmer working on
00:09:24 What is Tim Maudlin working on
00:11:47 Assumptions of Bell's inequality / theorem
00:22:40 Locality and Superdeterminism
00:28:33 Summary of disagreement + why do we care what Bell said?
00:32:54 Counterfactuals & Counterfactual definiteness
00:59:38 Chaos theory, attractors, and fractals
01:26:32 Free variables and ensembles
01:36:30 Invariant set theory
01:48:21 Relevant links and teaser for Part 2

[onebylandtwoifbysearunifby]

Curt, you've really honed your craft. Providing a glossary of terms before the discussion is proof you consider the viewer experience highly!

[Robinson]

Got a crate of my favorite whisky shipped in on my doorstep tomorrow for this convo. It's good to have some me-time together with my imaginary best friends Tim & Tim for three hours. Sit back, relax, shout at the screen and sometimes type some angry youtube comments. Good to have some male nerd self-care sometimes ❤

[expr]

Everything that Maudlin said was crystal clear, and made perfect sense. Palmer kept circling around a number of fairly irrelevant things...

[timjohnson]

Really great theolocution Curt; well done! Even though progress wasn’t definitively made between the two; it’s amazing to listen/watch the views clash. I was super impressed at Curt’s interjections. He interrupted at the perfect times when things were going nowhere and asked a very good and perfectly pointed question to Palmer (something like “can you explain your position with ensembles?”).

[shanerigsby]

Palmer is saying that there is no such thing as probability because if it happened, it had a probability of 1 and if it didn't, then 0. He os arguing for extreme determinism, and his rationale is that the seed values of a fractal change its path, but that's only true because a fractal is mathematically deterministic. What he fails to acknowledge is that math can only be a model of the universe. It's not the universe, itself. Within a fractal, the whole universe is the mathermatical model, but that's not what is at stake, here. We're talking about the actual universe, and the theorem is a model to understand the real universe, not to understand a deterministic mathematical model. Determinism is absolutely at the heart of their disagreement.

[pigro]

I, a lowly wind turbine technician, struggle to understand a majority of what was discussed here but I do take pleasure in listening to highly educated individuals disagree in such a constructive way. You, Curt, are an invaluable host in this podcasting space 🙏

[davy-jonesdevil-fruit]

Curt, you sir, realize it or not, are at the same time a young good looking successful man whom has a degree in theoretical physics/mathematics, a natural affinity for anything that has to do with audio and recording equipment as well as great tastes from what i can gather in every field of interest that you admit to, which leads me to how brave you are to step on stage, if you will, with the modern day equivalent of giants among men (in so far as science and physics and philosophy are concerned), and last but not least your humble, respectful, curious, studious, hip to most relevant literature, and display damn near perfect balance of letting guess spea their piece the way they wish it to be comsumed, while managing to push and pull and steer and reign in the flow and direction of the episodes, moderating between guests for debates while prodding it along and you do this all while also personally consuming, retaining, summarizing, and politely yet academically and rigorously holding your guests to the highest standard without surrendering any important ground or bowing down or giving any guest any opportunities to either mislead, lazily communicateto us audience, or use your platform to weaponise and/or propagandise any tool or idea or subject using there status or reputation or position professionally or academically. You are a true gem man

[KaiseruSoze]

Palmer understands the invariance of complex numbers or says he does, but doesn't say why a complex number has anything to do with invariance. I would like to hear an explanation of how this is so.

[mygamecomputer]

What’s the point of having a model if the vast majority of the contributors to greenhouse gas are China and India and neither one of them are going to change anytime soon. You can model all day long but if those two don’t modify their production of greenhouse gas, your model is pointless. I find it maddening that we waste a lot of time like in the UK where they contribute 1% and they’re trying to knock it down. Figure out a way to help India.

[mattbrown]

Ooohhhh tim palmer. You get a chance to talk with him about climate? His talk with Sabine was quite entertaining.

[Self-Duality]

Tim Palmer’s closing remark on “holistic fractal structures” being more fruitful (than Planck scale structures) for the formulation of quantum gravity is prescient.

[brainxyz]

Bell's theory is a mind boggling concept about the reality, I have tried many times to understand it but failed. Any debate between well educated scientists like this video will bring us a bit closer to understanding it. Well done I enjoyed it.

[RajatAgarwal-hl]

I believe that a debate between a scientist and a philosopher is not fair. They both talk in different languages. And I always trust a scientist over a philosopher. Both can be wrong or right. But I trust the scientific method over imaginative deductions.

[FunknBliss]

I surely enjoyed this. Much appreciated. However, it was disappointing to see Dr. Maudlin never really understand what Dr. Palmer was saying. He didn’t seem to try very hard. Instead, he continually defended his perspective and attempted to undermine Plamers’, which he admittedly didn’t understand.

I am also a physicist… and my thesis focused on chaotic systems… and I also discovered the remarkable ignorance that most physicists maintain around chaos theory. Why is that, I often wondered… and came to the conclusion that it’s too dangerous to most views on physics.

For example, it is proven mathematically that a chaotic set is indistinguishable from randomness… if viewed with sufficient coarse graining. Thus, the stochasticity of quantum properties could, in fact, be deterministic chaos… and yet, inherently indistinguishable from pure randomness… so long as the required resolution to observe the determinism were below the planck scale. Of that one fact, most physicists are strangely ignorant.

Such is the general case for physicists… they are mostly ignorant of chaos theory except at a superficial level.

That’s a VERY big deal… because, what chaos theory shows us is that the Universe IS a chaotic system. Must be.

Anyway… I digress. My point is that… to my one sufficiently knowledgeable in the domains of both quantum physics AND chaos theory… it is clear that Maudlin simply did not understand Palmer… whereas Palmer certainly understood Maudlin. That’s a bit sad because Palmer obviously hoped to share something valuable with Maidlin…. namely, the perspective of a physicist who is adequately knowledgeable regarding chaos theory.

(Note: When Maudlin supposes himself to be summarizing chaos theory, Palmer nods his head “no”… clearly indicating that Maudlin didn’t understand. Anyone well versed in Chaos theory nodded at the same time.

I highly respected appreciate Maudlin. I hope he turns some of his big brain toward chaos theory. It would help him for sure.

Thanks for this awesome video and all the others you offer.

Be Blessed, TOA

[saren]

I could follow Maudlin but had no idea what Palmer was talking about.

[ehici]

Pizza was just now delivered....lets gooo

[mylittleelectron]

Great stuff Curt. It's super refreshing to hear my favorite thinkers in physics being interviewed by someone competent in the subject who asks the questions I would have wanted to ask.

[UnMoored_]

Having worked with more than 60 graduate students in 3 different research groups, it’s important to point out that there are academically talented students who ALSO have limited, independent problem-solving skills, lack practical real-world experiences, and the ability to construct sophisticated conceptual models built upon foundational ones. Clear thinking takes time to evolve. If they do not improve under mentoring, they will not become good experimentalists, but instead do academic, mathematical analytical work based on existing literature. They can be really intelligent but do not necessarily become creative problem solvers outside of known, well-established works in their chosen field. This comment is not strictly about experimentalist versus non-experimental list, but about the ability to think independently.

As the person responsible for creating an apparatus for an experiment, on more than one occasion I had to block the involvement of some graduate students in experimental work because they were ill-suited for the task. My own experience has been that about one out of 12 students are the exception regarding their creative problem-solving skills. I am seeing evidence of this trained academic versus thoughtful creative thinking in this discussion.

[rv]

I have a phd in math and I fail to see why physicists call Bell's argument (and the resulting inequality) a _theorem_ when they even disagree on the hypothesis!
But it's even worse than that: Bell's argument doesn't even define all of its terms as unambiguous mathematical objects. So Bell's argument is "just" a very important rational argument that comes with a computation of probabilities associated to mathematically ambiguous entities (such as "a theory"). It's *not* a mathematical theorem.