Peter Atkins - Why the Cosmos?

The search for meaning and purpose is humanity’s never-ending quest. Some say that ‘how’ questions belong to the realm of science, but ‘why’ questions do not. Yet extraordinary scientific discoveries offer radical powers of explanation. Can ‘why’ questions be brought into science? What about the biggest ‘why’ of them all?

Peter William Atkins is a British chemist and former Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lincoln College.

Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[TorgerVedeler-jv]

“You feel wonder.” Beautifully put. Thank you.

[TheTroofSayer]

At 2:28 Peter Atkins says "The future of physics is to study nothing at all." Yes, we need to understand the void better, to understand its predispositions & its creativity. Hence the relevance of cube-root scaling. The smaller an object, the less constrained it is by classical (Newtonian) physics. Released from their classical (Newtonian) constraints, subatomic particles must take their cues for behavior (their physical/chemical properties) from the contexts in which they find themselves. In this way, the astonishingly complex dynamics playing out at the inter/intra cellular levels can begin to make much more sense.
I like Roberts train of thought beginning at 4:20 ranging across the hierarchy from the very small to the very large. 5:05 - Atkins talks about wonder & simplicity. Yes yes yes! It must be simple. Nothing could emerge from anything without simplicity... simple, general principles. The classic physicalist narrative entertaining the tiniest matter as tiny billiard-balls popping into and out of existence is a nonsense that stunts progress. The phenomenology playing out at the very small must be taken seriously... meaning, how *should* we interpret what's going on there? Ever-tinier billiard-balls no, predispositions and contexts, yes. Phenomenology/ontology - meaning.
Good science and good religion should never be inconsistent with one another. Top-down causation without God*. No fairies or angel-dust, no daddy-in-the-sky, no magic, no woo.

* Though God emerging *with* the evolving, unified whole is not an unreasonable position to take - every respect to the agnostics among us.

[longcastle]

One of ctt's best interviews, imo

[anwaypradhan]

"Cosmos is all about universe, every universal phenomemons, their mechanism, their relation with each other. Cosmos is all about adventuring and exploring every mysteries, complexities and contradictions of universal phenomemons, to find out every fundamental ways to reasonably find out every mechanism, physical to chemical process through developed and quantum science and technological means, modes and mediums, representing every aspects of universe through developed art, music and culture forming a colorful world."

[allauddin]

So we may never get bored. It is our
Play ground.

[osip]

rather than try to parse a question like "what is the totality of existence", ask the neverending "what is existence", the process itself is more of an answer than any semantics arrived at

[brendangreeves]

“Physics needs to understand the nature of absolutely nothing”.
Logic determines that an absolute state is impossible.
What we call nature is essentially a manifestation of purely abstract dynamic relations.

[MDOurMD]

I've long held the notion that nothing is something. People didn't understand me. Atkins not only confirms my thought, to a degree, he believes it needs to be studied.

[scotk]

I watch all these and they are wonderful but at the end would love it if the interviewee gave his best educated guess as to the ultimate realty. Is it God? The likelihood of a multiverse? When you take a flower pedal a smash it down to its basic form it’s is unrecognizable and the same for all living things. Are we humans just the consequence of a series of amazing mutations?

[stephenzhao]

2:08 Thanks be to God what a wonderful talking between you two.

[ahmedbensebti]

The wonders that unfold in the cosmos as a whole in astrophysics in the physics of elementary particles in atoms and chemistry and the mind boggling diversity of life can't sprang from nothing without a cause but is a neat signal for the grandeur of the Creator.

[gkelly]

I would have loved to have studied science

[johnburke]

Without intervention is VERY presumptuous. He does not know that one way or the other

[KrystelSpicerMindArkFB_FREE]

.. It's my birthday. You have to take the work lol. 🌹

[chrisgascoigne]

Why is there an assumption that the Cosmos came from absolute nothing? And an assertion that nothing is what physics needs to understand and describe? There is something and, in all likelihood, there has always been something. If physics, cosmology or philosophy needs to understand and describe anything it is eternity.

[-by-_Publishing_LLC]

(2:20) *PA: **_"Physics needs to understand the nature of absolutely nothing because it is from that we sprang without intervention."_* "Nothing" is not, nor can it ever be a *_"that, "_* nor can it ever be an *_"it, "_* nor can it ever *_"be, "_* period. ... Ex nihilo, nihil fit!

Any theory positing an _"infinite origin"_ to the universe or _"something from nothing"_ or an _"infinite number of universes"_ can be dismissed as total nonsense. This is why it will take a heII of a lot more than physicists to fully explain "Existence."

[peweegangloku]

Physicists need to study NOTHING from which we all came. What is the equation for studying nothing? Each variable, from A to Z, will equal zero, absolute zero. The sum, the difference, the product, the quotient and all other mathematical calculations will equal zero and absolutely nothing else.
This is the state where there is no number of anything, where there is no mathematics because there is only zero. There is nothing like 1 2 3 4 5
Laws of physics are a description of the behaviour of forces that are already in existence. Where there are no such forces, no push no pull, no attraction no repulsion, no suction no inflation, no motion or movement of any kind, no heat, no particle no wave, there can never be laws of physics.
For 1 of anything to emerge from such a state, no kind of mathematics and physics can produce such a result. From provable physics point of view, methods and procedures, this is an absolute impossibility.
Physics is based on mathematics, and mathematically, nothing can come from zero. There must have always been a 1 (ONE) of something somewhere, somehow. And if there was ever an eternally existing 1 (ONE), it evidently must have been an internally complex 1 (ONE). A simplistic or simple 1 would eternally remain just 1 because it would relate to or react with nothing. An internally complex one could produce something from within itself. So the eternal ONE must have been internally complex.

[whitefiddle]

"112 personalities"

Didn't take long to derail _that_ train! 👍

[viaini.niaivi]

2:17 so this interview is simply nothing. 😅

[rc]

it took humanity a few millennia to find the path of discovery from seemingly highly unfavorable odds, just like life in a remotely volcanic island :)