Nima Arkani-Hamed - What's Fundamental in the Cosmos?

Dig down to the deepest level of reality, the smallest things that exist, the building blocks of everything else. What do we find? What’s there at the very bottom? That’s what’s ‘fundamental’. Everything else is derivative, built up from the bottom. So what’s there at the bottom? So what’s fundamental?

Nima Arkani-Hamed is a Canadian/American theoretical physicist with interests in high-energy physics, string theory and cosmology. Formerly a professor at Harvard, Arkani-Hamed is now on the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

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.

[Nnamdi-winu]

This is a wonderful explanation by Nima, though I wish I could get it much more clear but I think our universe is made to be special because of those specific values and there's no way it couldn't have in the way it is. And that's the natural explanation it could have.

[ZedOhZed]

Fine tuning is only a problem if you define it as such. People commonly accept there are brute facts about the cosmos: the big bang, the fundamental particles, the forces of nature, etc. Why is it okay for those things to exist as a brute fact, but a few very specific numbers is not okay?

[peweegangloku]

While his candid approach to what appears to be an intriguing value of vacuum energy is appreciated, beginning at the level of vacuum energy, is clearly a leap, a jump, if your theme is "what is fundamental in the cosmos?". Since most physicists are misled into thinking that space and time had a beginning, the question dealing with the fundamentals of the cosmos must address the causality of space and time before discussing the vacuum energy of space.

[abrahambaktiar]

This young Nima Arkani Hamed, at least topic was recorded 10 years ago. Now he is Princenton professor, head bald, and mostly talk about "new physics", 220 feynman diagram, amplituhedron..

[adamkallin]

The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

[markuspfeifer]

What’s fundamental: Dialectic materialism as an eternal sequence of being and becoming something else via dialectical negation of what was. This takes the form of struggle, strife: objects have to risk ceasing to be in order to be reproduced in a new form. Matter (of which energy is just a form) and motion are indestructible and cannot be created.

[panmichael]

If! This is the content of this interview. If!

[genghisthegreat]

When would it become unreasonable to postulate that all possible values of every fundamental constant are allowed to " roam " in a froth of universes other than ours, where they independently settle on sweet values, in ours ?

[FigmentHF]

For me, the answer is fairly clear - metabolising life developed on Earth, and over billions of years it evolved a world model and a self model. The brain is blind and deaf, trapped in a dark vault called a skull, it has to infer reality based on the sparse sampling of quantum information. We developed a sophisticated and robust world model that was doing incredibly well with basic cosmological observation and classical Newtonian physics, it could even accommodate relativity. However, quantum mechanics was the start of the end, with regards to how much sense our generative world model could make of the staggeringly complex quantum and cosmological reality we find ourselves in.

And so, I feel that many of the staggeringly fine tuned, symmetrical and coincidental aspects of our understanding of the universe, as well the strikingly anthropocentric nature of the Axis of Evil in the CMB, and the universe at large scales being mathematically similar to complex brains, is all just an artefact of our perceptual interface. It’s the limits of satisfying and neat explanations that serve to reinforce the notion of a mind independent, objective, external reality.

Our reality is a participatory, inferred, constructed generative model. It’s simply our brains best hypothesis.

[islamtoghuj]

If we changed the constants a tiny bit, the universe would be empty, or it'd consist of only helium, and so on. But that helium-only universe would also have to be finely tuned in order for it to exist, so what's the point?

[ronhudson]

Very interesting and illuminating. The multi-verse explanation, while valid, seems to me to be more of an attempt to come with any explanation other than an originating and original mind with intention. Why would this not be an equally valid possibility? The Achilles Heel of the atheist scientist. AND.... once again the title has nothing to do with the content. Who the hell writes these? It's firing time, Robert.

[jamesruscheinski]

in quantum wave function, potential energy equals kinetic energy? does the potential and kinetic energy of quantum wave function have anything to do with quantum probability? virtual particles?

[Mentaculus]

4:11 So many “somethings”, put a name to them, it helps the explanation. AND “Supersymmetry” is mostly a no go, so this must be a very OLD interview.

[Deepakyadav-vpxx]

Nothing can be created nor be destroyed

[catherinemoore]

Nima is such a personable scientist! 🥰

[robotaholic]

The problem with fine tuning is we don't know if the constants even can change.
Also you're limiting god such that he must follow specific rules and tune the knobs just right to11 make the universe exist when in reality the god that everyone believes in is all-powerful and he can just go bonk and whatever constant he chose would work gravity will be this strong and that's that and it will work that's all god has to do.
Until someone tells me all the situations in which life can exist then also what values the physical contents can take then I might start down the path of believing what you're saying. Otherwise you are making things up and you know it

[mohdnorzaihar]

We(our body, minds & soul)were specifically made for these earthly lives ....can't live without a lights

[stjepannikolic]

Interesting how gravity keeps the galaxies, stars, planets, moons all together, enormous amount of mass and energy, yet it doesn't crush us little bugs on Earth..

[redshiftcomplx]

Aetheric energy. Very interesting. The more I hear from this guy the more credible Terrence Howard seems

[-by-_Publishing_LLC]

(3:10) *NAH: **_"There's an idea called naturalness that says that you should never have to fine tune parameters, you know, that that there should be an explanation for all of them."_* ... Ahhh, it's the fine-tuning dilemma once again. This is where we try to figure out why the universe is so perfectly orchestrated as to not fly apart. Nima has suggested that if we have _"ten to the 500th power universes, then there is a likelihood that that fine-tuning can be explained."_

*Translation:* Out of 10^500 universes, ... _we got lucky!_

I am amazed at what absurdly great lengths people will go to explain something in an effort to avoid a much simpler answer that they simply _don't like._

Intelligence absolutely exists in the universe. If you're reading this, then you know this is true! Intelligence also has to come from somewhere. Intelligence didn't "evolve" from nonintelligent matter as that would present the same logical paradox as "something from nothing."

The easiest, simplest, most logical conclusion is that the universe has a *minimum amount of intelligence* embedded within its structure. It's _just enough_ to facilitate its existence and not enough for us to detect.

Even though this makes far more sense than a "Multiverse, " most people choose to reject it because it undermines their *core ideology or belief* (theism or atheism).