Physicist explains time | Sara Walker and Lex Fridman

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GUEST BIO:
Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. She is the author of a new book titled "Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence".

PODCAST INFO:

SOCIAL:

[LexClips]

Guest bio: Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. She is the author of a new book titled "Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence".

[chadtorchia]

Lex Fridman. The most tired yet interested man to exist

[bwhale]

At 14:04 the answer is simple - as to “how humans can create so much order” which seemingly goes against second law of thermodynamics? It requires MORE entropy to create order. For example, we build a house - but the materials came from destruction of forests, extraction of resources, huge expenditure of fossil fuels to transport goods, a huge lifetime caloric requirement of a human - the order created from building structures is so minute compared to the enormous entropy involved in fuelling the creation of those structures. The same with our bodies and minds, they’re incredibly calorifically demanding, so any order we create is massively offset by the disorder needed to fuel it.

[PhilipSportel]

What she's describing as 'big' in time are systems with the most interconnections both in her mind and in reality. If you think of time as being either linear or cyclical, cyclical things remain the same 'size' in time, linear things continue to grow in complexity (specifically the number of agency/agent-directed interconnections). Everything contains a bit of both, but life hijacks the linear component of time in order to persist.

'Big in time' means intelligent things can make more choices. Across all of life, that sum total of all those choices creates a 'fanning out' in time that non-living matter doesn't. In a sense, the gestalt of life explores time for ways to persist.

You have to really zoom out from the individual point of view to start seeing these patterns.

I get what she's saying, but she's definitely coming from a non-standard thought origin and she's still working on the exact words to communicate it.

[guaromiami]

If she wasn't a physicist, she would totally be a crystals and aura person.

[waakdfms]

Okay, I'm entranced...gonna go listen to the entire podcast now....mind blowing stuff but resonates deeply with me....loved this so much, thank you both.

[fjdarling]

This young lady's thinking reminds me of the Tralfamadorians in the book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. They see living objects with their time evolving characteristics integrated. A sort of Tralfamadorian philosophy. Anyway, I should break out this book again now that I'm older. It might not seem so strange reading it at 72.

[stevenbratz]

"To bake an apple pie, you must first create a universe"

[liamweavers]

Time, as I understand it is the dual aspect of wave propagation and field dynamics. Originating from the Big Bang, time reflects both the linear sequence of events dictated by the metric expansion of space (as described by the FLRW model and Hubble's Law) and the nonlinear accumulation of coherent information influenced by quantum field interactions and informational density. The constant processing speed of the universe corresponds to the regular progression of cosmic expansion, while the nonlinear growth in informational complexity is rooted in the volumetric expansion and the dynamics of entropy and structure formation. Human perception of time operates at the universe's processing speed and is therefore linear, while our physical bodies respond to the cumulative effects of processed information since the Big Bang, highlighting the duality in our experience of and measurement of time.

[shawnouellette]

Time is distinctly right handed: always on the right of the equation as a product. This is because time is a measurement that can be used only after the first three dimensions appear. There must be present first: space, then energy, then matter(energy that is static); then time can be calculated; but only as the formalization of observed matter(3-dimensional) moving through a vectored space.

[nolynx]

"It's hard to use words for what's in minds" ❤

[zollen]

Her explanation reminded me of the movie "Lucy" who evolved to be able to see into the past and future of the Earth.

[ChrisAthanas]

15:14 there is no randomness

It's just effects we can't calculate

The universe is not random

Everything has a cause and it's true nature will be forever a mystery to us... But never to it

[ericmichel]

She starts by describing living beings as these massive causal structures (which seems like a perfectly rational perspective that I can understand), but then 15:10 she states "the universe is random at its base" and that the universe is not deterministic? If this were true, then what causes randomness? The very idea seems incoherent to me.

[AlphaFoxDelta]

I love this topic here, language vs thought meta analysis, humans have this unique ability to create highly abstract models in their minds so much so that even our language can't completely describe some of the most abstract/high level.

That's always been interesting to me personally and a challenge I take on frequently, one of my favorite ones which is trying to compress such thoughts into plain language, like mapping a 1000 dimensional thought into a lower subspace, or to put it simply, ha, how to speak clearly and plainly about complex thoughts. If you can do that, perform that mapping eloquently, you’ll be successful because it is so valuable and people love that.

It would be wild to imagine a world where it is normal to converse thought-to-thought, so much information could be shared, alarming scenarios aside.

[Obsidian-Nebula]

This is not physics, it's just philosophy. Doesn't really matter if we are big in time or not.
Universe is deterministic on the small scale but random on the grand scale. Good example is the weather.
Also, it's not like people don't know we need to look deeper. People have not stopped and said "yep, that's it, we've figured it out", they constantly are trying to see the more detailed resolution of the universe

[RetiredEE]

@9:30 think of the faces receding through time like an 'infinity mirror' (a physical object / set of reflections that models the history of what brought them to that point in space and time)

[Chronodesic]

She is basically talking about past and future lightcones but inserting "living things" as some special objects that affect / are affected by time in unique ways from non-living things. I doubt there is any reasonable way to argue that 2 objects made of fundamental particles, but differing in complexity would have differing future forking.

[shawnouellette]

Time is directly tied to matter; allowing dimension, shape and finally measurable time.

[levelupwithsam]

I've listened to this woman speak for 6 minutes and I'm already salivating at the idea that I'm actually able to follow her due to me coming to contact with Lex, Stephen Wolfram and Kurtzgezagt. If I send this video to my parents they will not assimilate what she is saying at all. Requires a decent foundation in scientific and abstract thinking to even contemplate what she is saying. This is some good brain food, if you have the pallet for it!