Lee Smolin - 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?



Lee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo. He is best known for his work in loop quantum gravity.


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.

[charc]

Lee is simply amazing. We need more Lee!
Closer to Truth: please can you post the full video of this?

[jackarmstrong]

There are no fundamental understandings in physics. Physics is about understanding and predicting behavior. It doesn't know what an electron is. Only how it behaves.

[stPrinciples]

This scientist is one of the most intellectually honest one i come across. Indeed, scientists do not know anything thats fundamental in nature. This however does not stop technological advances. For example, the first useful axe could have been invented without any knowledge of any scientific theory. This tells us theories are theories and not necessarily a pre-requisite for inventions benefiting the world. While no one knows whata fundamental in an absolute sense, this does not stop medicine, all having side effects, from saving lives. If we know whats fundamental, western medicine may not have any side effects and patients of some diseases could be fully cured wholistically.

[miltonedwincobocortez]

It is remarkable that the sound is decent and the camera doesn’t wobble….

[TheTroofSayer]

At 6:33 Smolin mentions Charles Sanders Peirce. He also suggests that the answers might lie within biology. He's right. It's what I'm researching, in the synthesis of Peirce's semiotic theory with the biosemiotics of Jakob von Uexküll - which, imho, factors in the mind-body problem like no other. We need a decent theory for the mind-body problem because bodies wire brains. The mind-body problem is key to understanding what it is like to be a human, or a bat, or a fish, or a dog.

[AntonioSanchez-ylwj]

We are at an interesting time when we start questioning if our taken-for-granted assumptions about laws, time, space and naturalness are right.

[Jalcolm]

I had thought 13, 800, 000, 000 years was a long time. But I’m not sailing anywhere. There must be things which are true but uncaused. You cannot explain their existence from causation. They are fundamental.
I don’t think you get anywhere by asking what caused fundamental things. What day is it. Thursday- eat your cabbage. Why do we always have cabbage on Thursday? It’s Thursday- eat your cabbage.

[brett]

Love to listen to great minds. I myself drive myself crazy with what it All came from.

[Qeyoseraph]

The Cosmos follows Universal Law.

Attraction, repulsion, and frequency; "Flow."

Everything in the universe may be broken down by these three fundamentals.

#rotaercmai

[rxbracho]

Yes! Something akin to natural selection is the only non brute force to explain the constants. That is another notch to Penrose's CCC (Conformal Cyclic Cosmology), aeon after aeon the universe has been literally evolving, to be a more hospitable representation of its consciousness, which I agree with some other comments, is more fundamental than particle physics. The latter emerges from the former, as postulated by Prof. Don Hoffman of UC Irvine.

[bwstsnserwtrng]

infinity is the most fundamental and the reason for all existence and all existence it self

0×♾=♾

[jamesruscheinski]

what is common to general relativity and quantum mechanics?

[mindbodysoul-musictherapy]

Why not stop the boat somewhere quiet?

[jamesruscheinski]

what could be the explanation for not feeling velocity?

[MrZabao]

Space? Time? Particles? What is the most fundamental issue in reality? Relations - every existing item somehow recognizes another and reacts. And what is the crown of relations? LOVE :)

[robertm]

Laws of nature doesn't have to evolve, but be what they have always been. One infinite space, certain amount of materia in it in a constant movement in relation to other particles/mass concentrations. There is a problem with the concept of ..elementary particle.., as it is not constructed by anything, but has to have a shape, a function to receive & emit information and a limited density. In a case of infinite amount of materia, where the materia is organised as hierarchies like we can observe today but truly going to infinity and if there would be similarly to our experience/the universe we are familiar with, a change for intelligent life forms etc. creatures, there would be a creature wondering a size bigger than the observable universe(what we can observe..) must be the minimum size for materia and so on. So, is there elementary particle, or could it be that the materia is always constructed of smaller particles?

[corkamstra]

When you are stuck, you made a mistake earlier.

[psmoyer]

No matter how the universe was created, or what caused it to expand, in the end Empty Space is the one and only success story. This universe is one step in the evolution of the factory of empty space.

[jamesruscheinski]

Would help to have breakthrough in psychology / consciousness?

[Light_EnterTainmenT]

I am telling you.. somebody did made all this., !!