00:00:29.760 Episode 1 of an entirely new series on the science of can and can't by Kyara my letter.
00:00:37.280 Now I did say towards the end of the beginning of infinity series, which I haven't quite
00:00:42.120 I said that the only thing that could dissuade me really from my next project being, an
00:00:48.080 exploration of the fabric of reality, David Deutsches' first book, would be if David published
00:00:56.640 What happened instead is that David's colleague Kyara my letter has published an absolutely
00:01:02.640 astonishing book about constructive theory called The Science of Can and Can't.
00:01:08.320 And it was so interesting, inspiring, original, groundbreaking that I couldn't let the
00:01:13.160 opportunity pass without doing a series on this book alongside the fabric of reality.
00:01:19.440 I think it would be really interesting to compare how some of these ideas have evolved
00:01:24.480 over the last few decades because certainly the seeds of the thinking of constructive
00:01:29.320 theory are there in the fabric of reality, in a certain form.
00:01:33.840 As I've been doing this podcast, I have had messages over the months and years now that
00:01:47.240 Possibly one of the most frequent requests I get is could you do something on constructive
00:01:53.680 And to be honest, I have really wanted to do exactly that.
00:01:56.600 Have an episode or even an entire series on constructive theory, but it has always seemed
00:02:01.840 to me to be too high a mountain to climb for myself.
00:02:05.800 There is a risk with any new theory like this, it's simply not doing it justice or in
00:02:10.560 fact making it egregious errors, perhaps dumbing it down a little bit too much patronising
00:02:16.000 the audience or perhaps going in the other direction and getting too technical and perhaps
00:02:19.680 making it too boring and getting away from what I really want to do here, which is I hope
00:02:24.560 makes something both as clear as possible in such a way that I think that I personally
00:02:30.160 come to a deeper understanding of it, as well as at the same time being actually faithful
00:02:35.400 to the truth of the actual explanations without denuding any of the ideas of their explanatory
00:02:42.840 So it's a fine line at times in trying to communicate any area of science, but in particular
00:02:52.520 If I was to cleave more towards the highly technical than the audience would probably become
00:02:56.920 a little smaller, but the entirely broad brush strokes mean you're not going to get the
00:03:04.920 And so taking all together, I kind of thought that constructive theory for me seemed like
00:03:15.760 Jeremiah has managed to provide with her book here something that is made for export to
00:03:22.840 different kinds of media like this one, for example.
00:03:26.280 And what I love is it begins with a lot of what we already know, peppered with the
00:03:31.800 spice of some cleverly new deep insights and big claims that make it really exciting.
00:03:38.280 And then it begins to dive into what can only be described as revolution.
00:03:45.800 I'm not big on thinking that someone like Thomas Kuhn was correct that their history
00:03:51.040 of science is about the history of scientific revolution, the overturning utterly of other
00:03:57.360 In fact, when you look and analyze the history of science, what you find is in fact, anything
00:04:02.400 that is described as revolutionary turns out on closer inspection to be an incremental
00:04:08.760 difference from what had existed before, but sometimes that incremental difference is highly
00:04:15.720 And it seems like it is a complete overturning of what went before, but usually a new theory
00:04:20.600 is contained within them as a subset or at least a predicated upon ideas that preceded
00:04:27.720 This is not to deny the great person vision of science.
00:04:31.200 I am very much as subscriber that to the idea that we need to have iconoclastic physicists
00:04:38.280 working against the grain, that the history of science has been people who are what we
00:04:45.680 It doesn't mean that none of us can learn what those people have done or even accomplish
00:04:50.240 what those people have done, but what it means is some people are able to think outside
00:04:55.840 the box and think of something creative, something new, and often this has been called
00:05:01.120 a revolution in science when someone does think of something genuinely new.
00:05:06.280 So these traditional ideas about scientific revolution, whether they are the Copernican revolution,
00:05:12.440 the Darwinian revolution, ideas about continental drift and geology and so on, believe
00:05:16.800 it or not, that is regarded as a revolutionary and one of the more recent scientific discoveries.
00:05:22.920 Actually these things are kind of incrementally better than what went before.
00:05:28.520 It's just that sometimes the increment might be a little bit bigger.
00:05:32.600 Now here in caramellados, the science of Ken and Kant, we are indeed getting a theory that
00:05:38.920 he is as big a jump as any of those that I mentioned.
00:05:42.600 The Copernican revolution, the Darwinian revolution, the Big Bang revolution, Einstein's
00:05:48.120 relativity revolution, all of these things construct a theory really is on a par with those
00:05:55.240 But at the same time, there's an incremental aspect to it.
00:05:57.800 It does come out of, it does, it's an evolution or a generalization as David Deutsch might
00:06:03.480 say, of the theory of computation, the theory of quantum computation.
00:06:08.080 It takes this, generalize it, goes further with it, and then probes areas of science that
00:06:15.000 here the two, physics hasn't had much contact with.
00:06:19.400 For example, biology, there is, I did in fact do myself, biophysics at university, but
00:06:25.000 this is a different way of approaching that, and even more exciting.
00:06:29.480 It brings epistemology, epistemology, to some extent within the purview of physics.
00:06:34.960 It's as if we have a physics of knowledge creation, the nascent beginnings of a physics
00:06:39.760 of knowledge creation here, and this is why I'm particularly excited about this theory
00:06:46.040 It's really it's deep, but then just a theory of physics.
00:06:48.280 It is a theory of science, and this is why the title of the book is the science of
00:06:52.760 canon Kant rather than merely the physics of canon Kant.
00:06:56.080 So the fact that this new theory reaches into physics, it reaches into computation, which
00:07:03.440 is already a part of physics anyway, biology, perhaps astonishingly into art, and we're
00:07:08.480 going to hear about that in this episode, it is, it has something to say about literature
00:07:19.240 It reads as if it belongs in that great lineage of books that began with the fabric of
00:07:23.960 reality, and it's now presenting for the narrator in a entirely new mode, as we say, of
00:07:32.160 A new way of conceiving how to do physics from the ground up.
00:07:36.240 So that's quite the task that Keira has set herself for a popular audience book.
00:07:42.280 But of course, just as with the beginning and infinity, it's really not just a popular
00:07:49.880 Like, for example, up here on my shelf, sit the Goldilocks enigma there by Paul Davies.
00:07:56.320 And that's in fact mentioned in the science of canon Kant.
00:08:00.240 The Goldilocks enigma really is a popular science book, a typical popular science book.
00:08:05.480 I don't want to denigrate it in any way at all.
00:08:07.880 It is a wonderful overview of the fine-tuning problem, which requires it to summarize what
00:08:15.000 we hear the two know about aspects of physics, chemistry, and biology.
00:08:19.000 And that's a wonderful, absolutely wonderful, I encourage people to read popular science
00:08:23.720 But I'm just mentioning, in order to contrast it with a book like this, or a book like
00:08:27.600 the beginning of infinity, of course, because this book, like the fabric of reality,
00:08:33.400 like the beginning of infinity, in the main, is not in the main, discussing the well-established,
00:08:41.480 well-known areas of science that kind of already appear in standard, high school undergraduate
00:08:48.160 textbooks by putting a little spin on the top, a little bit of icing on the cake, a
00:08:51.800 little bit of philosophical significance to these well-established scientific ideas.
00:09:00.360 This is a new theory, which has been published out there in referee journals, of course,
00:09:06.360 but is now, for the first time, really, being brought to a general audience in book form.
00:09:14.320 There are lots of resources out there on the constructor theory.org website.
00:09:19.080 Lots of talks for people who are new to this, but this is the first time in one place.
00:09:25.160 We have a whole bunch of that very latest research synthesized into a single volume.
00:09:32.920 And personally, in the book, what I have so far found is truly intriguing, and we'll
00:09:40.160 How in physics the denial of the possibility of considering counterfactuals means that
00:09:45.840 physics cannot possibly tell anything like a complete story of reality in its present form.
00:09:52.880 Now I emphasize the word story, as you will come to see, and there's a clue on the cover,
00:09:58.600 at least the Australian cover, the Kindle version, about this story.
00:10:03.800 Just as I mentioned literature earlier, what on earth could literature have to do with
00:10:09.120 We will see explanations, really, to be explanations that allow us to understand what is
00:10:14.200 happening in the world, need to consider what else could have happened in the world, aside
00:10:19.120 from what will happen, or what does happen in the world.
00:10:22.800 So explanations to be complete explanations, fundamental explanations, need to consider
00:10:32.520 And so like I say, one of the astonishing parts here is that we will see this comes to bear
00:10:36.920 on literature, on things like myth and fiction, but also history for the same reasons as
00:10:46.720 In constructor theory, we can seemingly do away also entirely with the notion, therefore,
00:10:54.240 Instead, if there is a law of physics prohibiting something, then it's an impossible task.
00:11:01.840 But if it's possible, this means there is no such law of physics, and there is a constructor
00:11:11.520 There's going to be a lot that I'm going to skip, but I will begin.
00:11:17.160 I will begin by reading the forward of the book by David Deutsch because no, I'm not going
00:11:24.120 to do that, because I want you to go and buy the book.
00:11:28.680 You can get the e-book now, as of this is May the 4th, I'm recording this, which is
00:11:35.280 I presume this episode of mine will be out on the 5th of May, broadly speaking around
00:11:40.600 the world, depending upon your time zone, but the actual hard cover version of the book
00:11:48.320 But I'm going to be careful, careful with the passages that are read from the book, because
00:11:52.680 I don't want to think that anyone doesn't need to buy the book, that you can just listen
00:11:57.160 to my podcasts and get a good understanding of it, but I don't think that's the case.
00:12:00.400 And I want to leave a whole bunch of gems that are in the book, in the book, again, to encourage
00:12:06.440 It's not an expensive book, but any stretch of the imagination, if you get a Kindle, you
00:12:09.560 can get it for a very reasonable price at the moment.
00:12:12.720 But there is a section there at the beginning, goes for a number of pages, which is a forward
00:12:16.720 by David Deutsch, which is, of course, worth the price of the book alone, but you're going
00:12:21.760 Now, also, right at the beginning of the book, after the forward comes a note on how to read
00:12:26.880 the book, I'm not going to read that either, and there is also a bit of a prelude.
00:12:31.920 And I won't read most of the prelude, but it is where I'll begin, I'll just read a very
00:12:36.880 small percentage of it, about 10% of that prelude, just one section of it.
00:12:43.320 The book is also interesting for the fact that it is chapters on the hard rigor of science.
00:12:48.320 I interspersed with interesting little stories, which really bring, in many ways, the
00:12:53.400 wonder of physics back, and that is another reason I'm excited about this book, being someone
00:12:57.280 who was trained in physics at the undergraduate level, and to a lesser extent, the graduate
00:13:03.360 I went through the motions of being excited, inspired, and at times let down, or disillusioned
00:13:11.400 with the project of doing physics, and I had to keep finding motivation by finding new
00:13:17.520 interesting topics within physics to try and understand to try and do.
00:13:24.840 This constructor theory is one of those areas, which is just so new, fresh, exciting,
00:13:35.240 It's not merely because there is this closer association between the work of Kiaramal
00:13:44.080 It's not only that, but because this particular theory of physics is as exciting as any
00:13:50.840 other area of physics out there, areas of physics in cosmology, about the fine-tuning
00:13:56.400 problem, for example, this will have something to say about how physics might be able
00:14:02.160 to find a resolution to this question about what is deeper quantum theory or general
00:14:10.720 And this will have something to say about that as well.
00:14:14.320 It might have something to say about why string theory has so far not borne too much fruit
00:14:20.320 in science, as much as it might be useful in mathematics.
00:14:24.160 There are just so many avenues of promise that a person who's interested in physics can
00:14:30.120 find a real thrill in, not least of which, is the derivation of the laws of thermodynamics
00:14:37.080 from deeper principles, bringing the laws of thermodynamics into fundamental physics as
00:14:44.080 well as being emergent laws that they can be now talked about as being just as fundamental
00:14:50.360 The reasons for that can be given through a construct that theoretic lens.
00:14:55.680 So all of this is just really exciting stuff for anyone interested in, and of course
00:15:00.720 the epistemology stuff that I said, that we could have a physics of epistemology, a
00:15:06.440 physics of testability, for example, we're going to get there, we're going to get there
00:15:11.240 throughout the course of reading through this book, which I imagine will take some months
00:15:16.080 and it will happen alongside a series on the fabric of reality as well.
00:15:21.120 As I finally tie up the beginning of infinity, we can go back in time to where the beginning
00:15:27.240 of infinity was inspired from, the fabric of reality, and forward to where the beginning
00:15:31.520 of infinity is leading to the science of can and can't.
00:15:37.040 I'm beginning on page XIX, because I'm not quite at page one yet, so this is still in
00:15:44.000 Okay, so for the first of what I presume will be many, many times, I'm going to say,
00:15:49.720 and Chiara writes, the assumption that all fundamental explanations in science must be expressed
00:15:56.440 only in terms of what happens with little or no reference to counterfactuals is now getting
00:16:04.720 For counterfactuals are essential to a number of things that are currently explained only
00:16:12.600 Actuals are central to an exact unified theory of heat, work, and information, both classical
00:16:18.760 and quantum, to explain matters such as the appearance of design in living things, and
00:16:26.960 As I shall explain in this book, some of these things such as information, heat, and work
00:16:30.600 already have some explanation in physics, but it is insufficient.
00:16:34.880 It is only approximate unlike more fundamental theories of physics such as quantum theory
00:16:40.880 Some others such as knowledge creation do not even have a fully-fledged explanation yet.
00:16:46.520 All these entities must be understood without approximations for science to make new progress
00:16:51.840 and all sorts of fields from fundamental physics, to biology, computer science, and even
00:16:59.080 Counterfactuals are essential to understand them all, pausing their just my unpacking of
00:17:09.440 We haven't yet been given an explanation of what they are, not by me, in the book,
00:17:14.600 So when I first heard about constructive theory and I heard that it was, and I began to
00:17:21.200 understand that it was about counterfactuals, I realized that David Deutsch was following
00:17:27.640 in a long line of philosophers and others who had tried to understand the nature of counterfactuals.
00:17:35.680 Counterfactuals being about what could have been the case, what might have happened,
00:17:44.320 And in physics, in constructive theory, in David Deutsch's new theory, and Cara Milletta's
00:17:51.120 new theory, what we're talking about is the physical possibility of things that could
00:18:02.560 And we're going to sharpen that up as we go along.
00:18:04.720 But I first encountered the significance or the mystery behind counterfactuals when I was at
00:18:12.280 University of the University of New South Wales, a lecturer of mine who's still there,
00:18:16.560 a lecturer of philosophical logic, his name is Michael, and one of his great heroes was David
00:18:22.200 Lewis, David Lewis, an American philosopher, and he wrote a book called Counterfactuals.
00:18:29.560 So it's a philosophical exploration of trying to understand the logic behind how to understand
00:18:36.480 Now I've had the science of Canon Can't for a few weeks now, I managed to get an advanced
00:18:43.560 copy, and I read through it and I realized there was no contact there with David Lewis.
00:18:50.720 And so I asked Cara about this, and there's good reason for that.
00:18:54.800 They want to clarify counterfactuals in terms of the physics.
00:18:59.520 I want to get bogged down in philosophical debates about who else said what, when, and where.
00:19:07.440 Instead we're going to get a clean new approach to what counterfactuals are about from
00:19:15.160 And so yes, you can go out and you can find other books that are about counterfactuals.
00:19:19.680 In particular, I book called Counterfactuals by David Lewis, which is a wonderful book,
00:19:27.040 But what we would now say, what we would have to now say, I think what we would have
00:19:30.840 to conclude, is that there is a better approach to these things.
00:19:35.520 So reading that book, I guess would be something like learning about Newtonian physics.
00:19:41.280 It could be useful and interesting and illuminating, but at the same time, if you want
00:19:45.920 the new stuff, if you want the quantum computation of counterfactuals, you literally want
00:19:53.800 So I am not going to, despite the fact I did, I grabbed my uni notes about modal logic
00:20:01.080 and counterfactuals and the work of people like Saul Kripke, as well as David Lewis,
00:20:09.760 But I quickly realized, well, the science of canon card, constructive theory, the new
00:20:15.640 physics of counterfactuals, is a much cleaner, better way to go.
00:20:22.960 Because it's not utterly disconnected from all these other subject areas, which are sometimes
00:20:32.800 Because after all, David Lewis, for example, who wrote that book and who consider he
00:20:37.680 also talked about the reality of other possible worlds, the logically possible other
00:20:45.360 worlds, and this is how he was trying to make sense of counterfactuals.
00:20:48.840 It didn't seem as though he was aware of avenues into reality, physical reality, namely
00:20:55.800 the Everett interpretation of quantum theory, that would have allowed him to really solidify
00:21:01.160 and to understand more deeply what these words essentially amounted to, given what we
00:21:10.000 So, after that, additional preamble from Kiara and myself, let's begin with chapter one,
00:21:19.320 which is titled, such stuff as dreams are made on, and there's a little introduction,
00:21:25.040 and Kiara writes, where I explain how to look at the laws of physics in a far broader
00:21:30.320 way, including counterfactuals, statements about what transformations are possible or
00:21:35.200 impossible, and you become acquainted with knowledge defined objectively via counterfactuals
00:21:41.560 as information that is capable of perpetuating its own existence, pausing there, and my
00:21:48.240 reflection echoes there clearly of the sentiments in the beginning of infinity, one particular
00:21:55.080 way of understanding what knowledge is, knowledge is this special entity in the universe
00:22:03.240 that tends to cause itself to remain in existence, and we used to say that once instantiated
00:22:10.240 tends to cause itself to remain so, and I guess instantiated is a bit of a complicated
00:22:15.040 word, so here we're saying perpetuating its own existence meant the same thing, let's
00:22:19.640 get into the meat of the matter, the beginning of chapter one, Kiara writes, quote, most
00:22:24.640 things in our universe are impermanent, rocks are inexorably abraded away, the pages
00:22:29.960 of books, tear and turn yellow, living things from bacteria to elephants to humans, age
00:22:35.560 and die, notable exceptions are the elementary constituents of matter such as electrons, quarks
00:22:41.120 and other fundamental particles, or the systems they constitute do change, those elementary
00:22:46.040 constituents stay unchanged, entirely responsible for both the permanence and the impermanence
00:22:53.440 are the laws of physics, they put formidable constraints on everything in our universe,
00:22:58.000 on all that has occurred so far and all that will occur in the future, the laws of physics
00:23:02.840 decree how planets move in their orbits, they govern the expansion of the universe, the
00:23:07.040 electric currents in our brains and in our computers, they also control the inner workings
00:23:11.640 of a bacterium or a virus, the clouds in the sky, the waves in the ocean, the fluid, molten
00:23:17.000 rock in the glowing interior of our planet, their dominion extends even to beyond what
00:23:22.000 actually happens in the universe, to encompass what can and cannot be made to happen, whatever
00:23:29.080 the laws of physics forbid cannot be brought about, no matter how hard one tries to realise
00:23:34.000 it, no machine can be built that would cause a particle to go faster than the speed of
00:23:38.680 light for instance, nor, as I have mentioned, could one build a perpetual motion machine
00:23:44.760 creating energy out of no energy, because the laws of physics say that the total energy
00:23:49.720 of the universe is conserved, the laws of physics are the primary explanation for that
00:23:55.360 natural tendency for things to be impermanent, the reason for impermanence is that the laws
00:24:01.440 of physics are not especially suited for preserving things other than elementary components,
00:24:07.880 they apply to the primitive constituents of matter without being specially crafted or
00:24:12.440 designed to preserve certain special aggregates of them, electrons and protons attract
00:24:17.920 each other, it is a fundamental interaction, this simple fact is the foundation of the complex
00:24:22.760 chemistry of our body, but no trace of that complexity is to be found at the laws of
00:24:26.560 physics, pausing their my reflection, already we have something new astonishing a different
00:24:34.520 way of picturing what I have who understood the second law of thermodynamics to be
00:24:40.320 about, this is already giving us an insight into where this book is going to go, a different
00:24:45.680 approach to physics altogether, the second law of thermodynamics is about entropy, and
00:24:50.760 in simple languages about no processes perfect, things degrade over time, nothing remains
00:24:58.520 permanent, except the elementary components or physical reality, so except for electrons
00:25:06.520 and quarks for example, now why, why should that be the case, well here we are getting
00:25:12.120 a hint, because the laws of physics apply to the primitive constituents of matter without
00:25:18.680 being specially crafted or designed to preserve certain aspects, certain special aggregates
00:25:23.240 of them, so the aggregates, the thing that you get when you put these constituents, these
00:25:30.080 fundamental constituents, the fundamental as far as we know, the electrons and the quarks
00:25:34.200 for example, putting those things together in complicated ways creates an aggregate, cats
00:25:41.040 and tables and people and stars, those things don't appear in the laws of physics, there's
00:25:46.760 no tables in the laws of physics but tables exist in our universe nevertheless, the same
00:25:52.280 is true for cats, same is true even for simple objects out there in space, far more
00:25:58.480 numerous than any of those things that I've just mentioned, stars, they don't appear
00:26:02.280 in the laws of physics, but the fundamental particles do in the standard model, they do
00:26:08.520 appear in the laws of physics, so therefore the laws of physics are telling you what
00:26:13.160 exists over time and so that is why those things exist over time and other things do
00:26:19.560 not, now can we go deeper than that, can we get beneath these laws of physics to say
00:26:23.960 why, why would it be the case that some things will just continue and some things won't,
00:26:31.440 that is going to be one of the motivations for constructive theory, so and this idea, this
00:26:36.600 idea that no trace of complexity is to be found in the laws of physics, even though there
00:26:41.320 is complexity in the universe is just such a deep mystery, so let's continue with the
00:26:45.640 book, chiarites, laws of physics such as those of our universe that are not specially
00:26:53.240 designed or tailored to preserve anything in particular, aside from that elementary stuff,
00:26:59.440 I shall call no design laws, under no design laws, complex aggregates of atoms such as
00:27:07.160 rocks are constantly modified by the interactions with their surroundings causing continuous
00:27:12.400 small changes in their structure, pausing there, so let's just recap that because this
00:27:19.680 is an important, given a new theory, we're going to have some important ways of sharpening
00:27:26.680 up nomenclature, sharpening up the fundamentals of the theory, which allow us to then go
00:27:34.040 forth and to make predictions that testable, testable about this new theory, and one such
00:27:41.240 thing is this concept of no design laws, so let me just emphasize that again, chiarites,
00:27:47.800 laws of physics such as those of our universe that are not specially designed or tailored
00:27:52.440 to preserve anything in particular, aside from elementary stuff, I shall call no design laws,
00:27:57.480 what a no design law, it's a law that doesn't have any special place in it for the things
00:28:04.960 that emerge out of that elementary stuff, the elementary stuff might be specified within
00:28:10.720 the no design law, but there's nothing in those laws that suggest a design, even though
00:28:16.400 we have appearance of design, it doesn't seem as though within the laws of physics,
00:28:21.920 anywhere at all, do we find life, do we find humans, do we find anything more complicated
00:28:30.160 than the basic constituents of matter, there's fundamental particles, including the
00:28:35.960 force carriers, which are fundamental particles as well, so this really is a new scientific
00:28:43.280 theory, and in an earlier part of the book, which I did not read, in the fairly extensive
00:28:50.800 preface, chiarites says we're going to meet new beasts along the way, new beasts along
00:28:55.320 the way, so new things that new ways of conceiving of stuff that we haven't before, and
00:29:01.560 I think this is one of the first, this concept of a no design law, so chiarites has just
00:29:06.800 written, under no design laws, complex aggregates of atoms, such as rocks are constantly
00:29:13.360 modified by the interactions with their surroundings, causing continuous small changes
00:29:18.160 in their structure, and then she goes on, quote, from the point of view of preserving
00:29:23.320 the structure, most of these interactions introduce errors, in the form of small glitches,
00:29:28.800 causing any complex structure to be corrupted over time, unless something intervenes to
00:29:33.800 prevent and correct those errors, the structure will eventually fade away or collapse.
00:29:38.760 The more complex and different from elementary stuff a system is, the harder it is to counteract
00:29:43.120 errors and keep it in existence, just pausing there again, here we already see how construct
00:29:49.780 the theory is drawing inspiration from the theory of computation, that to some extent
00:29:56.520 there's this idea of degradation in the physical world and the idea of error correction
00:30:02.720 in computation, so here there's already the hint of marrying these concepts together,
00:30:10.520 The more complex and different from elementary stuff a system is, the harder it is to counteract
00:30:16.640 errors and keep it in existence, think of the ancient practice of preserving manuscripts
00:30:21.240 by hand copying them, the longer and more complex the manuscript, the higher the chance that
00:30:26.040 some error may be performed while copying, and the harder it is for the scribe to counteract
00:30:31.000 errors, for instance, by double checking each word after having written it, given that
00:30:35.760 the laws of physics are no design, the capacity of a system to maintain itself in existence,
00:30:41.680 in an otherwise changing environment, is a rare, noteworthy property of our universe,
00:30:47.000 because it is so important, I shall give it a name, resilience.
00:30:51.320 That resilience is hard to come by, has long been considered a cruel fact of nature, about
00:30:56.480 which many poets and writers have expressed their resigned disappointment.
00:31:00.600 Here's a magisterial example, from a speech by Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest.
00:31:09.400 Our revels now are ended, these are our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits
00:31:15.200 and are melted into air, into thin air, and like the baseless fabric of this vision,
00:31:21.520 the cloud kept towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself,
00:31:28.240 they all which it inherits, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial, page-and-fated,
00:31:34.160 leave not a rack behind, we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life
00:31:40.040 is rounded with a sleep, and, quote, from Tempest.
00:31:45.520 Now those lines have such a delightful form and rhythm that, on first reading, something
00:31:50.600 important may go unnoticed, they present only a narrow, one-sided view of reality which
00:31:58.120 If we take these other facts into consideration, we see that Prospero's pessimistic turning
00:32:03.160 conclusion misplaced, but those facts are not immediately evident, in order to see them,
00:32:08.840 we need to contemplate something more than what spontaneously happens in our universe, such
00:32:13.880 as impermanence, occasional resilience, planets in the cloud kept towers of our cities.
00:32:19.680 We shall have to consider what can and cannot be made to happen, the counterfactuals,
00:32:25.720 which too, as I said, are ultimately decided by the laws of physics, okay, now pausing
00:32:33.160 Now I think it behooves me to go back and to actually read Shakespeare, there is a reason
00:32:38.600 why people study Shakespeare as well as just enjoy it, and the reason is that it can be
00:32:45.320 complicated, and so here is my imperfect attempt to translate part of this.
00:32:53.480 So Shakespeare wrote, our revels are now ended, we're all spirits and are melted into
00:32:59.760 air into thin air, the cloud kept towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the
00:33:04.360 great globe itself, yay which we all inherit, shall dissolve.
00:33:07.440 So what are you talking about there, impermanence, everything there, our revels are now
00:33:10.880 ended, so this thing is ending, things melt into air into thin air, so it sounds very grim,
00:33:18.720 and doesn't it, even our solemn temple, the great globe itself, the entire planet.
00:33:23.800 So it's interesting that he kind of got that, that everything goes the way of the second
00:33:30.920 law, everything degrades, everything is subject to entropy.
00:33:35.840 We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep,
00:33:41.240 so rounded with a sleep, there's nothing before or at least, we begin as babies sleeping
00:33:48.120 and we end as people dying, sleeping, all very depressing, and Kiara is going to cheer us
00:33:55.600 up, Kiara writes, quote, the most important element that Prospero's speech neglects is that
00:34:02.600 even under no design laws, resilience can be achieved.
00:34:07.800 There is no guarantee that it shall be achieved, since the laws are not designed for that,
00:34:12.080 but it can be achieved because the laws of physics do not forbid that.
00:34:16.920 And the immediate way to see this is to look around a bit more carefully than was possible
00:34:21.360 in Shakespeare's time, there are indeed entities that are resilient to some degree, even
00:34:26.040 more importantly, some are more resilient than others, some of them very much more.
00:34:31.560 These are not contrary to what proverbs and conventional wisdom might suggest are rocks
00:34:36.000 and stones, but living entities, pause there, my reflection, wow, this is thrilling already.
00:34:43.960 We think, we look at landscapes, like I'll put a landscape up, and we think that there's
00:34:52.720 stone structures like this have just been there forever.
00:34:56.320 Australia in particular is an extremely old continent, we're talking billions of years.
00:35:01.720 There are rocks there that exist in Western Australia, for example, that the geologists
00:35:06.440 have found that have been there, that have got minerals in them, that were there, not that
00:35:11.880 long after, the planet itself formed, they seem to be resilient.
00:35:17.160 But there are things that rival that kind of thing, and ultimately will far out strip any
00:35:24.760 kind of mineral or rock or anything that seems to be robust.
00:35:29.440 And we think to ourselves, no, hold on, life degrades much more quickly than those things.
00:35:34.720 Any individual organism dies very, very quickly on geological time scales.
00:35:40.120 Let's see what Keira has to say about this, let's keep going.
00:35:43.760 And she writes, quote, living things in general stand out as having a much greater aptitude
00:35:52.920 An animal that is injured can often repair itself, whereas a rock cannot.
00:35:56.920 An individual animal will ultimately die, but its species may survive for much longer
00:36:05.480 They have remained almost unchanged on earth for more than three billion years.
00:36:12.240 More precisely, what has remained almost unchanged are some of the particular sequences
00:36:17.400 of instructions that code for how to generate a bacterium out of elementary components,
00:36:23.440 which are present in every bacterial cell, a recipe.
00:36:26.960 That recipe is embodied in a DNA molecule, which is the core part of any cell.
00:36:31.560 It is a string of chemicals of four different kinds, the string works exactly like a long
00:36:36.160 sequence of words, composed of an alphabet of four letters, each word corresponds roughly
00:36:43.200 Groups of these elementary instructions are called genes by biologists, pausing their
00:36:48.880 So this is just astonishing, interesting, new, a new way of looking at things that there
00:36:53.600 are aspects of biology that are remained in existence, far longer than almost all rocks.
00:37:01.800 There might be some minerals out there that exist for longer, and I suppose in a sense
00:37:06.560 you can kind of think of DNA as like a mineral, not really, the technical differences
00:37:12.560 if you speak to a chemist, but in both cases it is just an arrangement of atoms, right,
00:37:17.680 But the thing with something like DNA is it is not just a mineral like a zircon, every
00:37:23.200 DNA strand is different to another DNA strand, and it contains information, and some of
00:37:27.720 that information is the same consistent across DNA strands.
00:37:31.720 For example, bacteria which have been around well, soon after the late heavy bombardment
00:37:36.720 in astronomical terms here on Earth, DNA did appear.
00:37:42.760 And some of those DNA strands have been replicated for the last three and a half billion
00:37:48.280 years, something like that, through today in certain bacteria or archaea, even these
00:37:57.640 Now for the first time, I'm going to be skipping a fair bit of this chapter which talks
00:38:03.480 about the significance of the fact that DNA contains this resilient information, and I'll
00:38:14.960 Of course, the resilience of our civilization is constantly threatened by severe problems,
00:38:21.680 Some of them, such as global warming and fast-spreading pandemics, are in fact a byproduct,
00:38:28.160 These problems present considerable challenges, and could easily wipe out several aspects
00:38:34.480 But the point I would like to focus on here is, it is possible to take steps to solve
00:38:39.120 those issues, remember how serious they appear, and the laws of physics do not forbid
00:38:45.200 They do not guarantee improvement or resolution, but nor do they forbid it.
00:38:49.960 This and further progress by addressing a problem such as the climate crisis are both possible
00:38:54.840 the laws of physics expressed as counterfactuals offer a chance for improvement, pausing
00:39:01.320 So this is introducing optimism, optimism into the laws of physics as well.
00:39:06.160 We had this, to some extent, in the beginning of infinity.
00:39:10.680 We had it as a description of how reality might operate, but here we're trying to sharpen
00:39:16.880 things up, and it appears as the, with constructive theory, we're getting a more rigorous
00:39:26.760 Optimism, epistemology of certain kinds, physics, biology, and computation.
00:39:33.360 Okay, skipping a little more, and going back to the book in Kiara Runt.
00:39:39.680 These reflections suggest that the recipe in certainty and A-patterns is much more resilient
00:39:44.600 than stone, and that the elements of our civilization for which there exists in analogous
00:39:49.000 recipe, such as medicine, science, and literature, can be more resilient still.
00:39:54.280 So under no design laws, a higher degree of resilience seems to require there to be recipes
00:40:00.080 of a particular kind, what kind, and what are such recipes made of exactly?
00:40:05.840 The answer has to be constructed gradually, and requires a digression about recipes.
00:40:10.920 First, let's understand how recipes can be created under no design laws of physics,
00:40:17.200 As I said, the only thing that these laws preserve for free are certain elementary particles
00:40:23.360 One, therefore, has to understand how those recipes have come about at all, out of elementary
00:40:28.800 things that know nothing about recipes of such complexity.
00:40:31.840 I shall start with the recipes coded in the pattern of living cells DNA.
00:40:35.800 It is now well understood how those have come about, Darwin's theory of evolution explains
00:40:40.080 how living entities and their stupendous biological adaptations, such as the snout of the dog,
00:40:44.960 the fins of a dolphin, or the wings of a bee, have come about in the absence of a designer,
00:40:52.320 Now each biological adaptation of a given animal is coded for somewhere in the recipe embodied
00:40:59.120 What Darwin's theory tells us is how the recipes coding for complex biological adaptations
00:41:05.200 can have come about without being explicitly designed.
00:41:09.520 This will be key to understanding what the recipes are made of, as is often the case
00:41:14.560 with deep theories, grasping exactly what problem Darwin's theory addresses require some
00:41:21.600 The problem was stated with great clarity by their theologian, William Paley, a few decades
00:41:27.680 Living things are so perfectly orchestrated that they seem to have been the output of an
00:41:31.480 actual design process, such as that which produces a current factory directed towards
00:41:36.440 a purpose, they have the appearance of design, just like cars or smartphones or a watch.
00:41:43.520 If you're walking along a beach and you suddenly see a watch on the ground, you may
00:41:46.960 be guessing that some designer must have assembled it.
00:41:50.240 But at the dawn of our planet's history, there was no designer, factory, or intentional
00:41:54.400 design process that could create living things, only elementary components of matter, served
00:42:00.200 in the form of an amorphous bubbling soup and nothing more.
00:42:03.760 So how can living entities and the resilient recipes coding for the biological adaptations
00:42:09.120 in their structure have come about in the absence of a designer?
00:42:13.280 What Darwin discovered and what Paley could not quite see is that there is no need for
00:42:18.120 any intentional design process, biological adaptations and animals can be created out of
00:42:22.280 elementary components of matter such as simple chemicals via a non-purposeful process
00:42:29.800 That process needs only enough time and elementary resources such as simple chemicals
00:42:34.840 It is an undirected mechanism and yet it can produce purposeful complexity starting from scratch
00:42:40.760 under laws of physics that are simple and no design themselves.
00:42:44.920 Now at this point, Kiara goes into an explanation of evolution by natural selection via
00:42:50.880 the neo Darwinian framework, which is best explained by Richard Dawkins in the selfish
00:42:58.040 gene and so this idea of a replicator that allows for genes, genetic information, knowledge
00:43:06.400 to be passed from one generation to the next is explained here and I'm skipping all that
00:43:11.760 and she does make the point of course that during this process, this transcription process
00:43:17.680 where the DNA can be replicated, where genes can be replicated, there is an error correction
00:43:24.040 So there's error correcting there at the core of how the transcription works.
00:43:27.920 If there was no error correction, then there would be no replication but the error correction
00:43:32.320 isn't perfect and so therefore you can have errors creeping, which leads to mutations,
00:43:37.800 which leads to genes which can be more or less fit for a particular environment and this
00:43:42.320 is the way in which of course you end up getting selection pressure and some things, some
00:43:47.600 variants surviving being more fit given a particular environment and some being less fit
00:43:53.480 For more on that, buy the book or of course buy the beginning of infinity or you could
00:43:58.400 go back and listen to the chapters about artificial creativity and creativity that appear
00:44:08.480 in the beginning of infinity that I read through in my own series.
00:44:12.080 Now this idea of some genes being more fit when you have a mutation, you will produce
00:44:19.480 a genetic variant that 999 times out of 999 times out of 1000 or more, the chance is that
00:44:28.240 it's not going to be better for the organism, this particular gene, it's not going to be
00:44:32.720 more fit but sometimes it will be, very rarely it will be and Chiar on this point basically
00:44:37.880 says quote, what distinguishes helpful changes in the recipe, the genetic recipe, from
00:44:45.120 unhelpful ones, it is a particular kind of information, information that is capable of keeping
00:44:52.720 itself instantiated in physical systems, it is resilient information, I shall call this
00:44:58.320 resilient information which is the ingredient in successful recipes knowledge and I shall
00:45:04.040 talk about it extensively in Chapter 5, for adaptations it is knowledge of some features
00:45:09.120 of the environment and so an explanation there about what biological knowledge is, knowledge
00:45:16.480 which is in the genes which keeps itself instantiated in physical systems, namely in
00:45:22.320 the GNA of course, the DNA of course and this knowledge of how to keep the organism
00:45:26.920 or in fact more specifically the gene in existence over time, so I am going to skip
00:45:32.680 past that entire section largely speaking on biology and you get the book for that to
00:45:38.240 read that, I am skipping to where Chiar writes, the other kind of recipe I mentioned is those
00:45:45.920 that maintain our civilization in existence by coding for how to build things like
00:45:50.480 palaces, factories, cars and durobots, such recipes contain knowledge too, they consist
00:45:56.960 of information that can perpetuate itself, embodied in physical support such as our brains,
00:46:02.680 bits of paper, books, documentaries, historical records, scientific papers, conference proceedings
00:46:08.200 with the internet and so on, however this kind of knowledge is brought about via a different
00:46:12.240 process than natural selection, it is produced by thinking and it can reach further
00:46:18.160 the knowledge that emerges directly by natural selection, it is primarily this kind of knowledge
00:46:23.320 that humans have been able to construct their civilization that is tentatively improving
00:46:27.480 and growing despite also often making bad mistakes, such knowledge consists of thoughts,
00:46:35.720 it is made of the same stuff as dreams are made on, yet rather than fading away like fog
00:46:40.920 in the morning sun as Prospero suggests, knowledge is the key to resilience.
00:46:47.680 The knowledge in his speech survives to this day, in fact knowledge is the most resilient
00:46:52.200 stuff that can exist in our universe, given that knowledge has such an essential role in
00:46:57.520 the survival of complex entities, it is essential to understand the process by which new
00:47:01.240 knowledge is created from scratch in our mind. Fortunately, this process was elucidated
00:47:06.640 by the philosopher Carl Popper in the mid 20th century, he argued that knowledge creation
00:47:11.000 always starts with a problem, which we can think of as a clash between different ideas
00:47:16.120 someone has about reality. Incidentally, this suggests a rather positive uplifting interpretation
00:47:21.680 of conflicting states of mind where contrary impulses clash and fight. These conflicts are
00:47:26.840 all examples of problems, but luckily problems can lead to new discoveries, for example
00:47:30.800 in writing a story, the clash in the author's mind might be between the desire to use
00:47:35.320 elegant, a lyrical language and the necessity of keeping the attention of the reader alive
00:47:40.200 with a gripping plot. The author has to find a way of meeting both these criteria, which
00:47:44.600 may clash in certain situations, along passage describing an idyllic landscape might
00:47:49.280 give a perfect chance to meet the former criterion, but might result in the reader dropping
00:47:53.160 the book and switching on the TV, because it slows down the pace of storytelling. To address
00:47:56.800 problems such as this, one has to create new knowledge. First, one conjectures several tentative
00:48:03.960 solutions, the analog of variations in replicators in natural selection, these could take
00:48:08.120 the form of actual drafts written down on paper, or thoughts or a combination of those,
00:48:13.320 those conjectures may well be full of errors and produce even worse results at first.
00:48:18.200 So one proceeds with the second phase, criticism. Criticism is the act of seeking and correcting
00:48:24.080 errors in an attempt to improve on the solutions, the analog of natural selection. Sometimes
00:48:29.800 this process may be completely opaque to us, so that we may have the impression that
00:48:34.440 good ideas come out of the blue, but it does in fact take place. The author will usually
00:48:39.120 discard most of the earlier versions of the story until some final product that meets
00:48:44.040 both criteria comes about. This final product, if the process has worked, may have the
00:48:49.520 hallmark of all masterpieces. It is hard to change further, while still meeting the criteria,
00:48:55.920 because it has been obtained by tentatively removing flaws in previous versions which
00:49:01.360 met the criteria to a lesser extent. The masterpiece contains new knowledge. It shall be remembered.
00:49:08.280 It shall be translated into different languages. It shall live on for centuries and
00:49:13.480 survive for generations, inspiring readers of all ages, as long as civilization survives,
00:49:19.400 as Shakespeare's sonnet number 18 says of itself, so long as men can breathe or eyes can
00:49:25.360 see, so long lives this and this gives life to thee. That process is tentative. Given
00:49:33.360 that there is no designer, the laws of physics, there is no guarantee that one shall
00:49:36.880 make progress by conjecture and criticism. But one can. For the same reason, a solution
00:49:42.480 that looks good for one problem may be found to be an adequate at a later stage. For
00:49:46.520 example, in physics, Newton's theory of gravitation had been tremendously successful
00:49:50.800 for nearly three centuries at explaining planetary motion and many other things. But nevertheless,
00:49:55.880 it was later found to be inadequate and was superseded by a better theory, Einstein's
00:50:00.680 general relativity, pausing their myreflection. So this is a remarkable application of the
00:50:09.360 nascent physics of construct a theory to epistemology and in particular to knowledge that
00:50:17.280 tends to cause itself to remain in place. And in particular, great works of literature
00:50:22.960 or great works of music where the masterpieces we refer to is a masterpiece precisely
00:50:28.960 because errors have been corrected. Errors in light of a particular criteria set of criteria
00:50:36.040 beyond that the author, the composer, is striving to meet. It's that thing that is set
00:50:44.560 in armadias about that Mozart talking about Mozart's music. Displace one note and there
00:50:52.480 would be diminishment. If you try and fiddle with the great works of classical music,
00:51:00.040 even the great works of pop music, then they tend to sound worse. The composer is striving
00:51:06.320 for something objectively good. And even if they cannot explain precisely what it is,
00:51:12.280 they're nonetheless meeting it. Okay, it might be in explicit knowledge.
00:51:15.160 And when it comes to books, you know, one of my favourite all time works of literature
00:51:20.680 is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. And many of us love it precisely because of exactly
00:51:25.640 how Kara described this clash that occurs in the mind of the author. No doubt. And some
00:51:33.000 people, some people do find Tolkien's work slow in parts. And this is precisely why some
00:51:39.240 of us absolutely love it because it is this wonderful, finely tuned blend of a fast,
00:51:47.880 paced plot, interesting characters, getting up to fun stuff that's exciting. And these long
00:51:56.760 poetic passages of prose describing the countryside, the scenery. And you feel like you're there
00:52:04.760 if you really take it on board. And it's nice to have that kind of experience with a book.
00:52:09.240 And that's why it's so long, of course, you know, it has these very long passages where you can sit
00:52:13.080 back and meditate and relax and really imagine that you're there and it really does inspire
00:52:19.560 one's imagination. You can visualize, you know, the forests and the mountains leap into existence
00:52:25.480 because of these long passages where Tolkien being just an absolute master of the English
00:52:31.720 language is able to conjure these images in your mind. And then that's broken up with
00:52:35.960 the excitement of some sort of plot thing going on with the characters where they're being attacked
00:52:41.240 by the baddies or some other great battle goes on. And so Tolkien clearly was, did have that
00:52:50.280 question his mind at times? No doubt. No doubt he probably thought to him, so this is going on a bit
00:52:54.520 long, where he's thinking, well, now I'm just engaged in an authoring a blockbuster fairy tale,
00:52:59.960 which is what he never wanted to do. But they're kind of exciting. There's something
00:53:03.400 fun and exciting happening on every page, but that doesn't happen in Lord of the Ring. So it is a
00:53:07.160 masterpiece because of this, at least some of us would say it's a masterpiece because of this.
00:53:11.080 So to, of course, with Shakespeare's work or with any of the great poets and playwrights,
00:53:16.120 you know, it's difficult to improve, okay? Not to say it's an impossible,
00:53:21.160 an imprintable to improve, but very difficult, hard to vary, which is what makes it good.
00:53:27.560 That's the thing. That's one of the things that make it good, okay? It's hard to vary,
00:53:32.120 while still achieving what you want it to achieve in the case of Lord of the Rings being an
00:53:37.160 absolutely engaging, entertaining, thrilling read, an impressive read. Okay, let's go back to the
00:53:45.240 book and Keira writes, there are no absolute sources of certain truth. Any good solution to a
00:53:52.040 problem may also contain errors. This principle is based on fallibleism, a pillar of poppers
00:53:58.120 explanation of rational thinking, fallibleism makes progress feasible because it allows for further
00:54:04.360 criticism to occur in the future. Even when it presents, we seem to be content with whatever
00:54:09.480 solution we have found. It leaves space for creating ever improving theories, stories,
00:54:15.480 works of art and music. It also tells us that errors are extremely interesting things to look
00:54:20.280 for. Whenever we try to make progress, we should hope to find more of them as fast as possible.
00:54:25.720 Now, I'm going to do something that I haven't done with my other series on the beginning of
00:54:30.120 Infinity, but I'll do it here for this episode. I'm going to skip an extensive number of pages
00:54:37.560 for about 20 pages or so because it's largely about physics, which is the area I'm most interested
00:54:44.920 in probably alongside of epistemology and there's a lot of epistemology there as well.
00:54:48.600 And so I want to devote a separate episode, my next episode, to that part of this first chapter.
00:54:55.480 I want to end today's episode, however, with something that comes later, which really,
00:55:01.480 I think, very clearly illuminates the centrality importance of this concept of counterfactuals
00:55:10.360 and how physics hasn't really dealt with counterfactuals before, but construct a theory
00:55:15.880 offers a new lens into understanding reality scientifically. And so I'm going to read the story
00:55:26.440 that Kiara tells from ancient Greek myth, this is still in chapter one, and Kiara writes,
00:55:34.360 consider, as another example, a simple story, one that could be told from generation to generation
00:55:41.000 by oral tradition without having to be written down, an ancient Greek myth will do. The story goes
00:55:46.680 that Theseus, son of Agius, King of Athens, went to Crete to kill the Minotaur.
00:55:53.160 Theseus made an agreement with his aged father that if he defeated the Minotaur on their return,
00:55:58.520 his crew would raise white sails on the ship. Had he perished, his crew would raise black sails.
00:56:05.560 So, off went Theseus and he defeated the Minotaur, but on his way back, distracted by all sorts
00:56:11.640 of things, including possibly the presence of his fiance, Ariadne, on the ship,
00:56:18.280 he forgot to tell the crew about the sails. The crew left the black sails on, and Agius,
00:56:24.840 seeing the ship approaching from the highest tower of Athens, thought his son was dead.
00:56:29.480 So, he threw himself into the sea and drowned. This tragic story is why the sea is now called
00:56:36.440 the Agian. Now, suppose we asked a master storyteller to tell that story with the constraint that
00:56:44.680 he could formulate statement only about what happens. That is, he must report the full story without
00:56:52.040 ever referring to counterfactual properties. In particular, he cannot refer to properties
00:56:57.480 that have to do with what could or could not be done to physical systems. This task turns out to
00:57:04.520 be impossible for the story to make sense and to convey its full meaning to attributes of the
00:57:09.880 ship are essential. One that can be used to send a signal by assuming one of two states,
00:57:16.520 white sail showing or black sail showing. The other that the state of having black or white sails
00:57:22.280 can be copied onto another physical system such as Agius's eyes and brain. The copyability
00:57:28.440 property tells us that the flag contains information just as in the case of replicators.
00:57:33.560 These two properties just like the property of blank paper are counterfactual,
00:57:38.520 so that myth could not be told, conveying its full meaning under the constraint that one should
00:57:44.280 refer only to what happens, not even by the best storyteller ever. Pause their
00:57:48.920 my reflection, ending the reading for today of the science of Canon Kant. What a wonderful
00:57:55.960 way to bring myth into this whole thing and to bring storytelling into this thing,
00:58:02.040 because I think that gets across the whole point of this. Hit the two, physics has been about
00:58:07.720 dynamical laws where you plug in, and I'll do an example next time, where you plug in the conditions,
00:58:13.720 initial conditions, they're often called, but they can be conditions at any particular time,
00:58:17.560 which will allow you to then do a prediction of what will happen, and this has always been the
00:58:23.320 story of physics. Here we're going to predict what will happen, or in certain modes of quantum
00:58:30.120 theory, what probably will happen, something like that, like an in Bayesianism of course you get
00:58:35.960 this whole idea of what probably will happen. But in other areas like storytelling, for example,
00:58:42.040 it makes no sense at all to just talk about what will happen. We want to know what could possibly
00:58:47.800 have happened. The only way that story makes sense, the only way we know why the king throws
00:58:52.120 himself into the ocean, why the sea is now called the Aegean, is because his son was flying
00:58:58.120 black sails. If he had have been flying white sails, as he should have been, if he had
00:59:03.240 have defeated the Minotaur, then the sea would not have been called the Aegean, because the
00:59:08.840 king would never have flung himself into the sea, killing himself. Now, this makes sense of the
00:59:15.560 story, this makes sense of the story in literature. How much more so then can it make sense of
00:59:22.360 what physically is going on in reality, in physical reality? This is why this new mode of explanation
00:59:30.680 in physics is just so exciting. This is at the crux of it, that hitherto we've been given this
00:59:36.200 tiny little slice of reality through the lens of physics. Powerful as it is, useful it is,
00:59:42.440 and I'll talk about all the ways in which it's so useful and powerful next time via the book.
00:59:49.320 But it is a tiny sliver of the possibilities that give you the much more grand picture
00:59:56.840 of what reality is about. And hopefully into the future as constructive theory unfolds and we learn
1:00:01.640 more about it, of our researchers working in this area, we begin to flesh out, we've been to
1:00:08.120 color in the lines about what constructive theory is telling us about a physical reality.
1:00:14.040 But for now, at least we have the stage set that we are pivoting away from this single line
1:00:21.560 idea of physics tells us what is going to happen, what has happened and what is going to happen,
1:00:27.560 but constructive theory, moving beyond the dynamical laws, can now explain what possibly
1:00:35.480 could happen. And that what possibly could happen indeed comes then in part to what we choose
1:00:43.560 to create knowledge about, because then that allows physical possibilities to occur in the future.
1:00:51.000 And we, people are instrumental in that central to that whole conception. So I'm excited about
1:00:57.320 this series, go and get the book. It's a great book. This is my only second reading of it,
1:01:03.400 so I'm still learning new things about it as I go through it. And look out also for an episode
1:01:11.240 about the fabric of reality released near to this one. Probably a short one, but near to this one.