Alan Guth - What Can't Be Predicted in Physics?
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- Опубликовано: 28 май 2024
- Prediction is the fruitful product of good science, but how far can prediction go? Physics is the most mathematical and rigorous of the sciences and so prediction is most successful in physics. But are there limits to predictability in physics? What about quantum indeterminacy? Are there ultimate barriers to prediction in physics?
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Alan Harvey Guth is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory (and how particle theory is applicable to the early universe). He is currently serving as Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he is the originator of the inflationary universe theory.
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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.
I found this channel by accident, now i'm slowly going through the whole catalog of episodes, I really love this channel, the core fundamental topics discussed are presented in an easy to understand format. Alan Guth is the man! the only reason he didn't get the Nobel Prize yet is because, proving what came before time began may be impossible but he's still a genius!
Same. Showed up in recommendations and I totally thought it was going to be about aliens or something but it's quite good and it's been around for ages. I can't believe I'd never heard of it before a year or so ago.
Guth is legend. Incredible content, love it!!
No doubt, but use your own imagination. Thanks for your replay and have a good life.
@@richg2881 There's no such thing as "own" imagination.
@@richg2881 we always pile on to existing imagination. It's called "shared system of knowledge"
@@bojackhorsingaround reality is pure imagination. Reality IS for YOU what YOU IMAGINE it to be.
@@mrbwatson8081
Agree. As Neils Bohr said, reality is the sum of our observations.
I HAVE WATCHED SEVERAL EPISODES OF CLOSER TO TRUTH. IT IS VERY ENLIGHTENING.
This is the first time a scientist has made me feel comfortable over the hard problem of consciousness.. what a great mind!
Thank you RLK for another exploration and explanation.
I have tremendous respect for Alan Guth; he is not only an extraordinary physicist, but also a most gifted physics / science expositor. That said, I think we’ve been spoiled by the fact that many of our beautiful mathematical / theoretical works have historically found corresponding analogies / evidence in the physical world via clever experimentations. For now, however, strictly speaking, String Theory is neither a theory per se nor a scientific endeavor for that matter. At the moment there is no experimental evidence in favor of String Theory, nor is it a falsifiable hypothesis. String Theory at the moment could perhaps best be described as a quaint philosophical curiosity in mathematical reverie.
There will never be experimental evidence for string theory as the energy required for a particle accelerator to prove the theory is just too immense. No such accelerator can ever be built and it will always remain an unproven theory.
Very informative
Guys manisfestaion that conscieness are parte phich are baseless and non sense because Guth not show it though Law of phich. There are gap between phich and reality that Guth hipotesy are cover up by his lack phich evidence. Trust me NEVER believes when scientif experience are keep it out by baseless hipotesy .
I love this program
Consciousness can be unpicked by careful thinking and experimentation. Anil Seth's book - Being You - is a good place to start. Any job that takes 3.8 billion years to complete - that is, the construction of a structure aware of itself and a creator of elaborate symbol systems - will take some patience to read the working manual and fully understand the operating system. Intelligence is not awareness. Computers can be more intelligent than humans, but they are not alive and cannot be alive. Therefore they are not aware.
He makes terrific sense. I agree with virtually everything he says.
You have to pick n choose where you are going to stand .
When playing pool its not good enough to know the angles the back spin still can change your determined outcome no different in the qauntom.
scale and how far into the future you are predicting are the variables further in the future means less predictable.
Grow Observe and Develop
Alan talking about consiousness. Thats was quite brief
Man once you hear Alan say "uhh" every 2 seconds you just can't unhear it.
He's been saying uhh, for as long as I can remember, and I first saw Alan Guth on TV about 25 years ago.
That's an awful lot of UHH's.
On the other hand, one can easily predict what Closer to Truth is going to post about. It's going to about about consciousness and fine tuning.
The same people that think the pyramids were build by a "lost technology" love to come here and spread mumbojumbo about consciousness.
@@TurinTuramber You don't sound very conscious 🙂
@@seetowin I just don't like to mix up my imagination with evidence based beliefs.
@@TurinTuramber You've apparently never been informed of the numerous electrical and mechanical engineers who've demonstrated with absolute certainty that the pyramids, specifically the Great Pyramid of Giza, can function as a huge harmonic resonance chamber, tuned to vibrate at the exact frequency required for the granite and quartz, which are intricate layered between insulating minerals, to produce electricity (through the piezoelectric effect). Nikolai Tesla's tower, for transmitting electricity atmospherically, that he built at his property in Colorado, was set to the exact height of the Great Giza Pyramid, and he (who we have to thank for the electric motor, generator, and the ac system on which our whole transmission system worldwide is built, among other wonders) specifically stated that the Giza Pyramid, which he studied first hand too, was built for power generation. It was originally encapsulated in white limestone, an excellent insulator, and had a gold pyramidion as a capstone, gold being an phenomenal conductor. That is credible evidence, just not commonly discussed knowledge. Also, NDEs are incredibly compelling set of evidence of there being more to consciousness than just a bio-electro-chemical function of the nervous system. Situations in which people resuscitated have clearly told the doctors, medical staff, friends, and family detailed facts that they simply had no conventional way of knowing, often corroborated by numerous people gaining nothing from it, number on the thousands. Highly respected Dr.'s have written extensively about this. Many times times the information they had came from locations far removed from their body. Furthermore, the CIA recovered a downed Soviet spy plane in Africa before the U.S.S.R. could even find it using a remote viewer, as part of their psychic intelligence program, which operated for decades. These are not anecdotal musings, these are all well documented and researched events that are not disputed credibly by anyone with credentials and knowledge of the situations. We are indoctrinated, by and large, in the materialist reductionist worldview, which seeks to break things down into parts, to understand the whole, but not only doesn't understand everything about the parts, and excludes anything it can't explain, in doing so it is oriented away from emergent phenomenon; when more emerges from the parts as a whole, then when studied in isolation. Science has discovered and allowed for unbelievably advancements, awe inspiring, obviously, but to think that it is predestined to figure everything out, at least with it's current methods, and limitations, is a little too presumptive to be considered rational, logic would dictate that different phenomenon must be tested with different methods. We don't even understand how the brain could even create consciousness, but scientists often hate to admit they don't. However, stating you know something, when your don't, is the antithesis of the scientific method. I see no issue with opening our minds up to all the possibilities reality might contain. I appreciated your response, and apologize if this is too lengthy for you at all. I just find all of this too fascinating, interesting to summarize. Thank you though, you forced me to think even more clearly about some of life's questions, and I am constantly reevaluating as I learn more.
So what. Both items are very intriguing.
can computers be programmed to go backwards in time, to attempt modeling of cosmos beginning?
when or where gravity happens, are any quantum waves / fields emitted? such as in black holes, which are caused by massive gravity and emit quantum waves / fields?
My amateur opinion about what consciousness might be: a consequence of the quantum properties of particles to be entangled with or affected by other particles in a non-local sense. Thus, a particle can "know" (inherit information about) the state of other particles. Maybe that's consciousness at the most fundamental level, and biological life has exploited this fundamental property of nature, extended/developed it massively for survival purposes in critters such as ourselves, or in a very rudimentary sense like what happens in photosynthesis. Maybe consciousness isn't so mysterious at all but is rather a basic property of particles in terms of their ability to share information between them.
My bacteria said no . They say viruses are not conscious . But how could they know ?
@@thierrylandrieu7441 LOL nice. Depends on your definition of "conscious". Are entangled particles conscious? They clearly possess a sort of knowledge about their partner, but they lack awareness of awareness, which I theorize comes about by biology exploiting that fundamental consciousness inherent to all particles.
Consciousness is just self-awareness at the highest level which now humans experience... Read how the eye evolved, consciousness evolved the same way....
The problem is that at the particle level the information could at best be syntactic, whereas our consciousness is semantic. The meaning attributable to states, events and processes in the brain presumably derives from their interrelation and function. The problem for all theories of consciousness is how to move from that functional meaning to a unified experience of the meaning. Quantum states covering the particles in the syntactic functional network would not offer an interpretation of the semantic meaning. In philosophical terms this relates to Brentano's theory of irreducibility of intentionality, or Quines indeterminism of radical translation, or Dennett's notion that brains are syntactic engines that only mimic semantic engines.
@@emergentform1188 our cells have an awareness of viruses , no problem , but we do not . Only when they make us sick AND we develop a reasonably precise test , and then some people are aware that we are aware and start selling snake oil medication…. When they do not make it compulsory . Our kind of Awareness means making mistakes too .
We don't know... please fund every project we can think of to get Closer to the Truth. Patience is a 4 way stop.
'Belief' is the word that came across strongly to me. Belief that *everything* can be explained by physics because it has a good track record is exactly the problem of induction. And what's that thing atheists always say to theists about lacking proof? 🤔
There isn't really such a thing as a particle, they are a mistake in physics. What we call particles are actually just gravity spinning inside holes. If you were to program gravity into a computer you get all of the missing physics. So for someone asked a question to reply with physics that don't even exist in the first place will not lead you to any answers.
how explain observation in physics?
ALAN GUTH IS AN INSPIRATIONAL SCIENTIST.
ve-*dick* thumper!?
could models of consciousness be programmed by computers?
That conclusion is problematic if ultimately it is physical law that determines our mental faculties and reasoning.. if there is no autonomous law at work in each individual experience of consciousness where then is autonomous rationality? it seems to remove the bedrock of the scientific method
Hard to argue "autonomous rationality" when most physicists have abandoned the notion of free-will. Everything is a mathematical function of something else.
@@drbuckley1 agreed, that’s the problem though! that would eliminate the enterprise of the scientific method. how can anyone discern between 2 competing hypothesis and trust that their rational faculties are capable of choosing one over the other - when in fact all of their mental processes are determined by physical law, not an actual capacity to reason.
It’s a break with our most precious intuition. We’ve literally lost the foundation of science and are only continuing on propped up by the scaffolding of our intuition that we actually are thinking and reasoning ourselves.
Alan Guth is one of the great scientific thinkers of our time, but I fear he overplays his hand when he ventures beyond particle physics. While the physics of light, sound, and atoms is involved in everything, this is true, physics will not explain humans dealing with information and emotional content. Two people watching this video: Person A might think Kuhn is agreeing with everything Guth says, while Person B might think Kuhn is humoring Guth at times. That isn’t physics.
Leviticus 19:31 - "Do not turn to the spirit mediums, and do not consult fortune-tellers so as to become unclean by them. I am Jehovah your God." The question is more like what physics shouldn't try to predict.
but the laws of physics are conceived of in consciousness surely
Exactly. It's human consciousness that collapses the wave function in quantum mechanics.
maybe experimentalists can better develop tests for theories that are difficult to verify?
Guth's reductionism may be a bit over optimistic. He concedes at the end of the talk that we conscious being are incredibly complicated systems but that we will ultimately be able to be reduced to our quantum mechanics. He doesn't seem to understand that complex systems are emergent and do NOT reduce. They are greater than the sum of their component parts.
Yeah, that was an exaggeration in the extreme. Yet, one might argue that every moment is determined by the moment immediately preceding it, all the way back to the Big Bang. The classical world we live in is deterministic; quantum mechanics is famously probabilistic.
It is AMAZING how smart people's minds break down when they get to the edge of their domain and start projecting what they know...and he has no idea as far as I can tell?
There was nothing in his discussion that countered emergent properties from complexity whatsoever. His opinion in answer to Roberts question, was that “subjective consciousness” is an emergent property just as stars emerge from gravity induced compressed gases and not some metaphysical woo woo such as panpsychism or dualism.
@@frankkockritz5441 That's not even the reproach levelled against reductionists. You're talking about the common-sense understanding of emergence. But the question posed to reductionists is whether an epistemic closure in the domain of physics (which they definitely hope to achieve) can allow them to predict the newly emergent order properties of entities from its lower level constituents and their interactions (like what the next stage in human evolution would look like, or what are the exact properties of new chemical compounds going to be like or even how human societies will be structured in the near future). In other words, is emergence merely epistemic or is it ontological. Many from chemical and biological sciences claim that emergence is ontological, and that it is impossible to even know what the future potentialities could look like. Even the mainstream position in QM now rules out the presence of any local hidden variables that could account for the uncertainty, which makes pure randomness a part of reality itself and not merely a lack of human understanding. So, the question of how this randomness gives rise to order and whether the same non-local ontology of the QM universe has any implications for consciousness is at the least an interesting one. Of course to some, this is still a woo woo proposition, but that's just how some people are- confidence in conventions is not always bad either, I guess
Well, it depends. Because, in science, it has been shown that most natural systems can be derived from the properties of their constituents and the interactions between them. But ultimately, we can't make bold statements because we're not experts and we haven't extensively studied about the subject by ourselves yet🤷
Physics has two magical incantations: space and time.
The problem with reconciling gravity and quantum mechanics is acceleration: t² (time squared). It cannot be avoided in physics that the "source" of all forces has nothing to do with matter, and has everything to do with time.
For a magical quantity that can't be seen time sure has a central role in the conscious inferences of physics and physicists. For it is the rate of motion of "conscious things" that physics deals with.
When you get to particle physics those "conscious things" disappear and all you get is "footprints" left behind in cloud chambers. They don't know what they're dealing with and those "fundamental laws" they've invoked are simply rules to go by...for now.
Get rid of forces and what you get is time. Not strings, not springs, not waves, not particles but a mystery. A phenomena of motion without a conscious cause. A bird flies by its wings. A plane by thrust and airfoils. A car by gas combustion engines. Why does an apple fall from a tree? Gravity? Why not say most everything falls at the same rate, except feathers and gases and smoke and flames from a fire, and...
Most isn't everything. Stop pretending. Stop substituting forces for "consistencies in time". Incomplete consistencies. Your magic words are starting to wear thin.
Predict for everyone the exact path of a robin's feather as it floats to the ground. Now where exactly did that robin come from? From the big bang? Is life one of the "fundamental laws"? Feathers one of the side effects of supernovae?
Are time and Life compatible? Reconciliable through consciousness or irreconcilable? Which is more "fundamental"?
Physics doesn't try to explain consciousness as of now because the theorists haven't come up with an idea that the experimentalists can put to the test.
Of course there are universal laws. You can't believe the universe is in chaos. The universe is organized, and along some guiding laws. Whether we can measure and understand the laws is an open question.
No, there is no universal law. You have to imagine the universe as a scale going from chaos to order (self organization) as an ever changing mix. Laws come from pattern manipulating each other.
Things appear as "magical" or better put, miraculous when we do not understand the underlying working principles. The deeper we understand, when we take the right path, what appears impossible becomes possible. What appears miraculous becomes common sense. The invisible becomes visible. One day, to the sincere and humble minds, what we call God today, will become the ultimate reality.
No thats an 1850s outdated antiquated model based on old discovery that appeared that way.
Just because we apply a symbol to something and agree upon it doesn't make it objective or physical.
We already have moved past that point into discovering things that aren't material in the way you think of it .
Its revolution in science going on but some language and old beliefs still havnt caught up to the discovery yet.
Its just a matter before old beliefs many cling to fall off and better explanations arise.
if we dont know the immediate reality, how can we say we know god and assign significance to supernatural!?
What logic you follow to conclude "ergo gawd"?
On one hand you accept "we don't know" and then you take a step ahead to claim all the more facetitous and incomprehensible entity "Gawd".. why tf would you do that?
Stephen King is so smart
Why should we accept the naive dichotomy that reality is either to be explained by physics or given an account which rests on the magical?
You could just get rid of your ideas 💭 about what reality is, and just be in reality:)
@@mrbwatson8081 You’ve got a point. If Guth could pull off that trick I could hardly justify failure on my part
@@theophilus749 physics maths science religion are all ideas, our minds project onto reality. Physics maths science religion, exist only and firmly between ones 👂and on pieces of 📃. Speak to a physicist and he will insist reality IS physics. Speak to max tegmark and he will insist even more enthusiastically, that reality IS maths. Speak to your local Bishop and he will insist reality is a creation of a wise all knowing God. They have somehow managed to entangle thier mind in ideas concepts beliefs models. Countless hours creating a conceptual matrix which seems more real to them then reality itself. I call it delusion:)
@@mrbwatson8081 I can see where you are coming from in all this - and sympathise. I can see where you are going - and not agree. There is no idea-free conception we can have of reality. If that is where we think we are then our assumptions and models are simply not apparent to us. Any conception of reality just is, in a loose sense, just another ‘idea’ of it.
That shouldn’t matter, though. It doesn’t mean that none of our conceptions are any good, or merely illusions (though some may be). It merely means they are partial. They don’t tell the whole story of reality, that reality in its fullness transcends our conceptions.
@@theophilus749 that was beautiful 🥲🙃😊
Maybe not very magical of a seer (consciousness), but I think there is something quite magical about the seen (this incarnate).
INFORMATION!
thnx..lil too much background noise
Its a godsend the noise if you've been in solitary confinement for decades.
He is wrong. There can't be any final fundamental laws. Who would have created them? Where had they come from?
We know the fundamental law. Read the Bible.
@@Kenneth-ts7bp The bible does not explain the fundamental laws. God in the bible created the world, no laws required. A creation does not follow laws, it's like an idea, which does not need any laws, it is independend of laws.
Guth seemed disingenuous at 2:54 when he talked about the experimental energy required to test predictions of string theory. The LHC was designed to test some string theory predictions (supersymmetry) and the LHC results falsified it. So string theorists revised the theory to make testable predictions only at energies above what LHC can generate. They moved the goalposts. They could always move the goalposts again.
What lies beyond both dark veils cannot be predicted.
🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨
"Before I start, I must see my end.
Destination known, my mind’s journey now begins.
Upon my chariot, heart and soul’s fate revealed.
In time, all points converge, hope’s strength re-steeled.
But to earn final peace at the universe’s endless refrain,
We must see all in nothingness... before we start again."
🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨
--Diamond Dragons (series)
Puff, puff, pass you've had way too much.
Metaphysicists umm ba bub bbba ba wa 'bout spirit(not alcohol), NDEs baarf poop.. naah there's gawd!
In regard to the game called "Baseball", Physics can analyze speed of a pitch, the weight of the ball, the trajectory of the delivery, the density and weight of the bat, the speed and kinetic energy of the bat, and the distance the ball will travel upon contact with the bat.
However, Physics cannot explain _why_ the game of "Baseball" exists.
Distance how far the ball travels,weather permitting.
@@dogsbollox4335 *"Distance how far the ball travels,weather permitting."*
... Another factor is the amount of steroids used by the batter.
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC the game does not collapse to involve the baseball until the crowd is there to witness it. Quantum mechanics needs an audience for the ball to exist...
The game of Baseball was created by people as a way of entertainment.
In principle, physics could explain why baseball exists if you specify all of the initial conditions and have enough computing power to process all the equations, and assuming "why" means "because it satisfied the laws of physics." Physics has the same trouble predicting the distance a baseball will travel if you neglect to specify some of the relevant conditions, such as whether the batter manages to contact the pitch squarely with the sweet spot of the bat, what the bat is made of, etc.
My God, Alan Guth demonstrates Faith. Wonders, miracles, never cease.
No, he doesn't. "Faith" is the believe in a deity or something completely without evidence and reason. He already stated that he doesn't believe in that, and what he describes and hope and belief are still founded on reason.
Also, you don't capital God or Faith in those sentences, and the second sentence doesn't make any sense.
He really doesn't.
@@Etheralstew I disagree of course. Read Iain McGilchrist's books or better still, Google his name. There is a multipart series where he explains his ideas. The fundamental problems for me with Guth is that he does not seem to believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, if you love classical music, you don't think about the physics of what you hear. In other words, the properties of the whole are not the properties of the individual parts Physics does not explain emotion or beauty, or love, how can it ever, and I pray to God that no one ever tries to. But thanks for your reply. Have a good life.
@@richg2881 That's fine, you can disagree with me, but not the facts or definitions, which is all I'm expressing in terms of what faith is and what he said.
God can't be predicted in physics
God is very predictable within the imaginations of superstitious hairless apes.
Because God does not exist
God can be defined by physics as a real figure as physics proves all the foundations are supernatural and arose from that realm.
@@Kenneth-ts7bp Don't suppose you can back up that claim with evidence or data?
@@TurinTuramber Of course. Everything you have heard about space defines the supernatural. Have you ever looked for something but couldn't find it because it was too obvious?
What a silly man is Guth.
....any reasons for this opinion?
@@jareknowak8712 Yes. He appears to believe that all experiences of humans can be reduced to physics. Now maybe I misinterpret what he is intending to say, but I will always as long as I am alive, respond to Verdi's Requiem with emotion and not thoughts or elementary particles dancing in my head. He cannot get over his reductionism.
@@richg2881
It seems to me that this is due to lack of understanding the fundamentals of the problem.
Are Your emotions born in the brain?
Is the brain part of the physical world?
Is it subject to its laws?
Highly complicated response of the system to the introduced environmental stimuli.
Guth is an Icon of the world of science.
The history of humanity has shown that everything, that we once considered magic or God, along with the development of science, suddenly became ordinary laws of physics.
@@jareknowak8712 Nope
@@Kenneth-ts7bp
Which part?
Math, discovered or manmade?
Great question
Or neither?
Definitely discovered. Schrodinger's wave function existed before man discovered it.
@@70ad25 I would agree. The golden ratio among many others existed in nature long before mankind.
@Robert R McKerrow But isn't the wave function applied mathematics while the golden ratio pure mathematics? Does the distinction matter in regards to your OP?
I can explain consciousness with just three letters, G O D and good luck trying to figure Him out. IMO, consciousness doesn't come from physical matter but from God and physical matter comes from God's invisible spiritual power and energy.
Consciousness is in fact multiple storage capability of space and I agree, god is deep inside the vacuum and connects to infinite energy supply.
Quantum Information and Quantum Entanglement... Are Fundamental.
Lol how many "aaaaah" ? 😂
He's been saying uhh, since the first time I saw Alan Guth, about 25 years ago on TV.
It's either physics or magic. 🤌 And we are committed to the disenchantment of the world by reducing everything to that which can be measured or quantized. 😌