294. Sabine Hossenfelder — Existential Physics (3)
2 (25m 2s):
I think what people mean when they ask this question is whether time could be emergent in some sense, from some underlying theory, which may not have time. And that could be, but I would still say, even if that's the case, I would still say time is real.
1 (25m 18s):
Yeah. Here's what you write in your book. According to the currently established laws of nature, the future, the present in the past all exist in the same way. That's because regardless of exactly what you mean by exist, there is nothing in those laws that distinguishes one moment of time from any other the past, therefore exists in just the same way as the present, while the situation is not entirely settled. It seems that the laws of nature preserve information entirely, all the details that make up you and the story of your grandmother's life are immortal. Now, some people might read that and think, oh, okay. So there's a physics theory that allows for immortality, but are you, are you suggesting that say the pattern of information that represents your grandmother, Paula to soul or whatever you want is still out there somewhere and could be retrieved or replicated in a virtual reality or whatever,
2 (26m 12s):
Theoretically, yes. With an asterix, the cells where they are, they might be an issue with black holes and the quantum measurement problems. And I discussed those specifically in the chapter, you from what you just quoted the summary. So yeah, leaving this aside and we, we can talk about this, the loss of nature, basically just reconfigure particles, but you can always from the state of everything in the universe at one time calculate, whoops, what happened at any earlier moment and the other way round. And so in, in this sense, information cannot get destroyed.
2 (26m 52s):
And I should add that. Not in all areas of physics is the word information used in exactly this way. When I talk about inflammation, I just mean everything that you need to specify the exact state of the system. So there's nothing else to it, just a bunch of numbers basically,
1 (27m 10s):
Right? So is this the block universe theory that the entire universe past present and future is say this angular block and, and everything in it past present, and future is all happened already. And we're just entering a slice of it. That's our now, but it's already happened and will happen and so forth. Or am I confusing that with something else?
2 (27m 34s):
So there are two separate arguments, but, but also it's kind of ought to say it ha it, it has already happened because clearly for us, that's not the case, right? So I think the way that you have to think about the block universe is that you're looking at it from a point of view outside of time. But when you're inside of time, you know, at, at one particular moment, it certainly feeds like there's a future in the past. And I, there's no disagreement between the two things because the one has an outside view. And the other one is the insight now about the block universe. This is this issue with the simultaneity, the relativity of simultaneity, which all moments exist in the same way.
2 (28m 21s):
The other argument which I make is about the time reversibility of the evolution, or which is a separate thing. The two go naturally together, but logically they're different arguments. So the thing with the time reversability just says that for all we know the evolution laws that we use in physics, they can be used forwards and backwards. So you can, you know, long after someone has died in principle, the information about the exact configuration of the person is still there. It's arguably inaccessible to you, but it cannot get destroyed unless something falls into a black hole or we, we could talk about the quantum measurement problem if you want.
2 (29m 11s):
So they're the, those two things that you kind of have to live.
1 (29m 14s):
Yeah. Again, I think, you know, somebody might hear that and think, well, so my loved ones who have gone past, they're still out there somewhere, the information that represents them, whatever you want to call it, their connectome or their soul or pattern of information, it's not lost. So are you suggesting that in mortality could be achievable if you could somehow gather up that information? And I don't know, reconstructed somewhere.
2 (29m 43s):
That's a pretty big if, but yes. I think that's just what the laws of nature say at the moment, like there's inflammation actually isn't get it. Isn't lost. And I actually think that most businesses would agree with me on that. Unless, you know, they think that inflammation actually gets destroyed and black hawser, there are some people who believe this, but yeah, in, in, in principle, this is exactly why worry about the inflammation loss in black holes, because it shouldn't happen that inflammation gets destroyed, but this is the consequence from this. Like, if information can't get destroyed, then it can't get destroyed.
2 (30m 24s):
It's still there. It's just a in practice, it becomes inaccessible. So, you know, you you'd have to have a computer the size of the universe or something to recover this information.
1 (30m 36s):
Well, I don't know how familiar you are with Frank Templars, physics of immortality book back in the nineties. But, you know, we, we, we brought him to Caltech and I had him give a public talk and Kip Thorne was there. It was really, it was really quite the interesting day, but his argument is essentially something like that, that in the far future, he called us the omega point, a super computer, which essentially God could re will reconstruct everyone who ever lived or ever could have lived. It doesn't matter if there's non-existent people that, you know, he's recreated. Cause you only care about that. You and your loved ones are recreated in this far future. But if I recall at the time he hit required the amount of energy it would take for to get to do that from a collapsing universe.
1 (31m 22s):
And since that, he wrote that book, the universe is not collapsing. In fact, it's going the opposite direction. So I'm not sure where he would get the energy to do this, but the energy I'll never forget that. Number 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 186 is how many binary digits or whatever it would take to recreate everyone who ever lived. I don't know, you know, and of course by the end of the book, he gets to, you know, Christianity is right and Jesus was the savior and so on. I mean, there's a lot of steps to get there, but at that always to me, it always felt very religious, like, okay, this is a long argument to get to where you really want to go, where you started, which is, you know, Christianity is the right religion and so on. And then he later wrote a book called the physics of Christianity in which he had some wild ideas about the resurrection of Jesus having to do with neutrinos.
1 (32m 7s):
I think it was anyway. Well, but you see how people take those kinds of ideas.
2 (32m 14s):
Yeah. Well, I didn't say anything about what it would take to actually recreate someone. I think that's a much more difficult question because it, you know, you have to think about energy and entropy and what kind of computer you can possibly build and, and so on. And then you have to extrapolate the whole thing some Chilean years into the future. So I, it seems to me that this kind of a pretty hopeless argument, but I think just from the point of view of what we know about the loss of nature at the moment, I think it's, it's pretty accurate to say that inflammation probably can't be destroyed.
2 (32m 55s):
So in some sense, everybody who dies is mortal, even though you can't communicate with them. And then, you know, I mean, there's always the question. Maybe there are types of communication that we just don't know. So I know this sounds a little bit wacky, but our, our type of communication is very strongly based on this notion of locality. You know, I'm, I'm pretty compact. You know, all my atoms are pretty close together, according to a particular notion of closeness. So this is kind of really relevant. And so if someone, someone dies and their body decays and so on, then all this information that was contained in the structure, disperses over a huge area.
2 (33m 49s):
And so this is what makes it difficult to communicate with, with someone who's dead, because all this information is now spread out. It just goes away, which is another way to say that the entropy increases, but it's all based on the difficulty of communicating with something that is very spread out. So it's, so this communication that we are used to is very strongly tied to our notion of locality, which may not be fundamental. So this is something which comes up in this quantum gravity research that I've been involved in. And so, I mean, God knows what we would find out in a hundred or a thousand years about what, what we can communicate with.
1 (34m 39s):
Interesting praise, God knows, or God only knows it's a, it's a thrall phase, but phrase, but in fact, maybe that's correct, right? If there is a God, a deity of some kind that knows everything, then he would be the only one who would be the only one that knows. Yeah. So here, let, let's, let's dig into some of this, what Murray Gell-Mann used to call quantum flap doodle. Cause he was always frustrated by what people were doing with quantum physics and turning it into consciousness and God and whatever you must get. Again, a lot of these letters and theories of stuff about how maybe when you die, that pattern of information that represents you floats off out of the skull and into some quantum field state and you continue on indefinitely in these quantum fields.
1 (35m 28s):
You know, this isn't completely crazy, I think, right? Cause I mean, people like Deepak Chopra, quotes people, like you saying, look, the quantum field theory suggests this is possible. And then maybe somebody like Roger Penrose or Heisenberg, I mean, Deepak, you know, has a list of all these famous quantum physicists who write things that suggest that, well, maybe we do continue on. And one of these quantum states. So give us your thoughts on that. Since you do this for a living
2 (35m 56s):
Well, everything is a quantum state. Okay. Problem solved. So I mean, brain is made of particles. Particles are described by quantum states and it's all quantum field theory. So I, you know, I would agree on that. Does it make any difference? Not really. You know, you may, you might as well say what the brain is made of partiers and that's the end of the story. So why talk about quantum fields or that doesn't really make any difference? So, you know, I've actually, you might, you may laugh, but I've actually read a few books about quantum healing because you have to know what the enemy's up to.
2 (36m 35s):
And a lot of this is just very vague, blah blah. You know, it's basically a kind of self-help book about, you know, positive thinking. I mean, so at least all the stuff that I've read and, and I would put Chopra's ideas into the same corner. I have a general problem with this kind of idea that if you're real, it's your fault because you haven't been thinking smartly enough, I find this really insulting, but all the quantum stuff is just some sprinkled interpretation on the, not on top of it, right. It's like, oh, and if you think this way, then quantum jump and somehow you can change the past stuff like this.
