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How the Big Bang gave us time, explained by theoretical physicist Sean Carroll.

In this Big Think interview, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll discusses the concept of time and the mysteries surrounding its properties. He notes that while we use the word "time" frequently in everyday language, the real puzzles arise when we consider the properties of time, such as the past, present, and future, and the fact that we can affect the future but not the past. Carroll also discusses the concept of entropy, which is a measure of how disorganized or random a system is, and the second law of thermodynamics, which states that there is a natural tendency for things in the universe to go from a state of low entropy to high entropy. He explains that the arrow of time, or the perceived difference between the past and the future, arises due to the influence of the Big Bang and the fact that the universe began in a state of low entropy. Carroll also touches on the possibility of time travel and the concept of the multiverse.

chapters:

0:00 What is time?

1:32 How the Big Bang gave us time

3:31 How entropy creates the experience of time

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About Sean Carroll: Dr. Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy — in effect, a joint appointment between physics and philosophy — at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Most of his career has been spent doing research on cosmology, field theory, and gravitation, looking at topics such as dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, topological defects, extra dimensions, and violations of fundamental symmetries. These days, his focus has shifted to more foundational questions, both in quantum mechanics (origin of probability, emergence of space and time) and statistical mechanics (entropy and the arrow of time, emergence and causation, dynamics of complexity), bringing a more philosophical dimension to his work.

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Propaganda is ubiquitous, and everyone uses propaganda. It's a kind of communication that makes a case for a goal, bypassing reason. Propaganda is a method to urge you to mobilize towards something while concealing from you things that you reasonably should think, should consider.

The word propaganda by itself is neither good nor bad because we talk of abolitionist propaganda. We talk about the propaganda that people use in social movements. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the need for propaganda because you need to get people to reconsider their racist assumptions. The goal of propaganda is to connect neutral words to other things.

Propaganda will always be here. Our words always have these associations, any word I have. The goal is to have lots of different ways of living and lots of different ways of thinking and to recognize that we're not a threat to each other.

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About Jason Stanley:

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Stanley is the author of Know How; Languages in Context; Knowledge and Practical Interests, which won the American Philosophical Association book prize; and How Propaganda Works, which won the PROSE Award for Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers. He writes about authoritarianism, propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, and other topics for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Review, The Guardian, Project Syndicate and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications.

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Why does time move forward but not backward? Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explains. Why does time move in only one direction? This still-unsolved question was posed in 1927 by the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, and the concept came to be known as the arrow of time. As theoretical physicist @SabineHossenfelder explains, there's a longstanding mystery in the foundations of physics: If we look at the laws for microscopic constituents, like elementary particles, they work the same way forward in time as they do backward in time. But the same does not hold true on macroscopic scales. In this Big Think video, Hossenfelder dives into this mystery and explores how it has captivated the minds of so many scientists and science fiction writers.

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0:00 The arrow of time

1:14 Why doesn’t anyone get younger?

2:39 Can we stop human aging with entropy control?

4:01 Is ‘maximum entropy’ how the universe will end?

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About Sabine Hossenfelder: Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, author, and creator of "Science Without the Gobbledygook". She currently works at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy in Germany.

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Humanity’s future is bright, according to the ones who study our past.

This video is an episode from @The-Well, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation.

The future is coming, whether we’re ready or not. Physicist Sean Carroll, planetary scientist Nina Lanza, and futurist Kevin Kelly are three brilliant minds who have spent their careers studying how time has affected the Earth — and Kmele is on a mission to understand their findings.

Part of understanding what we know includes identifying the things we don’t know; this way, we can keep our minds open to new discoveries and ideas.

What is it really like to be a theoretical physicist, who only works with ideas? How does philosophy underline the progress we’ve made as a society? And, finally, what is humanity’s role in the future, and what can we do to make sure our lives have meaning? Find out this, and much, much more, in the last episode of Dispatches from The Well.

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About Kmele Foster:

Kmele Foster is a media entrepreneur, commentator, and regular contributor to various national publications. He is the co-founder and co-host of The Fifth Column, a popular media criticism podcast.

He is the head of content at Founders Fund, a San Francisco based venture capital firm investing in companies building revolutionary technologies, and a partner at Freethink, a digital media company focused on the people and ideas changing our world.

Kmele also serves on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)

About The Well

Do we inhabit a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is love? Is evolution directional? There are no simple answers to life’s biggest questions, and that’s why they’re the questions occupying the world’s brightest minds.

Together, let's learn from them

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Devil’s Advocate: Why worry about fascism? with Jason Stanley

Up next: ►► The 10 tactics of fascism   • The 10 tactics of fascism | Jason Sta...  

Fascism is a very particular ideological structure. The first pillar is the Mythic Past. Then there's Propaganda. Anti-intellectualism. Unreality. Hierarchy. Victimhood. Law and order. Sexual anxiety. Sodom and Gomorrah. And then finally, Arbeit macht frei- 'work shall make you free.'

Each of these elements taken in and of itself, is not fascist. You can think about these individual elements in isolation. When it comes to these fascist tactics, people often ask, "Why do you need to worry about it. There's lots of tactics people use to win power. Why worry about these in particular?"

Jason Stanley’s response is to say that fascist politics wears down democracy. Even if it doesn't result in a fascist regime, it creates the conditions for itself. Fascist politics, it's a politics of fear. So even if we don't get a fascist regime in the end, we destroy the basis of democracy.

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About Jason Stanley:

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Stanley is the author of Know How; Languages in Context; Knowledge and Practical Interests, which won the American Philosophical Association book prize; and How Propaganda Works, which won the PROSE Award for Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers. He writes about authoritarianism, propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, and other topics for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Review, The Guardian, Project Syndicate and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications.

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Did you know that our desires are not entirely our own? Desires are imitated from the first moment we are born. Our desires form from what our parents, friends, and significant others want in life. Now placed in a group, large or small, these imitative desires are even more powerful. These transferred desires within a group do create cohesion, but they're also the heart of where scapegoats are born.

A scapegoat is someone outside of your group who also stands out from the social norm. The group then uses these scapegoats to transfer blame and negative emotions because they do not share the desires of the group. This blame, negative emotion, or fundamental truth is something the group does not want to acknowledge internally, so the blame is transferred to the scapegoat.

In an instant, the problems of the group are gone because of the transfer of blame onto the scapegoat. Since scapegoats are identified as the root cause of the problem, they create a sense of relief, healing, and even protection for the group.

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About Luke Burgis:

Luke Burgis has co-created and led four companies in wellness, consumer products, and technology. He’s currently Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship where he also teaches business at The Catholic University of America. Luke has helped form and serves on the board of several new K-12 education initiatives and writes and speaks regularly about the education of desire. He studied business at NYU Stern and philosophy and theology at a pontifical university in Rome. He’s Managing Partner of Fourth Wall Ventures, an incubator that he started to build, train, and invest in people and companies that contribute to a healthy human ecology. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Claire, and her crazy New Orleans cat Clotille.

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There are two kinds of desire, thin and thick. Thick desires are like layers of rock that have been built up throughout the course of our lives. These are desires that can be shaped and cultivated through models like our parents and people that we admire as children. But at some level, they're related to the core of who we are. They can be related to perennial human truths: beauty, goodness, human dignity.

Thin desires are highly mimetic (imitative) and ephemeral desires. They're the things that can be here today, gone tomorrow. Thin desires are subject to the winds of mimetic change, because they're not rooted in a layer of ourselves that's been built up over time. They are like a layer of leaves that's sitting on top of layers of rock. Those thin desires are blown away with a light gust of wind. A new model comes into our life; the old desires are gone. All of a sudden we want something else.

In the stream of daily life, we're pushed and pulled in a million different directions. And if we don't extract ourselves and find time for recollection, we won't be able to listen to our lives, to listen to others, and to understand the way that our relationships and our desires are growing and emerging. We'll be surprised if five or ten years from now, we've pursued desires that have led us to a place that we really may not have wanted to go. Listening is critical to the transformation.

Read the video transcript: https://bigthink.com/videos/mimetic-d...

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About Luke Burgis:

Luke Burgis has co-created and led four companies in wellness, consumer products, and technology. He’s currently Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship where he also teaches business at The Catholic University of America. Luke has helped form and serves on the board of several new K-12 education initiatives and writes and speaks regularly about the education of desire. He studied business at NYU Stern and philosophy and theology at a pontifical university in Rome. He’s Managing Partner of Fourth Wall Ventures, an incubator that he started to build, train, and invest in people and companies that contribute to a healthy human ecology. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Claire, and her crazy New Orleans cat Clotille.

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About Big Think | Smarter Faster™

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From hunter-gatherers to the American Dream: How humanity’s definition of “work” has developed over time.

Humans used to hunt and gather. Now, we have 9-to-5 jobs. Anthropologist James Suzman joins us to talk about the historical roots of our desk jobs and how they all connect back to the agricultural revolution.

The definition of work is ever-evolving, with each new era posing unique challenges. In this interview, Suzman explains how each era has actively contributed to humanity and how we can use this knowledge to help us prepare for (and even reconsider) our future.

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About James Suzman:

Dr. James Suzman a PhD an anthropologist specializing in the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa. A former Smuts Fellow in African Studies at the University of Cambridge, he is now the director of Anthropos Ltd., a think-tank that applies anthropological methods to solving contemporary social and economic problems. Dr. Suzman's latest book is Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots...

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College is absurdly expensive. Can a radical new model change that?

With Austen Allred, Co-Founder & CEO of BloomTech. Since filming, Lambda School has rebranded to Bloom Institute of Technology.

Up next ►► You Don't Need College to Get a College Education, with Salman Khan | Big Think   • You Don't Need College to Get a Colle...  

When Austen Allred was going to high school, nobody said anything other than: "Go to the best college you can, pay whatever it costs, study what you love. ‘Because as long as you graduate from college, you will be set for the rest of your life." After having been preached this for decades, Austen’s generation was one of the first to realize that that's fundamentally not true. Today, we're getting to a point where people are rethinking college education, and they're weighing the costs and the benefits.

There are a number of schools that if you just look at the outcomes of the students that attend relative to the debt that those students incur, most students would have been better off not attending that school in the first place. This is what sparked Austen’s idea for Lambda School - a radical new model to college education.

Lambda School is entirely online, and they train people to be software engineers and data scientists for no upfront tuition in exchange for a piece of what you'll make later. At Lambda School, you don't pay until you're hired.

Since filming, Lambda School has rebranded to Bloom Institute of Technology.

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About Austen Allred:

Austen Allred is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lambda School. A native of Springville, Utah, Austen’s start-up journey began in 2017 with him living in his two-door Civic while participating in Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based seed accelerator. This experience became the foundation of Lambda School’s rapid growth.Before founding Lambda School, Austen was the co-founder of media platform GrassWire. He co-authored the growth hacking textbook Secret Sauce, which became a best-seller and provided him the personal seed money to build Lambda. Austen’s disruptive ideas on the future of education, the labor market disconnect, and the opportunity of providing opportunity at-scale have been featured in: The Harvard Business Review, The Economist, WIRED, Fast Company, TechCrunch, The New York Times, among others. Austen is fluent in Russian and currently lives in San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two kids.

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About Big Think | Smarter Faster™

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Rogue Putin is the biggest risk of 2023. Here are the other 9, explained by global political expert Ian Bremmer. Today’s world is facing large-scale problems, from wars to water shortages to a looming global recession. It's not easy to accurately conceptualize the risks posed by these issues. This is especially true when people on social media or in the news inaccurately overblow certain problems and discount others, or when problems become so emotionally or politically charged that it seems impossible to work toward a solution. That’s one reason why the Eurasia Group publishes a detailed analysis of the top risks facing our world each year. As political scientist Ian Bremmer explains, the top risks for 2023 include water stress, inflation shockwaves, and the uncertain future of a “rogue Russia.” Bremmer is the founder of Eurasia Group, an organization that for 25 years has been using political science to help investors and corporate decision-makers better understand how politics impact risks and opportunities in foreign markets.

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Chapters:

0:00 What is the global risk report?

1:17 #10 Water stress

2:37 #9 TikTok boom

3:43 #8 Divided States of America

4:54 #7 Arrested global development

6:15 #6 Energy crunch

7:15 #5 Iran in a corner

8:47 #4 Inflation shockwaves

10:30 #3 Weapons on mass disruption

12:08 #2 Maximum Xi

14:18 #1 Rogue Russia

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About Ian Bremmer: Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm started in 1998. Today, the company has offices in New York, Washington, and London, as well as a network of experts and resources around the world. Bremmer has authored several books, including the national bestseller The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

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