ToKCast

Julian Barbour is an independent British Physicist and the author of technical and popular books including the best selling "The End of Time" and most recently "The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time". In this lecture, Julian shows just how interesting Newtonian Mechanics can get. Can it be a fundamental theory of space, time and physical reality? This is a tour de force of the history of ideas in physics by an iconoclastic scientists working at the deepest foundations of his subject.

The video version of this lecture can be found at https://youtu.be/VzZbjL_Jvwk which may be helpful. 

This is not a regular ToKCast episode - it is highly technical in places. We will return to regular programming for episode 225 when we will have passed 1 million downloads. Thankyou to all fans! If you would like to support ToKCast, go to my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/c/tokcast or paypal via https://www.paypal.com/donate?token=qyzc2PwQaXf2XNAZS8g5Ke9eRfYfUs73xlBzXNfM8Bnjdm__ETUCyw86HKQ9wd1jBQ4zVKLsW0uRmB53

After a short introduction by me, the remainder of this episode is a reproduction of "The Deutsch Files IV" the latest in a series of conversations between myself, Naval Ravikant and David Deutsch about a wide variety of topics including, and sometimes going far beyond the contents of "The Fabric of Reality", "The Beginning of Infinity" and Constructor Theory. Go to https://nav.al to access all the other "Deutsch Files" as well as earlier content Naval and I produced about all the Big Questions of Life, the Universe and Everything and, helpfully, the transcripts to all our discussions.  

Is time travel into the past and the future possible? What is time dilation? Subjective and objective senses of "time travel". David Deutsch's own documentary on Time Travel from the BBB (192) https://youtu.be/C6_gxoLwrWw?si=8vw8cwbP49XkY6e8

Here I present a "positive vision" of the kind I complained was absent in the episode right before this ("Criticism is never enough"). Here I am riffing off a line which contains a deep truth out of the Beginning of Infinity where Socrates is speaking with the god Hermes. In that passage David links a moral injunction "Do not" to an epistemological concept (error). From this stepping stone I explore some of the institutions which emerge from such a commitment, but which themselves can also be regarded as fundamental features of a dynamic society.

Another response episode. This time to Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson. Douglas and Jordan are seeking a way to construct a positive vision for society, but they seem at a loss for what in fundamental terms, this might include. Part 1 of 2.

Parts 1 and 2 were, admittedly, long. So if you could not persevere through those, this gets the major points out serving both as an appendix to tie up some loose ends and as a summary of parts 1 and 2.

Here I get to the part of the discussion Peter has about my own "airchat" explanation of "anyone can understand anything". I go through arguments based on the Church-Turing Principle, computational universality and how denials of explanatory universality are appeals to the supernatural and other topics.

The great epistemologist, Peter Boghossian, created a video on Youtube that responded to me, in part. It's to be found in full here: https://youtu.be/5Vf-T8K0_zE?si=T2XkG8h8iNj1ZXGR

This first part is largely a response to Richard Dawkins on his notion of "Middle World" and Michael Shermer's notion we are not evolutionarily capable of understanding anything.

Part 2 in a series about the work of researcher Charley Lineweaver. In this episode, a targeted focus on the one thing we did not discuss out of all of Charley's scientific interests in my interview with him in Ep 215: his recent work with Paul Davies on "The Atavistic Model" of Cancer. For the peer reviewed paper on The Atavistic Model by Lineweaver and Davies see: https://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/LineweaverDaviesVincent2014.pdf

For more recent work on the theory see: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014APS..MARF14002L/abstract

and https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017PNAS..114.6160B/abstract

A conversation with physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, polyglot and polymath - Charley Lineweaver.

00:00 - My introduction

08:57 - Charley’s fascinating early years

12:14 - From an English/History degree to physics

13:53 - Charley’s historic work on the Cosmic Microwave Background

17:34 - Methods of probing deep space

19:51 - Our accelerating universe

22:15 - Dark Matter Candidates

23:20 - The Fermi Problem and the “Planet of the Apes” Hypothesis

28:37 - Natural experiments in the evolution of intelligence

33:38: What can the early appearance of life on Earth tell us about aliens?

37:31: Non-intelligent alien life.

38:06: Deep homology and misconceptions about convergent biological evolution

44:31 The Shadow Biosphere

48:53 The significance of extremophiles

50:23 Does life arise from non-life easily or not? What do we know?

53:32 What is life?

55:56 A “debate” about people?

1:10:20 - The Potato Radius

1:15:00 - What Charley is working on now