César Hidalgo: belief

Transcript context

…You're strongly asserting that there is a huge physical component. There's embodiment to the propagation of knowledge, way it flows, ebbs, and decays. Know, everyone can access GitHub. People on the other side of the world can start playing with software. So do you think at some point at least the propagation of knowledge becomes more virtual? I think there's 2 things. 1 thing is to be precise about what we mean by physical. And everything has to be physical because even GitHub, you know, has to store its data in some sort of hard drive or magnetic field or whatever technology but it's not storing it in nothingness, you know. So so knowledge information always has this form of physical embodiment. Now, I think we tend to think about it as non physical because it is a thing that is not a thing, which is the same as temperature. Yeah? So in the book I have a chapter in which I tell the history of temperature. Temperature is kind of funny because today you wake up, you look at your phone, and you see the temperature, and you decide how you're gonna dress, and nobody has any doubt that temperature is something that can be measured. But it took about like 2000 years for us, you know, as a species to figure out, you know, what temperature was and the fact that it could be measured. And there were 2 fundamental difficulties that I would say made it difficult for us to understand, you know, temperature. The first 1 is that first people thought that hot and cold were 2 separate things. Okay? So that temperature was like a mixture of the 2, it's like when you make green out of blue and yellow. Okay? And it took a while for people to understand that cold was the absence of heat and not that cold and heat were 2 different quantities that were tempered together, that were mixed. So temperature actually mix means mixture, not you know, like what we now mean by temperature. The other thing that was very difficult to understand is that people thought that temperature was a thing, was some sort of fluid that grabbed onto things. So let's say if you had a steel rod that is hot, is that steel rod kinda like has this sort of invisible fluid that is heat, and they had good reasons to believe that it was an invisible fluid because it could flow, let's say, you could connect that rod to something that was cold and that cold thing was gonna warm up because that fluid was gonna be flowing in that direction and so forth. So they thought that it had a physicality as a thing. And brilliant Englishman, Jowell, basically figures out that that is not the case, that you know temperature is not a thing. And the way that they do it is through this observation which I don't know if you know how cannons used to be built, you know. So if you just grab a piece of sheet metal and you make it into a cylinder and you try to make a cannon out of that, the moment exactly that you that you shoot the cannon, that's gonna open up like a flower in a cartoon, you know, like like you know, like a Looney Tunes type of situation. So what they would do is they would make this solid, know, cylinders of metal and they would bore a hole in it, you know, to create the cannons. And boring those holes released an enormous amount of heat. So Joel thought, well, how come all of that heat is there? nders of metal and they would bore a hole in it, you know, to create the cannons. And boring those holes released an enormous amount of heat. So Joel thought, well, how come all of that heat is there? It's like an infinite amount of heat if I continue to bore a hole in a piece of metal for an infinite amount of time. I'm not gonna it cannot be a thing then. And that, you know, leads him to realize that temperature is actually something that has to live in things, but it's not a thing itself, it's related to the kinetic energy of the particles in the thing. But it's not a thing itself. It doesn't have its own particle. There isn't kind of like a temperature particle. Temperature is kind of like a property that matter has and that holds onto things. Knowledge is similar, you know, in that it holds onto you and to me, know, and to the collective to exist. But it doesn't have kind of like a physicality in itself. But it always exists in some sort of physical medium or substrate. So in that sense, it's always gonna be physical. No matter how virtual it gets, it has maybe a different type of physicality. But even electromagnetic waves that are transmitting, you know, data from your WiFi router to your laptop are technically a physical embodiment.…

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