Lee Cronin: commitment

Transcript context

…Okay, so the set of steps it took to create the object. So there’s a sense in which every object in the universe has a history. And that is part of the thing that is used to describe its complexity. How complicated it is. Okay, what is an assembly index? So the assembly index, if you’re to take the object apart and be super lazy about it or minimal say ’cause it’s like you’ve got a really short-term memory. So what you do is you lay all the parts on the path and you find the minimum number of steps you take on the path to add the parts together to reproduce the object. And that minimum number is the assembly index. It’s minimum bound. And it was always my intuition, the minimum bound and assembly theory was really important that I only worked out why a few weeks ago, which is kind of funny ’cause I was just like, “No, this is sacrosanct. I don’t know why, it’ll come to me one day.” And then when I was pushed by a bunch of mathematicians, we came up with the correct physical explanation, which I can get to, but it’s the minimum and it’s really important. It’s the minimum. And the reason I knew the minimum was right is because we could measure it. So almost before this paper came out, we’d published papers, explain how you can measure the assembly index of molecules. Okay, so that’s not so trivial to figure out. So when you look at an object, we could say a molecule, we could say object more generally. To figure out the minimum number of steps it takes to create that object, that doesn’t seem like a trivial thing to do.…

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