Sara Walker: evaluation

Transcript context

…So we may still expand our understanding, what is incorporated in the category of matter, that will eventually incorporate such magical things that the vitalists have noticed, like life? Yeah. I always like to use examples from physics, so I’ll probably do that. It’s my go-to place. But in the history of gravitational physics, for example, in the history of motion, when Aristotle came up with his theories of motion, he did it by the material properties he thought things had. So there was a concept of things falling to earth because they were solid-like and things raising to the heavens because they were air-like and things moving around the planet because they were celestial-like. But then we came to realize that, thousands of years later and after the invention of many technologies that allowed us to actually measure time in a mechanistic way and track planetary motion and we could roll balls down inclined planes and track that progress, we realized that if we just talked about mass and acceleration, we could unify all motion in the universe in a really simple description. So we didn’t really have to worry about the fact that my cup is heavy and the air is light. The same laws describe them if we have the right material properties to talk about what those laws are actually interacting with. And so I think the issue with life is we don’t know how to think about information in a material way, and so we haven’t been able to build a unified description of what life is or the kind of things that evolution builds because we haven’t really invented the right material concept yet. So when talking about motion, the laws of physics appear to be the same everywhere out in the universe. You think the same is true for other kinds of matter that we might eventually include life in?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.