Michael Nielsen: evaluation

Transcript context

…The universe is like a platypus. Being a good Australian, you appreciate the platypus, right? Yes, indeed, I appreciate the platypus quite a bit. It’s good for fooling visiting Americans about whether or not this animal can exist or not. I still don’t find that compelling, I think, because we’ve always known that there seemed likely to be fairly contingent facts about the universe. It shifts the level at which they are. It’s more interesting if the value of the fine structure constant is actually a contingent fact. That is interesting. Or if some of the other coupling constants are changing over time, or models like this. But it’s still not getting at the essential question, from my point of view, which is, why is there something rather than nothing? That, I’ve long thought, is an impossible question. We might have theories of parameter values, or be able to predict how things interact, or what happened a long time ago. The Heideggerian question— I don’t think it’s a meaningful question at all because the word why is already embedded in some context which — it’s then a self-undercutting query.…

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