Adam Brown: evaluation

Transcript context

…At the frontiers of physics today, in your experience, does it feel like if you just have millions of them running autonomously you could have enormous discoveries, or are we in a different era now, and really there’s limited usefulness of that parallelism? I think there is usefulness. I do think that different parts of science have different branching fractions, and how much experiment you need to cut off that branch. I talked about chasing the high of Einstein. Arguably, string theory has really been going all in on that. Einstein’s theory is just general relativity. There’s also quantum mechanics. Trying to marry those two in a consistent way—which general relativity doesn’t do at all, there’s no quantum mechanics in general relativity—has motivated a lot of people. The problem is that in order to see that in experiments, if you just do the dimensional analysis, you need ginormous particle colliders, absolutely galactic-sized particle colliders. It’s just very hard to see any of that stuff. But that doesn’t stop people. I mean, it stopped many people, but many people didn’t stop and keep trying to do it. So there you just have to hope that it works out sort of like it did with general relativity, where just by thinking very, very hard with minimal input from experiment, you can feel your way to the right answer. For that to be true, the tool you have at your disposal is mathematical consistency and whether it reduces correctly in the known limits. So you better hope that there’s only one or a very small number of possible consistent theories if you were going to do that. If it turns out that there’s an unlimited number of consistent theories, you’re never going to feel your way to the correct answer, because they’re all consistent, and the only tool you have is consistency, and perhaps some notion of aesthetics. But if there’s only a few, then maybe you could do it all the way. So string theory has kind of gone all in on that, I would say. Trying, with minimal experimental input, believing that there’s only one consistent theory of gravity and that just by doing sufficient consistency checks you can find it. For other examples it’s much harder. In condensed matter physics, often you simply need to go and do an experiment to find out which one is correct. Whenever our future AI civilization does come up with more and more unified theories of physics, or deeper theories that make better predictions, do you think that humans will be able to keep up? Once this step is taken, will we actually be in a position to understand what our AI civilization understands?…

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