Adam Brown: belief

Transcript context

…What part of this is the least logically inevitable? Some theories seem to have this feeling of like, "It had to be this way." And then some are just like, "Why are there these 16 fields and hundreds of particles?" What part of our understanding of physics? I would say that there are three categories. There are things like quantum mechanics and general relativity that are not logically inevitable but do seem to be attractors in some sense. Then there are things like: the standard model has 20 fields, and it has a mass of the neutrino. Why do those masses of the neutrino have the values that they have? The standard model was just fine before we discovered that the neutrinos have mass in the 1990s. And those just seem to be totally out of nowhere. A famous Nobel Prize-winning physicist said about the muon, in fact, longer ago than that: "Who ordered that?" They just seem to be there but without any particular reason. And then there are these quantities that are somewhere in the middle, that are not logically necessary but do seem to be necessary for life as we know it to exist. How confident are we that these different properties of different universes would actually be inconsistent with intelligent life?…

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