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Adam Brown

Published podcast speaker

Claims
49
Episodes
2
Shows
1
Named items
0

Claim ledger

What Adam said.

49 transcript-backed records

01 / belief

I think the very first thing that he did was he phoned up the observatory and said, “Can you look at distant stars behind the Sun and measure how light bends as it passes the Sun?” This was the true theorist move, because I think the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory said, “Absolutely not.

“I think the very first thing that he did was he phoned up the observatory and said, “Can you look at distant stars behind the Sun and measure how light bends as it passes the Sun?” This was the true theorist move, because I think the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory said, “Absolutely not.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

03 / prediction

In particular, the force gets so strong when you try to get within this radius, that in fact you cannot slowly lower the brick down towards the surface because you’ve formed a black hole.

“In particular, the force gets so strong when you try to get within this radius, that in fact you cannot slowly lower the brick down towards the surface because you’ve formed a black hole.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

05 / evaluation

In other words, the gravitational binding energy of something on the Earth’s surface is quite small in natural units. That’s why we didn’t really notice general relativity on the Earth’s surface until we did very sensitive experiments, because general relativity is in some sense a Taylor expansion in this number, where the relativistic effects, where the first order term is just Newtonian, and then the next order terms will give you the GR corrections to the Newtonian answer.

“In other words, the gravitational binding energy of something on the Earth’s surface is quite small in natural units. That’s why we didn’t really notice general relativity on the Earth’s surface until we did very sensitive experiments, because general relativity is in some sense a Taylor expansion in this number, where the relativistic effects, where the first order term is just Newtonian, and then the next order terms will give you the GR corrections to the Newtonian answer.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

06 / evaluation

It’s responsible for the fact that if you take a feather and a brick in a vacuum chamber and drop them both, they will both fall and hit the ground at the same time. They’ll fall and hit the ground at the same time because even though the force on the brick is much stronger than the force on the feather because it’s heavier, that exactly cancels out the fact that the resistance to acceleration of the brick is larger than the resistance to acceleration of the feather, and they fall exactly at the same rate.

“It’s responsible for the fact that if you take a feather and a brick in a vacuum chamber and drop them both, they will both fall and hit the ground at the same time. They’ll fall and hit the ground at the same time because even though the force on the brick is much stronger than the force on the feather because it’s heavier, that exactly cancels out the fact that the resistance to acceleration of the brick is larger than the resistance to acceleration of the feather, and they fall exactly at the same rate.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

07 / evaluation

Conversely, if you have two like charges, they electrostatically repel each other, which is why that’s a minus sign and that’s a plus sign. That means that you cannot do literally the same thing for gravity that you did for electromagnetism, because otherwise, if you did mathematically the same trick, you’d end up with mathematically the same result, which is that you would find that like masses would repel rather than attract.

“Conversely, if you have two like charges, they electrostatically repel each other, which is why that’s a minus sign and that’s a plus sign. That means that you cannot do literally the same thing for gravity that you did for electromagnetism, because otherwise, if you did mathematically the same trick, you’d end up with mathematically the same result, which is that you would find that like masses would repel rather than attract.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

08 / evaluation

If I start off with a mass object of m, I can extract, up to quantum corrections, essentially 100% of the rest mass energy that I’ve gone in with. It is the most efficient possible power plant, because by building an apparatus like this, in principle, I could extract 100% of the energy of whatever I started with.

“If I start off with a mass object of m, I can extract, up to quantum corrections, essentially 100% of the rest mass energy that I’ve gone in with. It is the most efficient possible power plant, because by building an apparatus like this, in principle, I could extract 100% of the energy of whatever I started with.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

09 / prediction

You’d find that your feet are being attracted to the black hole much more vigorously than your head is, because they’re closer, and you end up getting stretched.

“You’d find that your feet are being attracted to the black hole much more vigorously than your head is, because they’re closer, and you end up getting stretched.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

10 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

12 / belief

I think in part people's intuition is maybe formed in cases like extinction, where if you have an animal that's going extinct, if half of the animals get wiped out, that's somehow less bad than if both halves of the animals get wiped out.

“I think in part people's intuition is maybe formed in cases like extinction, where if you have an animal that's going extinct, if half of the animals get wiped out, that's somehow less bad than if both halves of the animals get wiped out.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

13 / belief

I've done Oxford to Morocco, when I moved from Princeton out to Stanford, I hitchhiked a bunch of other times, down to New Orleans, various other places. I think probably the biggest tip for hitchhiking is to stand in a good place.

“I've done Oxford to Morocco, when I moved from Princeton out to Stanford, I hitchhiked a bunch of other times, down to New Orleans, various other places. I think probably the biggest tip for hitchhiking is to stand in a good place.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

18 / belief

We think that in particular, if we're going to do computations with it, for example, that there's going to be—and that computation makes errors—that there is a fixed cost of a bit, basically a bit of free energy, in order to correct those errors.

“We think that in particular, if we're going to do computations with it, for example, that there's going to be—and that computation makes errors—that there is a fixed cost of a bit, basically a bit of free energy, in order to correct those errors.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

20 / observation

The problem is that if you have a rope that saturates the bound as strong as any rope can be, it is just strong enough to support all of its own weight exactly on the edge there, with exactly no strength left over to support any payload it might wish to carry.

“The problem is that if you have a rope that saturates the bound as strong as any rope can be, it is just strong enough to support all of its own weight exactly on the edge there, with exactly no strength left over to support any payload it might wish to carry.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

21 / belief

You have an intuition that if something is real, it needs to be spatially localized, and things that are delocalized in space somehow can't be real. I would say that that's not my intuition.

“You have an intuition that if something is real, it needs to be spatially localized, and things that are delocalized in space somehow can't be real. I would say that that's not my intuition.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

22 / belief

I would say we should definitely build another one if it was cheap to do so, and we should build another one once AGI has made us all so rich that it's cheap to do so.

“I would say we should definitely build another one if it was cheap to do so, and we should build another one once AGI has made us all so rich that it's cheap to do so.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

23 / belief

If for no other reason than there is a minimum background temperature caused by the expansion of our universe—again, it all comes back to the cosmological constant—that gives a very small but non-zero temperature to our universe, that I think will inevitably mean that we make errors.

“If for no other reason than there is a minimum background temperature caused by the expansion of our universe—again, it all comes back to the cosmological constant—that gives a very small but non-zero temperature to our universe, that I think will inevitably mean that we make errors.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

25 / belief

If universes can expand a lot, then at all, according to the gravitational theory, then quantum mechanics will naturally populate those bits that can expand a lot, and so you'll naturally end up with an expanding universe. So I would say probably in my heart, slightly higher than 50%, but I'm going to round it down to 50 out of epistemic humility.

“If universes can expand a lot, then at all, according to the gravitational theory, then quantum mechanics will naturally populate those bits that can expand a lot, and so you'll naturally end up with an expanding universe. So I would say probably in my heart, slightly higher than 50%, but I'm going to round it down to 50 out of epistemic humility.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

26 / belief

I would say that typically theoretical physicists are not particularly well-calibrated and tend to be in love with all their own theories and make highly confident predictions about their own theories.

“I would say that typically theoretical physicists are not particularly well-calibrated and tend to be in love with all their own theories and make highly confident predictions about their own theories.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

27 / belief

What I'm describing is changing the way that the universe looks around you, changing the cosmological constant. So I think again, changing water into water vapor into water is a great analogy here.

“What I'm describing is changing the way that the universe looks around you, changing the cosmological constant. So I think again, changing water into water vapor into water is a great analogy here.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

28 / belief

In the late 90s, he wrote down an exact, we believe, an exact duality between a particular theory of quantum gravity, some particular flavor of string theory, and a non-gravitational theory that lives on the boundary of that space.

“In the late 90s, he wrote down an exact, we believe, an exact duality between a particular theory of quantum gravity, some particular flavor of string theory, and a non-gravitational theory that lives on the boundary of that space.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

30 / belief

I think general relativity is really an extraordinary story. It's pretty unusual in the history of physics that you, to first approximation, just have one guy who sits down and thinks really, really hard with lots of thought experiments about jumping up and down in elevators and beetles moving on the surface of planets and all the rest of it, and at the end of that time writes down a theory that completely reconceptualizes nature's most familiar force and also speaks not just to that, but speaks to the origin and fate of the universe and almost immediately achieves decisive experimental confirmation in the orbits of astronomical observations or the orbits of planets and the deflections of lights during eclipses and stuff like that.

“I think general relativity is really an extraordinary story. It's pretty unusual in the history of physics that you, to first approximation, just have one guy who sits down and thinks really, really hard with lots of thought experiments about jumping up and down in elevators and beetles moving on the surface of planets and all the rest of it, and at the end of that time writes down a theory that completely reconceptualizes nature's most familiar force and also speaks not just to that, but speaks to the origin and fate of the universe and almost immediately achieves decisive experimental confirmation in the orbits of astronomical observations or the orbits of planets and the deflections of lights during eclipses and stuff like that.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

32 / belief

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

33 / belief

If the laws of physics are as we believe them to be, and if we do not blow ourselves up in some other way, this is an issue that our distant descendants will eventually have to confront.

“If the laws of physics are as we believe them to be, and if we do not blow ourselves up in some other way, this is an issue that our distant descendants will eventually have to confront.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

35 / belief

My answer would be that if the isomorphism was just an approximation -- if it was really one thing and you were just pretending it was the other thing, and that approximation worked in some region of validity and not others -- then I would say that one was right and the other one was just an alternative, fanciful description.

“My answer would be that if the isomorphism was just an approximation -- if it was really one thing and you were just pretending it was the other thing, and that approximation worked in some region of validity and not others -- then I would say that one was right and the other one was just an alternative, fanciful description.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

38 / belief

I think maybe this is a philosophical difference, where you maybe think that the way that a theory is good is that it best matches the data with some loss minimization.

“I think maybe this is a philosophical difference, where you maybe think that the way that a theory is good is that it best matches the data with some loss minimization.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

40 / belief

I think some people are just totally normal people. Families moving their child to college, and you get there and you help them move some stuff into the dorm room just to, just to thank you, all the way through to absolutely wild cases.

“I think some people are just totally normal people. Families moving their child to college, and you get there and you help them move some stuff into the dorm room just to, just to thank you, all the way through to absolutely wild cases.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

41 / preference

I enjoy the experience of meeting people and the weird episodic sense of which, just, you never know what's going to happen. I think I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity, and I enjoy that.

“I enjoy the experience of meeting people and the weird episodic sense of which, just, you never know what's going to happen. I think I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity, and I enjoy that.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

42 / recommendation

If you get a bad spot, get out of there on any means necessary because there's, because there's probably a thousand X variance in how high quality hitchhiking spots are, I would say.

“If you get a bad spot, get out of there on any means necessary because there's, because there's probably a thousand X variance in how high quality hitchhiking spots are, I would say.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

43 / evaluation

An example that sometimes people use is a puddle that's sitting in some depression in the ground reflects on how wonderful the universe is, that this depression in the ground seemed to have been made the perfect shape for the puddle to exist. And our view would have said, "No, the reason the puddle has that shape is because it isn't self-adapted to the hole in the ground.

“An example that sometimes people use is a puddle that's sitting in some depression in the ground reflects on how wonderful the universe is, that this depression in the ground seemed to have been made the perfect shape for the puddle to exist. And our view would have said, "No, the reason the puddle has that shape is because it isn't self-adapted to the hole in the ground.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

44 / prediction

If we can make them long enough and pure enough, then they will be strong enough that we will be able to build a space elevator around Earth in, you know, maybe sometime in the next century, that you only need a couple of doublings of the thickness of the carbon nanotubes along its entire length.

“If we can make them long enough and pure enough, then they will be strong enough that we will be able to build a space elevator around Earth in, you know, maybe sometime in the next century, that you only need a couple of doublings of the thickness of the carbon nanotubes along its entire length.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

45 / evaluation

Then this is a matter of extreme interest, I would say, to us. It won't be relevant for tens of billions of years, probably, because that's the timescale on which the cosmological constant operates.

“Then this is a matter of extreme interest, I would say, to us. It won't be relevant for tens of billions of years, probably, because that's the timescale on which the cosmological constant operates.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

46 / evaluation

In my mind, you need to worry about that less because if you are a mass murderer, it's really not a high expected value strategy to cruise around looking for hitchhikers since there are so few of them.

“In my mind, you need to worry about that less because if you are a mass murderer, it's really not a high expected value strategy to cruise around looking for hitchhikers since there are so few of them.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

47 / prediction

A solar mass black hole, if you don't help it, will take about 10 to the 55 times the current age of the universe to have given out all its energy back into the universe.

“A solar mass black hole, if you don't help it, will take about 10 to the 55 times the current age of the universe to have given out all its energy back into the universe.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

49 / commitment

Just because enough people have generously picked me up down the years that I just feel as though it's my duty and sort of not subject to a cost benefit analysis.

“Just because enough people have generously picked me up down the years that I just feel as though it's my duty and sort of not subject to a cost benefit analysis.”
Speaker
Adam Brown
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast
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