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Adam Brown

Published podcast speaker

Claims
49
Episodes
2
Shows
1
Named items
0

Claim ledger

What Adam said.

25 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 / 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

04 / 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

06 / 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

08 / 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

09 / 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

10 / 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

12 / 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

13 / 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

14 / 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

15 / 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

16 / 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

17 / 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

18 / 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

20 / 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

23 / 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

25 / 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
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