Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
31 transcript-backed records
01 / uncertainty
“Clearly, I’m going to need the mathematical tools necessary to describe curvature. I don’t know them, so I will learn them.”
02 / uncertainty
“I also was, I almost say pleasantly, but I don’t know whether it’s pleasantly or unpleasantly, but factually surprised by the recent rate of progress.”
03 / belief
“I think we are part of the physical world, the natural world. Physicalism would’ve been just as good a word to use as naturalism, maybe even a more accurate word but it’s a little bit more off-putting so I do want to snap your more attractive label than physicalism.”
04 / evaluation
“From outside the black hole, doesn’t matter ’cause they’re inside the black hole.”
05 / belief
“I think that that’s a super important question that I can imagine making progress on, but right now I’m more or less maximally uncertain about what the answer is.”
06 / belief
“There’s one pitfall that I’ll just mention because there’s a move that is made in these theoretical edges of cosmology that I think is a little bit mistaken, which is to say I’m going to think about the universe on the basis of imagining that I am a typical observer.”
07 / uncertainty
“The problem is the questions that are easy to ask that we don’t know the answer to are super hard to answer.”
08 / evaluation
“You can come up with the words and you can wave your hands, but then you got to write down the equations; and I did. And I figured out that it could help with the dark energy, the acceleration of the universe; it doesn’t help with dark matter at all.”
09 / belief
“We think that in the galaxy dark matter is lumpy, but it’s weaker, its effects are weaker.”
10 / belief
“I think is a perfectly reasonable attitude to have before you confront the data.”
11 / belief
“I have no idea. But I think your intuition is right that it would’ve been easy for there to be lots of civilizations then we would’ve noticed them already and we haven’t.”
12 / uncertainty
“According to the rules of quantum mechanics, I can set up an electron, let’s say, in a state where it is neither purely clockwise or counterclockwise but a superposition of both. And that’s not just because we don’t know the answer, it’s because it truly is both until we measure it.”
13 / belief
“I think that there are colleagues of mine who think that we’re pretty close to figuring out how information gets out of black holes, how to quantize gravity, things like that.”
14 / commitment
“The most personal I will get are questions like what do you think of Baltimore, that much I can talk about.”
15 / uncertainty
“I try to be clear on what is professional expertise, what is just me babbling, what is my level of credence in different things, where you’re allowed to disagree, whether, if you disagree, you’re just wrong and people can disagree with that also. But I do think I’m happy to go out on a limb a little bit, I’m happy to say, “Look, I don’t know but here’s my guess.”
16 / observation
“Maybe. The point is that black holes are mysterious for various reasons. So yeah, if our best theory of the universe is wrong, that might help explain why.”
17 / commitment
“” The reason why that idea, Everett’s idea that the whole wave function always sticks around and just obeys the Schrodinger equation was not thought of years before is because naively, you look at it and you go, “Okay, this is predicting that I will be in a superposition, that I will be in a superposition of having seen the electron be clockwise and having seen it be counterclockwise.”
18 / belief
“I think that’s fair. Yeah. It’s always interesting when something is difficult, but happens anyway.”
19 / belief
“I think the philosopher, David Chalmers, has done what I consider to be a good job of arguing that we should treat things that happen in virtual reality and in simulated realities as just as real as the reality that we experience.”
20 / belief
“I think that what we mean by aesthetics or morality are we’re attaching categories, properties to things that happen in the physical world and there is always going to be some subjectivity to our attachment and how we do that and that’s okay and, the faster we recognize that and deal with it, the better off we’ll be.”
21 / prediction
“If you look at the data, their data gives out exactly where our cutoff is. That doesn’t mean that our cutoff is right, it means they lose the ability to do the experiment exactly where we predict the cutoff should be.”
22 / evaluation
“The single best reason in my mind to be skeptical about many-worlds is not because it doesn’t make sense or it doesn’t fit the data or I don’t know where the worlds are going or whatever, it’s because to make that extrapolation, to take seriously the equation that we know is correct in other regimes requires new philosophy, requires a new way of thinking about identity, about probability, about prediction, a whole bunch of things.”
23 / evaluation
“In the progress of science, the words that would be used to give the most fundamental description of how you were predicting the sun would rise changed because now you have curved space-time and things like that and you didn’t have any of those words 200 years ago.”
24 / prediction
“I think the key is information, and I think that what we see through the history of the universe as you go from simple to more and more complex is really subsystems of the universe figuring out how to use information to do whatever, to survive or to thrive or to reproduce.”
25 / recommendation
“It’s a profound insight. That’s why I said I think we should give Minkowski more credit than we do.”
26 / evaluation
“There’s one difference that is important, which is the following; If you have a curve in space, I’m going to draw it horizontally, because that’s usually what we do in spacetime diagrams, if you have a curve in space, you’ve heard the motto before that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”
27 / prediction
“As I’m falling in, I’m waving to you because I’m going into the black hole, you will see me move more and more slowly.”
28 / commitment
“I think that if you want to make the case for Einstein’s greatness, which is not hard to do, there’s two things you point at.”
29 / evaluation
“I think that Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s.”
30 / preference
“I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world. It depends on what you mean by beauty, but I think that the answer to your question is quantum mechanics can start with extraordinarily austere, tiny ingredients and in principle lead to the world.”
31 / preference
“I think I’m in favor of this kind of humility, this intellectual humility that we won’t know because we should be prepared for surprises.”