158 | David Wallace on the Arrow of Time

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2021

⏱️ 108 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The arrow of time — all the ways in which the past differs from the future — is a fascinating subject because it connects everyday phenomena (memory, aging, cause and effect) to deep questions in physics and philosophy. At its heart is the fact that entropy increases over time, which in turn can be traced to special conditions in the early universe. David Wallace is one of the world’s leading philosophers working on the foundations of physics, including space and time as well as quantum mechanics. We talk about how increasing entropy gives rise to the arrow of time, and what it is about the early universe that makes this happen. Then we cannot help but connecting this story to features of the Many-Worlds (Everett) interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

David Wallace received a D.Phil. in Physics and a D.Phil. in Philosophy from Oxford University. He is currently W.A. Mellon Professor of Philosophy of Science, with joint appointments in the Philosophy Department and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation. Among his honors are the Lakatos Award for outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science. His most recent book is Philosophy of Physics: A Very Short Introduction.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.0	The passage of time, it gets to us all, doesn't it? I've been doing this podcast for over three years now.
0:10.1	I remember almost everyone that I've done. Actually, I remember everyone, but I don't remember any of
0:14.9	the ones that I haven't yet done. There's an asymmetry, right, in my memory, between the
0:20.4	podcast that I've already done in the past and the podcast yet to come in the future, not because
0:25.3	there aren't any in the future, but because of some feature of the way that time works in our
0:30.5	universe, the arrow of time, pointing from the past to the future that gives it that imbalance.
0:36.4	And this is one of my favorite topics to think about in physics and philosophy. And the amazing
0:41.5	thing is we haven't really talked about it here on the podcast yet. We did talk about time,
0:46.9	the psychology neuroscience of time with Dean Bonomano, but the physics and philosophy of the
0:51.9	arrow of time, which was the subject of my first trade book from eternity to here, we haven't
0:57.2	talked about yet. Also, surprising is that we have not yet had David Wallace on the podcast. David
1:03.4	is one of the leading philosophers of physics in the world today. The third surprising thing is that
1:10.0	we're having David on and we're not talking that much about the many worlds interpretation of
1:14.4	quantum mechanics. David is most famous for being probably the person who is thought most
1:18.9	carefully about how many worlds should work in the real world. I all encourage you to check out
1:24.0	his book, The Emergent Multiverse, if you really want to dig into the details. But David is broad
1:29.3	in his interests in physics and philosophy. And he's certainly thought a lot about entropy and the
1:34.8	arrow of time and the initial conditions of the universe and so forth. That's what we're going
1:38.8	to be mostly talking about today. How are all these different things related in the typical good
1:45.3	philosopher, very, very careful way of teasing out what all the assumptions are, how they go into
1:50.8	things? I know that I found by talking to people that the arrow of time is one of the hardest
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sean Carroll | Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Sean Carroll | Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.