215 | Barry Loewer on Physics, Counterfactuals, and the Macroworld
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll | Wondery
4.8 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2022
⏱️ 95 minutes
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Summary
The founders of statistical mechanics in the 19th century faced an uphill battle to convince their fellow physicists that the laws of thermodynamics could be derived from the random motions of microscopic atoms. This insight turns out to be even more important than they realized: the emergence of patterns characterizing our macroscopic world relies crucially on the increase of entropy over time. Barry Loewer has (in collaboration with David Albert) been developing a theory of the Mentaculus — the probability map of the world — that connects microscopic physics to time, causation, and other familiar features of our experience.
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Barry Loewer received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University. He is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the foundations of physics and the metaphysics of laws and chance.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Whether it's a team reinventing the electric motorbike, |
| 0:03.0 | the sound of what this place is looks like it should be in front. |
| 0:05.6 | Or a company making a vest that allows you to feel the virtual world. |
| 0:09.8 | Right now we have wind, now it's hailing. |
| 0:13.8 | Uh-oh, now it looks like it's going to be fireballs. |
| 0:16.8 | The third angle podcast introduces you to the brilliant minds |
| 0:20.0 | behind some of the world's most unique feats of engineering. |
| 0:23.6 | I'm your host Paul Hames from PTC. |
| 0:26.0 | The third angle is out now on your favourite podcast app. |
| 0:29.8 | Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. |
| 0:32.0 | I'm your host Sean Carroll. |
| 0:33.6 | Some of you may know that one of the bonuses of my new job here at Johns Hopkins |
| 0:38.4 | is that I got to choose my own title. |
| 0:40.8 | I mean my title is Homewood Professor, but then Homewood Professor of What. |
| 0:44.8 | And I got to choose what that is. |
| 0:46.8 | Knowing that I would both be involved in the Physics Department and the Philosophy Department, |
| 0:50.8 | I thought it would be fun to call myself a Professor of Natural Philosophy. |
| 0:55.8 | Those of you who know realize that back in the day before we had separated out |
| 1:00.8 | something called science and something called Physics from Philosophy, |
| 1:04.8 | people like Isaac Newton or Galileo would have been considered to be philosophers. |
| 1:08.8 | Newton famously wrote his Principia Mathematica, right? |
| 1:12.8 | Principles of Mathematics, but it's actually mathematical principles of natural philosophy |
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