51 | Anthony Aguirre on Cosmology, Zen, Entropy, and Information

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

🗓️ 17 June 2019

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cosmologists have a standard set of puzzles they think about: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, whether there was a period of inflation, the evolution of structure, and so on. But there are also even deeper questions, having to do with why there is a universe at all, and why the early universe had low entropy, that most working cosmologists don’t address. Today’s guest, Anthony Aguirre, is an exception. We talk about these deep issues, and how tackling them might lead to a very different way of thinking about our universe. At the end there’s an entertaining detour into AI and existential risk. Anthony Aguirre received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard University. He is currently associate professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where his research involves cosmology, inflation, and fundamental questions in physics. His new book, Cosmological Koans, is an exploration of the principles of contemporary cosmology illustrated with short stories in the style of Zen Buddhism. He is the co-founder of the Foundational Questions Institute, the Future of Life Institute, and the prediction platform Metaculus. Web site UCSC web page Google Scholar page Wikipedia Amazon.com author page Foundational Questions Institute Future of Life Institute Metaculus Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and today we have a
0:05.0	cosmologist on the show, not just myself, another cosmologist, Anthony Aguire, who you know,
0:10.9	I'm not gonna be able to say this is giving you a typical view of what cosmologists think about
0:16.4	because Anthony and I actually are much more sympathetic with each other in our views of what are
0:21.8	the important cosmological questions than we are with other cosmologists out there, but that's
0:26.7	okay, it's my podcast. Anthony has recently written a wonderful book called Cosmological Coons,
0:33.0	where he tries to introduce some of the mind-bending features of our cosmological universe through the
0:39.8	device of telling little zen coons. If you're familiar with the idea of a coon, it's a little
0:44.9	story that is supposed to bend your mind a little bit, right? Make you think about things that are
0:50.3	apparently paradoxical. This is how the world works. The world itself is not paradoxical,
0:55.1	but it can seem that way sometimes. So thinking about those paradoxes drives you to interesting places.
1:01.5	And as a cosmologist, it drives you to think about things like entropy and information and what
1:07.2	happened at the Big Bang. Do we live in a simulation? Questions like this. So those are the kinds of
1:12.8	issues that Anthony and I discussed in the podcast and we get to interesting places because
1:17.7	entropy and information are behind things like the existence of life in the universe. Why you
1:23.2	remember the past and don't remember the future. So do we live in a simulation? These become
1:29.6	interesting questions for human life as well as for studying the universe. And at the end,
1:34.4	we mentioned the fact that Anthony has gone beyond studying the universe to actually found some
1:38.3	organizations that worry about human life and where it's going. So it's a very fun conversation.
1:44.8	We had to sort of bite our tongues because we wanted to rush forward because we know our common
1:49.6	background, but I think that we did a pretty good job of explaining things. Let me remind everyone
1:54.4	that this is a podcast. You can review it on iTunes, which we always love. You can support it on
	...

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