How AI Sees Science Differently Than We Do

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Science, Natural Sciences

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2025

⏱️ 128 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if the great discoveries of science came in the "wrong" order? The Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered well after the creation of algebra, classical physics, and chemistry, but are perhaps much more important to our basic understanding of the universe.

Chris Edwards argues that AI will be able to understand science outside of the traditional chronological developments of the sciences, unlocking entirely new potentials and perspectives on the universe. If human scholars are to understand how AI interprets the universe, we will first need to understand the scientific narrative in a "new order."

Chris Edwards teaches history, English, and mathematics at a public school in the Midwest. He is a frequent contributor to Skeptic magazine and the author of Thought Experiments: History and Applications for Education, Beyond Obsolete: How to Upgrade Classroom Practice and School Structure, Femocracy: How Educators Can Teach Democratic Ideals and Feminism, and most recently of The New Order: How AI Rewrites the Narrative of Science. His background is in world history.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What if Isaac Newton had focused on why the apple rotted rather than why it fell?
0:05.7	Now, he couldn't have done that.
0:07.0	The reason he couldn't have done that was that he had, you think, like, Marty McFly goes back to
0:11.6	1955.
0:12.8	Is it also 1955 on Venus?
0:15.1	Hmm.
0:15.8	You know, because it's the entire universe.
0:17.7	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:18.6	So when you ask that question, I said, oh, wait a minute,
0:21.2	you know, what does it mean to go back into time? So you could probably borrow, borrow entropy
0:27.5	from some other system and push something back, but you can't stop everything around it from decaying.
0:34.1	And so it's, it may be back as a single system the way it had once been,
0:38.4	but the other systems around it have decayed.
0:40.3	So in relation to them, it is different.
0:42.2	One of the criticisms of evolutionary theory was that it violates the second law of
0:45.4	Dumban dynamics, which trends towards disorder.
0:47.5	But that's a misunderstanding of where energy comes from.
0:50.6	The word energy was developed just before entropy.
0:53.7	And one of the core notions of the book is that, you know, the sun's not shining, it's decaying, that we don't get any energy without something else's destruction. It's all your time travel scenarios, so sent somebody to the past, but we were there, you and I were there, and we've always been here, every particle or wave and our body's always been here. We can't go back to the past because that would mean us unraveling. Or we would have to add matter to the universe, which would violate the law of conservation. The hardest thing for me to write was, I think that the concept of the human genius might go the way the religious prophet.
1:23.3	Which is that we might start defining human genius as trying to figure out what artificial intelligence is doing.
1:32.0	And I think that that may be the next phase.
1:38.7	All right. Hey, everybody. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show.
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