Complex Conceptions of Time with David Krakauer, Ted Chiang, David Wolpert, & James Gleick

And now for something completely different! Last October, The Santa Fe Institute held its third InterPlanetary Festival at SITE Santa Fe, celebrating the immensely long time horizon, deep scientific and philosophical questions, psychological challenges, and engineering problems involved in humankind’s Great Work to extend its understanding and presence into outer space. For our third edition, we turned our attention to visionary projects living generations will likely not live to see completed — interstellar travel, off-world cities, radical new ways of understanding spacetime — as an invitation to engage in science as not merely interesting but deeply fun. For our first panel, we decided to inquire: What is time, really? How has science fiction changed the way we track and measure, speak about, and live in time? And how do physics and complex systems science pose and answer these most fundamental questions?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

In this week’s episode, we share the Complex Conceptions of Time panel from InterPlanetary Festival 2022, moderated by SFI President David Krakauer and featuring an all-star trinity of panelists: science journalist James Gleick, sci-fi author and SFI Miller Scholar Ted Chiang, and physicist and SFI Professor David Wolpert. In this hour, we play with and dissect some favorite metaphors for time, unroll the history of time’s mathematization, review time travel in science fiction, and examine the arguments between free will and determinism.

Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com — as well as the extensive, interactive web-based “Voyager Golden Record Liner Notes” with links to not only all of the panels from IPFest 2022 but also copious additional resources, including contributor bios, peer-reviewed publications, science fiction and nonfiction science writing, and more…

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Episode cover art by Michael Garfield with the help of Midjourney.

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(SOME) Mentioned & Related Links:

David Krakauer
Mathematical languages shape our understanding of time in physics
by Nicolas Gisin
Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math
by Natalie Wolchover
The Principle of Least Action
Path Integral Formulation
Closed Timelike Curve
The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells
Kip Thorne

James Gleick
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
The Physicist and The Philosopher
by Jimena Canales

Ted Chiang
“Story of Your Life”
Arrival
Exhalation
Russian Doll (TV series)
“The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”

David Wolpert
Complexity 94 - David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
Complexity 45 - David Wolpert on The No Free Lunch Theorems and Why They Undermine The Scientific Method
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
Intuitionist Mathematics