158 | David Wallace on the Arrow of Time

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.

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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.


Avsnitt(418)

169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

169 | C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency

Games are everywhere, but why exactly do we play them? It seems counterintuitive, to artificially invent goals and obstacles just so we can struggle to achieve them. (And in some games, like Twister, ...

18 Okt 20211h 24min

AMA | October 2021

AMA | October 2021

Welcome to the October 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of que...

14 Okt 20212h 59min

168 | Anil Seth on Emergence, Information, and Consciousness

168 | Anil Seth on Emergence, Information, and Consciousness

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those law...

11 Okt 20211h 25min

167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility

167 | Chiara Marletto on Constructor Theory, Physics, and Possibility

Traditional physics works within the "Laplacian paradigm": you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system thro...

4 Okt 20211h 35min

166 | Betül Kaçar on Paleogenomics and Ancient Life

166 | Betül Kaçar on Paleogenomics and Ancient Life

In the question to understand the biology of life, we are (so far) limited to what happened here on Earth. That includes the diversity of biological organisms today, but also its entire past history. ...

27 Sep 20211h 14min

165 | Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics, Luck, and Fairness

165 | Kathryn Paige Harden on Genetics, Luck, and Fairness

It's pretty clear that our genes affect, though they don't completely determine, who we grow up to be; children's physical and mental characteristics are not completely unrelated to those of their par...

20 Sep 20211h 25min

AMA | September 2021

AMA | September 2021

Welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of q...

16 Sep 20213h 38min

164 | Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality

164 | Herbert Gintis on Game Theory, Evolution, and Social Rationality

How human beings behave is, for fairly evident reasons, a topic of intense interest to human beings. And yet, not only is there much we don't understand about human behavior, different academic discip...

13 Sep 20211h 29min

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