Lex Fridman Podcast
#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens
Mon, 22 Apr 2024
Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist, author, and host of Mindscape podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - HiddenLayer: https://hiddenlayer.com/lex - Cloaked: https://cloaked.com/lex and use code LexPod to get 25% off - Notion: https://notion.com/lex - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/sean-carroll-3-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Sean's Website: https://preposterousuniverse.com Mindscape Podcast: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ Sean's YouTube: https://youtube.com/@seancarroll Sean's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll Sean's Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll Sean's Instagram: https://instagram.com/seanmcarroll Sean's Papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Lfifrv8AAAAJ Sean's Books: https://amzn.to/3W7yT9N PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (11:03) - General relativity (23:22) - Black holes (28:11) - Hawking radiation (32:19) - Aliens (41:15) - Holographic principle (1:05:38) - Dark energy (1:11:38) - Dark matter (1:20:34) - Quantum mechanics (1:41:56) - Simulation (1:44:18) - AGI (1:58:42) - Complexity (2:11:25) - Consciousness (2:20:32) - Naturalism (2:24:49) - Limits of science (2:29:34) - Mindscape podcast (2:39:29) - Einstein
Full Episode
The following is a conversation with Sean Carroll, his third time in this podcast. He is a theoretical physicist at John Hopkins, host of the Mindscape podcast that I personally love and highly recommend, and author of many books, including the most recent book series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe.
The first book of which is titled Space, Time, and Motion, and it's on the topic of general relativity. And the second, coming out on May 14th, so you should definitely pre-order it, is titled Quanta and Fields, and that one is on the topic of quantum mechanics. Sean is a legit active theoretical physicist, and at the same time, is one of the greatest communicators of physics ever.
I highly encourage you listen to his podcast, read his books, and pre-order the new book to support his work. This was, as always, a big honor and a pleasure for me. And now, a quick few second mention of these sponsors. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
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And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Hidden Layer, a platform that provides security for your machine learning models. Boy, is this a fascinating space.
The very fabric of truth is being torn apart by increasingly powerful systems that we consult about what is true and what is not. It's really fascinating if you take all the security attacks away how difficult it is to make sure that threats to truth-seeking mechanisms do not sort of rise above a certain threshold where we no longer know what to trust and not.
I'm talking of course about machine learning models that are trained on a lot of data that comes from the internet, from all the different news sources, to Wikipedia, to Reddit, to all those places that they're trained on, and integrate and compress into a representation that we can then consult through natural language
and ask questions about politics, about geopolitics, about wars, about history, all of that, and we turn to those models for truth, or at least to take steps towards understanding something about the world. basically engaging in a truth-seeking process.
Now, if you add on top of that bad actors that want to mess with those models so that for the most part, they appear perfectly rational and perfectly safe to use as truth-seeking mechanisms, but on certain topics, they're not.
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