The Intersection of Science and Meaning
Jordan B Peterson, Oct 3, 2024 | Dr. Brian Greene | EP 486
Peterson talks to a physicist of string theory to ask him how physics might provide insight into ideas of psychology, philosophy and meaning. Here are some topics he gets into over the course of the hour and a half
1. The beginning of the universe – What does time mean at the beginning of time? (starting at 4:00)
2. (20:15) Green says something interesting about the second law of thermodynamics. Other physical laws, like the law of conservation of mass, are true. They can not be violated. The second law can be violated. It is just really unlikely.
Peterson asks a paradoxical question. The second law says the disordered states are more likely than ordered ones, but how do you define disordered? Isn’t one lottery ticket as unlikely as the next?
3. (37:42) How do you explain the double-slit experiment? If the stripe pattern happens because photons interfere with each other, how can you get the same pattern when you send one photon through at a time? This gets into some good questions about the limits of Einstein’s relativity. How does time work on a particle going so fast that time stops? What happens to a massless photon going so fast that mass becomes infinite? (Which leads into my favorite, how do we know that light goes the speed of light?)
4. (46:00)The quantum explanation, which says that you can’t ever know the location and speed of an object (The world you see is misleading about the fundamentals!), is not the only explanation that fits the data. De Broglie had a different interpretation that works.
5. (58:27) Greene talks about free will. He and Peterson lay out the usual positions. Particles behave in a deterministic way! Actions have predictable outcomes! Therefore everything is determined. So there is no free will. Peterson responds that at the quantum level there is no determinism, so Greene’s fixed chain of events is wrong. (Sounds like a first-year philosophy class. Then it takes a turn...)
Greene claims that the quantum world is not indeterminate. It is just too small to observe. All that probabilistic stuff of quantum mechanics is not real. It compensates for the fact that we can’t see the details of reactions. This seems to me relevant to a theological paradox. humans are free to act as we choose, to the point of following or not following God’s will. Yet God know the present, past and future, which depends on the choices that humans freely choose.
6. (1:07:00) Starts on string theory, which claims that it can combine general relativity (which works on big things) and quantum theory (which works on little things). String theory proponents say it is beautiful. Its detractors say it is not science. It has never made a testable prediction (I think they mean a novel testable prediction.) This looks to me like a very common choice between the scientific type (who makes a hypothesis, then waits for the results of the test) and the imaginative beauty-seeker.
Bonus idea: (50) tohu vabohu: Is it the state before the big bang (or, as its originator called it, the primeval atom)?
