Einstein lecture by Douglas Hofstadter

INTRODUCTION in Swedish. LECTURE in English. DISCUSSION mostly in English, partly in Swedish.
Einstein, ljuset och det mänskliga tänkandet
Det är lätt att tro att fysik är en rationell matematisk vetenskap, men när man betraktar de största upptäckterna som gjorts inom fysiken, finner man att de gjorts av de djärvaste fysikerna, de som drivs av otydliga, instinktiva, nästan irrationella kreativa krafter.
Albert Einstein är ett tydligt exempel på en sådan fysiker. I denna presentation diskuteras Einsteins revolutionerande insikt om ljusets natur - ett vetenskapligt mysterium som i årtusenden fascinerat och förbryllat många stora tänkare innan en förklaring som presenterades på 1800-talet blev vedertagen som gåtans sanna lösning.
Men en dag våren 1905 formulerades en absurd ny idé av en okänd patenthandläggare - en idé som krockade våldsamt med den vedertagna förklaringen. Hur fick patenthandläggaren denna galna idé? Hur togs den emot av det vetenskapliga etablissemanget? Och vad kan denna märkliga berättelse, fylld av motsägelser och ironier, säga oss om hur den mänskliga hjärnan fungerar?
Douglas Hofstadter är mest känd som författare till Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979), som diskuterade medvetandets och tänkandets natur. Han forskar om hur vi skapar analogier och hur de genomsyrar vårt språk och våra tankeprocesser, liksom kreativa tankeprocesser inom fysiken och matematiken.
Inspelat på Kulturhuset den 31 januari 2018.

[@David-tp7sr]

His book Godel, Escher, Bach changed my life as a teenager.

[@PianoGesang]

same here

[@Warguard9]

I read GEB in 1980...to this day it still inspires me and is my Goto book when dealing with anything logical or cognitive... Achilles and the Tortoise were my constant companions... Thanks for a Great book!

[@douglasstrother6584]

Planck's professional advocacy of Einstein was another of Planck's profound accomplishments.

[@dougr.2398]

I saw Doug H. Circa 1983 @ SUSB, when he was touring with a pianist. His talks are always clear, honest forthright and informative. I had no idea that his Dad had won a Nobel Prize, or, had I known at some point, I had forgotten

[@vynderma]

Absolutely fantastic. Hofstadter retains child-like inventiveness and wonder, which is so evident at points. The same playfulness is infused in his Godel, Escher, Bach book. Planck was heroic. The portrayal of Einstein as a lonely prophet in the desert for 20 years is apt. One thing that I wonder is how did experimentalists measure light intensity back in the late nineteenth century.

[@vynderma]

Why are there only around 650 “likes” for this lecture? More people need to see this.

[@SimonRichardMasters]

Lovely to hear the interview switch languages right at the end

[@nakor555]

Reasonably no one understands what he's talking about..... but monsieur is the smartest human being alive.... Hofstadter rocks....

[@douglasstrother6584]

Planck studied blackbody radiation in the context of researching more efficient lightbulbs. The introduction of "quanta" was to solve an engineering problem! Pretty awesome!

[@nbme-answers]

2:08

[@tomaszkostyra7554]

What a lecture! Thank you professor!!!

[@buddhabillybob]

A Great Genius. Full stop. Read his books and prepare to be blown away.

[@daithiocinnsealach1982]

5:12 (skips his own introductory marks also)

[@fuseblower8128]

Great lecture! At many points, listening to the statements of great scientists criticizing AE, I thought : "Well... that didn't age very well..." 😁

[@davegrundgeiger9063]

15:57 "Analogies lurking under every stone." ❤

[@davidwilkie9551]

A great talk that deals with the physical basics, and reasons not to be conditioned by beliefs. A QM-TIME modulation of probability potential (as a result of stacking harmonic cofactor frequencies in superposition) is perceived as a linear wave format, and cofactor multiples within an harmonic, as transverse. Modulation, modules, waves and wavelengths are all "mathematical or ideal" quantization of the eternal diffentiability of possibility duration, naturally occurring e-Pii type proportions of .dt smooth time continuum into "entangled" analog images of the connection inflated by probability durations. On Topic, and on Theme, unless the essential properties of the analog image of a particular pulse-event is identified as "dimensionally-discrete", WYSIWYG-physics, then the observable integration of all histories of events, is buried in cultural jargon and human social values. (I'm just as careful about avoiding unintended offence as Professor Hofstadter, "they're none so blind as those who will not see", rules) Understanding wave-particle duality-multiplicity is not going to happen, (choosing words carefully to distinguish between quality and quantity), unless the picture of oscillation and its derivation in qualitative-concept.., mathematically-specific particular-ideal or pure Calculus-Numerical mathematics type discrimination.., is practiced from an early age. Ie, if hands-on experience is overwritten by an amorphous "philosophical" or "word-wave" culture without evidential restrictions.., no amount of research will restore the appropriate-analogous images of actual probabilistic behavior of events in context. Because Philosophers are are as prone to creating a "self-consistant" body of work as any Artist or person presenting an idiosyncratic world view of fashionable impressions and policies. (Maynard Keynes said, "In the end, we are all dead", but Economics is very Biological(?), and in other words, "dead and living" have the same connotations as "particle and wave")

[@SimonRichardMasters]

Thank you for a wonderfully insightful retelling of this story

[@SimonRichardMasters]

Good effort David Willie but your words won't make a book on the subject not without revision A simple man like myself would probably miss your point

[@daithiocinnsealach1982]

@@SimonRichardMasters If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

[@Achrononmaster]

@1:13:00 we in fact _do_ have an analogy for how light can be photons and yet also exhibit wave-like interference. The analogy is seen in every tenth-or-so B-grade scifi movie ... it is time travel. The problem is _how can a photon be in two or more places at once, and yet whenever detected is only ever in one place?_ Well, consider that we cannot see the Planck scale structure of spacetime, but that almost every physicist alive today would agree it is some kind of Wheeler "spacetime foam," and that this foam must have wormholes all over the place, which photons could traverse, and since they are Lorentzian (it is hard to conceive of a grand conspiracy of nature to produce only Euclidean wormholes) this implies closed timelike curves exist, but likely of course _only at the Planck scale_ or thereabouts. But CTCs mean anything that can traverse these wormholes will act as if it can be any damn place/time where the wormhole jumps to, but once removed from the time-line it'll only ever get detected at a spot. That is the solution (via analogy, as Doug would love it). The statistics governing such spacetime foam wormhole traversal are what we would conjecture gives rise to wave-effects. It's analogous to Huygens' principle: wavelets. All wave motion can be decomposed into wavelets originating at every point in space like quantum harmonic oscillators (just a toy model you understand). But it is a good toy model analogy for de Broglie wave-duality, since if a photon can hop through wormholes with some probability, and supposing fairly local clustering, then it'll have the same effect as a Huygen wavelet origin, always, except for when we finally detect the thing. Notice I used no quantum mechanics for this, other than that photons are "topological" (small packets) and the idea of the spacetime foam. String/M-Theory btw hints to us that fundamental particles are topological, and a lot _like_ (analogy again) minimalist wormholes, for what else is a loop of string? But spacetime foam, while motived by concepts from quantum theory, actually _could be_ entirely normal classical but non-standard general relativity, all you need to suppose is that spacetime wormholes are a ubiquitous sought of "gas" comprising the vacuum in GR. That's not so hard to imagine, since a wormhole is topological too, so is a particle-like thing, and so is really just a fundamental particle, like a graviton or higgs. Furthermore, there is one remaining weird feature of quantum mechanics, which is entanglement. But wormhole bridges are _non-local correlators_ (if you do not know there is a wormhole when there is one, you'll _think_ the correlations are magical "entablement"). I guess"spin" is also considered a bit of a mystery by some, but this is not really the case, since spin quantum numbers are not "discrete rotation rates" since they are not rates, they are also topological, or group theoretic, since spin numbers just characterise symmetries, and quantum mechanics fields are nothing but information carrying these symmetries (the Lie algebra of bivectors for rotation and Lorentz symmetries). (Epistemological interpretation of QM, not ontic interpretation). By the way, closed timelike curves are heretical! But that's only the case for macroscopic objects with mnds, sice we'd get apparent "free will" paradoxes. At the Planck scale nothing can traverse a wormhole other than something fundamental, qubits basically, since these ER=EPR wormholes would be minimal (they cannot Hawking evaporate becasue they cannot conserve the quantum numbers, like spin). So there is no possibility of time-travel paradox for large objects composed of more than a few qubits, since getting all qubits in a brain through a wormhole would be an unimaginable feat, if you could do it you'd deserve to lose your free will, or be smart enough not to do it, or be smart enough to know what you will do in the future ergo no problem going back to change your future, since you won't want to change it (just messing with ya, since Novikov--Deutsch causal consistency has to apply, so even photons cannot create paradoxes). By the by the way,... ER-bridges, aka. wormholes, are Einstein-Rosen bridges, so yet another discovery of A.E.! (Maybe you can see why I'd be Albert's even better pal. ;-) So again via analogy, we can see that almost all of quantum mechanics derives from general relativity. Einstein wins again, and defeats Bohr.

[@rosarl13]

If it's a wave and a particle maybe since it's the same wave it's the same particle but only see a particle because of the limitations. I hope I don't regret saying that before I finish finageling with thebidea.

[@Achrononmaster]

@3:20 oh, don't you love it when you guess (first guess! though I should say "understand") what the "PE" paper was _really_ about before Doug spills the beans?

[@andrewandrus3296]

that was so random when they just started speaking Swedish

[@tiamelancholyjeoncockity]

I thought I was going crazy for a second and couldn’t understand English, he wasn’t speaking in English 💀

[@milu3779]

28:57 Einstein in 1905: hope this little hack of mine can be useful to somebody eventually, ok back to checking patents!

[@ratsukutsi]

If quantum mechanics explains certain experiments, it doesn't mean gods plays dice or whatever. It means that we have a good explanation for a certain (large) group of phenomena. It probably involves probabilities because we don't have enough computing power to turn such complex events into something deterministic. Just like neural networks work (may that be my analogy).

[@ratsukutsi]

​@Heisenberg-SchrodingerEmc2 Think there is only a few people in the world that can properly translate mathematics into plain English (or other spoken languages). So certain calculations get this mind blowing interpretations that are just badly spoken maths. It's all over sciences. Would say that all theories are incomplete in a sense, but relativity is certain a very solid one with a very compressed set of rules. Quantum mechanics is different, it's too messy, even though it gives solid experimental results. It looks like a very ugly code.

[@schmetterling4477]

@@ratsukutsi Every physicist worth a salary can translate mathematics into plain English.

[@whirledpeas3477]

I would enjoy this even more with a chocolate milkshake 😋 just sayin'

[@John-lf3xf]

when does he get to the point lol.....

[@martinzitter4551]

Elon Musk says he reasons from first principles, not analogy.

[@schmetterling4477]

He may very well think that, but that's simply not possible.

[@rafaelarevalo8047]

absolutely insulting comparison

[@justingreenough4296]

He also can't explain crypto, so...

[@patwailes5927]

that explains a lot