Reality Has No Foundation – Carlo Rovelli

I think my issue with the example of the bike is that while sure the physicists at CERN won't directly know how to fix the bike based on the fundamental principles of physics, they can with "relative ease" go from fundamentals to figuring out what is wrong with it and how it could be fixed, with little prior knowledge of bikes, at that point its mostly a matter of training physical dexterity and gathering materials to apply an actual fix.

I say "relative ease" because by comparison, going from knowledge of fixing a bike to explaining the fundamental workings of the bike down to its basic principles is near impossibly hard, to the point that it has taken us millennia to go in that direction.

Either direction would require a lot of work, but I would always trust a physicist to figure out the bike before a bike mechanic figures out physics, and not because I think the physicist is smarter, but because of that very fundamental understanding of the physicist lends itself vastly better to explaining non-fundamental interactions than the other way around.

If one wants proof that knowledge of fundamentals via the study of physics can be used to explain, improve and "fix" aspects of day to day life one needs only look at the myriad of commercial products and refinements of products and methods that have come out of our study of physics. It is very clear that we are not just explaining reality, we are learning how to interact with it and how to better understood day to day interactions, objects and affairs.

All that said I can definitely think of things I would never go to a physicist and ask them to fix or explain. My first thought is sociological, psychological, emotional, etc type of issues. I studied physics and I would not know how to even begin to explain such phenomena based purely on knowledge of physics, at least outside the purely physical aspect of neurotransmitters and such. I think in this field a physicist trying to derive sociology would find comparable difficulty in that as a sociologist trying to derive physics. That said I would still be more inclined to say that physics influences sociology to some extent, but the fundamental workings of physics is not affected by sociology, only how we study those phenomena.

In conclusion, I find it hard to support a statement that physics, to our current knowledge, doesn't lie at the heart of everything else we experience, IE underpins it. It may not always be valuable to seek understanding in the knowledge of physics, depending on your current problem, but physics does always play some part in any problem at some level.

Carlo Rovelli is one of the greatest mind, love his books, he's open minded and has excellent scientific and philosophical views, he changed my mind about reality and my perspective on it.
One of is colleague in France, Aurélien Barraud, talks a lot about him and how they work on a quantum theory of gravity, and its amazing.
Love science, love philosophy, love you all, Friends of the same reality <3

I don't think I agree with his view regarding the "what is more fundamental the chair or the atoms that comprise it?". When he argues that it makes more sense to go to a mechanic with your broken bicycle then to a particle physicist he is obviously right. My probelm with that is however, is that he is talking from a human point of view. The physicist will tell you he has no idea is because his knowledge and his brains computational power are finite. From his point of view the mechanic is more adequate for the task is because they both can have only X amount of knowledge. When dicussing such a fundamentel question however, I don't think we should argue from a human point of view. If the particles physicist had all the knowledge there is to have about his domain and all the "brain power" then he could not only fix the bike just as well as the mechanic, because he can concieve any possible malfunction on an atomic level, but he could also then answere how a human cell works. The mechanic with infinite knowledge over the domain of engineering could repair the bike, but would not be able to understand the biological processes with a human cell. So my point is, that there has to be something more fundamental since from the knowledge of the subatomic world you essentially know all the physics to understand the chair perfectly. However, if you are coming from our macroscopic viewpoint of the chair, you can not trivially understand why atoms behave in certain ways.

Reality does have a wobbly base: there is nothing but energy and its antithesis (space, nothingness). Energy is bipolar: which introduces a binary logic in turn becoming the natural origin of order. A theory of everything but not for those who need magic, elitism, chaos, relativity, spacetime and ultimately time travel without the expense of providing or proving a medium for time to wibble and wobble. However if matter is merely xxxillions of gyrating energy bits it can still render intelligence, imagination and beauty. That's good enough. What are you going to do with it human? Genius is the only currency of value, not wibbly fakery.

"Relative but not arbitary" but then what is it based and why is that superior rather than dismissable?

Thanks for this conversation

The Greek Indian connection:
Megasthenes, Seleucid ambassador to Chandragupta Maurya's court (c. 300 BCE), wrote the Indica, a firsthand Greek account of Indian society and philosophy. Pyrrho of Elis, founder of Greek Skepticism, is recorded (by Diogenes Laërtius) as having traveled with Alexander's campaign into India and encountered the "gymnosophists" — likely Jain or early ascetic renunciants — with some modern scholars (Christopher Beckwith, Greek Buddha, 2015, a genuinely contested but serious academic thesis) arguing this contact directly shaped Pyrrhonist epistemology. And the Milindapañha ("Questions of King Milinda") records an extended philosophical dialogue between the Indo-Greek king Menander I and the Buddhist monk Nāgasena, a real, extended text of direct Greek-Indian philosophical exchange from the Indo-Greek kingdoms that followed Alexander.

The divergence between Buddhism and the Vedantic schools, over the existence or absence of self is not a minor technicality — it was one of the most bitterly contested fault lines in the actual history of Indian philosophy.
There is a clear three-way fork to be identified:
1. Materialist/Voidist: No self, only causally interdependent process.
2. Monist/Impersonalist: Self (non-physical consciousness) exists, separate from the material processes but individuality ultimately dissolves into one featureless impersonal consciousness-soup.
3. Personalist: Self exists and is part and parcel of the Supreme Self (God), individuality remains.

"Reality has no foundation" ? Bullsh-t. All physical reality is made of flowing and vibrating forces, a universal continuum of force fields. Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist or obey the accounting of cause-effect (why mathematics always adds up). For example, the only light you can see are the photons that arive at your functional retina. There are bosons propagating everywhere, going thru each other (like light beams, radio waves, etc.), in every direction, even if the observing monkey doesn't think about it.

You're such a good interviewer

Ty alex! very interesting

This was excellent, thank you very much Alex and Carlo.

Alex, I really hope you eventually make it out to Upstate NY or the Southern Tier. Binghamton, Broome County, Ithaca, Cornell area.

Even though your New York shows are only about 4 hours away, I just can't manage that, unfortunately.

I sincerely appreciate and enjoy your work. I know a lot of us Upstate folk are fans of you.