Max Tegmark

Quotes

1. The very fabric of our physical world, space itself, could be a purely mathematical object in the sense that its only intrinsic properties are mathematical... as dimensionality, and topology.

2. 

   In 1814... Joseph von Fraunhofer invented... a spectrograph, which let him separate white light into into a rainbow of colors... He discovered mysterious dark lines in the rainbow... and... the detailed positions of these lines... depended on what the light source was made of, constituting a kind of spectral fingerprint. During the following decades such spectra were measured and catalogued for many... substances. ...Sensationally, the spectrum of sunlight revealed that the Sun... contained elements... such as . Moreover... it revealed that stars are made of roughly the same mixture of gases as the Sun! This clinched it in favor of Bruno: stars are distant suns...

3. 

   But I’ve suddenly changed my mind and turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. Why? Because I’ve come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge future potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.

4. 

   So this book... [is] my personal quest for the ultimate nature of reality.

5. 

   ... achieved a breakthrough. Please hold your thumb at arm's length and alternate closing your left and right eyes a few times. ...[Y]our thumb appears to jump left and right by a certain angle relative to the background... [M]ove your thumb closer... and you'll see this jump angle growing. Astronomers call this jump angle ... [W]e can... compare telescopic photographs taken six months apart, when Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun. ...Bessel noticed ... ...moved a tiny angle, revealing its distance to be almost a million times that to the Sun... Now that Bessel knew the distance he used... [the] to figure out how luminous it was... in the same ballpark as the Sun... Giordano Bruno had been right after all!

6. 

   Let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

7. 

   How is technology changing the hierarchical nature of our world? History reveals an overall trend toward ever more coordination over ever-larger distances, which is easy to understand: new transportation technology makes coordination more valuable (by enabling mutual benefit from moving materials and life forms over larger distances) and new communication technology makes coordination easier. When cells learned to signal to neighbors, small multicellular organisms became possible, adding a new hierarchical level. When evolution invented circulatory systems and nervous systems for transportation and communication, large animals became possible. Further improving communication by inventing language allowed humans to coordinate well enough to form further hierarchical levels such as villages, and additional breakthroughs in communication, transportation and other technology enabled the empires of antiquity. Globalization is merely the latest example of this multi-billion-year trend of hierarchical growth.

8. 

   (…) the bottom line is that if you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. Nothing else has a baggage-free description. In other words, we all live in a gigantic mathematical object—one that’s more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably also more complex than objects with intimidating names such as Calabi-Yau manifolds, tensor bundles and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today’s most advanced physics theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical—including you.

9. 

   (…) no spectator is needed, because your consciousness basically is your reality model. I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways. Since the different parts of your brain interact with each other, different parts of your reality model can interact with each other, so the model of you can interact with your model of the outside world, giving rise to the subjective sensation of the former perceiving the latter.

10. 

    We're all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us. ...[M]y main responsibility as a teacher isn't to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.

11. 

    What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it.

12. 

    [W]hat I had been missing... and what Feynman realized: physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. ...[I]t makes us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world ...[T]he lens of physics adds more beauty to the world ...