Sublime

“How many piano tuners are there in New York City?” Students had to estimate, just by reasoning, and try to get the right order of magnitude. The professor later explained that these were “Fermi problems,” because Enrico Fermi—who created the first nuclear reactor beneath the University of Chicago football field—constantly made back-of-the-envelope

Astrophysicists apply the tenets and tools of general relativity and quantum mechanics to very different classes of problems.

It is because the laws of physics support computational universality that human brains can predict and explain the behaviour of very un-human objects like quasars. And it is because of that same universality that mathematicians like Hilbert can build up an intuition of proof, and mistakenly think that it is independent of physics. But it is not ind

So, I agree when you say we shouldn’t categorize the economy. We shouldn’t observe the economy and be like, “Oh, that’s a harmonic oscillator.” Yeah. “That’s an Ising model.” No. But we should absorb the data. We should observe the economy, and think in the physicist way of saying, “Okay, this is what I see. Let me think of a way of describing it.”

So Dunbar proposed a novel idea: the size of a species’ brain determines the optimal size of their social groups. Maintaining relationships, argued Dunbar, requires brain power. More relationships require more neurons. Extrapolating his straight line from primate brains to human brains, he found that the optimal human group size, if this hypothesis

Even in physics, some of the most fundamental explanations, and the predictions that they make, are not reductive.

But there is another side to Galileo’s discovery which is much less often appreciated. The reliability of scientific reasoning is not just an attribute of us: of our knowledge and our relationship with reality. It is also a new fact about physical reality itself,