Name: 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation?
Uploaded: 2016-09-09T10:59:59.000Z
Duration: 2 h 59 s
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>>NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Welcome back. This is the 17th Annual Isaac Asimov Panel Debate.

And we’ve been going strong ever since the year 2000,

when an idea surfaced in the hearts and minds of the family of Isaac Asimov, exploring a

memory to be preserved in the programs of this institution. And Isaac Asimov was a friend

of the American Museum of Natural History.

Much of the research for so many of the books that he wrote took place in and around the

halls and in our libraries. And so perhaps there’s no more fitting

tribute to him and to his memory, than to keep this celebration going. So, thank you

We are also streaming live on the Internet. And I’m your host for this evening, Neil

deGrasse Tyson. I’m the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium.

This year we sold out in three minutes. And it’s not a particularly sustainable model.

So, we’re going to have top people looking at how to improve that next year.

We don’t know how yet, but the least we can do is offer it live streamed on the Internet

from the Internet universe, as well as the universe gathered here.

Tonight’s topic is: Is the Universe a Computer Simulation? Yeah.

Do you want it to be a computer simulation?

I mean, this topic is—we’re going to—you’ll see.

We’ve got some highly thoughtful, talented,

respected people to weigh in on this. I will introduce them individually, and then we will

By the way, unlike most debates you might have heard about or read about, where there’s

point/counterpoint and an argument is presented and attacked,

that’s not what’s going to happen here. We’re using the word debate loosely. Think

on scientists at a break-out room in a conference on this topic. So, we’ll all be sort of

arguing with one another, and you’re listening in. That’s really what’s going on here.

And you get to see how scientists think. You get to see how arguments are contested.

You get to see how resolution arrives, if it arrives at all.

So, afterwards we will have a brief time for question and answer before we adjourn before

9:00 Eastern time zone—Eastern daylight time.

So, join me in welcoming my first panelist this evening. He is a professor of philosophy

at New York University, where he’s also director of the Center for Mind, Brain and

Consciousness, David Chalmers. David, come on out.

>>DAVID CHALMERS: Hey. Looking forward to this.

>>NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Thank you. Next we have a nuclear physicist, who’s a post-doctoral

up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And let’s give a warm welcome to Zohreh Davoudi. Zohreh.

Next, we have someone who is actually no stranger to this panel. This may be his third visit

was selected because he brought it up a couple of years ago. And I said, man, we could do

Let’s give a warm welcome back to James Sylvester Gates.

Another non-first timer is professor of physics up at Harvard,

a specialist in nuclear particle physics. Give a warm New York welcome to one of our

a graduate of Stuyvesant High School, Lisa Randall.

Did I do this out of order? No, we didn’t. Good.

And last among the five—yeah, I did do it out of order. My bad. Yeah, sorry. You guys

know where you need to sit. Talk among yourselves while I do this.

There’s a friend and colleague, an astrophysicist, also from MIT,

who’s done some deep thinking about this very subject and has even written a book on

Let’s give a warm New York welcome to Max Tegmark.

Oh, by the way, we are lit for live streaming. And the intensity of the lights on the stage

two of our panelists—I think they just want to look cool, but they said they need to wear

sunglasses for this event. And that’s cool. Later on I might join you. I brought my pair

If I’m feeling cool I might do just that.

So, Zohreh, I’d like to start with—no. who should I start with here? Yes, let me

Could you tell me why this topic interests you? Just give a couple of minutes just as

>>ZOHREH DAVOUDI: Sure. So, as Neil said, I’m a theoretical physicist.

My interest is in nuclear physics. In fact, I got my PhD in 2014 from Institute of Nuclear

And the research I was focused on there, and at the moment, is trying to use the knowledge

in particular, strong interactions to start from a bottom-up approach and try to see what

And that’s actually relevant to why I got interested in the simulation idea. And, in

by just watching the progress that researchers in this field of simulating a strong interactions

we started to wonder how could we not think about the universe itself based on the laws

So, that the way that we actually simulate the universe, it might actually give us hints

that the universe itself could be a numerical simulation. And then

you would start thinking, well, let’s make assumption that if that scenario is the case,

and if that simulation is actually—has similarities with what we do in our research

and just drawing parallels between our algorithms and techniques that we use to simulate laws

of nature, and making assumption that they are similar,

then what can we actually conclude about the universe as a simulation.

Can we actually make predictions for the signatures that we should go after and test?

So, that’s that approach we took. And it was a fun idea and fun paper became of it

with my collaborators Martin Savage and Silas Beane at the University of Washington.

And that’s basically why I’m here. I’m trying to—

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2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation?

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