Physics vs. Human Perception: Which Represents Reality? | Janna Levin

Physics vs. Human Perception: Which Represents Reality?

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What does a theoretical physicist do all day? Janna Levin shares some insight on perception vs. reality, and provides a glimpse of how she spends her time (hint: doing math).One of humanity’s gifts is the ability to simplify. Instead of acknowledging millions of molecules creating structures strong enough to sit on, people just see a chair. People can look past underlying patterns of electricity and silicon, to see a computer. When looking at a crowd, most people aren’t hit with immediate wonder at the hundreds of individuals with unique lives and perspectives. Instead, it’s just a crowd, filled with bustling bodies and blurry faces. Humanity simplifies things in order to understand them.

We also are very accomplished at assigning things meaning, according to Janna Levin, a theoretical astrophysicist, and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College at Columbia University. Looking at a chair and seeing a chair is a distinctly human trait. Robots struggle with this – they see particles, lines, and shapes but not a direct meaning. This human habit is useful but often lands us into trouble. A chair is a chair to us, but we can’t assume that to be the truth of the object, it’s just the meaning we have assigned it. This becomes complicated when the item is not as objective. Different things have different contextual meaning to different people. Although Levin is an expert on particles, not people, she theorizes that humanity could benefit from remembering that meaning is entirely projected, and that we should be conscious of that fact in our daily life. The only truth that is reliable is that we can never really know what a truth is, even if 7 billion people agree on it, or if the disagreement splits the world in half. It’s humbling to remember and is helpful, even philosophically, in conflict resolution. Don’t assume that what you see is the only truth.

Levin is not just an accidental philosopher, but a very intentional mathematician. In her second point of this video, she explains her job as a theoretical physicist. She will work for days on end to find new ways of solving a problem she already knows the answer to, searching for new methods that will be more direct and efficient, and useful in later calculations. She explains that a normal linear math equation is like playing a step-by-step chess game, where each step is the whole focus. But a physicist tries to create a more succinct equation to do what a good chess player does: see the entire game before it happens. It’s truly fascinating to get a small glimpse at a day in the life of a physicist.

Janna Levin's most recent book is Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space.

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JANNA LEVIN :

Janna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works, a center for arts and sciences in Brooklyn, and has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. Her previous books include How the Universe Got Its Spots and a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize. She was recently named a Guggenheim fellow.

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TRANSCRIPT. :

Janna Levin: Every human being models the world to understand it and that's cognitively how we're successful. So I don't look at a chair and see a huge number of molecules or some very complex structure, I see a chair. This is something that's very hard to teach a computer to do to understand conceptual things forward. And we conceptualize right away. We theorize right away. I have a theory of what that object is and my theory is that it's a chair. And that's what helps human beings be so adaptable in the world and so fast at moving through the world is precisely this ability to theorize and model. But we also know that by doing so we are projecting a theory of the world on the world and we trick ourselves, we deceive ourselves sometimes. The trick is to use the power that's given to us by being able to conceptualize and model and have metaphor, but always to remember that that's what we're doing and to always - when you come to a point there is in some sense no such thing as knowing something's true. It's true in the context of the model of the world that you have.

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