Sara Imari Walker > Quotes

“That rockets can be made to happen, once minds emerge that can imagine them, is a nontrivial feature of our universe.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“You might naïvely think that the electron really does have a mass, a charge, and a spin, and that these are intrinsic properties of the electron. But these properties can also be considered to merely describe how electrons interact with certain measuring devices.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“objects that are larger than us in time look “abstract” and “informational.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“features of reality appear “material” or “physical” to us if they are smaller in time than we are.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“We have encountered three hard problems now. The hard problem of consciousness: that existing feels like something (at least for us). The hard problem of matter: that nothing can be observed to exist outside of interactions. The hard problem of life: that abstractions (information) matter in determining what can exist.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“In constructor theory, the only transformations that can be caused to occur are those for which there exists a constructor.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Human-invented mathematics, human-invented language, the information content of genomes and bioelectric patterning in tissues behave in much the same way when you abstract them to such a level (as do many other things in the biosphere and technosphere; maybe you can think of other examples). This universality suggests a broad regularity in information that might point to underlying universal laws.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Not only can the information in a genome be copied, it can cause the same things to happen in a different point in space and time given suitable conditions (e.g., a machine or organism capable of reading and executing the information in a manner consistent with its historical use).”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Chemistry is what happens when elements are combined into molecules. Currently, the largest chemical databases in the world include lists of tens of millions of molecules. That sounds like a lot of cataloged molecules, but it pales in comparison to estimates of the number of possible molecules.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“What details are important? Which ones can we neglect? These are challenging questions.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“It is important to keep in mind as a theory builder that whatever you assume as the axioms in your mathematics, or fundamental in your theories of physics, constrains and in many ways determines your subsequent reasoning and worldview. It defines the boundary of what you can explain.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“How can we distinguish this type of reliable artificial event from the naturally occurring types that also happen repeatedly? On large enough timescales, wouldn’t meteor strikes also be considered reliable and repeatable? Yes, they are. But this is precisely the point: what life does is turn something that can happen, but perhaps is so exponentially rare or impossible as to never be observed, into something that can happen with very regular occurrence and be observed in abundance. Perhaps you are not surprised by a single event of ejecta that start orbiting a planet, but if you saw two, or three, or ten thousand in a short interval with precise control, your degree of surprise would increase. Physicists will sometimes talk about the laws of physics as universal regularities in our universe. What life does is create local regularities—these are things that can happen repeatedly with high likelihood, but only in a local part of the universe because they require memory and information stored locally to happen, and these can be acquired only via evolution.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“second key feature of information—it causes things to happen.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“What is considered fundamental in modern physics merely defines the boundary of what we can observe.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“it is not spontaneously self-organized in space, but instead assembled across time.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Unlike elementary particles and atoms, molecules are special because they are the simplest combinatorically built matter where not all the things that could be built will ever exist. There is not enough material, energy, or time to build them all.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Existing is special: most things—at least among the set of the ones that we can even imagine—will never even have the chance to exist. Perhaps even more things will never even have the chance to be imagined.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“If we are ever to understand what life really is, we need to recognize that among the unimaginably large number of things that could exist, or even the smaller subset of ones that we can imagine, only an infinitesimal fraction ever will. Things come into existence when and where it is possible to—and what we call life is the mechanism for making specific things possible when the possibility space is too large for the universe to ever explore all of it.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Technical science is hard because a lot of skill goes into it, and this requires experience. Once you learn the logic of the rules and how to apply them, it’s not such a leap to apply those same tools to new problems.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“either our categorization is wrong or life is not something to be categorized.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“for a complex object to exist in many copies, there must be many copies of other objects that can make it, and many copies of objects that make those objects, and so on, forming a chain of objects that can cause others to come into existence.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“To calculate motion or gravitational attraction, we need only concern ourselves with mass, position, and acceleration. This simplification was a huge conceptual leap made by our species—it allowed us to describe all motion, whether here on Earth or on the other side of the observable universe, in the same way.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“This is the great trick physicists use to get to the heart of reality: we identify what details are important and drop all the rest. This art allows us to unify a seemingly disparate range of things in a mathematically concrete and testable way.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“Both the hard problem of consciousness and that of matter seem intractable to answer in our current scientific framework.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“We (humans and our technology) understand that there is a regularity—a predictable and recurrent feature of what we observe—associated with how objects move, and that what goes up must come down. Over time we turned this regularity into a law describing how it is that massive objects are mutually attracted to each other, via a force we call gravity. That law is formalized mathematically and allows precise predictions of the behavior of two gravitationally interacting objects, such as our Earth and our Moon, or our Earth and you. It also allows us to calculate how much counterforce is necessary to escape Earth’s gravity, e.g., by accelerating an object to its escape velocity.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“What modern science has taught us is that life is not a property of matter.
Physicists and chemists see very intimately what the rest of us who think life exists cannot: there is no magic transition point where a molecule or collection of molecules is suddenly "living."

Life is the vaporware of chemistry: a property so obvious in our day-to-day experience—that we are living—is nonexistent when you look at our parts.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“understanding the mechanisms underlying replication, compartmentalization, and metabolism—some of the key chemical functions of known life that commonly come up in the many failing attempts to define life.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“not a property of the screwdriver—it is a local, relational property of all the objects the screwdriver comes into existence alongside in the unfolding of our biosphere. Thus, if you study the objects that exist now, they should already encode all the information you need about the functions that constructed them to also anticipate much of how the near-term future will be constructed (though not all if our universe can produce genuine novelty).”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“It is not just that we need new principles, but we also need to rethink how we write down laws of physics in the first place. We need new physics.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence

“We need to imagine what is possible before we can cause it to exist.”
― Sara Imari Walker, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence