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macroscopic
“people used words like macroscopic, okay? At the level of the macroscopic, you know, the boundary is such that, once you get into macroscopic superpositions,” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 3: Two Laws That Can't Both Be True▶︎ watch 27:20 · read ↗︎
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 5: Three Ways to Save Reality▶︎ watch 4:01 · read ↗︎
magnetic fields
“The way you measure them is by arranging a certain configuration of magnetic fields. There's a certain configuration of magnetic fields, which will deflect an incoming white electron in one direction…” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 1: The Experiment That Broke Reality▶︎ watch 3:46 · read ↗︎
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 4: Bell's Impossible Proof▶︎ watch 36:02 · read ↗︎
man is the measure of all things
“from Protagoras, and the direct statements we have about him are almost exclusively due to Plato. The statement is, "Man," meaning human beings, the human being, "is the measure of all things, of the…” (Richard Polt)
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 1: Is Knowledge Just Perception?▶︎ watch 35:45 · read ↗︎
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 2: When Every Perception is True▶︎ watch 3:07 · read ↗︎
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 3: Does Relativism Refute Itself?▶︎ watch 1:03 · read ↗︎
Many Worlds?
“And the papers from that conference were collected in a book called Many Worlds?, which is a very, which will give readers a very useful survey of various attempts,” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 5: Three Ways to Save Reality▶︎ watch 52:31 · read ↗︎
many-worlds interpretation
“1950s of hoping that, as a matter of fact, if you examine things more closely, there is no need for von Neumann's rule number two at all....” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 5: Three Ways to Save Reality▶︎ watch 36:25 · read ↗︎
marital status of the number five
“as category mistakes, okay? If you ask... If somebody says, "By the way, is the number five married?" You say, "No." And the guy says, "I see. So number five is a bachelor." You say, "No. Neither of…” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 2: When Physics Stops Making Sense▶︎ watch 8:52 · read ↗︎
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 3: Two Laws That Can't Both Be True▶︎ watch 5:17 · read ↗︎
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 5: Three Ways to Save Reality▶︎ watch 27:15 · read ↗︎
Martin Heidegger
“My main specialty is actually Martin Heidegger, a twentieth century German philosopher, but so my exposure to Plato is through, as a devoted and loving reader of several favorite dialogues over many…” (Richard Polt)
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 1: Is Knowledge Just Perception?▶︎ watch 1:07 · read ↗︎
Martin's axiom
“different models of set theory so as to exhibit different combinations of truths. We want CH to be true, or we want it to be false, but also we want Martin's axiom true, or we want Susan trees to…” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 10: Set Theory's Deepest Mystery▶︎ watch 41:43 · read ↗︎
matching problems
“In particular, a lot of, sort of beautiful algorithms around what are called matching problems. So basically if you have a bunch of objects or you have a bunch of people and you would like to pair up…” (Tim Roughgarden)
Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept · Lecture 4: Two Worlds We Might Live In▶︎ watch 17:37 · read ↗︎
Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
“Von Neumann wrote a very famous book, I think, in, I think before the end of the 1920s. Do you remember when? I think it was '29. '29 or something like, called Mathematical Foundations of Quantum…” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 2: When Physics Stops Making Sense▶︎ watch 35:16 · read ↗︎
matrix multiplication
“Super, super important practical problem. So like, modern machine learning algorithms, you know, the bulk of the cycles that they are doing involves matrix multiplications. Okay, so really, like…” (Tim Roughgarden)
Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept · Lecture 2: How Algorithms Outsmart Complexity▶︎ watch 29:44 · read ↗︎
matters of fact
“The other kind of knowledge, what he calls matters-of-fact, these are completely different. Now, a matter-of-fact, uh, is, is informative.” (Lee Braver)
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 3: Hume's Map of the Mind▶︎ watch 28:54 · read ↗︎
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 4: Why You Can't Prove Tomorrow▶︎ watch 0:25 · read ↗︎
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 5: Kant Wakes from His Dogmatic Sleep▶︎ watch 14:00 · read ↗︎
Maxwell's Equations
“toward the end of the 19th century. Faraday had anticipated a lot of the features of these equations, but they take a final, clear, pristine mathematical form in Maxwell, and” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 4: Bell's Impossible Proof▶︎ watch 32:40 · read ↗︎
Maxwellian electrodynamics
“from Maxwellian electrodynamics, so on and so forth, it has no space in it for anything like a mind, okay? We're just collections of billiard balls, you know, these anxieties centered” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 3: Two Laws That Can't Both Be True▶︎ watch 33:36 · read ↗︎
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 4: Bell's Impossible Proof▶︎ watch 46:45 · read ↗︎
measurement
“okay, I believe the word he uses in the book is when a measurement is performed, okay? When a measurement is performed, the usual Schrodinger rule gets suspended, okay? And it's replaced by a rule” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 2: When Physics Stops Making Sense▶︎ watch 37:11 · read ↗︎
measurement problem
“which is referred to in discussions of foundations of quantum mechanics as the measurement problem. So the second thing I want to try to do is to set that up. The third thing I'd like to do is to…” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Intro: The Crisis In Physics▶︎ watch 10:33 · read ↗︎
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 3: Two Laws That Can't Both Be True▶︎ watch 17:01 · read ↗︎
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 5: Three Ways to Save Reality▶︎ watch 1:05 · read ↗︎
Meditations on First Philosophy
“We're beginning with Rene Descartes and, his Meditations on First Philosophy, which is undoubtedly one of the most important books in philosophy, but really one of the most important books in the…” (Lee Braver)
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 1: Descartes Reboots Everything▶︎ watch 0:01 · read ↗︎
Meletus
“This is a little reminder, "No, we are beautiful." And now punchline, "I must go to the king's porch to meet the indictment that Meletus has brought against me." What? This is, he's being put on…” (Richard Polt)
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 5: Defeat as Philosophical Victory▶︎ watch 39:20 · read ↗︎
memory-free strategy
“based only on the set of chocolates on offer, regardless of the order in which those chocolates have been served. So this would be called a memory-free strategy, or also it's called, it's the…” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 2: Supertasks: Doing Infinitely Many Things▶︎ watch 40:00 · read ↗︎
Meno
“It's an attempt to remember, in a way. There's a dialogue called Meno where Meno, who's a real jerk, asks Socrates what virtue is. And Socrates says, "Well, I don't know. Let's look for it together."…” (Richard Polt)
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 5: Defeat as Philosophical Victory▶︎ watch 2:59 · read ↗︎
mental arithmetic
“don't involve perception at all. The example being, doing a little mental arithmetic, seven plus five is 11, right? No, probably that's a little too simple for anybody, but that's his example. With…” (Richard Polt)
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 4: The Soul Behind the Senses▶︎ watch 40:13 · read ↗︎
mental geography
“He does what he calls a mental geography, a map of the mind. He's going to find the contents of the mind and the structure of the mind, what is in there and what we do with what's in there.” (Lee Braver)
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 3: Hume's Map of the Mind▶︎ watch 9:33 · read ↗︎
mental reflex
“You expect the second billiard ball to move the same way your foot jumps when the, when the hammer hits it. It's a mental reflex. Not an argument, not an inference, nothing rational.” (Lee Braver)
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 4: Why You Can't Prove Tomorrow▶︎ watch 34:25 · read ↗︎
mergesort
“algorithm, called mergesort. So like when I teach algorithms at university, lecture number two is mergesort, and that Von Neumann came up with before really the, the computers he was working on had…” (Tim Roughgarden)
Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept · Lecture 4: Two Worlds We Might Live In▶︎ watch 13:38 · read ↗︎
metaphysical
“that the character of what we're missing here is metaphysical rather than epistemic, okay? If you adopt this way of telling the story, okay? If you go with Bohr, you don't” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 2: When Physics Stops Making Sense▶︎ watch 18:02 · read ↗︎
metaphysics
“If you build a bridge based on the wrong principles of physics, it'll fall down. You will get feedback. You will find out about your mistakes. But if you do metaphysics, if you speculate about the…” (Lee Braver)
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 3: Hume's Map of the Mind▶︎ watch 7:16 · read ↗︎
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 5: Kant Wakes from His Dogmatic Sleep▶︎ watch 3:53 · read ↗︎
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 6: How Your Mind Builds Reality▶︎ watch 12:36 · read ↗︎
methodological doubt
“So he's going to perform what has come to be called methodological doubt. That means it's not organic, natural doubt. It's not because he actually wonders if these things are true or not. He's…” (Lee Braver)
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 1: Descartes Reboots Everything▶︎ watch 16:47 · read ↗︎
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 2: The Birth of Modern Science▶︎ watch 0:38 · read ↗︎
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Recap: Making Your Beliefs Your Own▶︎ watch 1:03 · read ↗︎
Michael Faraday
“development was Faraday, okay? Who was one of the important 19th century investigators of electricity and magnetism. Slowly, people, and like I say, I think Faraday was an especially important” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 4: Bell's Impossible Proof▶︎ watch 31:44 · read ↗︎
Middle Ages
“For a long time, uh, throughout the whole Middle Ages, the picture of the universe was that it was cr- the universe was created by God for us, and God, uh, wants what's best for us, so he gave us an…” (Lee Braver)
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Intro: When the Old Map Stopped Working▶︎ watch 0:53 · read ↗︎
midwife
“extended metaphor in which Socrates compares himself to his mother, who apparently was a midwife with the wonderful name Phainorete, meaning she who brings virtue to light or virtue shower, which…” (Richard Polt)
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 1: Is Knowledge Just Perception?▶︎ watch 27:06 · read ↗︎
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 2: When Every Perception is True▶︎ watch 1:02 · read ↗︎
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 4: The Soul Behind the Senses▶︎ watch 25:02 · read ↗︎
Milky Way galaxy
“400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and we just happen to be around one. This galaxy is 200,000 light years across. It takes 230 million years for it to rotate once.” (Lee Braver)
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 7: Nietzsche's Warning to the Future▶︎ watch 10:01 · read ↗︎
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 4: The Largest Tweetable Number▶︎ watch 3:46 · read ↗︎
millennium problems
“Institute issued seven millennium problems, which were again meant to inspire the full field of mathematics, sort of inspire the full field of mathematics, to rally around trying to solve these deep,…” (Tim Roughgarden)
Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept · Lecture 1: Is There Anything Computers Can't Do?▶︎ watch 6:51 · read ↗︎
Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept · Lecture 4: Two Worlds We Might Live In▶︎ watch 34:30 · read ↗︎
mind-body problem
“In which the thought was the following. First of all, on this view, yes, conscious entities behave physically differently than entities that are not conscious, okay?” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 3: Two Laws That Can't Both Be True▶︎ watch 32:34 · read ↗︎
mind/body dualism
“We have some weird connection to a body. This was a big problem. The mind-body dualism is a big problem. How are they connected? But minds are defined as thinking, and bodies are defined what he…” (Lee Braver)
From Descartes to Nietzsche: The Birth of Science and the Death of God · Lecture 1: Descartes Reboots Everything▶︎ watch 40:58 · read ↗︎
minimal criminal
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 7: What Does Finite Really Mean?▶︎ watch 35:36
minimax theorem
“the players in some sense doesn't matter. And so von Neumann there in real time kind of absorbs Dantzig's version of linear programming... understands the simplex method, and then realizes in real…” (Tim Roughgarden)
Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept · Lecture 2: How Algorithms Outsmart Complexity▶︎ watch 54:54 · read ↗︎
misperception
“and mishearing and seeing and other cases of misperce- misperception." It seems obvious that there you have perceptions which are not knowledge because they're simply wrong. So here's where a…” (Richard Polt)
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 2: When Every Perception is True▶︎ watch 29:42 · read ↗︎
modal logic
“structure where you have sort of possible worlds that are getting larger that's ripe for modal logic analysis. Modal logic is the study, the general study, abstract study, of possibility and…” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 5: Potential vs Actual Infinity▶︎ watch 27:20 · read ↗︎
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 9: Beyond Countable Infinity▶︎ watch 33:38 · read ↗︎
Modal Model Theory
“the set-theoretic foundations of mathematics. There's potentialism in any mathematical structure. So I have a paper with one of my graduate students, Vojtěch Voroušin, called Modal Model Theory, and…” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 5: Potential vs Actual Infinity▶︎ watch 48:18 · read ↗︎
modal semantics
“abstract study, of possibility and necessity. And we can define a modal semantics in such a, with such a kind of picture. So, if we're at some world, say U here, then we say that U thinks...” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 5: Potential vs Actual Infinity▶︎ watch 27:31 · read ↗︎
modernism
“other intellectual movements are going on, the rise of modernism in literature and in painting, so on and so forth. All kinds of... You know, there's some sense in which in the” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 2: When Physics Stops Making Sense▶︎ watch 2:58 · read ↗︎
modified Gabriel's horn
“So, this is a modified Gabriel's horn where I'm using a different function. So now, I'm gonna use the function one over x squared instead of one over x, and the difference between one over x squared…” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 3: The Paradox of Giants: Strange Consequences in High Dimension▶︎ watch 27:34 · read ↗︎
momentum
“But this is an example of exactly the same thing. We call observable properties like color and hardness incompatible with one another because our experience is that there is no procedure by means of…” (David Albert)
Quantum Mechanics and the Crisis of Scientific Realism · Lecture 1: The Experiment That Broke Reality▶︎ watch 33:40 · read ↗︎
monism and dualism
“an ongoing, maybe eternal debate, between monism and dualism, or between those who want to explain everything materially and those who believe that consciousness cannot be explained in those terms.” (Richard Polt)
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 5: Defeat as Philosophical Victory▶︎ watch 9:05 · read ↗︎
Moore's law
“thinking about it is in terms of something you might have heard of, Moore's Law. So Moore's Law was first stated by Gordon Moore, who at the time was at Intel. This was in the mid-'60s. And Moore's…” (Tim Roughgarden)
Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept · Lecture 3: Easy Problems, Hard Problems▶︎ watch 19:18 · read ↗︎
more committees than people
“So the first claim I'm gonna make is that for any set of people, maybe there's infinitely many people, there are more committees than people. That's the claim. What is a committee? Well, a committee…” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 9: Beyond Countable Infinity▶︎ watch 1:16:28 · read ↗︎
more fruit salads than fruits
“more fruit salads than fruits. Suppose you have a collection of fruits. Okay, maybe infinitely many different fruits. Then, what's a fruit salad? Well, we make a fruit salad by specifying the fruits…” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 9: Beyond Countable Infinity▶︎ watch 1:20:15 · read ↗︎
most contested equation in middle school
“So, next I would like to tell you the most contested equation in middle school. And maybe some of you have heard of this equation, and maybe you've had arguments about it, and that's what I mean by…” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 1: Zeno's Paradox and Infinite Sums▶︎ watch 7:54 · read ↗︎
multiverse view
“and the philosophy of set theory, the multiverse view, and so on. And this is the sort of radical branching perspective on potentialism, where you don't have convergence. So, maybe you have a world…” (Joel David Hamkins)
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 5: Potential vs Actual Infinity▶︎ watch 50:01 · read ↗︎
Lectures on Infinity · Lecture 10: Set Theory's Deepest Mystery▶︎ watch 41:04 · read ↗︎
my perception is true for me
“So my perception is true for me because it's always a perception of that being which is peculiarly mine. And that means I'm unerring and never stumble in my thought about what is or what's coming to…” (Richard Polt)
Plato’s Theaetetus: An Inquiry into Knowledge · Lecture 2: When Every Perception is True▶︎ watch 33:31 · read ↗︎