The Fundamental Switch That You Need to Take When Formulating the Laws of Physics

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Law o physics are just an about what's possible, whas impossible, without having to deal with the complexity of each particular constructor. So i can imagine this universal computer, and asking what it can and cannot do sheds light on the very idea of computation in the limits of that in the physical world. And likewise, with von eyman's constructors, you, david doch and your collaborators, are saying that if we knew the whole set of things that could or could not be performed, that would be equivalent to most physicists think of as knowing the full laws of physics.

Traditional physics works within the “Laplacian paradigm”: you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system through time. Constructor theory proposes an alternative paradigm: to think of physical systems in terms of counterfactuals — the set of rules governing what can and cannot happen. Originally proposed by David Deutsch, constructor theory has been developed by today’s guest, Chiara Marletto, and others. It might shed new light on quantum gravity and fundamental physics, as well as having applications to higher-level processes of thermodynamics and biology.

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Chiara Marletto received her DPhil in physics from the University of Oxford. She is currently a research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her new book is The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.

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