Er, What Constitutes Something That's Alive?

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The laws that we are talking about in constructor theory try to capture regularities that are true independent of the scale. So they would be true within a set of objects that we would label as microscopics, like a bunch of atoms. But also it could be true of more microscopic object which displays some information teretic regularities such as a flag. And this is not an unusual thing in the sense that most traditional physics wouldn't think of laws of this kind as fundamental. In the case of quantum computing, we already encounter these kind of things.

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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