Prologue: Coffee and ¬Claude

This site is where The Superphysicist Project will live.

The project's mission: To explore how superintelligent civilizations might understand our Universe, and what miracles this understanding might enable.

This is a very unusual project. I thought it might be worth saying a few words about it before we dive in. Hopefully you will be intrigued, not be too put off by its perhaps overly ambitious frame or the presence of my feet in the header image, and spend some time reading (and commenting on!) the posts as they come.

My name is Geordie Rose. I started my career as a theoretical physicist. I've had the good fortune to work on lots of really cool things, including quantum computers, humanoid robots, and superintelligence.

The Superphysicist Project, at least for now, is just me. I will be doing my best to explain difficult ideas at the intersection of fundamental physics and how minds work. Maybe some day it will be interesting enough to grow into something else.

On our journey, we will encounter profound ideas related to consciousness, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, what minds are and how they work, the nature of space and time, alien civilizations, warp drives, and/or time machines.

If these are things you are interested in, strap yourself in, we are going for a ride!

I am going to aim for a level somewhere around Sean Carroll's Biggest Ideas in The Universe books. I will try to write in a way that is both correct and accessible to non-specialists. The subject matter is immensely important for all of us. But accounts of these topics that are both clear and coherent are unfortunately very rare.

The title of this prologue is Coffee and ¬Claude. The symbol ¬ means negation, or 'not'.

I am a fan of coffee. But I am not a fan of AI-generated text. So.

Every word will come from my (admittedly biased and flawed) human perspective. I suppose there might be a place for machine-generated prose for some things. But personally I intensely dislike it.

My loathing-adjacent view of machine text does not come from some uninformed luddite point of view. I have been using and re-implementing these sorts of thing for a long time. I understand Large Language Models and their cousins very well. They are remarkable things.

But I want this project to come from a uniquely human perspective. The topics we will touch on might matter profoundly for the future of the great human experiment. I would not be comfortable outsourcing explaining how I think of them.

I will use Claude and its cousins to do some things though. Mainly to generate visualizations for the blog posts. Whenever I do this, I'll call it out!

I set things up this way because I like coffee. A lot.

Also, coffee has been very important historically to bring people together to discuss important things.

I am using the ghost platform. It is stellar for communicating difficult technical concepts. It allows the use of latex inline for math, and it naturally and easily allows complex visualizations in the posts themselves. Very easy to use and customize. Highly recommended!

I would love for you to join the community here. Things get more interesting and vibrant with more discourse. I have to admit I am nostalgic for the heady early days of the internet, when you could be sure you were talking to real people.

Ah alt.bigfoot, I remember you well. (Staring into the distance with a glazed look).

Ahem.

I will answer questions you leave in the Comments on the posts, engage in debate if you think I am wrong about something, and promise to fix anything that turns out to be wrong.

But.

If you do, I will delete it.

On the topics we will be discussing, I would prefer to communicate with people.

I am currently walking across Canada. It is quite taxing. Most of my time is on the road, or recovering from being on the road.

But it does give me time to think. I am going to aim for a cadence of roughly one post per week.

I have a lot of material already written. At least for a while, the hard part is turning it from "this makes sense to me" to something that is actually coherent for everyone else.

During each update video for the walk (you can find them here), I will do a section where I talk about any recent posts here.

You don't have to watch these to follow along here. The posts here will be self-contained. But sometimes talking through difficult ideas gives a different way to communicate that might be a helpful complement.

If you just can't get enough minds vs. physics goodness, consider watching the walk videos as well!

OK! I think that is it for setting the stage.

Here we go!!!