Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?

Plus: this week’s Behind the Scenes with David Krakauer, and some of the most popular stories on Nautilus. [View in browser]( | [Become a member]( EDITORS’ CHOICE November 13, 2022   Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here](. Good Morning! This Sunday, read the latest and most popular stories from Nautilus—plus, watch this week’s Behind the Scenes with David Krakauer below [READ NAUTILUS](   [ENVIRONMENT]( [Coral Restoration Goes Big]( Saving reefs is possible—but there are challenges. BY JULI BERWALD In 2016, a small group of coral scientists gathered at a workshop in Florida to discuss the future of Earth’s reefs. [Continue reading →]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [SUBSCRIBE TODAY](   [The Most Accurate Smart Ring]( Experience a path to better health with the most stylish smart ring on the market. Powered by innovative technology, the [Oura Ring]( delivers accurate, personalized health insights. Your wellness journey is in your hands with Oura. [Learn More](   Popular This Week [PHYSICS]( [How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Uncertainty]( I now realize Heisenberg and Schrödinger are less like physicists and more like therapists. BY PAUL M. SUTTER [Continue reading →]( [NEUROSCIENCE]( [Why Your Brain Isn’t Into the Future]( What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less. BY JIM DAVIES [Continue reading →]( [GEOSCIENCE]( [How It Feels to Surf the World’s Biggest Wave]( Riding Earth’s mighty forces in Nazaré, Portugal. BY KRISTEN FRENCH [Continue reading →]( [PHYSICS]( [Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence?]( Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics. BY CALEB SCHARF [Continue reading →](   BEHIND THE SCENES [David Krakauer Takes Us Behind “The Cormac McCarthy I Know”]( I love the way David Krakauer sums up his scientific specialty. His [profile page]( on the website of the Santa Fe Institute, a research outfit of which he’s the president, tells us, rather pointedly, that he “explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth.” There’s something amusing and compelling about the idea of studying what’s stupid. For Krakauer, it’s not limited to human thinking. His big question, he told me in [our recent conversation](, is: “How does the natural world arrive at computation?” He has an expansive view of the concept. Molecules compute, as do whole societies. “Computations sometimes go well,” he said, “and we call that ‘smart.’ And they sometimes go wrong, and we call that ‘stupid.’” As a teenager he was always interested in these issues, he said, of “why we choose to represent things the way we do.” It could be a question of art. “Why perspective?” Or math. “Why fixed point? Why Platonic solids? Why imaginary numbers?” Or biology. “Why genes?” He’s “fascinated,” he went on, “by the way that the complex world, meaning the living world by and large, encodes the reality in which it lives, and how it uses those encodings to solve problems.” Chatting with Krakauer—an eloquent, English-accented speaker—I have no trouble imagining why the renowned American novelist Cormac McCarthy was drawn to and became friends with the polymathic scientist. In “[The Cormac McCarthy I Know](,” Krakauer’s latest article for Nautilus, he offers, with entertaining erudition, a glimpse into their long friendship, which grew from the conversations they’ve enjoyed as colleagues and office neighbors at the Santa Fe Institute. “As a child, you dream of these places. They’re almost like secular monasteries,” he said of the institute. Krakauer met McCarthy, who had been at the institute for almost two decades, on his first visit. “He was just a kindred spirit,” Krakauer said. “This is a very curious mind, voracious in his interests and very giving of his time. And so just someone that I naturally was drawn toward.” One of the things Krakauer didn’t have the space to mention was he and McCarthy’s shared interest in the history of polar exploration. The subtext of many of their conversations is the risk of death. “There are these personalities around the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th, people like Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Richard Byrd, polar explorers,” Krakauer said. “Their lives and what they were doing seemed, on the one hand, so pointless, and at the same time so epic and laudatory.” The connection to that world and science captivates them both. “Cormac’s favorite adventure-exploration book of all time by a long shot is absolutely Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s [The Worst Journey in the World](,” Krakauer said. It’s a memoir of Scott’s disastrous Terra Nova expedition, in which Scott died. The scientific purpose of the trip was to test the so-called recapitulation theory. It’s the idea that, during the development of, say, a bird or a mammal, you recapitulate the evolutionary stages of the lineage that it belongs to. “In order to test this, they were in search of the egg of the emperor penguin,” Krakauer said. “And so all of this heroism—the end of empire, the beginning of the first World War just prior—was in the service of this very esoteric scientific question relating to the nature of development and evolution. And that conjunction is something that has fascinated us forever.” Krakauer also discussed, among other things, his current interest in understanding the power of “mind palaces” as mental memory devices. “Finding a way to actually quantify and catalog the geometry of the memory palace, and then connect it to the way memory systems work, is a real challenge.” [Watch here](. —Brian Gallagher, associate editor   [Who Knew George Washington Grew Hemp?]( In the latest issue of the [World Sensorium Conservancy Journal](, Columbia University Asst Prof Lewis Ziska reminds us that rising CO2 is now more than ever impacting the plants we’ve used for centuries to produce medicines. [Read about this]( and more in Plantings. [Read More](   [“Because of fear of unintended consequences, they’re literally letting the reefs around them die.”]( [Tom Moore, formerly the head of coral restoration at the NOAA, on why Florida regulators are scared.](   More in Environment [To Save the Deep Ocean, We Should Mine the Moon]( The moon contains a lot of mineral wealth—but how practical is mining it? BY BRANDON KEIM It’s a Faustian bargain for the Anthropocene. [Continue reading →]( [It’s High Time to Protect Our High Seas]( The oceans belong to no one. But we can all take part to protect them. BY DONA BERTARELLI & LEWIS PUGH Look down at the Pacific Ocean from outer space and it appears to take up most of the globe. [Continue reading →](   Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher   BECOME A SUBSCRIBER [A Surprise Delivered to Your Doorstep]( Your mystery issue of [Nautilus magazine]( provides an experience of the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers. 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