I keep a circle of heretical physicists on purpose. Not because every weird idea is true, but because some working lab results mater more than a tidy explanation.

In part five, Danielle and I get into evidence versus first-principles gatekeeping, YouTube tinkerers making old experiments visible again, and how AI changes who can connect distant scientific ideas.

Transcript

Pablos: In my travels, I’ve collected a lot of heretical physicists.

Danielle: Oh, yes.

Pablos: And they’re important to me. And partly I just found that physicists were the smartest people that I have worked with. They tend to have at least what I think is a mindset around being able to understand things from the ground up. I love that and even if they’re not doing physics, they’re thinking in a logical way that I could appreciate. This part of the training to quickly try to apprehend what are the critical aspects of a toy model to start to understand something and they’ll do this with anything.

Danielle: It’s across a pretty wide range of different things. Honestly everybody should learn that people filter out: no it’s too hard, it’s math. I don’t know how to make it more accessible for more people.

Pablos: What I found is I also attract inventors with perpetual motion devices all the time. And I don’t dismiss them outright because I know most people will. They’re very, at least very passionate and convicted. And I can give them the time of day, not always. And what I find is a lot of times I’ll get in over my head on the physics, and I will try to get one of my friends to help.

What I’ve discovered is that even the most sacrilegious physicist, they all have one weird thing they believe in, but they believe everything else needs to be by the book. Because they’re trained to believe we can understand everything from first principles. So they will never engage or entertain any other one weird thing except their own one weird thing. And all of them have one.

And so what I found is by contrast biologists never had the expectation that they were going to understand how anything worked in the first place. Biologists don’t know how fucking aspirin works. Their standard is LD50. Give it to 100 people, did half of them die? If not, well, let’s run with it. So their standard is based on evidence: can we see it work? Even if they can’t explain why. Physicists don’t believe it if they see it work unless they can explain why. So I have actually invested in a few things that physicists think is crackpot.

Danielle: They’re like, probably crackpot.

Pablos: Yeah, but we have it working in the lab.

Danielle: It’s working, so I’m applying the biology. The thing that a lot of physicists will do, which is highly recommended, it’s a very good thing to do. However, when you say that you’re doing things from first principles, you’re not actually doing everything from first principles. You’re cutting corners. They pick and choose their principles. And it turns out there’s numerous things that are just, gosh, that’s not what I would have thought about that. I just saw one of these. People deeply respected lots of thermodynamic calculations for their entire careers. Work functions, everything. They’re thinking, well, isn’t it going to be capped by Boltzmann? We took a spectrum. No, it isn’t. It can’t be explained by that. I just saw this: somebody who I sponsored a long time ago Styro Pyro Drake Anthony’s got a big YouTube channel.

And he just made this flask and this was reported in the 1600s that you could have a flask, you could evacuate it, and you put mercury, and if you shake it, it glows. Wow, that’s pretty good. Let me put this in with neon. Holy hell. Now how in the heck is it supposed to work in your conventional reading of physics that a movement like this makes enough tribal electricity to glow a discharge of ions, neon so bright that you can read from it.

That’s not supposed to happen. It’s supposed to go you have quanta of energy that get filled from things with higher quanta of energy. Not you can shake it and somehow it builds up enough static electricity on the damn walls of the thing through the mercury somehow that you can ionize the thing. That would be completely outside of everybody’s expectations, including the people, who had no idea how it worked in the 1600s and Drake Anthony, who just made it.

Shows it. This is wild. Anybody else see something like this? I see a total change in the academic more: Hey, is this in the literature or not? And the LLMs are really stuck in this mindset. Open Sauce was going on this weekend. The YouTube science people who are actually making visible the experiments and the physics and science and preparation and that has led to a new golden age of people learning with their hands, learning things themselves and that kind of tinkering is extremely productive in the inventive sphere before you even know what’s going on. The thing is working in our favor before we know what is happening. It is happening as a byproduct of us trying something.

Pablos: I think maybe too many physicists learned everything they know without a shop like this.

Danielle: People should make more and get in there and remember that you are mortal so take precautions, but also don’t wait and don’t just spend time writing papers. At some point you’re going to really want to know if the effect is real.

Pablos: All right, this is great. We should talk about maybe next episode. Okay, any questions for me?

Danielle: What’s something that you want to be possible for the future, in this real future, but you don’t see a way how to make it yet?

So I can think about it.

Pablos: I don’t have any professional liability in this, so I’ll say I think there’s some channel we don’t understand how to read in the mind. Meaning we have all this orthogonal evidence of things like telepathy or maybe quasi telepathy. You’ve probably heard the telepathy tapes, which is very charming stories about these kids who are non-verbal autistic kids, but they can read their mind of at least usually their mother, someone close to them. It all sounds quack and all sounds like woo-woo bullshit.

Danielle: I try to pack it all into something I can smuggle in as a materialist. Maybe it is an effect, let’s investigate. This is a Feynman approach, right?

Pablos: It shouldn’t be taboo to go looking for that signal. What part of science could be forgiven for not looking? I think that’s irresponsible.

And I honestly think, we live in this world where I’m obviously pissed off that science is getting defunded in these different ways. But how much, what was Vannevar Bush’s budget? You know, like we have fucking money compared to all history. And we’re not getting results commensurate with it. They plotted in the 20s. It was: alright, here’s a log plot number of PhDs. Here’s a log plot number of papers. At some point we’re gonna have many more papers and PhDs. Think we passed it? We’re way past it. Look, I think we got to take responsibility for this and improve science. We’ve got to be going after stuff that matters. That’s another rant, but the point is why isn’t anybody looking, it’s obviously not electromagnetic, we’re really good at that, but we at least believe in entanglement, so maybe it’s entanglement or something entanglement-esque. Let’s look for it. What do we need to stick probes in the brain for if there’s some signal coming out? And I would like to find, I think we should be trying to find it.

Danielle: There are a lot of people who: well, we have to understand quantum mechanics, and there seems to be a lot of things that cause decoherence. It’s easy to calculate: well, probably nothing past this scale can possibly have coherence. But then there’s been all these increasingly less fringe, wacky experiments, where they have across many centimeters, even biological proteins, even super radiant transfer. Even in our system and we’re doing more work on this to show that we believe there’s a substantial collective effect of the flame plasma actually directly exciting all the sodiums as a plasmon, increases the rate of energy transfer out to the skin and then out. It was very difficult to convince, for example, Claude and chat to you about that and then oh here’s the data. It’s wow, this is quite compelling. People look under those rocks that you haven’t turned. Just yesterday, a mathematician at Anthropic overturned a long -standing conjecture that was sort of foundational, that people built a lot of stuff on top of. And just today, oh, hey, Fable, I was thinking about this. Wow, I would want him to know the Jacobian determinant. Oh my goodness, this changes it. We’re wondering if we can take the Jacobian of the Jacobian, and vary this a little bit and see if we can find any other examples and what’s the family resemblance. And we found one.

Pablos: Wow.

Danielle: What the, this is fabulous. But also, there are other things like that. Now we have something. Now we can bring them together. That has combinatorial capacity.

Pablos: I think a huge part of where we’ve got off the rails with scientific community was, you would make a name for yourself by becoming the world’s leading expert in the South American, left ear lobe of this worm. It was specific. And so you end up with these isolated towers that don’t hang out with each other. The good inventions are at the borders of different areas. To me that’s where the action is and the LLM’s kind of level all that.

Danielle: Very exciting. They let you put it together, but you have to take the extra special effort to bring it into the awareness together with you and maintain that. There’s a whole art. Still a tool for you.

Pablos: But I think that’s right, but you can be creative and bring to bear so much more.

Danielle: This is great. Thank you so much.

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Recorded on July 20, 2026