The same mathematics that explains why a fridge magnet sticks to your refrigerator also explains why neural networks work when they have no right to. Transcript, bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt His group did the calculation. Nobody else had. Nigel Goldenfeld is a Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a former director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. He spent 36 years at Illinois applying condensed matter physics to problems everyone else had abandoned. We cover: - Why a model fitting pure noise generalizes anyway - What Francis Crick concluded when he decided life evolved too fast to have started here - Why the genetic code is optimal rather than arbitrary - What horizontal gene transfer has to do with how libraries work - Why Enceladus is the better bet and Europa is the wrong moon - The purpose of life, stated as a thermodynamics problem The impact you make is the ratio of what you do divided by what everybody else does. Minimize the denominator. Nigel Goldenfeld, on this episode. Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Featured Guest: Nigel Goldenfeld website: https://guava.physics.ucsd.edu/~nigel/ Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201554097?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback Nigel Goldenfeld on blue sky https://bsky.app/profile/nigelgoldenfeld.bsky.social My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #NigelGoldenfeld #physics #AI #originoflife #condensedmatterphysics #podcast