Q2C - Day 1

I started the day by taking my two daughers, Heather and Addie, to the Physica Phantastica exhibit, part of the Quantum to Cosmos Festival put on by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. The hour passed really quickly. We watched an 8-minutes 3D movie about cosmology and scientific visualization, we saw a miniature traincar hover over a track, we looked at a replica of the Mars rover, we played with polarized lenses, and we formed our own scientific hypotheses that we tested.

After that, I went to a talk entitled "Does Reality Have A Genetic Basis?" by S. James Gates, Jr. I was intrigued by the title, since I've hypothesized that the physical laws, as we know them, are actually the result of an evolutionary process acting on a deep and fundamental substrate, perhaps a handful of truly universal axioms that interact and evolve, and the stable (and self-replicating?) laws persist and make up our universe (and others). Though I learned a lot during the talk, he did not actually address what he meant by the word "genetic" in the title. In fact, I asked about it during the question period, but he didn't answer the question I asked. He did bring up the anthropic principle, and the multiverse hypothesis. I wonder if he thought I was a creationist.

My question appears 60.5 minutes into the video.