In November of 2018, the LSAT confused a generation of future lawyers with a Reading Comprehension passage that seems to say there are definitely multiple universes out there. Not only was this an infamously tough passage to score well on, it shook students’ sense of reality to the core. Today, with Branden taking some time off to prep his students for the August LSAT-Flex, Jelena fact checks the PT 86 “high-entropy multiverse” passage.
Put your science hats on and learn…
Links and further resources from from this week’s episode:
2004 Coverage of Carroll and Chen’s initial paper & hypotheses: https://bit.ly/3jB2TVl
Carroll & Chen’s original paper that inspired PT 86 Passage 4: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0410270
NASA’s recent, surprising universe-expansion speed news:
https://go.nasa.gov/2EzZZ4l
Researcher Sean M. Carroll discusses his entropy & “arrow of time” theories on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3jy4pHy
“Arrows of Time Without a Past Hypothesis,” a 2020 paper building on Carroll and Chen’s work: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/17468/
Christopher Gregory Weaver roasts the Carroll-Chen Model: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.4976.pdf
Sean Carroll interviewed by Wired about his new book: https://bit.ly/2YSgKyG
Is there a mirror universe where time moves backwards? (Carroll thinks so): https://bit.ly/2YVaENY
Quantum Mechanics creeped out Albert Einstein: https://bbc.in/3gMgMOr
LSATMax 1-on-1 Private Tutoring: - https://testmaxprep.com/lsat/tutoring
Jelena was born & raised in Golden, CO. There she cut her teeth on logic by getting into, then out of, an impressive amount of trouble. When not organizing student protests or lobbying the school board, Jelena competed in equestrian sports & constitutional debate. Jelena took the June 2017 LSAT, partly out of curiosity and partly because she developed a serious Logic Games addiction. After three months of study, Jelena achieved a score of 178. While she didn't end up falling in love with law school, she did find herself really enjoying the LSAT—so much that she left her previous career in tech startups behind and began teaching. Jelena prides herself on helping her students understand not just the systems and methods they can apply to get a good score, but the underlying logic & its applicability to the challenge of learning to think like a law student. Outside of her work with the LSAT, Jelena is a writer, creative content producer, & a competitive equestrian endurance rider.
In 2000, Branden graduated with a BA in Philosophy from UC Santa Barbara. For a few years after, he cast about in vain for entry-level philosopher positions, but, when he was visited by the Ghost of Student Loans Past, he knew it was time to make a change. In June 2006, Branden took the LSAT, scoring a 175. Thereafter, he attended UCLA School of Law, graduating in 2010 and practicing patent law for several years. Since 2013, he has taught dozens of live LSAT classes and tutored scores of successful test takers. When he's not considering the finer points of a particularly tricky Logical Reasoning question or kicking it with his daughter, Branden writes Science Fiction. You can find him after work at the local Starbucks, typing furiously, then deleting what he typed, then typing more, and so on for hours.
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