In this week's episode, we're joined by astrophysicist Dr. John Rocha to talk about some of the weirdest things going on in the world right now, including NASA's plans to drill into the heart of Yellowstone National Park to save the U.S. from a nuclear winter, and the discovery of a new type of asteroid that could potentially destroy the Earth. Plus, we talk about whether or not we should be worried about asteroids, and what we can do to prepare for them. This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and produced by Riley Bray. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Additional music by Ian Dorsch Credits: The theme song is "Goodbye Outer Space" by Suneaters, courtesy of Epitaph Records, LLC. The album art for the episode was done by Dee McDonnell and the music used with permission from Fugue Records, and edited by Jeff Kaale, and additional selections were produced by Mark Phillips and Alex Blumberg. We're working on transcribing this episode of the podcast, so please don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, rate, and tell us what you think of it! and we'll be listening to it on Anchor.fm/The Dark Side of the Moon. Subscribe to our new music, The Dark Side Of... Subscribe To Our New Music: Good Morning America - Bad Astronomy - Good Morning, Good Morning Earth - Bad Radio - Bad Morning Outtropeep. Good Morning Outro, Bad Morning Joe - Bad Coffee - Good Evening Outro - Good Ol Olio - Good Luck, Good Olio, Good Luck - Bad Olio & Good Luck! - Bad Luck, Bad Luck - Good Day, Good Life, Good Night, and Good Morning Morning Out, Good Love, Good Blessings, Good Evening, Good Fortune, Good Dreams, Good Things, Good Rest, Good F Nights, Good Thoughts, Good Day & Good Morning Night, Good Relationships, Good Kept On Your Day, by You'll See You'll Have a Bad Day, Great Day by You're Not Too Good, Good Will, Good Or Bad Or Bad Day by Me, Good or Bad Or Good Day by Mr. , Good Or Not Good Or Good Morning by You Can't Say So Much Good or Not Good?
00:01:43.000There's all sorts of disasters that could happen to us that we don't really plan for because human lifetime is 100 years, technology is a few hundred years, but maybe there are disasters that happen every 1,000 or 10,000 years.
00:02:02.000It's not my professional concern, but I was once sitting next to a hotshot lawyer who had just been finished visiting Washington, D.C. to campaign for, we've got to start hardening up the electrical grid because one kind of solar flare that he says happens every thousand years could wipe out electricity in the United States or the world for weeks or months.
00:02:26.000So a few billion dollars and we can harden it and fix things, but who's going to spend a few billion dollars for something that happens once every thousand years?
00:03:54.000But isn't there, like, there's a lot of areas that can come from, like, behind the sun, where the gravity of the sun sort of distorts the view?
00:04:07.000There's what's called a Lagrange point.
00:04:09.000There's a place exactly the opposite where the Earth is, where you'd have to hang out if you were to be hidden from us for a long time.
00:04:18.000And you can hang out there, but you would never leave there.
00:04:20.000So there probably are some asteroids right opposite the Earth, just like most planets have them.
00:04:25.000So they're just sort of orbiting, is that what you're saying?
00:04:27.000Yeah, they're orbiting once a year, 180 degrees away from the Earth, and that's what they will be doing until they're gradually moving away.
00:04:32.000Is it possible that one can come up and hit us from the bottom when we're not looking?
00:05:23.000So Hawaii's another good place to put telescopes, but that's gotten in trouble with local resistance, and astronomers just not even trying to take that into consideration and therefore getting themselves in trouble.
00:05:36.000Canary Islands are okay, but yeah, Chile is one of the best places.
00:05:41.000I've been to the Keck Observatory a couple of times.
00:05:43.000I've been three times, and every time I go, like, the first time I nailed it, and every time I've been since then, I just haven't gotten, like, one time we went, and I didn't plan for the moon, and I was like, oh, there's too much moon out, and it just wasn't, it was just too bright, the sky was too bright,
00:05:58.000and then the next time, unfortunately, we got it when it was rainy and kind of cloudy, and we didn't get a good vision, but the first time, First time changed my life.
00:06:07.000I mean, I really felt like I was on a spaceship looking through a window.
00:07:29.000They get to dig up real fossils, bring them back.
00:07:31.000And she said the thing that got them the most, that was most affecting to them, was they saw stars for the first time in their lives, right?
00:07:44.000Yeah, you see like these faint little flickering things.
00:07:47.000You don't see like a full, the view of like the Milky Way where you actually look up and you see that white sort of stripe across the sky and you realize, oh my god, that's stars.
00:08:06.000As a person who studies space, do you ever take time to go out into the desert and just stare at the space with nothing out there, no light pollution?
00:09:14.000I have this vision that he goes home every night and plans out answers to every possible question, because they're so slick when he delivers them.
00:09:20.000He does a little, because I've heard him give the exact same semi-off-the-cuff.
00:09:24.000But they're great, so it's like a stand-up comedian delivering a line.
00:09:31.000So what is it about it that they don't understand, you think?
00:09:34.000Quantum mechanics, I think, that's the subject of the next book that I'm writing, the book I'm working on right now.
00:09:40.000So I'm just starting thinking about it.
00:09:42.000But it's not just the people on the street.
00:09:44.000It's my professional colleagues with PhDs in physics who don't understand quantum mechanics.
00:09:49.000And rather than being embarrassed by that, you know, rather than thinking, wow, this is, you know, a terrible thing that we should devote all of our resources to understanding, They flip it.
00:09:59.000It's like Aesop's fox and the grapes, you know, the parable where the fox is trying to get the grapes and he realizes he can't reach them.
00:10:07.000So he says, I never wanted them anyway.
00:10:24.000I've always assumed when I was younger that when you get to the highest levels of science or any sort of intellectual pursuit, that the people that are really involved, there wouldn't be any ego issues.
00:10:39.000As an outsider, I was like, well, there's ego in every other part of the world, but those super smart dudes that are figuring everything out, they got all that stuff locked down.
00:11:04.000The one thing about academia, being a professor, right, whether it's science or anything else, is that you are constantly being evaluated by every other person you meet.
00:11:14.000There's a rank, how good you are at everything, right?
00:11:16.000And it's not written down, necessarily.
00:11:19.000There's not a rankings that appear in the sports pages, but everyone is judging you all the time.
00:11:23.000And, you know, my students and so forth, they say, well, I don't like to ask questions in a seminar because I worry that someone's going to be judging me.
00:11:30.000And all I can say is that, yes, they are going to be judging you.
00:12:26.000Yeah, and in your field, there is a big issue, I guess, with people disregarding other people's discoveries, or wanting to, rather, like wanting to poo-poo things.
00:12:40.000Yeah, you know, I think this is a very complicated issue that I don't really have clear, because certainly scientists can be very, very supportive of each other under the right circumstances, but they're human beings.
00:13:41.000You can still be competitive, but avoid all these traps that are essentially like these intellectual rabbit holes that can go down that are really not beneficial to anybody.
00:13:50.000Yeah, I mean, if I'm formally teaching a class, if I'm standing up there in front of the lecture hall, 98% is teaching the material pretty straightforwardly.
00:13:57.000I try to dribble in little words of wisdom here and there, and especially if I think that There is a way that we always teach the subject that is wrong and wrongheaded and we should be doing it right.
00:14:08.000But if I'm advising students, like my graduate students or my undergraduates, then I, you know, lay on very hard my own perspective on how it is to be a scientist and what is the good way to do it and what's the bad way to do it, what are the pitfalls, and also just, you know, how to not make mistakes and trip up your own career.
00:14:28.000Now, what is it about quantum mechanics that you think people don't understand?
00:14:33.000Is there a way to describe it that way?
00:14:35.000Everyone agrees on what we don't understand.
00:14:37.000There's the thing that makes quantum mechanics, which is our single best theory of the universe in some sense, The thing that makes it difficult to understand is that it's the only theory you've ever invented where there is a difference between what the world is and what we see when we look at the world,
00:14:59.000And quantum mechanics has this fundamental rule that says you can't see the world as it is.
00:15:06.000If you have an electron, right, a particle that can be spinning clockwise or counterclockwise, you think that's what can happen because every time you look at it and you say, is it spinning clockwise or spinning counterclockwise, you get one answer or the other.
00:15:18.000But the rules of quantum mechanics say when you're not looking at it, it's in a superposition of both.
00:15:25.000And you can calculate the probability that you're going to get one answer or the other.
00:15:28.000And this drives people crazy because they think that what they see is what is real and therefore they have very, very difficult times figuring out how to make a sensible theory of quantum mechanics that explains what you actually see.
00:15:41.000Yeah, even you just explaining that, it's circling around inside my brain.
00:15:46.000I'm looking for like a cubby to place this, and like, where does this go?
00:16:00.000So exactly what you're doing right now, you're saying that there are things that it can be still in motion, this place, that place, and somehow it's in both at once or something like that.
00:16:11.000And what quantum mechanics says, it's not in either.
00:16:14.000Like, if you ask, where is the position of the electron?
00:16:19.000If you look at the electron, you will see it in a position, but that is not the fundamental essence of the electron.
00:16:26.000There's something called the quantum state or the wave function.
00:16:29.000There's a mathematical way that we have of representing the reality of it, but the answers it gives us to questions are just not, here it is, how fast it's moving, etc.
00:16:39.000That's not what we calculate using the theory.
00:16:57.000That was when I first started really paying attention to this stuff.
00:17:00.000And then I was reading criticisms of what the bleep, and that's when I got an understanding, like, oh, okay, well, this is kind of horseshit, and this lady is kind of a channeler?
00:17:37.000But when you look at an atom and realize that most of it is space, like most of the things that we're looking at are mostly space, and that subatomic particles really do kind of blink in and out of existence, and you look at...
00:17:51.000All the various quantum weirdness that is real and observable by people like you that actually study this stuff, it looks crazy.
00:18:00.000Yeah, in fact, so I hate to be that guy, but both the claim that atoms are mostly space and the claim that particles popping out of existence are both entirely bullshit.
00:19:20.000And people just can't And so that's why they talk about particles popping in and out of existence.
00:19:24.000What there is is this wave function, this probability cloud that tells you how likely it is that you'll see a particle.
00:19:32.000And if the answer is, well, it's very unlikely, it's 0.001% chance if I look here and look here again and look here again, then when you do see it, you're tempted to say, aha, a particle has popped into existence.
00:19:45.000The reality is there was the cloud that was there all along.
00:20:18.000So are we looking at things sort of in a very material sense, like, you know, this mug is ceramic, this table is wood, and we think about the composition of it.
00:20:27.000If we cut into the ceramic, we know what it looks like.
00:20:29.000So we're trying to apply those principles to, like, maybe an atom system.
00:20:33.000And they just don't apply because it's the other way around.
00:20:36.000Like, we think that our world that we see every day is sort of basically how things work, and we're going to sort of translate other extremes of existence into that language, whether it's far away or way back in time or very, very small or whatever.
00:21:05.000Very, very rigorous mathematical ways of describing what happens.
00:21:09.000And then quantum mechanics says what you see when you look at the atom is different.
00:21:13.000And we just sit there and insist that what we see is the real way to talk about it, no matter how anti-quantum mechanical that viewpoint really is.
00:21:21.000That's got to be incredibly frustrating to you, because I've heard, like, legitimate mainstream scientists on television talking about the atom and describing it in that way.
00:22:19.000Again, we can disagree about what the understanding will ultimately be, but physicists contribute just as much, you know, not on purpose, but they allow, they open up the space for what the bleep do we know people to insert their woo in there because they're not doing a very good job of measuring up to the reality themselves.
00:22:36.000So, it seems like it's something that's intensely complex that almost needs to be described with mathematics, which would require you to have a deep understanding of that mathematics to really completely grasp it.
00:25:39.000So my last book, The Big Picture, I actually devoted, even though it's mostly about physics and philosophy and cosmology and biology, I devoted a little bit to the fundamental principles of reasoning, and especially Bayesian reasoning.
00:25:51.000I don't know if you've ever heard of Bayesian reasoning.
00:26:44.000Be told that there is this law of attraction.
00:26:46.000If you understand how physics works, you know that it's completely nonsense, but if you were tempted to believe it, Say to yourself, all right, let me test it.
00:26:54.000Let me figure out whether it's true or false by saying if it were true, the following things would happen.
00:26:59.000If it were false, the following things would happen.
00:27:02.000I think that everyone thinks they work that way, but almost no one really does.
00:27:15.000And once you're on a path, like, I believe in this, it's super hard for people to shake that loose.
00:27:21.000And people generally think that the probability something is true is either zero or 100%.
00:27:25.000They don't like the idea that something is 70% true, and therefore they can sort of improve that or disprove that or whatever.
00:27:34.000It's just hard going through life thinking about probability distributions for every possible version of reality, but that is the best way to do it if you can.
00:28:34.000And I'm not, you know, there's some version of the scientific method that says every idea should be treated seriously, and you should sort of write down what the evidence for and against this is.
00:29:16.000You know, it was, to their credit, it was quite polite and, you know, we know you don't believe this, but let's come on and have a conversation and we'll talk to you.
00:29:26.000And we're just about, you know, questioning things and getting at the truth and not accepting dogma.
00:29:30.000Yeah, but they're not about getting an education in actual astronomy or astrophysicists.
00:29:35.000No, the crucial thing that you notice whenever you talk to the many, many physics and astronomy crackpots out there is that they're never asking questions.
00:29:48.000If people email me and say, help me learn, then I'm usually very happy to converse with them one way or the other.
00:29:54.000Well, it's super easy to start questioning things, but it's very difficult to get a degree in astrophysics or to get a degree in astronomy or to just really read books about it.
00:30:02.000Getting through Lawrence Krauss' last book, man, there's chapters that I had to go, okay, let's go through this one more time.
00:30:08.000When he came here, I had to ask him one of the first things we did.
00:30:12.000It was probably a mistake because it was so complex.
00:30:15.000I tried to get him to explain gauge symmetry to me.
00:30:56.000You communicating with people that have seen that and have these ideas that are false assumptions based on it, sort of like I said to you that atoms are mostly hollow.
00:32:04.000That guy is the biggest dealer of word salad that the world has ever known.
00:32:11.000And the genius is putting the word salad into a recipe that people think is nutritious for them, right?
00:32:16.000They really like to eat, even though there's no actual nutritional value.
00:32:19.000Well, you get a lot of that from certain yoga classes.
00:32:23.000There's certain yoga classes that I go to where the yoga teacher will start talking some woo-woo shit, and you'll be in the middle of the pose.
00:32:30.000You're like, what in the fuck is this guy going on about, man?
00:32:33.000I do it too, and as long as the pose is helping me, I'm going to put up with that.
00:32:54.000I had this conversation with a friend of mine who gave me a Deepak Chopra book, and I started going through it, and I go, you know this guy's crazy, right?
00:33:10.000But he's also ignoring the actual scientists that study all this stuff, and he's sort of pitching this thing, what it is like this Deepak Chopra-ism, this sort of spiritual pseudo-quasi-spiritual view of the world that he's pitching to these middle-aged housewives that are looking for some sort of meaning to life,
00:33:34.000Yeah, and Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, came up with a great word for it.
00:33:37.000He calls them deepities, when you string some words together in a way that sounds extremely profound, but you look closely at it and it doesn't actually mean anything at all.
00:33:45.000You know, there's a website that'll do that for you.
00:33:47.000Oh, the Deepak Chopra Quote Generator.
00:33:51.000I would like to laugh, but there's another website that comes up with random physics paper titles, and it's not that different.
00:33:57.000You can usually tell when it's a random physics paper title.
00:34:00.000I guess there's similar issues with the reason why Deep Rock can do that is because most people don't understand what he's talking about.
00:34:10.000So if you say a lot of stuff about things that people don't understand.
00:34:14.000There's been a bunch of videos that we played on this podcast about fake martial arts practitioners.
00:34:21.000There's a whole business in these people that have these fake martial arts techniques, and they use all these huge words.
00:34:30.000That are very rare about the central nervous system and about the structure of the body.
00:34:36.000And they'll use all this stuff to try to get you to think, like, oh, well, this guy obviously has an enormous vocabulary and a deep understanding of anatomy.
00:34:45.000He must, therefore, be this chi master that he's pretending to be.
00:34:50.000So I kind of recognize that pattern in the woo-woo people.
00:34:54.000I'm like, oh, I kind of see what you're doing.
00:34:55.000You're throwing a bunch of very complicated words that aren't in most people's vernacular, and you're saying them in a way that makes me feel like you have some sort of a connection to the chi and to the chakras and to the inner whatever that everybody's trying to reach to be happy.
00:35:11.000And another problem is just that whenever there is a field, whether it's physics or medicine or whatever, where we know something, but it's hard, complicated, counterintuitive, when we explain it, we translate it, right?
00:35:23.000You know, in physics, we have mathematical equations that are quite unambiguous as to what they say, but then we use words.
00:35:28.000We say, well, there's a cloud, there's a probability, etc.
00:35:31.000And every translation is inaccurate in some sense.
00:35:49.000Like, why when you're describing where the electron inhabits, why is it a cloud?
00:35:53.000Well, if you're thinking about the electron, what the wave function is, sort of, how we use it is, you ask the question, if I were to look For the location of the electron, there's a machine that tells me the answer.
00:36:08.000There's a probability of seeing it here with a certain number, a probability of seeing it there, a probability of seeing it somewhere else.
00:36:14.000And so at every point in space, there's a number, the probability you will see the electron there, right?
00:36:20.000And so if you visualize all those probabilities all at once, it looks like a cloud that is filling up all of space.
00:36:26.000And then the leap is to say there's no such thing as where the electron is.
00:36:52.000Yeah, so on the left, this is the picture we like to draw.
00:36:56.000Electrons orbiting around, as if they were little planets in the solar system.
00:37:00.000On the right is closer to reality, but you see, even there, they couldn't quite resist the temptation to make it pointless and little dots.
00:37:21.000And it answers the question, what's the likelihood that we see it in different places?
00:37:26.000The hard part to mentally get to is that the cloud is what is real.
00:37:30.000Is it almost like what we're looking at here with all these dots here?
00:37:35.000Jamie, go back to where it was at, please.
00:37:38.000Where it says the probability of the density of electron, and then you see all those dots.
00:37:43.000Is the issue like making a visual representation of it almost like if I asked someone to draw a visual representation of a thought?
00:37:52.000Yeah, it's something like that, exactly, because we're used to stuff, coffee cups, bottles of water, they have locations in space, they have a shape, a size, things like that.
00:38:06.000I mean, that's the most important thing that we've ever had when it comes to the creation of civilization, inventions, innovation, creativity.
00:38:53.000What do you think about the very uber-bizarre theory that the universe is incredibly fractal in the sense that what we're looking at when we're looking at the universe is essentially some sort of subatomic particles for a much larger atom.
00:39:07.000And then it goes bigger and bigger and then there's a human out there that's also a part of another galaxy that's also part of another universe.
00:39:16.000It's also a part of another atom that's also...
00:39:41.000If you're an honest, conscientious scientist, you always say we don't know for sure, right?
00:39:45.000But everything that we think we know about quantum mechanics says that things like electrons and quarks are completely featureless.
00:39:53.000That if you tried to put little wrinkles and make them different, like the Earth and Venus and Mars are very different from each other.
00:40:00.000Every electron is exactly the same as every other electron.
00:40:03.000And if you tried to give it any distinguishing features, it would cost an enormous amount of energy, energy that's just not there.
00:40:09.000So there's fundamental principles of physics that says that there are no people living on atoms, okay?
00:40:15.000And so what we're like with our solar system, even though it kind of vaguely resembles an atom in some sense, we are nothing like real atoms.
00:40:22.000We could not be packed together to make a solid object in this bigger world or anything like that.
00:40:27.000So our existence is sufficiently different from the subatomic realm that I see no way that we could be the same thing as the subatomic realm to some bigger people.
00:40:37.000I do think we could be living in a simulation, as Elon Musk famously suggested.
00:40:42.000We could be all living in a computer simulation.
00:40:44.000I don't think it's likely, but it's completely plausible given what we know right now.
00:40:48.000The real issue is that one day we most likely will have something, as long as technology continues to exponentially advance, we'll one day have something that's indiscernible from the reality.
00:40:59.000They'll be able to interface, more than likely, to be able to interface with your senses, with the way the mind perceives reality, and create something that passes that uncanny valley and literally feels like Like real life, like the Matrix or whatever.
00:41:14.000I think that we might be very far or we might be pretty close.
00:41:16.000I think it's hard to tell because there's so much we don't know right now.
00:41:19.000It's not like this is coming in the next 10 years.
00:42:59.000And there was someone else who was on the panel, I forget it was, another physicist.
00:43:04.000And the amazing thing was the science fiction author was by far the most conservative thinker up there in terms of what he thought would really be happening a thousand years from now.
00:43:20.000And it's just hard to predict the future accurately.
00:43:23.000And there's a role served both by trying to be as realistic as possible and careful and Bayesian and saying, what are the probabilities and so forth?
00:43:31.000There's another role served by just being the provocative and saying, well, maybe this crazy thing is going to happen.
00:43:37.000Maybe we'll cure death in the next hundred years and life will change for everybody dramatically.
00:44:12.000He thinks that there's going to come a time inside his lifetime, hopefully, that you'll be able to download consciousness.
00:44:20.000That consciousness is going to be something you'll transfer, sort of like code.
00:44:26.000Yeah, I think that there's a difference between, you know, what is potentially possible, given arbitrary amounts of time and resources, and what is realistic in the relatively near term.
00:44:37.000By the near term, we mean 50 or 100 years, right?
00:44:44.000I'm exaggerating what's going to be possible in the next 50 or 100 years, because they underestimate how little we know about how the brain works, how important it is for the brain to be in our bodies, right?
00:44:55.000One of the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence over the last couple of decades was to realize that if you tried to build an artificially intelligent computer, It becomes much more realistic if you give it a body, if you give it a face and it can interact with people.
00:45:09.000I mean, we underestimate the extent to which having a body is an important part of how we think and who we are.
00:45:14.000And this is just like such baby steps in understanding this stuff that to imagine that in a matter of decades we'll have it all figured out and have downloadable consciousnesses is not realistic to me.
00:45:24.000Do you think that we have to absolutely understand the exact way that the human brain works in order to replicate its possibilities?
00:45:33.000No, I mean, I think that we probably won't.
00:45:36.000That probably won't be the way that we make artificial consciousness or artificial intelligence.
00:45:41.000Like, we won't just be reconstructing human beings.
00:45:44.000Like, when we made cars, we didn't reconstruct horses, right?
00:45:47.000We just did it in a very, very different way.
00:45:49.000And cars are much better than horses in various ways.
00:45:56.000Going up hills, but also in the early days of cars, one big complaint was, but if I'm drunk and passed out, it won't take me home all by itself.
00:46:31.000The problems that can be solved by things that we design are just a different set of problems than the thing that evolution naturally made us do, right?
00:46:41.000Like, evolution built a very, very general-purpose machine That is inefficient and irrational in all sorts of ways.
00:46:49.000Like, anyone's pocket calculator since the 1970s can multiply numbers way better than your brain can, right?
00:46:55.000Your brain has enormously more computational capacity than a pocket calculator.
00:47:10.000I don't know exactly what it will look like.
00:47:13.000I actually think that the more important thing will be blurring the distinction between human beings and machines, you know, the crossovers.
00:47:20.000There's another one of Elon Musk's project.
00:47:24.000The idea of, you know, basically a neural lace, something that is just interfacing with your brain very, very, very fast so that you have access to the entire Internet or whatever peripherals you want in real time.
00:47:36.000So, like, Wikipedia is part of your memory, essentially.
00:47:39.000And that's just who you are and how you walk around.
00:47:40.000And you can multiply numbers as fast as you want to.
00:47:49.000And some sort of a weird symbiotic connection to the net and to electronics, whether it's a wearable thing or maybe even an embedded thing.
00:48:26.000It's a laptop bag that also is, you have a passport bag and a laptop bag and then a carry-on and then a check and stow, you know, for airplane luggage.
00:48:38.000And all of it is Bluetooth and all of it is location coordinated with GPS. So that if somehow or another your bag gets lost, you literally can go on a computer and it'll show you where your bag is.
00:50:09.000Another thing I wanted to talk to you about with quantum mechanics that came out of that movie, What the Bleep, that was very confusing to a lot of people, was the whole observer effect.
00:50:21.000Now that is something that I've tried to explain to people that the issue is...
00:50:26.000Well, please, if you could explain it.
00:50:28.000The thing is that people believe that in quantum physics it's been proven that if you look at things, that you looking at things changes those things.
00:50:40.000But the way it's been described to me, it's like, no, it's actually because you are measuring those things, and that's what changes it.
00:51:33.000And therefore, back in the bad old days, a lot of people wondered whether there was something special about consciousness or human perception or something that was helping us explain the laws of quantum mechanics.
00:51:49.000There's nothing special about quantum mechanics and consciousness in any way.
00:51:52.000A rock could do the same thing, or a video camera, or a speck of dust.
00:51:57.000The quantum mechanics rules says that things change when systems interact with each other.
00:52:03.000The way that you describe a system is different when it's all by itself than when it interacts in some interesting way with some other system.
00:52:09.000And that system can be a person, but it can be anything else also.
00:52:12.000So, in that famous experiment that's in that cartoon that gets passed around by people every two or three years, when they're like, wow, the world's made of magic.
00:54:56.000And so what happens when you let an electron go through?
00:55:00.000The answer is you get an interference pattern.
00:55:02.000It's more like a wave than a particle.
00:55:04.000But the real weird thing that they're going to get to eventually is if you let an electron go through two slits but You put little detectors on the slits.
00:55:15.000So you say, which slit did the electron go through?
00:55:19.000Then it always says it goes through one or the other.
00:56:02.000But you affected it, or whatever the detector was, affected it when it looked through the slits to see did it go through this one or this one.
00:56:10.000And that effect changed it from being going through both slits to being only going through one.
00:56:44.000So in other words, our natural intuitive way of thinking about electrons is as particles, little marbles.
00:56:49.000And quantum mechanics says, no, no, no, it's naturally a wave.
00:56:52.000The weird thing is when it acts like a particle.
00:56:54.000And if you're a many-worlds person, the answer you give is the following.
00:56:58.000When you look to see, did the electron go through one slit or the other, you, or whatever video camera you had or whatever, becomes entangled with the electron.
00:57:09.000And what that means is that the wave function of the whole universe, the wave function of both the electron but also your camera and you and the stars and galaxies and so forth, splits in two.
00:57:19.000And there's now one branch of the wave function, which acts like its own separate world, which says the electron went through the left slit, and your camera saw it go through the left slit, and it made a little line on the other side.
00:57:32.000And there's another branch, which says the electron went through the right slit, and your camera saw it go through the right slit, and it makes a line on the other side.
00:57:39.000And so they're both still there, but the world's split in two, and now you're only in one of them, you don't see the whole world anymore.
00:57:47.000You've managed to make it more confusing.
00:58:13.000Well, I get it now, though, in talking to you, why, you know, you have the Deepak Chopras of the world and why you have, like, the what the bleeps, because it's so intensely confusing.
00:58:31.000It's against every little bit of our everyday experience.
00:58:34.000It's a set of concepts that we're not equipped with, that we're not born with, that we have to struggle to get into our heads over many, many years, and it shouldn't be surprising.
00:58:43.000So you, as an educator, when you're talking to people about this, obviously you've probably done this thousands of times, right?
00:58:52.000And tried to have these kind of weird conversations with people like myself that sort of lack the tools to really truly understand what you're saying.
00:59:56.000And I think that it's certainly true that we don't understand quantum mechanics if, by understand, you mean both understand and everyone else agrees that you understand it.
01:00:40.000So when it comes to the people that you were talking about, like scientists who sort of dismiss quantum mechanics, what are they dismissing and how are they doing it?
01:00:49.000Well, to be very, very clear, they're not dismissing quantum mechanics.
01:00:55.000Quantum mechanics is a recipe for For calculating what's going to happen in your experiment that is of unprecedented precision.
01:01:03.000It's really the best way we have of knowing what's going to happen in the lab that we've ever invented, and there's no reason to think that it's wrong.
01:01:10.000But then when you press them on, okay, what was really happening?
01:01:13.000What is the description of reality that corresponds to the calculation you just did?
01:01:18.000They get annoyed and frustrated with you rather than give you an answer to the question.
01:02:29.000You know, there's a sort of a selection effect that the ability to structure it on your own is necessary to get to a certain stage in your career.
01:02:37.000But yeah, I have students, graduate students who I work with, as well as other colleagues that I collaborate with.
01:02:43.000But it's, roughly speaking, going into the office or going to a cafe, sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil and writing.
01:02:51.000You go to an office or a cafe, and you sit down with one of these yellow legal pads, and you write all that chicken scratch that nobody understands but you guys.
01:04:17.000So you say that the world really is some quantum wave function, but you and I observe things like space and tables and stuff like that, right?
01:04:36.000So that means that there's some way of writing the wave function of the universe that is sort of, here's a table, here's the rest of the universe.
01:04:43.000So I might write down on a piece of paper, well, here is a toy model, like a simple representation of the wave function of the universe that includes one piece and another piece, and they're interacting with each other.
01:04:54.000How would I know that that was table-like?
01:06:19.000It's a region of space where the gravitational field is so strong that you can never leave that region of space to go to the outside world.
01:08:18.000It is if you believe what we think is already true about general relativity, the curvature of space-time, and quantum mechanics, then Hawking says it follows from those assumptions that black holes are not completely black.
01:08:35.000Now, what about the theory, and I've heard this fairly recently, that there is potentially another universe inside of a black hole, that as you go into a black hole, you may in fact be going into another universe That's filled with hundreds of millions of galaxies that have hundreds of millions of black holes in the center and perhaps hundreds of millions of universes inside of them.
01:12:46.000When you're looking up in the sky and you're seeing something that's a million light years away, when you're looking through a telescope, you're seeing something that might not even be there anymore.
01:13:20.000They actually observed it taking place?
01:13:22.000Depends on your definition of observe.
01:13:23.000We know that it happened, yeah, from the gravitational wave signature that we observed.
01:13:27.000Okay, so you have a signature that is undeniably the evidence of this thing.
01:13:34.000Now this one, I don't know the details here with the neutron stars, but there they might be able to say there is now a black hole left behind.
01:14:24.000When, like, when you try to make these visual representations of something that is, like, essentially, you're only interpreting, you're getting the gravitational wave, you're getting the information,
01:14:39.000the data, and then you try to make a visual representation of this thing.
01:14:47.000So if you could also, though, see the event happen using visible light or using your regular telescopes, that would give you enormously more information, so that's always a good thing to aim for.
01:14:56.000So as they do, like, this array that they're putting together in Chile and all these different new, more advanced super-telescope arrays, they're trying to get more and more actual visual information so that people could see this stuff or something,
01:15:48.000I was watching a documentary, and they were talking about hypernovas, and they were talking about the initial discovery of hypernovas, that they detected this gamma radiation, these bursts in the sky, and they originally had one working theory that there was some sort of an alien war going on.
01:16:07.000Like, astronomers, bless their hearts, they, you know, are happy to at least contemplate some of the more way-out speculations, like when pulsars, which are just spinning neutron stars, when they were first detected, they were called LGMs for little green men, because they were these very,
01:16:23.000very regular pulses, and people said, what could it be?
01:16:28.000One of those planets that we've observed recently had something that was orbiting it, and they were trying to figure out if it was some enormous space station that was causing this.
01:16:39.000Well, yeah, there's something that got labeled the alien megastructure.
01:16:44.000Which is basically something that is bigger and colder than you would expect, but maybe if it were some structure surrounding a star, that's what it would look like.
01:17:06.000Yeah, because the people giving you funding are your fellow scientists who think that you're just taking cheap thrills rather than being serious.
01:17:13.000So what you do is you get hits for your website.
01:17:16.000Like when you're going to some of these websites that...
01:17:20.000Science websites, for the most part, have really straightforward sort of titles to their articles, but occasionally you get a little click-baity.
01:17:40.000So when they first initially discovered these gamma ray bursts, and they thought there was some sort of an alien war going on in space, I mean, so far, nothing, right?
01:17:55.000So far, there's no detectable evidence whatsoever of anything out there other than us.
01:18:45.000I think that we're not very realistic about these.
01:18:49.000I think that it could happen, but just like with quantum mechanics or artificial intelligence or whatever, we tend to put everything in the frame of what we're immediately used to.
01:19:00.000So we can beam out radio signals into space.
01:19:49.000Send a spacecraft and park it in the system that you want to know about, and then wait for life to arise in that system.
01:19:56.000So, honestly, if we're going to detect evidence for aliens, it's much more likely we're going to find a monolith on the moon or something like that than we're going to hear them in our telescopes.
01:20:38.000They could be perfectly sincere, but look, you want, when you pick who's gonna be an astronaut, is someone who can fly the spacecraft back, right?
01:21:15.000I did a show for SyFy, and one of the episodes we did, we spent weeks talking to people that are UFO researchers and studying the air quote evidence.
01:21:43.000And you want to keep an open mind because if there was a unique event where an alien spacecraft did enter our atmosphere and observe us and then take off, it would be quite fascinating if you could actually get a good read on someone.
01:21:57.000I think it'd be hugely important to the history of life on Earth, right?
01:24:38.000And it's also possible that we're—that life happens all the time, but it never becomes multicellular or intelligent, right?
01:24:45.000Or it becomes intelligent but never builds spaceships.
01:24:47.000There's many, many ways it could happen.
01:24:49.000But yes, we could be, in the entire observable universe, the only spaceship-building species right now.
01:24:54.000Well, we also have this weird way of defining intelligence by the ability to change your atmosphere, your environment, to build things.
01:25:03.000Like, that's what we think of as intelligent.
01:25:05.000Whereas dolphins are obviously extremely intelligent, but they don't really impact their environment much at all, other than biological life, like eating things and waste and things along those lines.
01:25:50.000We're already finding exceptions to that, right?
01:25:52.000Like, even here in the solar system, you wouldn't necessarily look to Earth first if you didn't already know.
01:25:58.000The moons of Jupiter and Saturn are very plausible places to look for the beginning of life, even though they're outside the Goldilocks zone, because it's just different conditions.
01:26:06.000So I think we should be very, very open-minded about...
01:26:11.000Yeah, I mean, we find weird life at the bottom of oceans and volcanic vents where it's insanely hot.
01:26:18.000And they find these life forms that are able to thrive in those conditions that would kill almost everything else.
01:26:26.000And part of that is, you know, I think the response to that would be, well, life started in fairly benign conditions and then evolved to survive in these harsher conditions.
01:26:36.000But I just think that our ability to understand chemistry and biology is not that good, especially hypothetical speculative chemistry and biology.
01:26:43.000We should be very humble about saying how life needs to be on other planets.
01:26:54.000Did you ever go through a period in your life where you were obsessed or fascinated by aliens?
01:26:59.000Yeah, when I was a kid, I certainly, not only aliens, but psychic powers and all this stuff, I was very, you know, interested in all the cool stuff.
01:27:09.000And I became more and more scientific as I aged.
01:27:13.000Yeah, those are weird things that are somehow or another linked together because they're...
01:27:18.000I don't want to be mean in saying this, but they're bullshit.
01:27:21.000You know, like, there were psychic powers or aliens, and when you bring up the fact that it's very likely these things are bullshit, people get very upset.
01:27:30.000Like, you're taking away their Santa Claus.
01:27:34.000There's a video I saw literally this morning on the web of these people stood outside a little mart on the corner of a street in New York where people were buying Powerball tickets.
01:27:48.000So the people buy Powerball tickets and it's like 10 bucks and they come out and they were offered, can I buy your Powerball ticket from you for $20 for twice what you paid for it?
01:27:58.000And 11 out of the 14 people last said, no, I'm holding on to my ticket, right?
01:28:02.000Because they thought that this ticket was the winner.
01:28:05.000And they're like, this is $700 million that I'd be giving you for $20, right?
01:28:38.000Or it might be the next one that gets sold.
01:28:39.000But what if you give it to them, you give them the ticket, you get the $20, you go buy some useless tickets, and it turns out the ticket you gave them was $700 million.
01:29:07.000You know, calibrate your odds of winning the Powerball or saying, you know, just play the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And people will go like, well, that's never going to come up.
01:29:26.000Now, have you ever read anything compelling at all that leads you to think that maybe somebody might have observed something that could potentially have been something from another planet or some sort of an...
01:29:40.000I mean, I think that astronomers do have a set of things that they don't understand very well.
01:29:45.000The most recent example are these things called fast radio bursts, which are a little bit different than the gamma bursts, gamma ray bursts.
01:29:51.000But, you know, as always, the more we think about it, the more we say, oh, actually, I can come up with a perfectly plausible explanation for that.
01:30:00.000Going back to this sort of uploading consciousness thing, there's a very real possibility that once civilizations or intelligent species become sufficiently advanced, they upload themselves and they realize there's not really any motivation to go exploring in the universe and maybe die anymore.
01:30:14.000Yeah, my thought would be that once civilizations get sufficiently advanced, they would go virtual.
01:30:21.000They would figure out some way to create these artificial universes to travel into that are probably just as complex, if not more.
01:30:30.000I think we have every right to imagine that, given that we know so little about what it would be about right now.
01:30:35.000Well, if we can create artificial intelligence, too, that's what's very bizarre.
01:30:38.000It's like, if we can create artificial intelligence and somehow or another corral it into existing only in this virtual world that we've created, and then inside this virtual world, you're interacting with these artificially intelligent creatures that are disembodied,
01:30:54.000And then in this world, you would give them some sort of a body, and you would interact with them.
01:30:59.000I think that, again, the thing that we underappreciate about that is what is the motivation that these artificially intelligent entities would have?
01:31:08.000We human beings, like it or not, we get hungry.
01:31:13.000But if you're just a virtual being in an environment without these energetic constraints or need to eat and sleep and so forth, why do you do anything at all?
01:32:20.000And again, I get in trouble on Twitter for saying that I agree with him.
01:32:23.000But because people who are actually doing artificial intelligence have this very real appreciation for how far away we are from something that you would classify as intelligent in any real sense.
01:32:34.000And so therefore, from their day-to-day perspective, the worry about super-intelligent AIs taking over the world is laughable.
01:32:42.000But my argument, I think Elon's, is that, yeah, but...
01:32:46.000What does the percentage chance have to be that this is going to happen before you start worrying about it if the consequence is really the ruination of the world, right?
01:32:54.000There are only so many things that we do for which the worst case scenario is quite that bad.
01:32:59.000That's what makes it a special circumstance.
01:33:21.000When I said this on Twitter, people, knowing that I was a physicist, were like, well, what did you think about people who were worried that the Large Hadron Collider was going to destroy the world?
01:33:41.000When you see articles like, did you see the recent article with the Google AI that they had to shut down because they were starting to communicate with each other in some sort of a language they invented?
01:33:52.000The language was not very convincing if you ever saw it printed out.
01:33:56.000But to me, that's like a scene in a horror movie, and then you go to blank screen ten years later, and we're all dressed up like Mad Max with fucking bandanas over our face, and we're running from Terminator bots.
01:34:11.000Again and again, we're coming to this theme that our imaginations are not quite up to the task, because our imaginations about super-intelligent AI are something like that, something Frankenstein-esque, just in Robots, or something out of Asimov.
01:34:24.000But the, I think, much more realistic worry are things like currently existing neural networks and deep learning algorithms.
01:34:33.000So basically, there's all sorts of problems like pattern recognition, facial recognition, right?
01:34:39.000We are very, very bad at sitting down and writing a program that recognizes faces.
01:34:44.000Human beings are not very good at figuring out how to do that.
01:34:47.000But we have ways of building programs that can teach themselves to recognize faces and they're amazingly good.
01:34:54.000So we have programs like when you go onto Google or your iTunes or whatever and your iPhoto is recognizing your face.
01:35:03.000There is some neural net that is doing that, and there is no human being alive that understands what it's doing.
01:35:09.000All we know is that it's getting the right answer.
01:35:12.000And that kind of logic can go very, very far.
01:35:16.000And so I'm not worried about a robot like Ultron taking over.
01:35:21.000I'm worried about all of our infrastructure being run by programs that no human being understands.
01:35:36.000I've always wondered whether or not what human beings are doing with our insane lust to innovate and to constantly create new and more spectacular things and to always look for the next version of something.
01:35:49.000I mean, we're not satisfied with the iPhone 6. We want the iPhone 7. We're not satisfied with that.
01:35:54.000We have this intense desire for better things.
01:35:58.000Unless you're a classic car advocate or devotee, really what you want is like, oh, this new car stops faster, it handles better, it accelerates quicker.
01:36:08.000We always want things to constantly improve.
01:36:13.000When you look at human beings, like if you looked at us objectively, that's one of the main things that we do.
01:36:18.000We produce better technology, better objects, better engineering.
01:36:24.000It's like constantly improving and accelerating.
01:36:26.000And then there's this potential artificial intelligence thing.
01:36:30.000I've always wondered if that's really what our focus or what our purpose is on this planet, that we're like some sort of an electronic caterpillar.
01:36:40.000That we recognize in some sort of a weird way, or nature recognizes, the biological limitations of flesh and tissue, and that it can advance far better with something that we create.
01:36:53.000So that we don't even realize what we're doing by making this cocoon.
01:36:56.000That we're just building it up, building it up, and we're not even thinking about what we're doing.
01:37:01.000And by buying this, and by this materialism that we all have, right?
01:37:07.000People have this innate sort of desire for new and shinier objects that that is fueling this innovation and that's pushing along this and that one day we're going to give birth to this new version of life.
01:37:20.000We can call it artificial life, but it's not artificial if it's right there.
01:37:24.000It's just created by human beings, which obviously are created by this intense and very long evolutionary process.
01:37:36.000Yeah, so I would tend to want to remove from that the sort of anthropomorphic or teleological aspects of the language, like that it's a purpose or we're meant to be here.
01:37:47.000But I completely agree with the idea that there's a threshold that has been crossed.
01:37:51.000Whether you want to say it's the last 500 years or the last 10,000 years, human beings have developed the ability to do something that has never been done before.
01:38:02.000And that has this sort of recursive, self-reflective thing that we can build things that can build things, and we can build things that can learn, and we can build things that are like living things.
01:38:12.000And we are just at the very, very beginning of exploring the space of what's going to happen because of that.
01:38:19.000And the idea that we human beings are going to be around 10,000 years to enjoy the fruits of that...
01:38:26.000I have no idea whether that's true or not.
01:38:29.000I mean, maybe it'll still be human beings.
01:38:32.000Maybe 100 years from now, we'll cure death and aging, and we'll stop having kids, and the people who are alive 100 years from now will live for another million years.
01:38:41.000Maybe human beings will just become more and more melded with artificial things, and they'll have artificial bodies and so forth.
01:38:51.000Or maybe, you know, another underappreciated thing, I think, is that at the very, very small scale, where we do like nanotechnology and so forth, There is a whole bunch of problems that have already been solved at that scale, namely biology, cells,
01:39:07.000Like, cells do many, many things really, really well, and they also repair themselves.
01:39:12.000They're much less brittle than things that we build using metal, okay?
01:39:16.000So synthetic biology, just programming existing biological organisms or designing new ones, but we would still recognize them as biological, But they might be very, very different than anything that naturally appeared through the course of evolution so far.
01:39:31.000That could be the thing that takes off, and 100 years from now, that's all the living beings or all the beings with higher intelligence left on Earth.
01:39:38.000I mean, I don't know what the actual thing that's going to happen is, but what I know is that the pace of change is just accelerating.
01:39:50.000Do you ever sit around and try to extrapolate and try to, like, look at where we are now as opposed to where we were at the turn of the century, you know, 20th century?
01:39:59.000And just try to think, like, where is this going?
01:40:24.000It wouldn't be that hard to film, you know, outside and in certain areas, certain suburbs.
01:40:29.000It kind of looks more or less like it looked in the 1950s.
01:40:32.000Whereas it actually would be harder to make something that was in the 1960s look like it did the 1910s, right?
01:40:39.000There's sort of more obvious visible change just because cars were different and so forth.
01:40:44.000But you don't see the sort of Technological change that might have a far bigger impact in electronics and artificial intelligence and so forth that happened in the last 50 years.
01:40:55.000So just because there's no visible sign of the change doesn't mean that the changes cannot be eventually very profound.
01:41:01.000It's always amazing, too, when you look back at science fiction movies from the 80s, where they were predicting 2017. They thought we were going to be flying around in space constantly.
01:42:46.000We'll just, you know, like I remember what I had for lunch, I'll remember what the population of Malta was in the year 1500. What am I looking at here, Jamie?
01:43:42.000She was probably in her 20s back then.
01:43:44.000But that movie in 1979, their idea of what 21, 22 was going to be like, they had weird lights flashing in the cabin that didn't really seem to make a lot of sense, but they looked electronic.
01:43:57.000Actually, these might have been pictures from the new Alien.
01:44:00.000Yeah, that's what it looked like to me.
01:44:02.000Yeah, because it did kind of look like a Tesla.
01:44:05.000It was weird because they're kind of...
01:44:07.000This is like from actual production set.
01:45:19.000Like if in my car and I have an idea that comes to me, I'll either record it with a voice recording function or sometimes it's better to do this.
01:45:28.000And when you're doing this, it essentially can pick up everything you're saying in real time and print it out.
01:45:49.000I don't know how well they work because I've only seen them out in commercials and whatnot, but real-time in-ear translations in French, Spanish, English.
01:47:14.000And now it speaks Japanese and French.
01:47:16.000Yeah, so this one is, how does it wear, Jamie?
01:47:20.000It says, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, out of the range of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, translate one-to-one, can still work just as well.
01:47:28.000As the first device on the market for language translation using AI that does not rely on connectivity to operate, it offers significant potential for its unique application across airlines, foreign government relations, and even not-for-profits working in remote areas.
01:48:10.000Yeah, so essentially it'd be like there's these map applications, like Onyx Maps and stuff like that.
01:48:17.000You can download like sort of a Google Earth-type topographical map of areas, and you could look at it.
01:48:25.000Say if you're hiking, you could look at these on your phone.
01:48:28.000Even if you don't have cell service, you could just pull them up and get a Google image of like, oh, hey, here's the creek that we have to go down to to get water.
01:49:38.000In Italy, I mean, it's like you barely need to understand anything other than saying thank you and saying, you know, hello and good evening, things along those lines.
01:49:49.000Yeah, the first time I went abroad to a foreign speaking country was France and I was just too shy to talk to anybody because I was not in Paris.
01:49:55.000I was like out in the middle of nowhere where people did not speak English.
01:49:58.000And you know, by now I'm and I and I even had like read the phrase books and things like that.
01:50:03.000But by now I've just done it so many times.
01:50:12.000When you travel to a place like France, people have this, French people in particular, there's always this stereotype that you hear that French people think that Americans are rude.
01:50:23.000I would try to go way out of my way to make sure that no one thought I was a rude American.
01:50:28.000Because there's always this reaction that they have.
01:50:32.000The worst case scenario is the American goes over there and is pissed off that they don't speak English and they start...
01:51:48.000I have to tell my incoming graduate students, if you get a PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech, and you probably want to be a physics professor, because that's the only thing you can do with that degree, and your chances are maybe 25% of...
01:52:36.000So what would you do on Wall Street with a PhD from Caltech?
01:52:40.000These days, all the money is being made by algorithms that study the stock market and destroy human beings picking stocks, right?
01:52:49.000Renaissance technologies and places like that.
01:52:51.000I mean, like we were just talking about, but soon the entire stock market will just be dueling algorithms, trying to sell something a microsecond before something else does.
01:53:00.000Now, you are involved in a hard science, right?
01:53:04.000I mean, you're involved in trying to understand the world and the universe itself.
01:53:11.000Do you see any of the identity politics issues that are going on on campuses today?
01:53:49.000And there's just no question that, you know, I'm in an area of theoretical physics where there's a very tiny fraction of women, an even tinier fraction of African Americans and so forth, but that's kind of...
01:54:01.000Less surprising because they just don't come up usually in economic circumstances that put theoretical physics as one of the plausible future research careers.
01:54:10.000But, you know, I see an enormous amount of discrimination against women in my field.
01:54:55.000And, you know, there's a certain style of aggressive, in-your-face egotism that serves you well in academia generally, and in physics in particular, putting yourself forward, asking questions, being loud and noisy.
01:55:10.000And women are less good at that for whatever reason.
01:55:13.000They're not trained to do that, or it's innate, I have no idea.
01:55:15.000But they can sort of get bullied into silence or just say, like, this is not worth it.
01:55:29.000Yeah, they're deemed to be like a bitch versus a guy who's aggressive.
01:55:34.000Yeah, so my floor at Caltech, I'm on the fourth floor of a building, which is the theoretical physics, theoretical high-energy physics group.
01:55:39.000So there's maybe 30 people total, professors, postdocs, graduate students.
01:55:45.000And until this year, there were zero women.
01:55:48.000Out of 30, which is just embarrassing.
01:55:58.000Yeah, but, you know, especially there's two, like, men either who think they can have sex with you or men that can never have sex with you.
01:56:13.000And I think that, you know, honestly, if I were giving advice to young women whose primary goal was to become a successful theoretical physicist, you know, if that was your only goal, then don't raise a fuss about sexism or discrimination,
01:56:28.000because just like worrying about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, Wow.
01:57:39.000Physics, philosophy, astronomy, all these areas are now having these examples of famous big-name professors that it's finally being revealed for the last 20 years have been regularly harassing graduate students and pushing them out of the field.
01:57:54.000And I think maybe finally that's coming to light enough that it hopefully will go away a little bit.
01:58:02.000It's a lot of like what we were talking about earlier with the people that don't necessarily understand quantum physics, and so they sort of dismiss what's important about it, or people that, you know, use their—they rely too much on ego,
01:58:18.000or it's too much of a part of their life.
01:58:20.000I mean, the human folly that sort of— It gets involved in everything.
01:58:25.000And, you know, I'm not the broader question of identity politics, etc.
01:58:30.000I mean, I'm pretty lefty justice warrior about this stuff, to be honest.
01:58:35.000I think that the number of women, for example, women are just the most obvious example in my field, who have been pushed out of my field because of bias and discrimination in very, very...
01:58:47.000Obviously, you know, verifiable ways is just that's the big embarrassment, you know.
01:58:53.000But at the same time, I'm kind of a free speech absolutist.
01:58:56.000If some crazy person who has very retrograde views wants to say those retrograde views, then I think that if someone else wants to invite them on campus to do it, I think they should be allowed to say all the craziness that they want.
01:59:07.000I don't think that's the right solution to these problems.
01:59:10.000Yeah, I think the solution in those cases is for someone who's got a legitimate viewpoint to debate them.
01:59:17.000Actually, the chancellor of Berkeley just put out a very good statement saying exactly that, and I give her credit for that.
01:59:24.000Well, that's great, you know, because I know that they have an issue there with Ben Shapiro coming, who's a very reasonable guy and sometimes gets lumped into the alt-right and gets lumped into these.
01:59:35.000He just happens to be conservative and young and very articulate.
01:59:39.000For a while, they were trying to limit his participation there and putting him in the same category that they would put Milo Yiannopoulos or some of these other guys there.
01:59:48.000We're very weird with free speech in that we love free speech as long as it's in line with how we think.
01:59:55.000It's easy to defend free speech for people we agree with.
02:00:32.000But then after that, like, people were saying, well, he shouldn't be invited to give talks about economics at other universities because he said this bad thing.
02:00:50.000Isn't there an issue with someone who's a professor who's constantly used to really not being questioned and giving lectures and being able to talk in front of students and you develop sort of a general hubris about your own opinions?
02:01:06.000Well, I would hope that, I don't know, in my areas of academia, you can't get through lunchtime without having all of your opinions questioned all the time.
02:01:32.000To be very, very fair, there's, like we said before, there's still prejudices about purely physics topics.
02:01:38.000Like, you can talk about quantum mechanics or the nature of the dark matter, and discussions get very, very heated and emotional, and people's jobs depend on it and the whole bit.
02:01:48.000But the idea that things go unchallenged is not—that just doesn't fly very far in this field, yeah.
02:01:59.000Because that's something that I would imagine if you went out and just randomly polled 1,000 people, all 1,000 would have no idea what dark matter is.
02:03:58.000What is the current theory as to where it resides and how it's formed and what its properties are and what impact it has on the galaxies?
02:04:08.000I think this is a really, really good question because we might be in flux right now.
02:04:13.000For a long time, like basically from the 1980s to today, There was a leading candidate for what the dark matter was, something called the WIMP, the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle.
02:04:24.000So if you indulge me for just a second, we have the particles we know and love.
02:04:28.000There are four forces that push these particles around.
02:04:31.000There's gravity, there's electromagnetism, and then there's the strong and weak nuclear forces, two nuclear forces.
02:04:38.000And the nuclear forces are distinguished by being short range, like you don't notice them in your everyday life.
02:04:42.000You've got to be down there at the atomic scale.
02:04:44.000So, it turns out that if you imagine a new particle that obviously interacts through gravity, because everything interacts through gravity, but doesn't interact through the strong nuclear force, like a proton does, or through electromagnetism that will be charged,
02:05:00.000but it interacts through the weak nuclear force.
02:05:03.000So you imagine a particle interacts through the weak nuclear force, relatively heavy, and you calculate how much of those should be left over from the Big Bang.
02:05:13.000You get the right amount to be the dark matter.
02:05:17.000So this is called the WIMP miracle, the idea that if you just hypothesize out of the blue a new particle that is invisible and stable and interacts through the known force of nature that we call the weak nuclear force, that could easily be the dark matter.
02:05:31.000So that seemed so natural and simple, and there were many more complicated theories that predicted that such particles would exist.
02:05:37.000I would say that many people 10 years ago or so would have said there's a 90% chance that WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles, are the dark matter.
02:06:39.000It's like going into a quiet room to listen to something very, very faint.
02:06:41.000What was the initial discovery that led to the conclusion that dark matter is the preeminent mass of the universe?
02:06:50.000Like, what percentage of the mass is it?
02:06:52.000Well, sorry, let me just finish this up very quickly because the point is that we have built these detectors and we haven't seen the WIMPs.
02:07:17.000So the first evidence, well, you know, it comes in drips and drabs.
02:07:21.000My Caltech predecessor, Fritz Zwicky, a famous astrophysicist, back in the 1930s pointed out that galaxies were orbiting each other too fast.
02:07:32.000In what are called clusters of galaxies.
02:07:34.000You look out there in the sky, you see like these bunches of galaxies that are orbiting each other.
02:07:38.000You calculate how heavy the galaxies should be from what you see.
02:07:42.000You can calculate using Newtonian laws of physics how fast they should be orbiting.
02:07:46.000They're actually orbiting much faster.
02:07:49.000And he said the only way for that to happen is if they're much more massive than you thought, if there's much more mass in there.
02:07:58.000But at the time, we didn't know it could just be stars that we didn't see, or gas, or dust, or whatever.
02:08:03.000It wasn't really until the 1970s that Vera Rubin, a famous astrophysicist, looked at how individual galaxies are rotating, and she found that it's a similar kind of thing.
02:08:13.000The edges of the galaxies are moving way faster than they should be.
02:08:18.000Given the amount of matter that is inside, and she concluded that there's a lot of dark matter causing a gravitational pull that we didn't see, but is causing the edges of the galaxies to spin a lot faster than they should be.
02:08:33.000Is there a possibility that some new discovery could happen or could come forth where you would re-examine this idea that there's some missing mass?
02:08:46.000So there's certainly this idea that is on the market that because all of our evidence for dark matter is indirect, because it's through its gravitational influence, not by directly touching it or seeing it, Maybe we just don't understand gravity.
02:09:03.000Maybe gravity is a little bit different.
02:09:05.000Now, I would argue, and I think I'm right, not everyone agrees with me, sadly, but that idea has basically been killed off by our observations of the microwave background radiation.
02:09:18.000You know, we are 14 billion years after the Big Bang.
02:09:22.000The Big Bang was very, very hot and dense, and it was glowing to beat the band everywhere, but it was also opaque.
02:09:47.000These oscillations in the microwave background, which look exactly like they would look if dark matter were causing them.
02:09:54.000And they don't look what they would look like if gravity were modified.
02:09:58.000So there's a much longer version of that story, but the basic thing is, if I can just pull authority and say, trust me on this, I was totally on board with the idea that there was something wrong about gravity.
02:10:09.000That would be a very cool thing if it were true.
02:10:11.000That would be a big mind-bending discovery.
02:11:03.000You need something that tells you that dark matter is influencing the motion of stuff in this vicinity of space.
02:11:09.000So in a galaxy, it's just like the stars at the edges of the galaxy.
02:11:13.000And most of the mass in our galaxy is dark matter.
02:11:16.000Like, we see these pictures of galaxies that you see that look very beautiful.
02:11:20.000The actual size of the galaxy is much bigger than that, but it's all dark matter.
02:11:24.000The galaxy you see is a tiny little puddle, you know, one-fifth of the total mass, that sort of settled down to the center of this big, puffy cloud of dark matter.
02:11:35.000And when people say, well, there's a galaxy that is only dark matter, what they really mean is it's almost only dark matter.
02:11:43.000It's a puffy cloud of dark matter where most of the stars have been pushed out by something, but some of the stars or the gas you can still see orbiting around, and that tells you there's some concentration of dark matter there.
02:12:09.000There's another kind of subatomic particle called the axion.
02:12:13.000Which is nice because people invented it for totally different reasons and they also worked out that could give you exactly the right abundance to be the dark matter.
02:12:20.000And there's dozens of different theories out there for what it could be.
02:12:25.000We're trying to figure out which one is right.
02:12:26.000What a weird thing to have something that's invisible, that's a giant percentage of the entire universe and a large percentage of galaxies, right?
02:12:58.000It depends on what the right theory of dark matter is.
02:13:01.000But in most theories, there are dark matter particles passing through your body right now.
02:13:05.000So with this WIMPS detection theory, where they've developed these detectors deep into the ground, that would be able to detect something that's actually prevalent here on Earth?
02:13:18.000And it's not that they're stuck to here on Earth.
02:13:20.000The Earth is just moving through space, and there's a wind of dark matter particles that we're passing through and occasionally bumping into.
02:13:27.000Right, and we're moving in some sort of a spiral through the universe?
02:13:30.000Yeah, because the sun is moving and we're orbiting around the sun.
02:13:34.000Now, the Big Bang one is another weird one, because I was watching this thing on television that was proposing alternative theories to the Big Bang, and one of them was that the universe is next to another universe, and that somehow or another it collided with this universe,
02:13:52.000and that this is probably a process that repeats itself.
02:13:56.000I know, we get paid to come up with these ideas, and that's what we're doing, you know, there in Starbucks with a pencil and paper, yes.
02:14:16.000And did a bunch of people jump on board?
02:14:18.000Say if something like that comes up, one of your colleagues has this idea, so then you go to the cafe with your legal pad and go, all right, how do we do this?
02:15:31.000Area that was smaller than the head of a pen, and that's everything you see in the sky, and it exploded 14 billion years ago, and no one knows why.
02:16:23.000The phrase the Big Bang is used in two different senses.
02:16:26.000One is what we call the Big Bang model, which is the whole history of the universe for the last 14 billion years from an original hot, dense state, expanding, cooling, galaxies form, here we are.
02:17:16.000You have no right to believe that that actually happened because it's a prediction of general relativity, but general relativity is not right in that regime because you're ignoring quantum mechanics once again.
02:17:27.000So if you don't think that you understand the fundamental quantum mechanical rules of the universe, you have no right to say what happened at the Big Bang.
02:17:36.000And what physicists should say, if they're being honest, is that could be That there was a first moment in the history of the universe, a first moment of time, a day without a yesterday.
02:17:48.000And once we understand quantum mechanics and gravity and how they play well together, that will all be very clear.
02:17:54.000Or there could have been something before.
02:17:57.000You know, what we call the Big Bang may have been just a phase the universe goes through occasionally.
02:18:02.000And this bouncing universe idea that you were talking about with the two different universes hitting each other, that would be an example of a scenario in which the universe actually was eternal, that it lasted forever.
02:18:12.000And right now we have no way of knowing.
02:18:20.000What do you take of the idea that the Big Bang is a process, a continual expansion and contraction process, and that it starts with the Big Bang, the universe expands, and then somehow another pulls back into itself until it becomes this infinitely dense small point again,
02:18:40.000and then the whole process starts from scratch?
02:18:56.000There's this extra dimension and two universes smacking into each other.
02:19:00.000They later realized the same people, very well-known, respectable physicists, realized they could just play the game over and over again.
02:19:06.000So you could have this smacking together, call that the Big Bang, it expands and cools, but then it re-contracts, and there's another bounce, and this goes on an infinite number of times.
02:19:16.000I am personally not that fond of this idea.
02:19:20.000Number one, there's no evidence whatsoever or reason to believe that our universe will ever contract.
02:19:25.000It's not only expanding, but it's expanding faster and faster.
02:19:27.000It's doing the opposite of what you'd expect if it were going to contract.
02:21:13.000The expansion of space is the answer to the question, you know, space is this big, by what amount has it expanded in one year or one second later?
02:21:22.000I have heard that expression before, that space is moving faster than light.
02:22:10.000So there are things far away that are so far away we can never possibly see them at this current age of the universe because it would take longer than 14 billion years for light to get from there to here.
02:22:30.000If there is a point where the Big Bang begins, right, there is a single origin point, and it explodes outward, and we are seeing it from some position, so we're seeing this explosion 14 billion years ago,
02:22:47.000does it move in the opposite direction as well?
02:22:49.000Is there 28 billion years from point to point?
02:24:05.000So the thing is that as far out as you look, even if you look at, you know, with your God's eye view faster than the speed of light, there's still stuff out there.
02:26:39.000That's not a we don't know because we're not sure.
02:26:41.000That's a we have no idea is the answer.
02:26:45.000Obviously, if there was a bounce or if there was some universe before ours out of which ours came, there would be a sensible answer to that.
02:26:54.000It's a more challenging question if you think that the Big Bang was truly the beginning of the universe, which is perfectly plausible.
02:27:04.000It's perfectly compatible with the laws of physics.
02:27:06.000And then you're in one of these situations, you have to reorient the kinds of questions you allow yourself to ask.
02:27:11.000Because if the Big Bang was the beginning, there's this intuitive feeling that there was a time before the Big Bang when there wasn't anything.
02:27:20.000And there was nothingness, and nothingnessness sat around for a long time, and then it decided to bang, okay?
02:27:25.000It could have sat around for an infinite number of years, right?
02:27:29.000Yes, but don't think of it that way, is what I'm trying to say.
02:27:32.000Don't think about nothingness transforming into the Big Bang.
02:27:35.000Think about our universe, think of it from the other side.
02:27:38.000Think of it from the side that we already exist, but visualize into the past.
02:27:42.000And imagine that as you visualize into the past, you hit a beginning.
02:28:34.000Actually, when I was a kid, like, it was 10 years old or so when I first got interested in this stuff.
02:28:39.000And so, yeah, when I was 11 or 12, the thing that would stop me from sleeping was I'd be, you know, dreaming about, you know, the Big Bang and the universe.
02:28:49.000And I would come to the beginning and I'd go like, but what if the universe had just chosen not to exist?
02:29:57.000Ask what were the laws of physics that can be compatible with both the universe we see today and with the universe having a beginning 14 billion years ago.
02:30:06.000We don't know the answer to that, but that's the question we should ask.
02:30:13.000It's so complex that it's almost like infinite in its possibilities.
02:30:18.000You go over all these variables, these possibilities, and what we know and what we're learning, and it's just...
02:30:26.000Well, it's complex, but more importantly, it's a realm that is just so far outside our experience and our toolkit for dealing with the world that we have no guidance, right?
02:30:38.000We're kind of at sea, like, what are the kinds of things we should be asking about?
02:30:42.000What are the answers that would satisfy us, right?
02:30:45.000I would argue that there are brute facts.
02:30:49.000There are things we just need to accept.
02:30:50.000If we come up with a picture of the universe, a set of laws of physics and a story for the history of the universe that says, well, the universe started this way and then that happened, etc., and someone says, well, why did it happen that way?
02:31:01.000And I would say there is no answer to that question.
02:31:06.000I might change my mind if you convince me, but there's no right to demand that there is a reason why things are one way rather than another.
02:31:56.000The Big Bang could be just one of these moments, one of these things that happens.
02:32:00.000One possibility is that there's another universe that is sort of big and quiet and empty, but through a quantum mechanical fluctuation, a little part of the universe could pinch off and become a separate baby universe and then grow by itself, and that could be the origin of our universe.
02:32:16.000So like a stellar nursery for universes?
02:32:28.000Let me put it back together again real quick.
02:32:29.000When you look at the universe, if a universe is finite in size, you know, we were talking about it could be infinitely big, it could be finite in size.
02:34:19.000So again, if you can make a universe at all, then you can probably make an infinite number of universes just as easily.
02:34:27.000It's not like you have 100 pounds of universe stuff and that gives you a finite number to make.
02:34:32.000Every universe costs you nothing to make.
02:34:34.000People have a hard time even thinking of there being more than one universe.
02:34:39.000You start thinking about the fact that there's a hundred million galaxies in this, or a hundred million, at least a hundred million solar systems, right?
02:34:46.000In this galaxy, this is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, and that there might be more than one universe.
02:38:35.000If anything, as time goes on, the entropy of the universe is increasing and the universe is becoming more random and disorderly.
02:38:43.000I think that we're, you know, riding a wave of a universe that is growing and expanding and cooling and becoming more and more disorderly, and that's a finite amount of time.
02:38:54.000So 14 billion years, from the Big Bang to today, sounds like a lot.
02:39:27.000We human beings and living creatures are temporary structures within it, and the idea that it's all for some big cosmic purpose seems to hold very little water.
02:39:36.000Do you ever contemplate what function human beings have in the universe?
02:39:43.000The way we interface with reality, the way we interface with the nature around us?
02:39:50.000Yeah, I think that we don't have a function.
02:39:51.000I don't think that's the right way to think about what human beings are.
02:39:54.000We should be glad to be alive, enjoy it while we're here, be nice to each other, and try to learn more about the universe.
02:40:01.000But if we choose not to do that, that's not going against any preordained function that we have.
02:40:07.000You're remarkably calm when you discuss these things.
02:40:15.000And honestly, this is very, very small amounts of data.
02:40:18.000But from what I can tell, when personal tragedies strike, people who are atheistic cosmologists and scientists deal with it way better than people who think that we're embedded in a matrix with a bigger purpose or a spiritual reality.