James Tagg is a philosopher, philosopher, and philosopher-in-chief. His work is widely known and appreciated throughout the scientific community. In this episode, he talks about consciousness, and how he came to believe that there is something more to it than we know about it, and that it may even be possible to be conscious. He also discusses some of his theories about consciousness and the nature of consciousness, including the Goldbach conjecture, and why he believes that consciousness is not simply a matter of calculation, but rather something that can be thought of as something other than mathematical knowledge. This episode was produced and edited by James Tagg. Additional audio mixing and mastering by Matthew Boll. Additional production by Ben Kuchta. Music by Ian Percival. If you like the show, please consider leaving us a five star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. Have a question or suggestion for our next episode? Send us an e-mail at sws@whatiwatchedtonight.co.uk and we'll get it on the next week's episode. Thanks again for listening and supporting the show. Timestamps: 0:00 - What is consciousness? 5:30 - What do you think of consciousness? 6:40 - What could consciousness be? 7:10 - What does consciousness mean to you? 8:15 - What are you conscious of? 9:00 What are your thoughts on consciousness and consciousness? ? 10:10 11:30 Is consciousness a thing? 12:15 13: Is consciousness real? 15: What is it possible? 16:00 | What are we're all conscious? 17:30 | How can we be conscious of something else? 14:00 / 15:40 | What does it matter? 21:00 // 16:10 | What is our brains know? 19:40 22:20 | What do we need to do with it? 23:40 // 21:30 // Is it possible to think of something more? 26: Is it a thing that we can be conscious ? 27:20 28:00 +3: What can we have a computer? 35:40: Is there a computer that can do it better than that which we can do better than a machine? & so on & so forth? 29:30 +3) 32:40 +3?
00:00:24.000I've seen many of your interviews and videos online.
00:00:27.000And one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about that I find quite interesting is consciousness.
00:00:32.000And your belief that consciousness is not simply calculation, but that there's something more to it.
00:00:41.000And what you think this more could possibly be, from a scientific perspective, which is unusual, because a lot of people have some theories about consciousness, but they're usually crazy people like myself.
00:00:54.000Well, I mean, we're all conscious, and so we may have theories about it.
00:01:09.000I was working on pure mathematical subjects, algebraic geometry.
00:01:13.000But I thought, you know, we've got three years, I'll spend some of the time going to other talks that might be interesting.
00:01:20.000So I went to three talks particularly, which had a big influence on me.
00:01:24.000One was a talk by Herman Bondy on general relativity, cosmology.
00:01:31.000Wonderful talk with very sort of animated presentation he had.
00:01:35.000And then there was a talk by Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.
00:01:40.000And his talk, well, his complete wonderful talk too, wonderful lectures as well, but in a completely different style.
00:01:47.000He was very quiet and precise in what he said and everything.
00:01:50.000Anyway, in the very first lecture, he was talking about the superposition principle in quantum mechanics.
00:01:56.000So, if you have a particle, and it could be in one spot, or it could be in another spot, then you have all sorts of states where it can be in both places at once.
00:02:05.000And that's sort of strange, but you've got to get used to that idea.
00:02:09.000And he illustrated with his piece of chalk, and I think he broke it in two to illustrate it could be in one spot or in the other.
00:02:17.000And my mind sort of wandered at that point.
00:02:20.000I don't know what I was thinking about, but I wasn't concentrating.
00:02:23.000And about a few minutes later, he'd finished his description, his explanation, and I had some vague memory of something about energy, but I didn't understand what he said, and I've been totally mystified by this ever since.
00:02:37.000So I suppose if I'd heard what he said, he would have said something to calm me down and sort of accept it in one way or another.
00:02:44.000But as it was, it seemed to me this was a major issue.
00:02:48.000How on earth do you have things that don't behave according to what quantum mechanics says, like cricket balls and baseballs and things like that?
00:02:58.000The other course was a course by a man called Steen, who talked on mathematical logic, and he explained things like Gödel's theorem and Turing machines, Turing machines being the mathematical notion upon which modern computers are based,
00:03:23.000The thing about Gödel's Theorem, you see, I heard, I used to have a colleague when I was an undergraduate, Ian Percival, who also became a scientist later on, and we talked about logic and how you could make these kind of mathematical systems which worked out logic.
00:03:42.000And I'd heard about this Gödel's Theorem, which seemed to say that there were things in mathematics that you just couldn't prove.
00:03:53.000But when I went to this course by Steen, and he explained what it really says.
00:04:00.000And what it says, suppose you've got a method of proving things in mathematics.
00:04:06.000And when I say things, I mean things with numbers.
00:04:09.000The one famous example is Fermat's Last Theorem.
00:04:14.000There's the Goldbach conjecture, which isn't yet proved.
00:04:18.000That every even number bigger than two is the sum of two prime numbers.
00:04:22.000That's the sort of example of the thing.
00:04:24.000It's just sort of mathematical things about numbers, which you can see what they mean, but it may be very difficult to see whether it's true or untrue.
00:04:34.000But the idea often is in mathematics you've got a system of methods of proof.
00:04:40.000And the key thing about these methods of proof is that you can have a computer check whether you've done it right.
00:04:48.000So these rules, they could be adding A and B, it's the same as B and A and things like that.
00:05:00.000You say to the computer, say, here is a theorem like Goldbach conjecture, and you see whether it can be proved, and you say, maybe I've got a proof, and this follows these steps.
00:05:11.000And you give it to the computer and it says, yep, you've done it right, it's true.
00:05:16.000Or maybe it would say, you've done it right and it's not true.
00:05:53.000Now what Gödel shows is he constructs a very specific sentence, a statement, which is a number thing, like the Fermat's Last Theorem or something, a thing about numbers, which What he shows is if you trust this algorithm for proving mathematical things,
00:06:13.000then you can see by the way it's constructed that it's true.
00:06:17.000But you can also see by the way it's constructed that it cannot be proved by this procedure.
00:06:24.000Now this was amazing to me because it tells me that, okay, You cannot formalize your understanding in a scheme which you could put on a computer.
00:06:37.000You see, this statement which Gödel comes up with is something you can see on the basis of the same understanding that allows you to trust the rules, that it's true, but that it's not actually derivable by the rules.
00:06:54.000You see it's true by virtue of your belief in the rules.
00:07:10.000Well, this more or less says it's not an algorithm, because whatever it was, there would be something that you could still see as true, even though you don't get it through the algorithm that you had in the first place.
00:07:22.000There are a lot of subtleties about this too, which people argue about endlessly.
00:07:26.000But it was pretty convincing to me that this shows that we don't think when we understand something that what's going on in our heads is not an algorithm.
00:07:40.000It's something that requires our conscious appreciation of what we're thinking about.
00:07:46.000Thinking is a conscious thing and Understanding is a conscious activity.
00:07:52.000So I formed the view that conscious activities, whatever they are, not just that kind of thing, but, you know, playing music or falling in love or whatever these things might be, are not computations.
00:08:07.000And then I thought, because I like to think of myself as a scientist, and I think that what's going in on our heads is according to the laws of physics, and these laws of physics are pretty good.
00:08:20.000They seem to work well in the outside world, and so I believe that the laws that work in our heads are the same as those laws.
00:08:39.000What about Maxwell's wonderful equations, which tell you how electricity and magnetism operate and light and radio waves and all these things?
00:08:48.000That's all follows this beautiful set of equations that Maxwell produced.
00:08:53.000Okay, you may have to worry about approximations and these depend on continuous numbers rather than discrete things, but I didn't think that's the answer.
00:09:02.000Then I thought, what about general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity with curved space and all that?
00:09:09.000We're familiar now with LIGO, this detector which has detected black holes spiraling into each other from distant galaxy.
00:09:17.000And how do we know that those signals are black holes?
00:09:20.000Well, because of calculations, people have put this thing on an algorithm, and you know what those signals look like.
00:09:26.000So, Einstein's general relativity, sure, you can put that on a computer.
00:09:43.000There's many more parameters you've got to worry about.
00:09:45.000But it's just as computable as these other things.
00:09:49.000Well, you see, I then remembered Dirac's lecture, you see, and how it is that these things that work in the quantum world don't seem to work at the level of classical big things.
00:10:04.000And it all depends on this process of what's called measurement in quantum mechanics.
00:10:09.000And the measurement process is something you learn how to do, but it's not the Schrödinger equation.
00:10:19.000I'm very intrigued by this fact, that his own equation gives you nonsense.
00:10:25.000And the famous Schrodinger's cat, where he produces a situation in which the cat would be dead and alive at the same time, he produced that example simply to demonstrate that, roughly speaking, his equation It gives you nonsense under these circumstances.
00:10:43.000And the something else goes beyond our current quantum mechanics, and it tells you what happens when the quantum state makes a decision between, well, it doesn't follow the Schrödinger equation, it does one thing or the other.
00:10:56.000Now, everybody knows that who does quantum mechanics, but they think, oh, it's what's called making a measurement, and you're allowed to do something different.
00:11:05.000And so I had the view that, okay, there is a big gap in our understanding.
00:11:10.000And if there's something in the world which isn't something you could put on a computer, that's where it is.
00:11:17.000So the view I've held that for a long time, and that there's something non-computable, something beyond computation involved in our understandings of things.
00:11:31.000I didn't do much with it, I just held the view.
00:11:34.000Until I think there was a radio talk between Marvin Minsky and Edward Fredkin and they were explaining about what computers can do and they were talking about, okay, you have a computer, two computers talking to each other over there and you walk up to the room and the time you've walked up the room to the computers,
00:11:51.000they have communicated with each other more thoughts than the human race ever has done, you see.
00:12:00.000And I thought, well, I see where you're coming from.
00:12:02.000But I don't think that's what's happening.
00:12:04.000In human communication, human understanding is something different from what computers do.
00:12:17.000But then when I heard this talk by Minsky and Fredkin, I thought, well, I had ideas of writing a book sometime in a long time in the future when I'm retired.
00:12:29.000And I thought, well, this gives it a focus.
00:12:33.000And so I wrote this book called The Emperor's New Mind, which is supposed to be saying, well, you know, everybody seems to be thinking one thing, but the little kid notices that the emperor doesn't have any clothes.
00:12:47.000So it was that theme of that story which was the basis of the book.
00:12:55.000Maybe lots of people think that all we're doing is computing, but if you stand back and you say, well, no, there's something else going on.
00:13:04.000So that was the basis of my thoughts about consciousness.
00:13:09.000But I wrote this book thinking that by the time I got to the end of the book, you see, it was mostly about physics and mathematics and things like that, but I was really aiming for this thing about what's going on in conscious thinking.
00:13:22.000And I thought, well, I'll learn a bit about neurophysiology and so on, and by the time I get to the end of the book, I'll know pretty well what it could be.
00:13:31.000I got to the end of the book, and I just sort of tapered off rather with something a little bit unbelievable, and that was the end.
00:13:38.000Now, you see, I hoped that this book would stimulate young people to get interested in science and that sort of thing, mathematics, and that was fine.
00:13:48.000And when the book was published, I didn't get letters from young kids.
00:13:51.000I got letters from old retired people, the ones who'd had the time to read my book.
00:13:57.000Okay, well, that was a little disappointing, but okay, I'm glad the old retired people liked my book.
00:14:03.000But the other thing was, I got a letter from Stuart Hameroff, and this letter said, more or less, I think you don't appreciate that there's something else going on, not neurons.
00:14:14.000I mean, the neurons, I could see, you couldn't isolate the quantum effects.
00:14:21.000What's called environmental decoherence would happen and you get no way of keeping the quantum state to the level that you need in this picture.
00:14:29.000I realized I didn't have it, but Stuart Hameroff pointed out to me these little things called microtubules, and he'd built up a theory that microtubules were absolutely fundamental to consciousness.
00:14:41.000He had his own reasons for believing that.
00:14:44.000I'd never heard of them at that time, but then I checked up.
00:14:47.000You know, I get lots of letters from people who maybe don't make sense sometimes, the letters.
00:14:53.000And this one, I thought, well, is this another one?
00:14:56.000I realized these microtubules are there, and they look like just the kind of thing that could well be supporting the kind of level of quantum mechanics, up to a level where you could expect the...
00:15:19.000No, they're actually in lots of cells, you see.
00:15:23.000People often complain, oh, they're in your liver too, not just your brain, so why isn't your liver conscious and all that.
00:15:28.000But it has to do with the organization of them and the nature of them, the particular kind of microtubules, how they're arranged, which is different in the brain.
00:15:36.000How does it vary in the brain compared to other cells?
00:15:39.000I think one big difference, although Stuart emphasizes this so much, there are two kinds of microtubules.
00:15:44.000They're the ones called the A-lattice and the B-lattice.
00:15:47.000And the A-lattice ones are the very symmetrical ones.
00:15:50.000They're tubes and they look the same all the way around.
00:15:53.000They've got a very beautiful arrangement of these proteins called tubulin and they make a very nice arrangement which is connected with Fibonacci numbers and things like that.
00:16:03.000So they look a bit like fur cones, but they're all parallel.
00:16:11.000But the thing is, in the brain, I think most microtubules are probably what are called B-lattice ones, and they don't have so much symmetry.
00:16:19.000They've got a sort of seam down one side.
00:16:23.000And they're very important in transporting substances around cells and so on.
00:16:31.000They don't just do what Stuart and I think they may be doing in the brain.
00:16:35.000So the idea is that in the brain they're organized differently and probably the ones that are important are the A-lattice ones, which are the very symmetrical ones.
00:16:45.000And for a long time people couldn't see the difference because they look very similar.
00:16:51.000And they may well be the ones that happen to be in pyramidal cells as a particular kind of cell.
00:16:58.000So, you know, one of the things that interested me a lot is how it is that not all parts of the brain are the same in this respect.
00:17:07.000This is the part at the top and, you know, divided down the middle.
00:17:10.000And that, when you see brains, that's what you normally see with convolutions in it.
00:17:16.000But right underneath and at the back, there's a thing called the cerebellum, which looks more like a ball of wool or something.
00:17:23.000And the cerebellum, there may still be argument about this, but it seems to be that it's completely unconscious.
00:17:31.000And it has comparable number of neurons, far more connections between neurons than the cerebrum.
00:17:37.000And it's what takes control and maybe when you're driving your car and you're thinking about something else and you're not thinking what you're doing.
00:17:47.000And the unconscious control, you know, a pianist who's very expert and moves the fingers around and plays a note with a little finger, that pianist doesn't think, well, I've got to move that muscle this way and this bone that way and so on.
00:17:59.000And it's all controlled unconsciously.
00:18:02.000And a lot of this unconscious control is done somewhere else in the cerebellum when you get really skilled.
00:18:09.000So it seemed to me, okay, you've got different kinds of structures, different...
00:18:13.000And it could well be that these pyramidal cells which have a particular organization of microtubules are the ones where the consciousness is really coming to light mainly.
00:18:25.000I don't know, there's a lot which is not known about this, controversial and all sorts of things.
00:18:31.000But the cerebellum seems to be different and organized differently.
00:18:35.000So it's not just how many neurons, how many connections are there, because there are more in the cerebellum.
00:19:52.000So you're saying that we don't totally understand, but we know that there's different parts of the brain that are responsible for different activities, and some activities don't seem to be conscious.
00:21:17.000Well, I think he would complain if I say putting it to sleep because under anesthetic is actually different from sleep.
00:21:23.000But you make them unconscious in a reversible way.
00:21:26.000You want to make sure that you can wake them up again.
00:21:29.000And it's obviously a very skilled thing.
00:21:33.000But I guess a lot of his colleagues might be skilled at doing it, but they ask the questions about what they're actually doing from the point of view of the biology and the physics and so on.
00:21:43.000So Stuart was really interested in that question.
00:21:46.000Partly, I think, things like mitosis, cell division.
00:21:50.000And he was very struck by the way that the chromosomes all line up and that there's these microtubules which are pulling them And they're a really big part in the structure of cells and how they behave and so on.
00:22:07.000Well, I guess it was an experience with putting people under anesthetics and the fact that the gases which They put you to sleep and they're, again, I shouldn't say to sleep, but put you on.
00:22:20.000Anesthetic are very unconnected chemically.
00:22:23.000They're different kinds of things, yet they still seem to have the same effect.
00:22:28.000And to understand what it is that they affect is, you know, a lot of his interest is to do with that.
00:22:35.000So just by putting someone unconscious and registering what parts of the brain are no longer active, this is what they're using to sort of reverse engineer by turning those parts on?
00:23:06.000It's one of those weird ones where people want to start talking about souls and universal consciousness, and they start – it gets – Yeah.
00:24:27.000Is it simply just your own biology trying to calculate your environment and looking out for its best interests and trying to procreate and move forward with the genes that it has?
00:24:42.000Instead of, the word mystical might be tainted.
00:24:44.000Maybe something far more complex than we're currently able to understand.
00:24:48.000I think to some extent I would agree it is, because it's certainly different.
00:24:53.000I mean, to have some internal perception of the external world and being able to think abstractly and all these things, it's surely different from the way baseball runs through the air and what makes it spin and And different than every other conscious animal.
00:25:27.000But whether it's a difference in kind, I'm not at all sure.
00:25:32.000You know, you watch these nature movies and I remember seeing one about elephants and this was about how the elephants were...
00:25:41.000And they're always led by a female elephant, and that's not relevant to the story, but they were trying to go from A to B. I don't remember what it was.
00:25:52.000But then at a certain point, they made a detour.
00:25:55.000And they went off to a place where the leader of the elephant heard her sister had died.
00:26:02.000And the bones, the tusks I suppose, were there, the bones anyway, were there, and the elephants picked them up, handed them around, and seemed to caress them and move them around, and then they went back, joined to the route that they were at before.
00:27:18.000And I think there's what you call understanding, okay, at a more primitive level than in human understanding, but nevertheless, there is something, there's no sort of clean dividing line in my view.
00:27:39.000And they do seem to have not just verbal but non-verbal communication.
00:27:44.000They seem to have some understanding of what the task is and what their roles are in the task.
00:27:49.000And even though there's not as many variables maybe as human life, there definitely seems to be a conscious awareness of, first of all, their position in the hierarchy of the tribe.
00:28:01.000Of the pack, rather, but also what their objective is.
00:28:06.000This is not a selfish objective, it's a group objective, and they operate as a group, and they do move like those African dogs that you were talking about.
00:28:18.000And there's a lot of indication that, well, certainly chimps and elephants and things, and dolphins, we know about them, but I imagine it goes quite far down, I should think.
00:28:40.000Yeah, I've only been really paying attention to them for a few years.
00:28:44.000I have a good friend, my friend Remy Warren, was doing a television show called Apex Predator, where he studied the way different animals hunted.
00:28:53.000And he started studying the way octopus and cuttlefish and all these different...
00:29:02.000Different octopi and the way they could adapt to their environment by changing their actual, not just the look, but the texture of their skin instantaneously.
00:29:11.000And how this is not really understood, not only how they do it, but how they know what's below them, what they're copying.
00:29:20.000That they somehow or another can figure out how to blend in almost perfectly with their environment.
00:29:26.000They also can open jars and they can climb out of tanks.
00:29:30.000There was one guy, he had a camera on his tank because he had two tanks.
00:29:36.000And one of them had very expensive tropical fish and the other one had his octopus.
00:29:41.000And he was trying to figure out what was happening to his expensive tropical fish, so he put a camera on it.
00:29:45.000And the octopus was climbing out of the tank, walking across the ground, climbing into the other tank, killing one of the fish, eating it, and then going back into his tank.
00:30:30.000Now, if you weren't pressed to figure this out in some sort of a paper that you had to display in front of scientists, if you were trying to figure out, what do you think it is?
00:30:51.000It's going too far to think, you know, I know what the answer is or anything like that.
00:30:55.000I just think that this issue of having some kind of quantum state which preserves itself up to a certain level.
00:31:04.000And the microtubules at least suggested something where you could isolate them from the outside and the symmetry of these things is important.
00:31:59.000There's a thing called the Jan Teller effect in quantum mechanics, which tells you that when you have a highly symmetrical structure like that, then there can be a big gap between the lowest energy level and the next one.
00:32:12.000And there can be information in this lowest energy level, which can be...
00:32:16.000It's shielded from the higher energy levels.
00:32:19.000So this is a sort of suggestion that some kind of quantum phenomenon is going on in a serious way, and there's a lot to understand there.
00:32:28.000I mean, synapses themselves are kind of strange things.
00:32:31.000You might think, if you were going to build a brain, why don't you just solder the wires together, the connections you see?
00:32:36.000What are you doing having this thing with all the chemicals transferring this information from one side to the other?
00:32:42.000I don't know, but it's something very...
00:32:46.000And it's all tied up with these clathorins there and cytoskeleton structures, which microtubules are one of the main constituents.
00:32:55.000So you see, I don't know, there's a lot to learn, I'm sure.
00:32:58.000So it seems like there's a bunch of different factors.
00:33:01.000There's the biological understanding of the brain itself, and then there's the understanding of the actual nature of cells and of reality itself, that this is being more illuminated by science with every new discovery, and we're getting a better understanding deeper and deeper as to the very nature of matter and of these structures themselves.
00:33:24.000I think it is getting deep into the way the physical world operates and things that we don't understand about it just yet.
00:34:15.000Well, we'd like to think that there's a reason, but then we look at other biological life forms and they look kind of preposterous, like a platypus, for instance.
00:34:22.000You look at that and you go, what is that?
00:36:28.000But it's coherent, and it makes sense.
00:36:31.000And if you study it properly, you say, okay, that makes sense.
00:36:35.000And this includes things like non-local effects, where you can have two things, now even thousands of kilometers apart, and you can see these quantum entanglement effects.
00:36:45.000So they're still, in some sense, connected with each other, even though they're that far apart, which is pretty amazing.
00:36:52.000That's baffling but that's part of the comprehensible part of quantum mechanics.
00:36:56.000It's muddied up because there's the other part which has to do with this collapse of the wave function.
00:37:01.000And standard quantum mechanics really doesn't make sense.
00:37:05.000But people get them muddled in my view.
00:37:07.000You think because this doesn't make sense and that doesn't make sense, well it's all a bit crazy and so anything crazy is up for grabs.
00:37:14.000But it seems to me that quantum mechanics, the things which are crazy and they do hang together and the theory works and you understand that, that's fine.
00:37:21.000But the things which involve the collapse of the wave function, that's not fine because we don't have the right theory yet.
00:37:58.000Now, in something like superposition, where something can be both still and in motion at the same time, as soon as you say that to the common person like myself, my brain glazes over and my eyebrows raise up and I go, okay, what is...
00:38:14.000And then you're talking about entanglement, things hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart that are somehow or another interacting with each other in a way that we don't totally understand or we don't have a theory that absolutely explains in a concrete way.
00:38:26.000Well, it does as long as you don't get to the measurement.
00:39:23.000What's not logical comes apart when you worry about the measurement issue and the collapse of the wave function and poor old Schrodinger was very upset by this quite right.
00:39:35.000Now when you discuss consciousness and the mystery of consciousness and then you Do you think that perhaps some of them are interchangeable or similar to consciousness itself,
00:39:54.000that there is some sort of a connection that human beings share in some strange, unique, and not understood way yet?
00:40:06.000I think one has to be careful about these things and sometimes do.
00:40:09.000Well, even Niels Bohr, who is one of the founders of these ideas, he tried to make a philosophy out of quantum mechanics and complementarity.
00:40:49.000I mean, if it comes to things like, you know, when people talk about entanglements and things, quantum states can spread to long distances, does that mean that human beings' minds can stretch to long distances and so on?
00:41:03.000So these people will raise questions like that.
00:41:08.000But, you know, you might worry, well, could it be that there's some...
00:41:14.000Quantum state, which is shared between different individuals.
00:41:18.000It's hard to see that could be unless they were, well, I mean, if they were identical twins, I suppose they were once in one cell at one time.
00:41:24.000But you'd have to preserve that information all the way through, and I just don't see how that could happen.
00:41:29.000So I'm not a fan of trying to use quantum ideas sort of directly in, say, human behavior or something.
00:41:38.000I think those analogies are pretty far-fetched, partly because the sort of mathematics you use in quantum mechanics is very specific to quantum mechanics and doesn't really apply to macroscopic behavior as far as I can see.
00:41:55.000Is this something that you're asked about most often?
00:42:09.000But you see, it's slightly misleading when you're thinking about what my interests are.
00:42:14.000Because I had this, as I say, I explained more or less the history of my ideas there, and I did write a book or at least another one after that too.
00:42:21.000In fact, I guess I've written three books about that, although one was taken down lectures and so on.
00:42:29.000My main research is on cosmology, Well, there's this area called Twister Theory, I won't necessarily go into that, but it's meant to be foundational quantum mechanics, foundational physics, not necessarily, but general relativity.
00:42:45.000I mean, I guess the work I did originally was people paid attention to is in general relativity and black holes, what a black hole is, why we have the idea that they're there at all, that sort of thing.
00:43:24.000It looks sort of mind-boggling at first, and then when you get used to the idea, you can sort of play around with the ideas and maybe forget how mind-boggling it should be.
00:43:34.000I was watching a documentary on supermassive black holes and they were discussing how the size of...
00:43:40.000I don't know if this is still a current theory.
00:43:45.000But they were saying that there's a supermassive black hole inside of every galaxy that's one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy.
00:43:52.000And that one of the theories was that inside these supermassive black holes could be an entirely different universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with their own black holes, and that it's infinite.
00:44:05.000Well, you see, I have a fairly, an idea which I think the mainstream does still regard as a bit crazy, but not like that.
00:44:13.000I don't think you're going to have much fun inside a black hole.
00:44:34.000No, yeah, I mean, black holes are remarkable enough, but the thing I did, which was in, well, 1964, published in 1965, It was to show that black holes—well,
00:44:50.000I'm using a terminology that wasn't around at that time—that the black holes—it was gravitational collapse.
00:44:57.000You see, the history went back to, originally, I guess, Chandrasekhar, an Indian scientist when he was not quite 20, I think.
00:45:05.000I can't remember if he was 19 or 20. And he was going to England to study physics, astronomy, and so on.
00:45:11.000And he worked on this problem about what holds white dwarfs apart.
00:45:15.000These are these very massive stars, the companion of Sirius.
00:45:21.000And he was doing calculations to find out whether the interior is particularly a structure of matter.
00:45:31.000And he came to the conclusion that if they had a bigger mass than a certain amount, which is about a bit less than one and a half times the sun's mass, They wouldn't be able to hold themselves apart.
00:45:46.000And he didn't speculate on what had happened.
00:45:50.000There was some very modest comment he made.
00:45:53.000We are left speculating on possibilities or something.
00:45:57.000But then that was in the 1930s, I guess around about 1930s.
00:46:01.000And much later, just before the war, Second World War, 1939, there was a paper by Oppenheimer of atomic bomb fame, and Schneider,
00:46:18.000which is a student of his, Hartland Schneider, And they produced a model which was a solution of the Einstein equations which describes a cloud of dust which collapses and becomes what we now call a black hole.
00:46:35.000So this was the first clear picture of collapse to a black hole.
00:46:41.000Now in their picture they made two huge assumptions.
00:46:56.000But more important, that the model was exactly symmetrical.
00:47:00.000So it was just spherically symmetrical.
00:47:03.000All the matter falling in, the dust particles, would be focused right into the central point.
00:47:08.000And so it's not so hard to believe that you get a singularity where the density goes infinite, the curvatures go infinite, and your equations go crazy.
00:47:18.000So at that point, when the dust reaches the middle point, okay, it's not so surprising because it's a very contrived situation.
00:47:26.000So I think a lot of people thought, well, perhaps we shouldn't take it seriously.
00:47:31.000But then there was a paper by two Russians called Lifshitz and Kholatnikov, and they seemed to have proved that you didn't get singularities in the general case, that somehow it would swirl around and swish out again, you see.
00:47:48.000And then there was this discovery, I think, in 1962, when Martin Schmidt, a Dutch astronomer, a Dutch-American, I think, where he was living there at the time, I don't remember.
00:48:00.000But he observed what became what we call the first quasar.
00:48:08.000We're radiating an awful amount of energy, far more than an entire galaxy, but it seemed to be a very small thing.
00:48:15.000It couldn't be much bigger than the size of the solar system, if even that big, because variations in brightness indicated that the speed of light, the size of it had to be comparable with the speed at which the variations in brightness came about.
00:48:35.000So it seemed to be an object That was enormously energetic, producing more energy than the whole galaxy, and varying with such a degree that it must be fairly small.
00:48:47.000And this raised the question of whether it was small enough to be what we now call a black hole.
00:48:53.000In other words, there's a thing called the Schwarzschild radius.
00:48:58.000Schwarzschild was the man who first discovered the solutions of Einstein's equations, which described this spherical body.
00:49:05.000But he didn't extrapolate it inwards to what's called this horizon.
00:49:23.000Make that clear, but not many people paid attention.
00:49:27.000But that was the idea of a black hole, and it looked then that these quasars could be having some black hole in the middle of them.
00:49:35.000And I remember John Wheeler, who was at Princeton then, a very distinguished scientist, And he got very worried about these things, and he talked to me, and he wanted to write about it, and do we believe, is there a singularity in the middle?
00:49:46.000Do we believe, Lifshitz and Klatenkopf, that they sort of swirl around and bounce out?
00:49:52.000So I started thinking about this problem, and since at that time, Well, you see, either people, when you want to solve the Einstein equations, either you make a lot of assumptions and it's asymmetrical, like the Oppenheimer-Snyder model,
00:50:07.000you assume it's got very special properties, and then you can maybe solve the equations.
00:50:14.000And the computers weren't powerful enough to tell you very much about what happened.
00:50:19.000So I started thinking about this problem and realizing that I'd have to think about it in a different way.
00:50:25.000And so I used ideas which involve ideas from topology and things like that to show that there had to be a singularity in the middle, provided that the collapse had reached a certain point of no return.
00:50:39.000I guess to get some idea, I don't know, it's not too misleading.
00:50:43.000There's a mathematical theorem called the hairy dog theorem.
00:50:50.000I mean, that's just a jocular terminology.
00:50:53.000But you think of something which is...
00:50:56.000Topologically a sphere, that means, you see, you imagine a dog shape, but you could sort of move it around with a piece of plasticine until it looked like a sphere.
00:51:06.000Okay, forget about this digestive system, you see.
00:51:08.000You're thinking about the surface outside.
00:51:11.000And then the problem is you try to comb the hair on the dog all the way around, and the theorem says there's got to be somewhere where the hair doesn't lie flat.
00:51:20.000And you try it on a sphere, there's got to be a point where the hair makes a kind of singular point.
00:51:27.000You have no idea where the singularity is, but you know from general topological reasons that there's got to be one somewhere.
00:51:35.000And that was the sort of argument that I produced.
00:51:41.000I guess a lot of people had a little bit of trouble because they'd never seen this kind of argument.
00:51:45.000And a lot of people picked up on it, in particular Stephen Hawking.
00:51:49.000And it became, for a while, many people working on it.
00:51:55.000I guess it's not so popular now because probably we've run out of theorems.
00:52:01.000The idea of a singularity is when you see something like a quasar or the center of a galaxy, and we were talking about a black hole, when you say a singularity,
00:52:19.000Well, the normal expectation is that you have a place, like in the middle of the Oppenheimer Snyder dust cloud, a point there where the density becomes infinite, and so the curvature of space-time becomes infinite.
00:52:36.000So you have a place where the equations run away and they go to infinity and you say, well, something's gone wrong.
00:52:43.000But maybe initially it was in these very symmetrical cases.
00:52:46.000But what you could show by these indirect arguments that somewhere something's got to go wrong.
00:52:52.000You can't continue the equations of Einstein and they got stuck to the place where they go infinite or What in detail happens, the theorems don't tell you.
00:53:03.000They just say that something goes wrong.
00:53:05.000And that's what we call a singularity.
00:53:08.000And if a black hole is larger or smaller, the singularity remains constant?
00:53:44.000The singularities are not all the same, but the black holes are not all the same.
00:53:47.000They're not all the same, but that's one of the strange things about black holes is that if you let them settle down, they're not all the same to begin with, but there are not many different things they can settle into.
00:53:59.000They can have rotation, they can have a certain mass, and the mass translates into the size of the diameter of the hole.
00:54:08.000And you've also got rotation, so they can rotate.
00:54:13.000Schwarzschild found the non-rotating ones and it was Roy Kerr, an Australian who first produced the solution for a rotating black hole.
00:54:24.000But then you see the remarkable thing is that's what they settle down to.
00:54:27.000So there are good theorems which tell you that a general black hole, which is very complicated, fairly rapidly will settle down and become one of these Kerr solutions, the rotating black hole.
00:54:37.000I remember when I first saw that documentary and I saw when they were discussing the shape of these galaxies and the center of it, It's an unbelievably beautiful yet simultaneously terrifying idea.
00:55:00.000Infinite power in the center of infinite mass that's absorbing slowly but surely everything around it.
00:55:37.000Yes, the black holes will probably spiral into each other, and there'll be one big one.
00:55:41.000So it's definable mass, but in infinite density, and that this point, which where they were speculating that this could possibly be in the center of these supermassive black holes, if you could go through that, there would be another universe.
00:56:49.000Early in this century, don't ask me dates again, some people, by observing supernova stars, exposing stars very, very far away, they found out that the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion.
00:57:06.000And some people found this very mysterious.
00:57:09.000On the other hand, it's in all the cosmology books because there is that expectation.
00:57:16.000You see, in 1915, Einstein produced his general theory.
00:57:21.000In 1917, he introduced what's called the cosmological constant.
00:57:30.000You think of a V-shape turned upside down, which is a lambda.
00:57:34.000And he introduced this term for the wrong reason.
00:57:38.000Because at that time, people weren't...
00:57:40.000There was some indication the universe was expanding, but not very clear.
00:57:44.000And Einstein, I guess, maybe didn't know or didn't believe it.
00:57:49.000The Hubble's observations hadn't yet come to make a convincing case of the expansion.
00:57:55.000So Einstein thought, well, maybe the universe is static.
00:57:59.000It's kind of philosophically nice to think that it's sitting there all the time.
00:58:02.000And he couldn't make it do that, so he had to introduce this term called the cosmological constant.
00:58:10.000And he did that, and then not much longer after this, Hubble showed that the universe does seem to be expanding.
00:58:20.000And Einstein regarded this lambda term as his biggest blunder, which is an irony because it turns out that this term is probably the explanation for the expansion of the universe that we now see.
00:58:54.000But the dark energy, as it's called, or the cosmological constant, which, as far as we can tell, is completely consistent with the observations.
00:59:05.000It's very small, but it seems to be producing this expansion.
00:59:10.000And I'm quite happy with that viewpoint because it leads to a picture which I've been trying to plug for a while now, maybe up to 15 years, I can't remember.
00:59:23.000The idea, and I said it's hard to explain, but let me try.
00:59:28.000It came about because I was worrying about the remote future.
00:59:33.000And I was thinking, okay, when these black holes are around, they swallowed up all the stars and they're just sitting around.
00:59:40.000And what's the most next exciting thing happening?
01:00:29.000Well, it may have been pretty boring when you're sitting around waiting for the black hole to go pop, but afterwards, that's really boring.
01:00:36.000So this was a picture I thought of, being rather depressed by it, thinking that's our fate.
01:00:43.000You see, the fate of all the interesting things happening, ultimate fate, is this unbelievably boring final state.
01:00:50.000Okay, this is an emotional argument, but give me a bit of leeway.
01:00:54.000So I began to think, well, it's not going to be us who are going to be bored, because we're not going to be around.
01:01:01.000But the main things that will be around will be photons.
01:01:05.000And it's pretty hard to bore a photon.
01:01:10.000One is it probably doesn't have conscious experiences, not that sure.
01:01:14.000But the other is more the science point, that they don't measure time, because a photon has no mass.
01:01:21.000It travels at the speed of light, and the way relativity works, it means that clocks stop, if you like.
01:01:28.000So, if it had experiences, the moment of its creation would be one moment, and the next moment would be infinity.
01:01:35.000And so they just zip out to infinity without noticing a thing.
01:01:39.000Now you see, I'd been doing work on this kind of thing, thinking more about gravitational radiation and how you measure its energy and things like that.
01:01:46.000And it was a very useful picture to squash down infinity A useful thing to think about here, if you've seen these pictures by the Dutch artist MC Escher, and there are those which are called circle limits, and there's a very famous one with angels and devils interlocking,
01:02:03.000and they get all crowded up onto the edge.
01:02:06.000Now what you've got to think about is that this is a kind of geometry called hyperbolic geometry, and the angels and devils live in that geometry.
01:02:15.000And the ones right close to the edge think they're the same size and same shape as the ones in the middle.
01:02:40.000What that means is that little shapes are quite consistently drawn, but they can be big or small.
01:02:47.000And you don't care about whether they're big or they're small, as long as small shapes are accurate, or angles, if you like, are correctly drawn.
01:02:56.000So it's what's called a conformal map, and that conformal map describes infinity.
01:03:01.000Now, you can do the same thing to the universe.
01:03:23.000It's worked just as well for small as for big, and you can stretch it in some place and squash it somewhere else.
01:03:28.000As long as the stretching and squashing is isotropic, so just as much one way as the other way, which means more or less that you keep what I call the light cones there.
01:03:38.000But it means that if you have things without mass, and most particularly the photons, Then that boundary is just like anywhere else, and the photons go zipping up to it, and so you might think they've got to have somewhere to go.
01:03:54.000Okay, well, you don't have to think that, but that was the point of view I had, that the photons need somewhere to enter, in a way.
01:04:04.000But then there's the other picture, which is the opposite end, there's the Big Bang.
01:04:08.000Now you can do a similar sort of trick there, which is stretching it out and making it into a boundary.
01:04:15.000And that can be done to, I played around with these ideas for a long time, and the standard cosmology models you can do it with.
01:04:23.000But the more complicated cosmology models, you might have one which is a very complicated Big Bang.
01:04:30.000The general ones don't look like that at all.
01:04:32.000So you need a condition which tells you that the Big Bang was the very special kind that it was.
01:04:39.000It's all tied up with this thing called the second law of thermodynamics and it all ties together with physics in a way which perhaps we don't have time to talk about.
01:04:46.000But it seemed to me a really good idea to have the condition on the Big Bang that you could continue it in the same way.
01:04:55.000I should say the idea of doing this was a former student of mine, Paul Todd, who was a colleague of mine, and he used this conformal continuation as a nice way of saying what the condition is on the Big Bang to give you what you want.
01:05:13.000But nevertheless, it's what starts our universe off in a very special state, which is what we live off in a way.
01:05:22.000It's the second law of thermodynamics that needs that to get going.
01:05:25.000Anyway, I don't know if you want to worry about that.
01:05:27.000But anyway, the point was that it looks as though it's a good condition on the Big Bang, but it also should be conformally like a boundary which, if you had no mass, you wouldn't notice it.
01:05:42.000Okay, you've got particles with mass running around near the Big Bang.
01:05:45.000But as you get closer and closer and closer, the energy goes up, the temperature goes zooming up.
01:05:50.000They're zipping around at such a speed that the energy of their motion is much bigger than the E equals mc squared mass, Einstein's mass.
01:06:02.000The energy in the mass is a certain amount.
01:06:06.000But when they get so hot, you can forget about the mass.
01:06:10.000So they, like photons, behave like particles without mass, and so they're just interested in conformal geometry.
01:06:19.000So the crazy idea I had Not just only you stretch out the Big Bang and you squash down the infinity, but maybe our Big Bang was a squash-down infinity of a previous eon.
01:06:34.000So I'm saying our eon began with the Big Bang, ended up with this exponential expansion, there was another one before us, there will be another one after us, there was another one before that, and so on.
01:06:46.000So it's an infinite cycle of Big Bangs.
01:07:27.000Not long after Einstein produced his theory and this Alexander Friedman, who was a Russian mathematical physicist, and he produced the first cosmology models.
01:07:38.000And one of these was a one which has sort of bounces.
01:07:41.000Big bang, it expands out and then it contracts again.
01:07:47.000The only trouble is if you put irregularities into these models, you get black holes, and these black holes form an incredible mess at the end, and that doesn't join onto a nice smooth big bang of the next one.
01:07:58.000So you have trouble with those models.
01:08:00.000But still, people take these things seriously.
01:08:03.000And as I say, Starnhart and Turok have a model which is like that.
01:08:06.000So these are the things one has to think about.
01:08:09.000My own view is that they don't take into account the black hole problem, which is that my one gets rid of that because the black holes all evaporate away by Hawking evaporation.
01:08:37.000But more recently, and this is only just this year, I have two Polish colleagues, that's Christoph Meisner and Pawel Nirowski, and there is a Korean who works in New York called Daniel Ann, and we,
01:08:54.000the four of us, have a paper which I think today or tomorrow will be, the new improved version of this paper should be on the archive.
01:09:03.000And this, the title of the paper is, Are We Seeing Hawking Points in the CMB Sky?
01:09:11.000You see, I talked about the black holes.
01:09:14.000See, in the previous eon to ours, assuming it's more or less like ours, there would be black holes in clusters of galaxies, huge, enormous ones, swallowing up pretty well the whole cluster.
01:09:24.000And what happens to the energy in those black holes?
01:09:27.000Well, it goes out in Hawking irradiation.
01:09:29.000It takes an age, ages and ages and ages, maybe 10 to 100 years, Google years, or something, ages and ages.
01:09:39.000But all that energy in the picture comes out basically in one point.
01:09:44.000Think of that Escher picture, and right at the very edge, you see there are an awful lot of angels and devils squashed together there, so that the entire radiation from that single black hole will be squashed into that little point.
01:10:09.000You see, what we see in the cosmic microwave background, this is radiation coming from all directions.
01:10:16.000And this radiation doesn't come from the Big Bang exactly.
01:10:20.000It comes from 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
01:10:23.000So there's a sort of last scattering surface where photons which are trying to get out finally can escape and we see them.
01:10:32.000Now, that spread out from the Hawking Point to what you see in the cosmic microwave background in the last scattering surface is something of the diameter of about eight times the diameter of the Moon.
01:11:02.000So you could imagine something from about four to eight times the moon's diameter, which is a small region which is Highly energetic, more energetic in the middle, and it tapers off as you go to the edge.
01:13:02.000Well, you see, there are two reasons for believing in multiverses.
01:13:07.000One of them is the quantum reason that maybe you have the Schrödinger's dead cat and the live cat, they're in different worlds and they're separate universes.
01:13:37.000And to explain that, well, it's only because we've drifted off into some world and another version of ourselves is drifting to another one and some see one and the others see the other and they're all in superposition.
01:13:49.000It doesn't explain why you see one world.
01:14:02.000And if you believe quantum mechanics that the collapse is not real and it doesn't happen, And all the alternatives, the dead cat and the live cat, coexist in different worlds.
01:15:15.000Now, the other many worlds view, which comes from a different reason, and that is that there seem to be various accidents in, well, maybe one of them being that the neutron is just slightly more massive than the proton.
01:17:02.000There's something out there, and now with the hawking points, there's something people can really go out and look for.
01:17:07.000And if they don't see them, there's something funny going on somewhere.
01:17:10.000If they do see them, there's something else going funny on, which they'll have to think of another explanation.
01:17:15.000Unless it's my explanation, they'll have to think of a different view from the current inflation view, which is in real trouble with these observations as far as I can see.
01:17:24.000Do you anticipate in any foreseeable time in the future a better understanding of dark matter and dark energy?
01:17:30.000Or perhaps a better definition of what those things are?
01:17:49.000And there are certainly questions about that, which I agree with.
01:17:53.000Dark matter, I didn't go into this, but in this scheme of mine, it has to be there.
01:18:00.000When I say it, I mean that if you want the equations to make sense, which cross over from our remote future to the big bang of the next eon, you have to have a creation of a dominant new material, which is scalar.
01:18:16.000As I say, it doesn't spin, it's just ordinary particles.
01:18:22.000And that they only interact gravitationally.
01:19:14.000And they should decay into gravitational signals which maybe could be seen by LIGO, maybe have been seen by LIGO and thrown in the rubbish bin.
01:19:26.000Because there'd be different types of signals from what people would expect.
01:19:30.000I wouldn't like to put my money anywhere there, but I'm hoping that these dark matter particles are the ones that come from the theory that I'm putting forward.
01:19:42.000So that would be another consequence of this particular point of view.
01:19:47.000And they've observed, correct me if I'm wrong, entire galaxies that they believe that consist of dark matter.
01:20:54.000When you discuss the cosmos, maybe the single most intriguing possibility to us as human beings is what other intelligent life, if any, is out there.
01:21:32.000There's this SETI program where they're looking to see whether they can see signals from distant civilizations.
01:21:37.000The problem there, from my perspective, is that although they might be out there, they've got to have had a real head start on us before you would see them.
01:21:51.000You see, actually, Vahir Guzajan, who's my Armenian colleague and who looked also for these ring-shaped things and looked at them in a different way from the Polish people, But we seem to have seen something there.
01:22:05.000But we wrote a paper in which we speculated on beings from the previous eon communicating with us.
01:22:13.000And the advantage there is that you're looking at the really advanced civilizations, right at the very end, you see.
01:22:20.000Billions of years ago, their universe disappeared.
01:22:27.000And then had to come back to a Big Bang state again?
01:22:30.000Oh, the signals could come through, yes.
01:22:31.000And somehow or another, those signals remain.
01:23:17.000The mass has to fade out, and how you measure time becomes problematic.
01:23:23.000And it's either infinity, you see, which isn't much use, or you might have different definitions of time, which depend on what particle you're using as your clocks and things like that.
01:23:33.000So are you essentially saying that it's entirely possible that we are the furthest in terms of our technological achievement and our understanding of the universe itself?
01:23:43.000It's possible that we're at the front of the line.
01:23:46.000There might be some other intelligent life forms in the universe, but they might be behind us.
01:24:21.000I don't want to say that I see it happening or anything, but it's not out of the question that they could develop some technology which would get information, which might be them in some sense, across in the form of photons.
01:24:36.000But you're not optimistic about current intelligent life somewhere in the universe?
01:24:44.000Well, maybe it took us a long time to get going because the dinosaurs were there for a while and somebody might have got in there earlier in their different planet and they could have got there quite ahead of us.
01:25:32.000We've come to terms with it very hugely.
01:25:36.000I know there's this activity, and I'd be interested to see if there was this thing that came past that some people speculated was sent there by a different intelligence, which came quite close in our solar system.
01:25:50.000Oh, that was that strange looking cigar shape?
01:26:53.000I was a bit worried about having my name attached to this thing when I didn't know much about it.
01:26:57.000But it seems to me a really important thing where you can, which the deliberate purpose of it is to develop ideas which make sense but are not mainstream.
01:27:11.000And one of these was the consciousness thing.
01:27:13.000So, you know, Stuart Hameroff is doing it, but it's not an activity that's taking part, people researching it in detail in other parts of the world.
01:27:24.000So to have a place which supports that kind of thing is great, and I think that's very good.
01:27:31.000But when I heard about it first, I thought, well, most of my interests are on the physics side, and not so much in biology, which I'm pretty ignorant about.
01:27:40.000And there are lots of ideas on that side, not just the cosmology, but ideas and building...
01:27:49.000Experiments which might detect the collapse of the wave function.
01:27:54.000And one idea is to look at Bose-Einstein condensates.
01:27:57.000See, I have a colleague that's Yvette Fuentes, who I knew about and who had these ideas of how to use Bose-Einstein condensates to detect gravitational waves.
01:28:10.000And that's also very, you know, not a mainstream way of looking at it, but a very clever idea.
01:28:16.000And the Bose-Ionstein condensates, because it's so quantum mechanical and they're so cold, they're almost virtually absolute zero.
01:28:25.000And they can keep external disturbances from causing problems.
01:28:33.000And you can manipulate them in ways to make them in two places at once.
01:28:38.000And so it might well be a good way of testing the Schrodinger-Cat thing, whether state reduction or the collapse of wave function is a phenomenon which is the kind which I hope might be,
01:28:55.000And in that case, if it is, then that would be relevant to the consciousness problem.
01:28:59.000So all these things tie together in various ways.
01:29:02.000And so the hope was that these things which are, you know, could be supported.
01:29:07.000And I thought it was important because there's always the danger of such an institute being regarded as flaky because you're doing weird things.
01:29:16.000So the important point from my perspective is that there should be things which can be...
01:29:22.000Either now, immediately, tested experimentally or within a few years.
01:29:27.000So they're things which are really, you can get and test them and see whether they're right or not.
01:29:35.000So this would be a protection against thinking, well, these are crazy ideas that are being pursued.
01:29:40.000They have to be ideas which are capable of tests and have a reasonable chance of showing evidence in their favor or against, you know, whichever would be interesting and important to know.
01:29:55.000From the outside looking in, to me, it's so fascinating to watch intellectuals like yourself that are bouncing these ideas around that are possible but are not mainstream.
01:30:06.000And it seems to me that it's a precarious sort of tightrope walk.
01:30:10.000Like, you don't want to say anything ridiculous that's not true.
01:30:13.000But you would love to say something that seems to be ridiculous but turns out to be, in fact, accurate and provable.
01:30:24.000And of course, you've got to play with ideas which are on the sort of edge of what we know.
01:30:28.000Otherwise, you're stuck with what we know.
01:30:31.000And these things will simply get channeled down the old roots and you need to be able to break free of those from time to time, but not in a way which is too crazy to be examined to see whether there is truth in these ideas or not.
01:30:47.000Because of this inclination that people have to go towards woo or towards crazy ideas, it is important for the skepticism, right?
01:31:01.000Well, you see, there's a strange kind of problem, you see, because with these observations, not about the hawking points, which I was just describing, but the earlier ones about black hole collisions.
01:31:12.000And my Armenian colleague and I had written a couple of papers on this, and we hadn't got any response at all.
01:31:20.000And the Polish people, and they'd written papers, two of them accepted by respectable journals, and And Christoph asked me, you know, what kind of response have you got?
01:33:20.000A lot of them have more attention paid to them than the ones we have.
01:33:23.000Actually, I'm curious to know whether the Hawking points will take off or not.
01:33:27.000Well, I'm so happy there's people like you doing this kind of work and then someone condensing it down to an understandable point that someone like me can absorb and just try to get a better picture of this insane reality that we're living in.
01:33:43.000Well, it is pretty weird, you're right.
01:35:18.000There are these things which I believe have to be true as much as the died in the womb quantum mechanics people who follow the party lines and so on.
01:35:30.000I mean, these quantum entanglements, the fact that things can be, whatever it is, a couple of thousand kilometers separated, and yet know each other in a way you can't explain that they're separate individuals.
01:35:46.000They behave as though they're one, what are called an entangled state.
01:35:52.000And you can make experiments which reveal that.
01:35:56.000I mean, it was John Bell, who was an Irish theoretical physicist, who really made all this very clear that these things are real manifestations of the peculiarity of quantum mechanics and really out there in the world.
01:36:12.000Was it J.D.S. Haldane that said, the world is not only queerer than you suppose, it's queerer than you can suppose?
01:36:26.000I really appreciate talking to you, and thank you for all your work and your contribution to our understanding of what we're looking at here.