In this episode, Dr. Carl Sagan joins me to talk about his new book, The Dark Side of the Universe. We talk about how he broke his own brain to figure out what gauge symmething is, why it's so important to understand nature, and what it means to be a scientist. We also talk about the importance of a scientific understanding of the universe, and how science can help us understand it. And, of course, we talk about quantum physics and the Higgs boson, and why the real world is so much more interesting than we think it is. It's a great episode, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it! Thank you so much to Carl Sagan for coming on the show, and for being so generous with his time and his insights. I really appreciate it, and it was a pleasure to have him on to talk to me about science and all the amazing things he's written about in his book, "The Dark Side Of The Universe." I hope that you enjoy this episode and that it makes you think about how important it is to have someone like Dr. Sagan as a scientist and a scientist in the field of science and how important science is to you. I think it's important to have a scientist on your side. . Thanks for listening and for supporting the show. - Carl Sagan - Tom Bell and his book "A Good Life: The Story of Science and Mythology: The Real World in the Making of a Good Life" by Carl Sagan, written by David Grauso, published in 2016, is a must-listen-listenergasmic in the best book I've ever written by a scientist, and the most brilliant man in the world, and a true story about science, and so much so that you should listen to it. Thank you, Tom Bell, for being kind enough to share it with the rest of us, and thank you for letting us know what you think of it, too. Tom Bell is a good friend of mine, and you're a wonderful human being and a great human being, and he's words of wisdom, and good advice, good words, good vibes, and hope you'll give us a listen to us all a listen, and we'll get a chance to hear it in the next episode of this podcast, too! - Thank you Tom Bell.
00:00:56.000It's one of the things that when I write books...
00:01:00.000I do most things for myself, in a way.
00:01:03.000And in every book I write, I usually learn something.
00:01:06.000And always when you're explaining stuff, most teachers say the first time they understand anything is when they teach it.
00:01:12.000And gauge symmetry, I'd never thought of really how to explain it.
00:01:16.000And I tried to explain to my editor, which was great because she didn't know any science and she kept not understanding it.
00:01:22.000And then I came up with this explanation involving these chess boards, which is still subtle, but I realized afterwards it was kind of neat because...
00:01:29.000When I developed this explanation for gauge symmetry, I not only understood it in a new way, but I realized, gee, I now understood physically, if I'd had this explanation before, I could have predicted this Higgs mechanism and all the things I only see mathematically all come out of the picture I gave.
00:02:07.000And if you can picture the fact that it's fundamental to nature, and therefore if you really want to understand nature, at some level you've got to grapple with it.
00:02:35.000We could have come this far in a few hundred years.
00:02:37.000And it's kind of sad that people don't realize, because they get all stuck at all this myth and superstition, and the real world is so much more interesting.
00:02:45.000It is unbelievably fascinating when you delve into the world of quantum mechanics and quantum physics and all these bizarre things that are happening far smaller than the eye can see.
00:02:58.000Well, it seems like magic, but the fact that We get it at some level is remarkable because the other thing I find that makes it magic is when you realize that the world we experience is such an illusion.
00:03:11.000That the real world is so different and I love telling you a story of how we got there because you see scientists are biased and prejudiced and have You know, they know where they're going, even when it's wrong.
00:03:24.000But science can overcome those biases and prejudices and drag us kicking and streaming in the right direction.
00:03:30.000And that's why the story is neat, but it's also lately, I've been thinking in terms of politics, why it's also neat.
00:03:35.000Because we need that to cut through the crap that we're hearing about in Washington.
00:03:39.000The same scientific methods of skeptical inquiry, of reliance on empirical evidence, of testing, of looking at many sources.
00:04:15.000Which was written by illiterate peasants 2,000 years ago and never changes because it was just as boring then as it is now.
00:04:21.000And this one keeps changing, and we're surprised every day.
00:04:24.000Well, I think one of the things that's important that you said is that scientists sometimes have ego problems and they have an idea where it's going, even if the evidence disproves them, but that science corrects it.
00:04:47.000And this story that I tell, which is, for me, actually, for me it was interesting because I really had to learn, I thought I knew the history, but of course when you write something down, you...
00:05:04.000You're looking in the wrong direction.
00:05:06.000The example I was just thinking about the other day when I was giving a talk, I don't know if you ever saw this video where you're supposed to look at these people bouncing basketballs and you're supposed to, I'm going to ruin it for you and all your listeners if they haven't.
00:05:19.000Where you're supposed to count the basketballs and see how many people are, and there's a guy walking between them in an ape suit and a gorilla suit, and you never see him.
00:05:28.000You don't even see him because you're so focused on the wrong thing.
00:05:31.000And that's the way physics often happens.
00:05:34.000We think the direction is one direction.
00:05:36.000We're so focused on it, we don't even realize the solution is there before our very eyes.
00:05:40.000And I think it's important because, you know, people think that science...
00:05:44.000You know, that scientists and science are the same thing, and they're not.
00:05:49.000The good thing about scientists, the good scientists, is they're at least willing to recognize in the end that they're wrong.
00:05:55.000So they have these preconceptions, and the great thing about science is it trains us, yeah, there are these things that are central to our being, but ultimately we realize we're wrong and we're willing to change our minds.
00:06:05.000That's the difference between science and religion, really, is that, yeah, we have biases, yeah, we have prejudices, yeah, we want to believe.
00:06:12.000We really want to believe, just like the X-Files.
00:06:14.000But eventually, when nature tells us otherwise, we throw out those beliefs like yesterday's newspaper.
00:06:36.000So it turns out that there's a fundamental principle in nature, which really was discovered by this wonderful woman mathematician, Emmy Nerther, who wasn't even allowed to get a job because she was a woman at the turn of the century.
00:08:15.000If I changed every negative charge in the world to positive charge and every positive charge to negative charge, everything would work the same way.
00:08:23.000A symmetry of nature represents something that doesn't change about nature when you make a change in a definition.
00:08:30.000So, calling electrons positively charged and protons negatively charged would not make the world difference.
00:08:58.000So every electron is negatively charged now, but now suddenly I'm God and I make every electron positively charged and I make every proton negatively charged.
00:09:07.000Nothing about the laws of physics will change.
00:10:17.000So what's white and what's black is kind of arbitrary, right?
00:10:20.000It doesn't matter, which is good because if it kind of wasn't, then chess wouldn't be a fun game because if you always had black, you might win.
00:10:26.000If you always had white, you might win.
00:11:28.000I can arbitrarily change each white square in a chess board to a black square.
00:11:34.000I can choose randomly which white squares to change to black squares.
00:11:38.000And I can still make the game of chess the same if I just have a rulebook.
00:11:43.000And the rulebook tells me, oh, if you're on that square, you can do what you could have done if it was a white square.
00:11:48.000So if I have the rulebook, then it doesn't matter what colors the squares are.
00:11:51.000If I know I was in the square that used to be white, but I call it black, and I look and I say, okay, my knight can do this in that square, but I couldn't do that.
00:11:59.000So if I have a rulebook, then I'm arbitrarily free to change the color of each square in a chessboard, as long as a rulebook tells me what I've done.
00:12:11.000Because it turns out, electromagnetism has a symmetry that says, you know what, I could change the definition of the charge on an electron here, but in the next room differently, so I could call this electron positive and that one negative, and it wouldn't change anything as long as I had a rule book that told me That I made that change and how the electromagnetic interaction would be the same.
00:12:34.000As long as I'm free to change the definition of what I call positive and negative charge locally, not globally.
00:12:41.000That means I can do it differently here and there.
00:12:43.000As long as I have a rule book that says, you know what, that electron used to be negative, so it'll still repel this electron here, even though I call it positive and I call that negative.
00:12:51.000I've changed locally the definition, but I also changed the rules.
00:12:54.000I understand that, and I understand the need for the rulebook.
00:12:56.000Now, it turns out that the rulebook really tells you it's a rule at each point in space, right?
00:13:14.000Well, it turns out the function that does that is the electromagnetic field.
00:13:20.000If you ask what would be the mathematical characteristics of a quantity that would make sure the rules remain the same no matter what I called an electron place to place, and you ask how I could write it down mathematically, It would have exactly the mathematical form of the electromagnetic field,
00:13:36.000the thing that we call the electric field or magnetic field.
00:13:40.000The mathematics of it is precisely fixed.
00:13:44.000By being able to allow us to change the definition of charge from place to place in a way that doesn't change the ultimate dynamics, doesn't change the way the world works.
00:13:55.000It's prescribed by the mathematics, the rule book is prescribed, and the mathematics of that rule book turns out, magically almost, to be exactly the mathematics of Maxwell's equations, which are the equations of electromagnetism.
00:14:06.000Here's where it gets squirrely for me.
00:14:14.000Well, because, I mean, what it says is that nature somehow has a symmetry.
00:14:18.000It doesn't depend, you don't want to, but it says nature has designed itself such that the definition of electric charge from place to place is arbitrary.
00:14:30.000It really came, if you want to step back, Einstein told us, You know, that length and time are kind of relative to...
00:14:41.000And his theory of general relativity actually said, I can define locally...
00:14:47.000What my coordinate system is, what my length is, what my time is, I can define that arbitrarily locally, and it may differ from place to place.
00:14:55.000My rulers could differ from place to place, but the universe doesn't care, because there's this thing called the gravitational field that takes into account of that, and nature has that symmetry, so it doesn't matter if I change the rulebook, if I change what I define as space and time locally,
00:15:10.000the universe behaves exactly the same.
00:15:13.000So when you say by symmetry, do you mean essentially there's a balance?
00:15:15.000That there's always going to be an equal numbers of negatives and positives, and if you change the functions of each one, it balances itself out?
00:16:31.000What we've discovered is that the playing field determines the rules.
00:16:35.000The characteristics of the playing field determine the rules.
00:16:38.000If you played baseball and there were five bases instead of four, the rules would be different.
00:16:44.000If the distance between home plate and first base was a mile, the rules would be different.
00:16:49.000If you had 25 outfielders in outfield, it would be different, okay?
00:16:54.000So the playing field determines the rules, right?
00:16:58.000Baseball would be a very different game if it were played on a field that's different.
00:17:03.000What we've discovered in nature is we used to think the forces were kind of fundamental.
00:17:07.000You know, Newton told us F equals MA and all that.
00:17:09.000What we've discovered is the thing that really constrains what can happen in the world is the playing field and the characteristics of the playing field.
00:17:17.000And for physicists, what determines the characteristics of the playing field are the symmetries of that playing field.
00:17:24.000Baseball, the fact that it looks like a diamond is a symmetry, right?
00:17:44.000And what we've learned is what's really fundamental in nature is the characteristics of that playing field and what determines the characteristics of that playing field are the symmetries of nature.
00:17:54.000The things that demonstrate to us that what we think is fundamental is really just an arbitrary label.
00:18:01.000Like electric charge, we've discovered, is an arbitrary label.
00:18:08.000And that determines the whole nature of the forces that can happen.
00:18:11.000Once you say that electric charge is an arbitrary thing and nature doesn't care what you call positive and negative from here or Mars, that determines the nature of the force, of what we call the electromagnetic force.
00:18:25.000And it turns out that's true for all the forces in nature.
00:18:27.000The nature of gravity is determined, as Einstein showed, by the fact that you can change what I define as one meter Here, and on Mars, call one meter something else, and nature doesn't care what I label as a meter.
00:18:42.000It turns out gravity takes that into account and says what we define as length is irrelevant.
00:18:49.000The fundamental gravitational field is due to a curvature of space that is independent of what we define as length or time locally.
00:18:59.000It's a weird thing, but it's a property of space and time that Einstein discovered for general relativity.
00:19:04.000We've discovered it for electromagnetism.
00:19:06.000It turns out all the forces in nature respect that same kind of mathematical symmetry, that there's some quantity that you can change in your equations.
00:19:17.000I can change its definition in the equations, but the physics remains the same.
00:19:22.000And the nature of the equations is prescribed, the mathematical form of the equations is prescribed precisely by the requirement that I can change, in the case of electric charge, that electric charge is arbitrary.
00:19:35.000I can call an electron positive or negative anywhere I want in space, and the equations don't care.
00:19:41.000That prescribes the form of the equations.
00:19:43.000They have to have a very particular form, a unique form, and that unique form happens to be the form that it has.
00:19:51.000Now, so you can say, look, it's an accident, that really there's something fundamental, that the equations have this form, and lo, and we've discovered this mathematical symmetry is an accident.
00:20:01.000Or you can say that the mathematical symmetry is fundamental, it's a property of nature, and it prescribes the form of the kind of forces that nature That the world allows.
00:20:12.000When you say that it's fundamental, that the symmetry is fundamental, do you study ecosystems?
00:20:39.000And so we often find the same mathematical formalisms apply to vastly different systems.
00:20:45.000So there's a very famous set of equations of predator and prey for ecosystems, and you can look at those equations, and they're the same kind of equations that apply in many different systems.
00:22:51.000And what I try and do in my books and other places is, look, you don't have to master it.
00:22:57.000And so, you may not master gauge symmetry, which is the most subtle and complicated thing in all of modern physics, but you can still, even if you skip that section of the book, there's still things in there you can appreciate about how we understand the world that we couldn't appreciate before, and have that orgasmic aha experience.
00:23:14.000That, hey, the world is different than I thought.
00:23:20.000So, you can appreciate science without mastering it, sure.
00:23:24.000Gate symmetry and things like it are basically mathematical concepts, so to talk about them in language without math is always sort of verbose.
00:23:34.000Well, I think what's important about your book, chapter 10 or 11, I think, I think what's really important about it is you're not speaking in layman's terms, but you're also not speaking in theoretical physicist's terms.
00:23:51.000Well, yeah, and someone, I think Richard, a few people nicely said about the book that, they claimed, as Einstein said, I'm trying to make it simple, but not simpler than it can be.
00:24:07.000Because it doesn't, you know, it says, look, you want to understand it?
00:24:11.000Okay, here's what you need to know to understand it.
00:24:15.000And here's how I can try to explain it without math.
00:24:18.000And you can puzzle through it and think about it and eventually maybe get to that aha stage.
00:24:23.000Or I could just say, you know, poof, it all happened, you know.
00:24:28.000And that's religion in a way, except the difference is this has content, religion doesn't.
00:24:32.000For people like me that have never studied it, when I read what you're doing, and I read what's been done, and I read all of the people out there that are trying to decipher all this magical stuff out there in the universe, It's important just to be aware that this is going on,
00:24:49.000because I think for the vast majority of the seven billion people on the planet, this is just unknown.
00:25:33.000I once said that one of the purposes of science is to make people uncomfortable.
00:25:37.000And I felt regretted that for a while, but it really isn't.
00:25:40.000If you're never outside your comfort zone, Then you're never growing.
00:25:45.000I completely agree, and I love that quote in the book.
00:25:47.000I think that for a lot of people, that discomfort is just, people are tired.
00:25:53.000They work, they've got jobs, they've got families, they've got a lot of stuff to do, and something like this comes along that just throws a monkey wrench into the gears of the mind.
00:26:01.000Yeah, it does, but sometimes you want your mind blown.
00:26:03.000And sometimes, you know, you can skim over or try with each of my books to say, okay, so that part you can get, but, you know, it's not like suddenly you won't understand the rest of the book.
00:26:14.000The idea that there's this invisible field everywhere in the universe that changes the way you haven't got there in the book yet, but that changes our picture of the universe.
00:26:23.000It's amazing, and people should have the opportunity to know that our picture has shown that we are a cosmic accident, that we're just like an icicle on a window whose direction, if you lived on that icicle, might seem very special to you,
00:26:55.000Well, in fact, in most cases, you wouldn't even have you and me, because there wouldn't be particles that have mass, and you wouldn't have stars and galaxies and planets.
00:27:03.000Now, what there would be, I can't say.
00:27:05.000But I can definitely say that everything we see in the universe would be gone.
00:27:09.000But you're confident that it was an accident at some point in time, and that's what created it.
00:27:13.000What I mean by accident, no more of an accident or less of an accident than an icicle on a window.
00:27:18.000Now, if you look at icicles on a window, they're beautiful patterns, they're in all different directions.
00:27:23.000Now, there's a physical reason, ultimately, why one icicle forms in a given direction.
00:27:30.000It may have been a dust particle that caused that part, you know, so we're not saying it's magic.
00:27:34.000There was ultimately some micro-physical reason why that happened and why oatmeal, when oatmeal boils, a bubble occurs in one place and not another.
00:27:41.000But there's nothing significant about that bubble popping up here or that icicle pointing in a given direction.
00:27:50.000Anything is possible in that icicle, okay?
00:27:52.000And so what I'm saying is, Our universe is the way it is because a field froze in a certain direction.
00:27:58.000Now, sure, there are laws of physics that say the field can freeze in that direction, but it's also laws of physics that say the field could have frozen maybe in another direction.
00:28:06.000And if it did, everything would be different.
00:28:09.000Now, by field, how are you defining field?
00:28:20.000It's some quantity that's defined in each point in space.
00:28:24.000And the neat thing in particle physics is every field, like an electric field, every field is associated with an elementary particle.
00:28:31.000So the electric field is produced by a coherent state of photons, the ultimate quanta of electromagnetism.
00:28:39.000The individual particles that are going into your eye right now and are being absorbed by your eyes so you can see me.
00:28:46.000The reason you can see light is it's a lot of little particles entering your eye that are reflecting off my eyes, so you can see them.
00:28:55.000And it turns out in quantum mechanics, every field, which is a function of points in space, the electric field in this room, there's a magnetic field in this room because the Earth has a magnetic field, right?
00:29:08.000If you put a compass here, we'll feel the magnetic field.
00:29:10.000That's because actually there's this coherent state of Photons that are basically very regular in space.
00:29:18.000That's really what a field is in quantum physics.
00:29:20.000A very regular configuration of elementary particles that are sort of hidden in space.
00:29:25.000And it turns out there's this background field, we call the Higgs field, which is everywhere in space and happens to have a very particular configuration.
00:29:34.000And then when the particles that make your body and my body up, when we move through it, they experience a resistance that causes them to behave as if they have mass.
00:29:43.000If the field wasn't there, the particles would be massless.
00:29:47.000If you're swimming in water, you feel pretty light, but if I filled the pool up with molasses and you tried to do 100 meters, you'd be pretty damn tired at the end of it.
00:29:56.000You'd feel like you weighed thousands of pounds.
00:30:21.000If that field is associated with particles, if I, as I like to say, it's cosmic sadomasochism, if I spank the vacuum, if I dump enough energy in empty space at a single point, I should kick out real particles if that field is there.
00:30:35.000If the Higgs field is there, if I dump enough energy in empty space, I'll kick out real particles.
00:30:42.000Let me build a big machine in Geneva, the biggest and most complicated machine humans have ever built, called the Large Hadron Collider, that dumps enough energy into a point in space that can maybe kick out Higgs particles if they're really there.
00:30:57.000On July 4, 2012, we announced the discovery of 50 particles that looked and sounded and walked and quacked like Higgs's, and we now have tested them much more, produced many more, and they're Higgs particles.
00:31:09.000It gives us evidence that that field exists.
00:31:11.000It was an outrageous and audacious claim that the properties of the universe we see are an accident due to this background field that's there, and if that background field wasn't there, the world would look very different.
00:31:26.000But is it a consequence of this field or an accident?
00:31:29.000Well, the properties of the universe we experience are a consequence of that field, but that field being there is as much an accident as an icicle freezing on a window in a certain direction.
00:31:39.000The field could have frozen with a different value.
00:31:41.000It could have frozen with a different magnitude.
00:32:49.000And it changes depending upon the temperature and the pressure and all the rest.
00:32:53.000Turns out the state of the universe changes as the universe cools.
00:32:57.000And you could think of that Higgs as like sort of a cosmic fluid that's everywhere.
00:33:03.000And as the universe cooled down, suddenly it found it would rather be in a certain configuration.
00:33:07.000It would rather be frozen than liquid.
00:33:09.000And it's some numbers that tell you whether it's acting like it's frozen or liquid.
00:33:13.000Just like I could describe the beer, I could define some numbers that would tell me whether the beer was frozen or liquid.
00:33:20.000And so as the universe cooled, that cosmic fluid, which is everywhere, all these elementary particles, if you wish, that are permeating space, suddenly found themselves preferring, as the universe cooled down, to be in a certain configuration rather than another configuration.
00:33:35.000And it really is no different than the arbitrary state of an icicle.
00:33:44.000In some sense, the accidents of the dust that's on your window and the wind that's blowing and everything else is going to determine what that pattern looks like.
00:33:55.000But every day, if you had a new cold day, the icicle pattern would look different.
00:34:06.000And that's what I mean by an accident.
00:34:08.000It's not as if the laws of physics at some level couldn't have told you that if you knew all the configurations on that day why it would look one way or another.
00:34:31.000We should celebrate that it's not quite different, because you and I can have this conversation.
00:34:36.000So it's a wonderful thing that it is the way it is.
00:34:38.000And let's celebrate that we've evolved, and I can still say that word in this country, we've evolved a consciousness so that we can appreciate all of the wonders of the universe.
00:35:22.000Because when things happen to you, suddenly they're significant.
00:35:25.000You know, you have a million crazy dreams, and then one night you dream that your friend is going to break their arm, the next day they break their leg, you go, oh my god, I'm clairvoyant.
00:35:34.000You know, or he'll say this, he'll say, you know, I just saw a license plate.
00:35:38.000You wouldn't believe, I just saw a license plate, it was J24796, can you believe it?
00:35:45.000Because, you know, that's as significant as seeing a license plate that says, 1-1-1-1-1-1, or a license plate that says, I am God.
00:35:54.000They're all just as significant, but the things that appear to mean something to us suddenly take on some significance, because we're hardwired to want to believe.
00:36:03.000Just like the X-Files said, we want to believe.
00:37:31.000But when you're talking about clairvoyance or when you're talking about some sort of a divine intervention by a deity, you're talking about something powerful.
00:37:39.000This is the one that is meant to be the leader of this tribe because he's going to lead us.
00:38:08.000That maybe would help make them happier about being alive early on, because they might be so scared of a universe that wants to kill them all the time, that it would embolden them.
00:38:17.000So there's obviously an evolutionary purpose to what is religion.
00:38:21.000Because if there wasn't, religions wouldn't be everywhere, right?
00:38:24.000I mean, pretty well all human cultures have religions.
00:38:26.000Each one is inconsistent with every other one, which is the reason we know that they're probably all wrong.
00:38:34.000The fact that it's universal must mean there's some evolutionary utility to believing.
00:38:41.000But then, certain things eventually, even though they worked and were useful early on, as our human condition changes, they may not be so useful.
00:38:50.000Well, that seems to be the place where we're at now as a civilization.
00:38:53.000I would argue that religion is turning out to be counterproductive now.
00:38:56.000It may have been useful early on in human history, but now what it's doing is it's getting in the way not only of progress, but of human cooperation.
00:39:06.000And so evolution is now counterproductive.
00:39:11.000But the great thing is we have a consciousness, we have an intellect, so we can actually overcome that evolutionary predilection by realizing we have that predilection.
00:39:21.000And as Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself.
00:39:26.000So if you're a scientist, what you have to do is ask yourself, am I believing that because I want to believe or because there's evidence?
00:39:32.000So if we constantly are skeptical of ourselves, we can know to overcome that ingrained impulse we have to want to believe.
00:39:42.000That's one of the utilities of science.
00:39:44.000So I may listen to you and like you, and I may listen to another radio person and not like them, and I may be therefore naturally willing to assume that they're wrong and you're right.
00:39:54.000But I should also say to myself, Is it really the case, or is it just because I like Joe Rogan and I don't like, you know, you pick your favorite right-wing nut?
00:40:02.000And so we should be asking ourselves, okay, maybe I should go beyond my predilections, beyond my biases, to ask why I am sympathetic to what I'm hearing.
00:40:14.000And if we did that in everyday life, I think we'd cut through the crap more carefully.
00:40:18.000So science says, look, we are hardwired to want to have these weird beliefs.
00:40:26.000But the only way to know is to test them.
00:40:27.000If we're not willing to test our beliefs, And subject them to the test of nature, then we're going to be deluded.
00:40:35.000And that's the problem with a lot of what's happening in our government.
00:40:39.000People are saying, you know what, I really want to believe in this absurd story, and therefore I refuse to accept evolution.
00:40:46.000If you're Mike Pence, the Vice President of the country, you say, I don't believe evolution, because it doesn't agree with my ridiculous fundamentalist And he said that in Congress, right?
00:40:55.000He said, we shouldn't be teaching evolution in schools.
00:40:57.000We should be teaching intelligent design.
00:41:07.000It might be, I think, because he knows that a large percentage of the country finds comfort in a leader that subscribes to the same sort of superstitions that they do.
00:42:08.000You may not want to believe in it, but it happened.
00:42:10.000And for you to withhold that kind of knowledge from your kids because you're worried it's going to affect their faith is, in my opinion, child abuse.
00:42:18.000Because you're hindering their capabilities as an adult in a society which is highly technological to function effectively.
00:42:25.000But they're doing it because they believe it as well.
00:42:50.000In fact, as Steve Weinberg, who's a Nobel Prize winning physicist, has said, and I love it, he said, so there are good people in the world, there are bad people.
00:42:57.000Good people do good things, bad people do bad things.
00:43:00.000When good people do bad things, it's religion.
00:43:03.000Do you think that religion in its earliest stages was, in a sense, primitive man with no science, trying to figure out the world and trying to have some sort of rules, like almost like a scaffolding in order to move to the next?
00:43:21.000If you see that it exists in so many different cultures, that it might have been something along those lines.
00:43:35.000But claiming that we today should be guided by the worldview of illiterate peasants in the Iron Age peasants who didn't know the Earth orbited the Sun and wrote down scriptures based on their beliefs at the time, they argue that that should guide our life today when we discovered 100 billion galaxies in the universe and discovered all this stuff,
00:44:15.000No doubt, religious ideas, and all our early scientists were religious, because there's the only game in town.
00:44:20.000You couldn't be educated, except the church controlled all the universities, and so it was like the National Science Foundation of the 16th century.
00:44:28.000It's not surprising they were all religious, because that was the only game in town.
00:44:32.000So that helped create the birth of modern science, but science outgrew it.
00:45:07.000But I found people come up to me I had no idea of this.
00:45:11.000It's one of the negative aspects of religion that I never appreciated.
00:45:15.000I have people come up to me, almost every day I write me, and saying, you know what, I saw that movie, and I realized I'm not a bad person for asking questions.
00:45:33.000And they're told by everyone else, not only you'll go to hell, but you're a bad person.
00:45:37.000And suddenly they discover that's not true.
00:45:40.000And so I think there are a lot of people who have that force down their throat.
00:45:42.000It's really hard when you're a kid, you know, and have these...
00:45:47.000And that's why I do think any kind of religion for kids is kind of child abuse, no matter what, because these concepts of a deity and the possible existence of a purpose of the universe are very deep and subtle concepts.
00:46:02.000To ram that down a three-year-old kid's throat is unfair, because the kid can't address it.
00:46:06.000It ends up being internalized in ways, and a lot of people, you know, I hear a lot of people who've had deep religious educations who say, you know, it's hard to outgrow that, because when that's thrust into you as a child, it's really hard to ever overcome it.
00:46:20.000The guilt feelings that many religions introduce, the fundamental notion that, you know, Ultimately sinful, and no matter what you do is sinful, is something a lot of people have hard times with.
00:46:33.000And that claim of sin is just so, you know, I've debated people who argue that homosexuality is sinful.
00:47:15.000There's some biological purpose to it.
00:47:18.000And so, to argue that it's both unnatural and wrong is to misunderstand biology.
00:47:25.000But people grow up being told it's evil because the Bible said it.
00:47:29.000And then they don't want to give people who are homosexual the same rights as other people because they say God didn't want them to have the homosexual.
00:47:36.000So the problem is people are told these things that are ultimately wrong because for whatever reason the tribe that wrote down that scripture Wanted to make sure that there weren't homosexual relationships in the group.
00:47:51.000Well, it's really baffling when you talk to people about the Bible and the Old Testament versus the New Testament, and they don't even understand where the New Testament was created by Constantine and a bunch of bishops.
00:48:16.000And the reason that nowadays the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity may seem a little less violent than Islam for some people is because people take the Koran literally.
00:48:31.000Very few, very few people take the Bible as literally as, namely, hey, we're going to stone kids.
00:48:38.000In the 12th century they may have, but now we've outgrown it, and Islam is 600 years younger.
00:48:44.000And so it's just, the Old Testament is just as violent as the Koran, but no one takes it seriously.
00:48:50.000Most people who call themselves religious They pick and choose the things they like from the Bible or the New Testament or the Old Testament.
00:48:56.000They pick and choose the nice, kinder, gentler things.
00:49:00.000You know, Richard Dawkins Foundation in England did an interesting survey.
00:49:04.000So the British government does a census, you know, and they ask people's religions as part of it.
00:49:10.000And in the last census, remarkably, only 55% of the people said they were Christian.
00:49:14.000Church of England, which was one of the lowest ever.
00:49:39.000People throw out all of the evil, and it's not just the Old Testament.
00:49:42.000No one talked about hell more than Jesus Christ.
00:49:46.000A guy who's supposed to love everyone talked about hell, this eternal damnation for people who disobey, as Christopher Hitchens used to say, God is like a cosmic Saddam Hussein.
00:49:56.000But worse, because Saddam Hussein used to just torture his enemies while they're alive.
00:50:54.000So the letter A is the number one, and words also had numerical value.
00:50:58.000And when you think about, I mean, and this is, if you've actually ever looked at this, it's amazing.
00:51:02.000So people say, the Bible, you know, is just the Word of God.
00:51:05.000But they don't realize that this came by, in fact, the King James Version was decided by a bunch of people who decided what to throw out.
00:51:13.000There were parts of the earlier Bible they didn't like, they threw out.
00:51:16.000They determined what is now the Old Testament in the King James Version was a bunch of people who got together and decided to throw things out and how to translate things and what to do.
00:51:48.000It was his determination after 14 years of deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls that the entire Christian religion was a massive misunderstanding, that it was really all about consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility cults.
00:52:02.000It's fascinating, but there are a lot of people who have written really interesting books on the early history of the Christian religion and Judaism.
00:52:09.000And I know a number of those scholars, and it's really fascinating.
00:52:12.000In fact, there's really great evidence that Jesus wasn't even divine in the early Christian way.
00:52:17.000I mean, his divinity came about 300 years later.
00:52:21.000And so religion has evolved, and we now take it as if it was sort of obvious.
00:52:29.000Apparently, according to the books I've been reading lately, there's really good evidence that, you know, Not only did Jesus never call himself God, his followers never did either.
00:52:39.000And this resurrection thing was put in later when people wanted to make him divine.
00:52:49.000But what's really amazing, and this is what bothers me, I wrote a piece for the New Yorker once that said all scientists should be militant atheists.
00:52:57.000Yeah, you were really criticized for that.
00:53:02.000Yeah, but the point is that people who criticize me never read the piece, which often happens for my work, because there was a title, and the editor chose the title, which is fine, but what I said was, When I simply asked the question, could it be that Jesus was,
00:53:19.000you know, what I just said, could it be that Jesus wasn't always considered divine in the Christian religion?
00:53:37.000In our society, nothing should be sacred.
00:53:40.000Everything should be open to question.
00:53:42.000So if simply questioning makes me a militant atheist, then all scientists should be militant atheists, because we should adore questioning.
00:53:50.000And so I wasn't arguing, you know, we should be handing out pamphlets.
00:53:54.000I said, we should be asking questions.
00:53:57.000And so the discussion you and I just had would be viewed by some people, and will be viewed by some people, as sinful, as sacrilege, should not be on the air, should not be allowed to have that discussion, because how dare we question the divinity of Jesus Christ, because after all,
00:54:13.000He was God, and to question His divinity is to do the work of the devil.
00:54:19.000And that's so sad, because, you know, you should be questioning.
00:54:23.000And it is fascinating where people draw that line, too, whether they draw the line at the New Testament, or whether they go back to the Old Testament, or whether they even...
00:54:31.000I mean, how many people are believers in the Dead Sea Scrolls?
00:54:34.000I mean, how many people have gone over the work from Qumran with a fine-tooth comb?
00:55:21.000But it is strange to me that people do draw those arbitrary lines at when they decide the doctrine is real.
00:55:27.000They'll tell you, you know, if you start talking to them about the Old Testament and they're trying to be a Christian apologist, they'll say, well, listen, you're talking about the Old Testament, and we don't go by that.
00:55:36.000We go by that thing that Emperor of Rome created with a bunch of bishops, and he wasn't even Christian himself until he was on his deathbed.
00:58:14.000And there are people who do good things.
00:58:15.000There are people who are more generous and give to charity because of religion and help their neighbors and go to, you know, at Christmas time, go to soup kitchens and all.
00:58:52.000I would argue that on average, and this is where you can have a debate, but on average I would say the net effect of religion is negative.
00:59:00.000And I know colleagues of mine, some of whom would disagree with me on that, but I think if you look at the net effect of religion on society in the current world, and maybe even over human history, The net effect is negative.
00:59:11.000And I would argue you could probably get many of the same features.
00:59:15.000If we dispense with religion right now, it'd be a problem.
00:59:18.000Because right now, for many people, religion gives them community, a sense of community, a sense of belonging, and maybe for many a sense of comfort and death and all sorts of things.
01:00:17.000But could we imagine building a sense of community because we care about each other and we have a commonality in other ways?
01:00:24.000That's another thing that makes science so wonderful, right?
01:00:26.000I've called the Large Hadron Collider the Gothic Cathedral of the 21st century because the Gothic The cathedrals were built in the 11th or 12th century by thousands of artisans over centuries working together.
01:00:37.000They had different languages, different cultures, different religions maybe, not so many different religions back then, but they worked together.
01:00:44.000The Large Hadron Collider is built by 10,000 scientists from over 100 different countries with different languages, different religions.
01:01:08.000With science, in principle, anyone can do it.
01:01:12.000And we're all working towards a common goal, which is to understand how the universe works.
01:01:17.000We're not interested in pushing our own picture or joining together to believe anything.
01:01:24.000That's the other thing people think of.
01:01:26.000Scientists push evolution because we all get together at night and with special rings and talk to each other and say, we don't want to believe anything else.
01:01:33.000They don't realize if you're a scientist.
01:01:36.000The biggest way to become famous, and what we all do when we go into work every day, is try and prove our colleagues wrong.
01:01:42.000Because that's how you really make progress.
01:01:44.000Hey, something we thought was right is really not what we thought it was.
01:01:48.000Those are the great discoveries that push people forward.
01:01:50.000So it's not as if we all buy into the same thing.
01:01:53.000We're all trying to push knowledge forward, which means we're trying to discover...
01:02:02.000And so scientists are bound together not to push their own...
01:02:05.000I mean, of course we all have theories, but we're all willing to throw them out if the theories are proven wrong.
01:02:12.000And we're all willing to celebrate being wrong.
01:02:15.000And that's a wonderful thing, and as I always say, if you're a theoretical physicist, the two favourite states to be in are either wrong or confused, because that's great, because then you're going to learn something.
01:02:26.000And if we are more comfortable with not knowing, which is the other aspect, I think, that science for many people is terrifying, because if you deeply believe you know the answers, if you deeply believe there's a God, you can put aside that uncertainty.
01:02:41.000And for many people, uncertainty is terrifying.
01:02:43.000But being comfortable with not knowing is wonderful.
01:02:47.000And moreover, I would argue, is better for teachers and for parents.
01:02:51.000You know, your kids ask you questions and you really want to always give them the answer, whether you know it or not.
01:03:31.000It's the process, and that's what we need to teach in school, the process of skeptical inquiry, relying on evidence, checking many sources, testing your ideas constantly.
01:03:42.000Those are the tools kids need to deal effectively in the modern world with an internet that's full of, and with news sources which are equally full of misinformation as well as information.
01:03:53.000One of the biggest issues I think that people are having with religion in the 21st century is these areas where you're not allowed to question and explore.
01:04:00.000That things hit these walls where this is God's will and this is the way it is.
01:04:05.000And in my mind, what we say, that is just a cold word for I don't want to think about it.
01:04:48.000You can never say up front that science will never explain this or that because you haven't tried.
01:04:54.000And in my experience as a scientist, I've been, you know, there could have been brick walls, but I've watched progressively those brick walls crumble as we move around them, or we break them, and it is so exhilarating, and that's why it's the greatest story ever told.
01:05:09.000It's so exhilarating to see them knocked down, and things you thought we'd never understand.
01:05:13.000I remember one of the forces in nature, a very prominent physicist, the 19...
01:05:21.000It will be a hundred years before we discover, understand this interaction.
01:05:26.000And it's so wonderful to see how the story surmounts The biases and the anticipation of individual scientists.
01:05:35.000That's the greatest story ever told so far.
01:05:38.000Well, what's ridiculous about saying no one will ever figure anything out is that what we figured out over the last 200 years is monumental and that human language has only been around for 40,000.
01:05:53.000As long as we don't, as long as we keep open inquiry.
01:05:57.000You could imagine moving, I mean, look, we went through a few hundred years of the Middle Ages where the incredible inquiry-based civil culture of the Greeks was just forgotten.
01:06:10.000You know, Greeks had determined the circumference of the earth, not only that it was round, but what its circumference was by simple measurements that were then not accepted because of dogma.
01:06:20.000So we have to, if we want to progress, we have to beware of dogma.
01:06:24.000How did they figure out the circumference of the earth?
01:06:48.000So the rays of the sun, which are coming down in the same direction towards the Earth everywhere, comes down in the deep well.
01:06:53.000But 100 miles away, the well, because the surface of the Earth is curved, the well is pointing in a little bit different direction.
01:06:59.000So the sun's rays come at a slightly different angle.
01:07:02.000So on this day, I will measure that the Sun is directly overhead for me, but I'll get my friend 100 miles away to measure the angle of the Sun relative to the well, and that tells you that the Earth is curved.
01:07:15.000And if you do the geometry, you can work out if the 100 miles of the Earth's surface causes the Sun's rays to suddenly be at that angle, how curved the Earth is and what the circumference of the Earth is.
01:07:25.000It's plain geometry that, in principle, any high school student could do.
01:07:28.000But when you say 100 miles away, first of all, how are they communicating with this guy 100 miles away?
01:07:32.000They're not immediately, but the guy writes it down, and then he takes a horse, and they come and compare notes later.
01:07:36.000And they use a sundial to determine the time?
01:07:38.000The sundial to determine the time, and the...
01:07:41.000But 100 miles away, would there be a deviation at all in the time, a minute or two?
01:07:45.000Well, yeah, but so to some accuracy, you get it wrong to some accuracy.
01:08:43.000Carry a magnet and look at it as what happens as you're falling to the earth.
01:08:45.000Well, what's even more hilarious is that they, well, we talked about this before the podcast started, the Japanese weather satellite that takes an image, a full image of the earth.
01:08:56.000What is the name of that satellite again, Jamie?
01:08:59.000It takes a full image of the earth from 22,000 miles away.
01:09:04.000People keep saying in this flat earth theory thing that there's no images of the earth in full, that they're all composites.
01:09:12.000There are images of the earth that are taken every 10 minutes by this one satellite and they're high resolution.
01:09:17.000You can access them online anytime you want.
01:09:21.000But people see those and they want to think they're fake, but yet they believe there's an ice wall around Antarctica that you cross over and you fall to the abyss.
01:09:53.000Well, no, but they probably think it's a human invention.
01:09:56.000But you know, the sun is still shining in L.A. when it's gone down in New York and they can call their friends and check.
01:10:02.000And if the Earth was flat, that wouldn't be the case.
01:10:05.000It's only the case because the Earth is curved.
01:10:07.000So those simple things should convince people.
01:10:10.000But people are willing to throw out evidence if they have a belief That's really firm.
01:10:14.000And what I said before is we have to realize the easiest person to fool is yourself.
01:10:20.000So if you're not willing to question your beliefs, especially those that you hold particularly cherished beliefs in, if you're not willing to question those, you're not going to ever grow.
01:10:30.000Yeah, well, that's a good way to put it, particularly cherish, because I think a lot of people do cherish these ideas, things like the earth being flat, because it gives them some sort of information leg up on everybody.
01:10:39.000I know something that people don't know.
01:10:41.000Or it makes them feel better about themselves.
01:10:42.000They may hate gays because it makes them feel better about not being gay.
01:11:20.000Again, Richard Dawkins tells me about an astrophysicist he knows who, during the day, you know, studies objects in the sky and looks at galaxies or stars and measures that they're 12 billion years old or whatever.
01:11:35.000But yet he goes home at night and is convinced that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
01:12:10.000So many people, you know, when I talk about this, I don't want to seem pompous in the sense of saying, oh, I'm better, or scientists are better.
01:12:18.000Science is better, because science helps us overcome those pitfalls.
01:13:22.000But I think you're talking about measurable things and elements and things that you could sort of expose and explain.
01:13:28.000But what these people seem to be really obsessed with is people lying about stuff and covering up secrets about, like, the earth being flat or Yeah, they like to believe there's a conspiracy.
01:14:32.000There's got to be someone making it happen.
01:14:33.000Just like the reason we burned witches, right?
01:14:37.000Because there were storms or there wasn't, you know, there wasn't crops that year.
01:14:41.000And a lot of people say, it's an interesting historical...
01:14:44.000theory, which I think seems quite plausible to me, that when Newton discovered the laws of gravity, the universal law of gravity, it contributed to the ending of the burning of witches.
01:14:54.000I thought that that was a myth, the burning of witches.
01:15:06.000And then when Newton discovered that even the planets are affected by the same laws that an apple is, there's a universal loss.
01:15:13.000It meant that physical effects had physical causes.
01:15:16.000And when bad things happen, there's a physical reason.
01:15:19.000There's not someone you can blame and witches or whatever.
01:15:23.000And so there's a lot of arguments that suggest that that kind of development in physics led to the end of blaming people for bad crops or for bad things happening.
01:15:33.000But I think that's the kind of thing when we want to find someone to blame, rather than just saying, the universe doesn't give a shit about me.
01:15:40.000And anybody interested in this, this is a really fascinating subject, but the whole Salem witch trial thing, there's a lot of really convincing evidence that seems to point towards ergot poisoning, that there was a late freeze, and that this particular type of fungus grew on some of their wheat that makes ergot,
01:15:59.000which has very LSD-like properties, and they think these people thought they were being bewitched because they're being contaminated.
01:17:37.000And then we have to look at those things and ask what there is.
01:17:40.000And if we explore those things, then there's a better chance that we can deal with them and ask what's useful and what isn't.
01:17:46.000But if we refuse to acknowledge that those things exist and that they may be the purpose of our religion or our beliefs or whatever, then we can't possibly overcome them.
01:17:59.000I'm going to change gears a little bit here, but are you concerned at all about AI? Yeah, yes.
01:18:05.000We just had a workshop again at My Origins Project, which you can watch it online, the public event anyway.
01:18:24.000I'm so pleased and privileged that people find things that interesting and come over and over again.
01:18:32.000So we ran this event called the Future of AI, Who's in Control?
01:18:36.000Because associated with it, we had a scientific workshop on what are the possible disruptive influences of AI. Now, AI is going to change the world.
01:18:44.000The future is not going to be like the past.
01:18:46.000What it means to be human is not going to be like it was the past.
01:20:20.000That may be, but on the other hand, it could be that intelligent AI decides that there's no need.
01:20:29.000For example, here's something that one of the people who was at our workshop, Jan Tallinn, who founded Skype, was one of the coordinators of our workshop.
01:20:38.000He says, well, you know, oxygen is really bad for oxidation of electronic systems, okay?
01:20:47.000So if AI could control, you know, technology, they might want to systematically reduce the oxygen content of the atmosphere.
01:20:57.000That wouldn't be so good for humanity.
01:20:59.000So you can imagine the other extreme where basically intelligent AI systems control most of the technology in the world and maneuver things so humans become extinct.
01:21:09.000So you can imagine one realm or the other, but unless you think about the ways that you can try and ensure that the future is as good as it can be, you've got to at least confront those possibilities.
01:21:22.000You don't put your head in the sand and you don't go, oh my god, the world is ending.
01:21:26.000You say, look, there are changes that are going to happen.
01:21:29.000For example, AI will displace millions of people from their work.
01:21:42.000Well, there are two possibilities, and one of them was imagined by John Maynard Keynes when he thought about what industrialization would do.
01:21:48.000He said, you know, the effects of it is that, yeah, machines are going to do a lot of the work that people are going to do, but the great thing is that'll free people from the work.
01:21:54.000They'll be able to go have coffee in coffee shops, go read books, see plays.
01:22:00.000The quality of their life will improve.
01:22:02.000But of course, that didn't happen because, you know, the increased resources that were, the increased money and all of that that was generated by industrialization wasn't uniformly distributed at some point.
01:22:15.000When we are billions of people out of work, we're going to have to decide to say, you know what?
01:22:18.000Those machines have produced a higher net potential quality of life for everyone.
01:22:26.000So some sort of universal basic income.
01:22:28.000Yeah, and I think, frankly, we have a choice.
01:22:30.000Either we, as machines, begin to do just that, we have a choice to move in that direction, it seems to me, or we have a choice to move in a direction of incredible socioeconomic...
01:22:44.000That's going to create huge, huge societal problems.
01:22:47.000And I'm worried that in our society, for example, that doesn't even want to provide health care to everyone, where some people say, why should I pay for you when you're sick?
01:22:58.000Even though we live in a society that's wealthy enough to do just that, that we'll never get to a point where we say, you know what, these machines have generated incredible wealth.
01:23:08.000Let's allow all the people who've been displaced to benefit from that wealth.
01:23:13.000I suspect that won't happen, and I'm pessimistic about the future, although as my friend Cormac McCarthy says, because he's a really chipper fellow, but he writes very dark books, and when I first met him, I said, how can you be so cheerful?
01:23:26.000And he said, you know, I'm a pessimist, but that's no reason to be gloomy.
01:23:31.000And that's become my mantra ever since then.
01:24:37.000Or, you know, in various places, they don't want the lights to happen because the turtles don't, you know, mate if the lights are on the beach.
01:24:42.000We don't do such a good job about that.
01:24:44.000We don't, but they'll be better than us, right?
01:24:45.000Right, but we might be an evil hyena-like species to them.
01:24:49.000If we are, then why should we be around?
01:24:51.000That's a good question, but I mean, I'm worried about that.
01:25:02.000Well, then you say, look, I'm my offspring.
01:25:03.000And in fact, actually, I do think, ultimately, if machines can program themselves and ultimately become better, then it will be difficult for biology to keep up.
01:25:13.000And our future as humans could easily be...
01:25:17.000What you would call the Borg in Star Trek.
01:25:18.000It could easily say, the only sensible way is to merge.
01:25:56.000That's what's really fascinating is the idea that we are some sort of, not just a creator, but that we are the predecessors of some greater species.
01:26:17.000And we have to try and prepare for it as best as possible to try and make sure it works out as well as possible.
01:26:24.000I begin this book, The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far, with a quote from Virgil from the Aeneid saying, I think these are the tiers of things and they're I should, you know, I don't know if you have a copy of the book around.
01:28:18.000Well, you know, of course, whenever I see science fiction, I try to suspend disbelief, okay?
01:28:25.000I think the idea, in fact, I showed a clip from Ex Machina in our event.
01:28:30.000Because I think there are many possible negative consequences of artificial intelligence.
01:28:38.000One of them is malevolence, but the other is unintended negative consequences.
01:28:43.000And I thought Max Machina was a wonderful example of unintended negative consequences of artificial intelligence.
01:28:49.000I don't think that lovely young woman was designed to be evil, but it was an unintended consequence when she saw an opportunity for herself.
01:28:57.000I mean, and the other one I showed, of course, is from 2001, Space Odyssey, the great Hal, where Hal says, sorry, Dave, I can't do that.
01:29:04.000And I think it's wonderful and thoughtful, and it was thought-provoking.
01:29:10.000And as I say, I've come to know Alex Garland, who wrote it and directed it since then, and he's a very thoughtful and interesting guy.
01:29:21.000I always try and analyze it afterwards, and sometimes as a scientist, I try not to get in the way of liking science fiction because, of course, they all involve...
01:29:51.000And the example that comes to mind is I remember a New York Times reporter after the physics of Star Trek came out said, can I go with you to a science fiction movie and watch you and talk to you about it?
01:30:01.000And so we went to see Starship Troopers.
01:30:05.000This is the stupidest movie of all time.
01:31:50.000When you think about artificial intelligence, do you consider, like, one of the things that freaks me out is that what we consider life, when we think about instincts and needs and desires, Those won't necessarily be programmed at all into any artificial life.
01:32:10.000Well, one of the questions that arises, and this is a huge point of discussion among AI researchers, because I've been to a bunch of meetings in preparation for our meeting, is whether, and I find this statement almost vacuous, but I'm amazed that they use it all the time, to program machines with human values.
01:33:18.000We want them to become the most capable human beings they can be, so that they can go out and do the best stuff.
01:33:23.000So why is it different for a computer?
01:33:25.000I'd want to make the most capable, intelligent, resourceful machine I ever could, because then I at least, all the evidence suggests to me that that machine will make the best decisions.
01:33:36.000Right, but if the machine doesn't have an ability to breed sexually, and if it doesn't have ego, and if it doesn't necessarily have creativity because it doesn't need to be praised for its ego...
01:33:46.000Oh, I don't think creativity comes from needing to be praised for ego.
01:33:49.000I think creativity is one of the great intrinsic aspects of human beings that makes being a human being worth being a human being.
01:33:55.000Well, I think, I agree with you, but I think if you're going to connect that sort of mindset to a computer or to artificial intelligence, don't you think it would have some need to create?
01:34:05.000Like, our need to create is, like, we like to express ourselves to other people.
01:34:10.000If you were alone on an island, do you think you would create?
01:35:56.000But you can imagine a sufficiently intelligent computer would be creative, because in order to do physics and science, you need to be creative.
01:36:02.000You know, in fact, I just did an event with Alan Alda in New York City.
01:36:08.000Yeah, who's a great guy, an intelligent man, and very interested in science and science communication.
01:36:12.000We've done a few events together, one with my origins project we can see online.
01:36:16.000So he was interviewing me, or we had a dialogue, but he was interviewing me about the new book, and in the context of that and science communication.
01:36:24.000And he said something wonderful, both there and earlier.
01:36:27.000He said, because it's so counterintuitive to modern culture's perception, he said, art...
01:36:39.000And I thought, wow, because that's the opposite of what most people think.
01:36:42.000But in fact, science, art requires rigor.
01:36:45.000You've got to just get just the right colors and work really hard to get the right patterns, whether that art is music or, you know, by art, I'm talking very broadly.
01:36:54.000Whereas science makes progress because we're creative.
01:37:24.000And I think that beautiful dichotomy, that juxtaposition of art and rigor and science and creativity is something wonderful that Alan said, and we should realize it's a characteristic.
01:37:34.000Science does involve creativity and rigor, but so does all the areas of human activity that make the story of humans so wonderful.
01:37:43.000That's why it's the greatest story ever told so far.
01:37:46.000Many, many aspects of human life require creativity.
01:39:02.000I guess I'm concerned that we've got to make sure we understand what we're doing at each step so we don't produce massive negative results that could have been avoided.
01:39:14.000But I'm not as concerned that the future will be different than the past.
01:39:21.000When you see some of the emerging technologies like CRISPR, some of these genetic engineering technologies where they're starting to use non-viable human fetuses and run some tests on them, are you concerned at all about that?
01:39:44.000No, no, it's not just let things happen.
01:39:48.000Watch what's going to happen, try and anticipate the results, understand them in detail, anticipate what the results are, and avoid negative ones to the extent you can.
01:39:57.000But accept the fact that things are going to change.
01:39:59.000But accept the fact that things are going to change.
01:40:05.000Aren't we happy that the world is different than it was during medieval times?
01:40:09.000I mean, except for, you know, Mike Pence and other people.
01:40:12.000The rest of us are happy, or, you know, I can pick a lot of radio commentators, but most of us are happy that the world has gotten more open, more interesting, and so that's part of the human drama, is that it's going to go places and we don't know where it's going to go,
01:40:28.000and that's okay, but we should all work as much as we can to try and make sure, to the extent that we can, that the direction it heads is a good one, is beneficial, more interesting, more exciting, more possibilities, more fun for everybody.
01:40:43.000And maybe even more sustainable, because it seems reasonable that it should be sustainable if we think we care about not just our children, but our grandchildren and their grandchildren.
01:40:51.000And so it's self-interest in some sense, to be interested in conservation and sustainability instead of immediate profit.
01:41:00.000Of course, you might say, if I amass enough wealth, then my children will be fine forever.
01:41:04.000And who gives a damn about the rest of the people's children?
01:41:07.000But, you know, we can decide that maybe it's in the best interests of everyone, if human society is sustainable, because there'll be less likelihood for extreme war, extreme violence, blah, blah, blah.
01:41:43.000Without is, you can never get to ought.
01:41:46.000Without knowing the consequences of your actions, which is what science is all about, you can't decide what's good and bad.
01:41:53.000And so science and reason is an essential part of any progress because we can't possibly decide what economic policies to enact or what social policies or what technological policies if we don't know the consequences of actions.
01:42:11.000It was so stupid for the Republicans to design this healthcare policy and promote it before anyone had analyzed, say, the economic impact of it.
01:42:19.000I mean, they could have still decided to do it.
01:42:22.000But at least that data would have been useful for making a final decision.
01:42:31.000But getting back to that CRISPR thing, if that becomes available, and if it advances to the point where it's available to people that are live today, would you give it a shot?
01:42:42.000Would you change anything about yourself?
01:42:53.000Because, you know, we can hack computers, and if you can hack DNA, as a lot of kids want to do, in fact, I was told years ago, I'm chairman of the board of something called the Bull's Need of Atomic Scientists, the board of sponsors, that sets the doomsday clock every year.
01:43:05.000And so we have to think about existential threats to mankind.
01:43:08.000I remember about seven or eight years ago, we had a professor from MIT who said his...
01:43:12.000Computer science students were most interested in hacking DNA. Much more interested than hacking DNA. Because it's just a code.
01:43:19.000And so, if you can manipulate arbitrarily, in a very precise way, DNA, then of course there are many good things that can come.
01:43:27.000And maybe you can make yourself stronger, bigger, whatever you want.
01:43:30.000Maybe we're not you, maybe your children, whatever.
01:43:32.000And maybe you can overcome genetic diseases, which of course would be great.
01:43:37.000But you can also, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
01:43:40.000And with that you can also imagine hacking, right?
01:43:44.000And creating new viruses or whatever you want.
01:43:45.000And so, yeah, it's any new technology.
01:43:59.000Some people are afraid of self-driving cars because they do present moral problems.
01:44:04.000If a car is designed to minimize the number of people it kills, and it can do that by killing you, if you're faced with running into five school children or the car turning and hitting a wall...
01:44:15.000What do you want your car program to do?
01:44:18.000And these are fascinating questions we will have to address.
01:44:21.000But technology can be used in many ways, and it's terrifying, but it's trite to use this old expression.
01:44:30.000But I do think of it at times, which is a little thing I gave my stepdaughter once that said, ships are safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are meant to do.
01:44:41.000I mean, you can bury your head in the sand, you can never go outside the house for fear of being run over by a car or being embarrassed or whatever, or you can choose to live a life.
01:44:55.000But to me, living the life is more interesting.
01:44:58.000That's why, in the book, I point out you can choose how to look at the world.
01:45:04.000You can choose to say you're the center of the universe, and if that makes you feel better, fine, and the universe was created for you.
01:45:09.000Or you can choose to let your beliefs conform to the evidence of reality and assume the universe exists and evolved independent of your existence.
01:45:17.000And in that case, you're bound to be surprised.
01:45:20.000Isn't it better to have a life full of surprise than a life that doesn't have any?
01:45:25.000What I'm thinking is, I'm wondering about these technological advancements when it comes to the ability to manipulate the human body, and when they get to the point where we don't have the same issues that we have today with diseases and injuries, or even with biological inferiorities.
01:46:17.000Because you know enough physiology now or whatever, exercise physiology, that you can manipulate your body more efficiently now than you could before.
01:46:24.000And people can run faster miles or jump higher because we've been...
01:46:33.000I just wondered what your thoughts are on the future when there aren't these physiological imbalances.
01:46:39.000I try to anticipate the possibilities and to the extent I can discuss what they are so that we as a society can address them more cogently.
01:46:47.000I do not, however, generally make predictions about anything less than two trillion years in the future.
01:47:47.000Okay, it is true that it's amazing that most galaxies that we can measure have large black holes in the center, which leads to an interesting question we don't have the answer to, and one of the reasons we're building the James Webb Space Telescope.
01:48:30.000And did the black holes form and that was necessary for the galaxies to coalesce around them?
01:48:34.000Or did the galaxies exist and then the black holes built up hierarchically by swallowing things and getting bigger and bigger and bigger?
01:48:40.000It's a question we don't know the answer to.
01:48:42.000When we build that thing, we might have the answer to it.
01:48:44.000It'll be an interesting question that we resolve.
01:48:47.000It is amazing that, as far as we can tell, these supermassive black holes exist.
01:48:51.000Even though we don't know they're black holes, by the way.
01:48:53.000We know they kind of look like black holes and quack like black holes and walk like black holes.
01:48:58.000But what I mean is we can tell there are mass concentrations that are immense, a billion solar masses, in a region so small that our theories tell us they should be a black hole.
01:49:09.000But we don't know if the consequences of general relativity tell us that they are black holes, but the simplest assumption is that they are, that nothing escapes from them, that they formed classically like black holes.
01:49:22.000And they're fascinating, and we're learning about black holes, by the way, or putative black holes in ways we never thought we could, because we now have a new window on the universe, gravitational waves.
01:49:33.000This LIGO detector just detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes that coalesce and just discovered that the predictions of general relativity are validated.
01:49:42.000We're like Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens and saw the moons of Jupiter.
01:49:48.000We've just opened a new window on the universe and it'll be the new astronomy of the 21st and 22nd centuries and we will learn things we had no Knowledge about, because that new window will reveal to us the dynamics of black holes in ways we never thought possible.
01:50:20.000We know classically, if general relativity tells us what's happening, we know that things will collapse to an infinitely dense singularity.
01:50:27.000But, you know, most of us physicists think infinite is a pretty bad word.
01:50:31.000That in physical reality, things don't get infinitely dense.
01:50:34.000That the laws of quantum mechanics are going to change things.
01:50:37.000And when things get sufficiently dense, so that quantum mechanics has to be applied to gravity.
01:50:42.000And the only time that really happens Operationally, or either the beginning of our universe, when our entire observable universe was in potentially an infinitely dense singularity, or at the center of black holes.
01:50:55.000That's the only places where that matters.
01:50:57.000When quantum mechanics must be applied to gravity, our current physical theories break down.
01:51:03.000So we don't know what happens in the ultimate state of black holes.
01:51:07.000One possibility is indeed they are a portal to another universe.
01:51:10.000Because what's really interesting is what you see from the inside of a black hole and the outside are very different.
01:51:16.000If you're inside of a black hole, the space can look like it's expanding.
01:51:21.000Whereas outside the black hole, it can look like the black hole is contracting.
01:51:25.000Because general relativity tells you that your perceptions of what space is doing around you, in some sense, depends upon the gravitational configuration in which you live.
01:51:39.000In general relativity, you can be moving and standing still at the same time.
01:52:10.000So general relativity says that what you consider to be happening to space around you depends upon your local environment.
01:52:18.000And so you can locally be at rest, but globally be part of an expanding universe.
01:52:24.000Similarly, inside of a black hole, the direction of time reverses.
01:52:28.000It turns out, because space and time are tied together.
01:52:31.000So what you perceive inside of a black hole to be happening to the time evolution of the system you're in would be very different than what's seen from outside to be happening at the surface of the black hole.
01:52:47.000I mean, black holes are fascinating and they're laboratories that allow us to focus on the physics we can't yet fully understand.
01:53:20.000He came up with the term black hole in 1965 or something like that to describe the ultimate state of collapsing.
01:53:27.000People felt it was impossible, that physically forces would stop things from collapsing to the kind of densities that black holes would format.
01:53:35.000But based on the work of Chandrasekhar and others, it was discovered that if you have a massive object that's massive enough, Nuclear forces and all other forces cannot fight against gravitational collapse.
01:53:46.000And eventually, things will collapse inside of what we call the event horizon.
01:55:09.000So the GPS satellites, global positioning satellites that are in orbit, they take into account the fact that they are higher above the Earth.
01:55:17.000That their clocks are ticking more slowly than ours.
01:55:25.000They basically look at the time it takes They have atomic clocks, very accurate clocks.
01:55:30.000The time it takes for a signal from your watch or your phone to get up to the satellite and back, and that other satellite and back, allows you to determine your position.
01:55:40.000But if the clock there is ticking at a different rate, then you get a wrong answer for the time it takes for it to go on the...
01:55:46.000the number you get from that satellite when it reports to your watch.
01:55:55.000Due to its motion, Due to its motion, it's basically slower, but due to its motion, it's ticking at a slower rate.
01:56:06.000Due to its height in the gravitational field, it turns out that it's faster.
01:56:11.000So the two effects counter each other, general relativity and special relativity.
01:56:15.000In this case, general relativity wins, I think.
01:56:17.000It's something like, they're ticking more slowly.
01:56:21.000I calculated once, I wrote a New York Times piece on this, and I forget the number, but it's something like, Of the order of 38 microseconds per day, they're ticking at a slower rate, 38 millionths of a second every day different.
01:56:40.000And that may not sound important to you, but if you calculate how far light travels in 38 millionths of a second, it's pretty far.
01:56:47.000And so therefore, if you keep getting wrong by that number, your determination of your position is going to keep getting wrong by that number.
01:56:57.000And I worked out, and this should allow me to work backwards if I had a pad and paper.
01:57:02.000I see a pad, but I'm not going to do it right now because I don't care.
01:57:04.000But I remembered you'd be out by something like a kilometer in two minutes.
01:57:11.000So we use these abstract esoteric principles and they govern our lives.
01:57:15.000So general relativity really matters for our technology.
01:57:18.000But it tells us, but what's really interesting, so as objects fall into a black hole, because they're getting in stronger and stronger gravitational fields, from the outside, we see them moving more and more slowly.
01:57:29.000And eventually we see them freeze at the surface.
01:57:32.000We will never see, from the outside, it will look like it will take an infinite amount of time for an object to fall through the event horizon of a black hole, even though in its own frame it falls through no problem.
01:57:43.000For us, it will watch it slowly, slowly, slowly, because its clock is literally ticking at a different rate, and it will take an infinite amount of time for us, for any object, to fall through the event horizon of a black hole, if we're watching from the outside.
01:57:56.000That's why the Russians called them frozen stars.
01:58:01.000Now, where did the concept come from that inside every black hole is perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with a black hole in front of it?
01:58:15.000And moreover, that inside the black hole you could imagine that you're observing a space that appears to be expanding instead of contracting.
01:58:24.000And is it possible that those inside that black hole, that universe, would not have the same laws of physics that we experience?
01:58:31.000Well, once you go through the singularity, who knows?
01:58:33.000Because the laws of physics break down.
01:58:34.000But one thing I can tell you for sure is there aren't millions and billions of galaxies inside that black hole.
02:00:41.000When we weigh galaxies, which we can do by seeing how fast the stars move around them, we find out that they weigh a lot more than can be counted by counting all the stars.
02:00:56.000But what we have discovered, and this is the surprising part, is we can estimate how much normal matter there is.
02:01:03.000And by normal matter, I mean the stuff made of protons and neutrons, the same as you and me.
02:01:08.000And when we add up how much dark matter we see in the universe, there's a heck of a lot more of that than can be accounted for by the total number of protons and neutrons in the universe.
02:01:17.000And that means that we think that dark matter is made of some new type of elementary particle, something that was created in the early history of the universe that's different than normal matter.
02:01:26.000That's not too surprising either, because in the early universe there was lots of energy around, and if there are new elementary particles that are stable, it's not too surprising that there are lots of them around, and if they don't interact with light, we wouldn't see them.
02:01:37.000In fact, not only is that reasonable, but we cannot understand how galaxies would form if it weren't for dark matter.
02:01:45.000We can do the calculations and show that if the dark matter weren't made of stuff that's different than protons and neutrons, there would not have been enough time in the history of the universe for galaxies to form.
02:01:59.000Therefore, that's really strong evidence that that stuff must be there and it must not be made of protons and neutrons because we're proof, you and I, that galaxies formed.
02:02:08.000It's so fascinating that there's this element that's a huge part of the universe itself that we're not really exactly sure what it is.
02:02:52.000I watched a science documentary that freaked me out about how when they first started measuring gamma-ray bursts out into the unit, they thought there was wars going on between alien races.
02:03:02.000Well, the point is that, you know, there are these things called gamma-ray bursts?
02:03:56.000I honestly don't know the answer to that question.
02:03:58.000But the point is they were used as monitoring systems to look for nuclear weapons explosions.
02:04:04.000And then these things which are looking downward discovered these short bursts of gamma rays, which would be a potential signature of nuclear weapons explosions, but they discovered they weren't coming from Earth.
02:04:16.000And then they discovered they were coming from everywhere in the cosmos.
02:04:30.000And they happen there one second, two second, one minute long, bursts that are incredibly energetic, emitting more energy than the sun may emit in its lifetime.
02:04:51.000Stars explode, and it's good for us that stars explode in this book, because every atom in your body and every atom in my body was made inside stars that eventually explode.
02:05:10.000Well, for some people, lithium is important, but the rest of us, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the stuff that makes us human was only created in the...
02:05:33.000Stars explode about once every hundred years per galaxy.
02:05:38.000So in our galaxy, once every 100 years, the stars explode.
02:05:41.000There have been about 200 million stars explode in the 12 billion years since our galaxy's been around.
02:05:47.000And that's produced the raw materials that 4.5 billion years ago coalesced to form our sun and the planets and you and I. So all the atoms in your body have gone through stars and been through the most intense explosion that we know of in nature, a supernova.
02:06:01.000And every atom in your body has experienced it, maybe more than once.
02:06:04.000Because to get to the amount of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that's in our bodies, it had to be recycled many times.
02:06:09.000So the atoms in your left hand may have been inside a different star than your right hand.
02:06:41.000Well, as I say, there's one way, is to assign a graduate student to each galaxy.
02:06:45.000You know, a PhD period can be about 100 years.
02:06:47.000And if they die, students are cheap, so you get a new one.
02:06:51.000Or we use this fact that the universe is big and old.
02:06:54.000If you take your hands up tonight and weren't in Los Angeles where you could see the stars and made a dime-sized hole and looked up at a dime-sized dark region of the universe where you didn't see any stars, if you had a telescope that is as big as the telescope,
02:07:10.000say, we have in Chile, you'd see 100,000 galaxies.
02:07:14.000100,000 galaxies in that small region.
02:07:17.000Then if one star explodes every 100 years per galaxy, if you work out how many stars will I see explode tonight, you'll find out you'll see two or three stars explode.
02:07:32.000And that's what makes the universe so exciting because now we can use supernovae to study the universe because astronomers write proposals and say, tonight I'm going to use the Hubble Space Telescope to look at this region and I'm going to see three stars explode.
02:08:12.000We have a real issue, I think, with cities where light pollution prevents people from seeing how amazing the stars are.
02:08:18.000In fact, there's a lot of astronomers who are doing, in fact, active work to try and reduce light pollution in cities near telescopes.
02:08:26.000And there's other, I mean, the Arecibo Radios Telescope, if you've never been down to Puerto Rico, It's beautiful.
02:08:32.000It was actually, you would have seen it in two James Bond movies, because they made it into the, like, the lair of, you know, the pictures of it in the lair of some crazy, evil scientist.
02:08:41.000And I've been there a few times, and it's amazing, because it's this thousand-meter-wide net of wires in a natural...
02:09:17.000It's wires, because it's only measuring radio waves, and if the wavelength is large compared to the spacing between the wires, you don't need something solid.
02:09:27.000They were worried, and this is a real example.
02:09:30.000They're looking for, among other things, a frequency of radiation which is ubiquitous in the universe that is emitted by hydrogen.
02:09:37.000It was the first sort of thing that people used to do radio astronomy.
02:09:42.000Hydrogen has a characteristic frequency of emission of radio waves due to what's called the hyperfine splitting in hydrogen.
02:09:57.000If they're smart enough to know how the universe works, that's a universal frequency that's everywhere, because hydrogen is the dominant kind of matter, and it always emits radiation at that frequency, okay?
02:10:09.000It's 1,040 megahertz, I think, is the frequency, okay?
02:10:13.000Although, again, I could be wrong, but something like that.
02:10:18.000But they're worried because there was nearby...
02:10:22.000There was an evangelist who had a huge radio station.
02:10:26.000And wanted to broadcast to the continent of the United States his evangelical message.
02:10:31.000And he was going to basically broadcast at a frequency that would mean that air speedball couldn't work anymore.
02:10:37.000Speaking of light pollution, we talk about light pollution, but that was radio pollution.
02:10:40.000And in this case it was pollution in many ways because everything he said was polluting.
02:10:44.000And finally they managed to be able to fix that.
02:10:47.000But there would have been one of the most amazing windows on the universe that would have been Blocked out by radio light, just like...
02:11:41.000Because at the instant of the Big Bang, the whole universe was contained in a region where you'd have to understand gravity as a quantum mechanical force to really understand what was happening.
02:11:51.000And we don't have a quantum theory of gravity.
02:11:54.000But we can say what plausibly was the case.
02:11:57.000And one possibility, and the possibility that looks most plausible that I talked about, is our universe spontaneously came into being from nothing.
02:12:07.000A space and time that did not exist, so our space and our time didn't exist, and there was no matter in the universe, and it suddenly popped into existence.
02:12:15.000And one of the neat things is if you add up the total energy of all the stuff in our universe, it adds up to zero, as far as we can tell.
02:12:35.000If you were going to create a universe from nothing, what would you make the total energy of the universe?
02:12:39.000But why does it have to be from nothing?
02:12:41.000Once you realize the total energy of the universe can be zero, then the possibility that it comes from nothing becomes plausible.
02:12:48.000Because if it doesn't, you may need a deity to create everything.
02:12:50.000But it turns out you can create a hundred billion galaxies, each containing a hundred billion stars, without violating energy conservation.
02:13:07.000But everything we can point to makes it plausible.
02:13:10.000In fact, you can ask the following question.
02:13:12.000What would a universe look like today That arose spontaneously from nothing 13.8 billion years ago, just by known laws of physics, or at least plausible laws of physics,
02:13:27.000what would it look like today if that was the requirement?
02:13:31.000And the answer is it would look just like the universe in which we live in.
02:13:34.000Now, does that prove that that's what happened?
02:14:26.000What is the difference between this infinitely dense small point that the universe came out of and the center of a black hole, the event horizon of a black hole?
02:14:37.000Well, the event horizon isn't the center, it's the outside of a black hole.
02:15:19.000LAUGHTER So this infinitely dense point of 13.8 billion years ago, whatever it was, this something out of nothing point, what are your thoughts about before that?
02:15:33.000Well, here's the thing that you're going to hate.
02:16:03.000If our universe is all there is, and that, we happen to think, by the way, is not likely, but if it is, Then it doesn't make sense to ask the question what was before, because time didn't exist.
02:16:14.000It sounds like a cop-out, and it kind of is, but it may also be true.
02:16:18.000And if there's no before, then all of our notions of causality go out the window, because we all depend on before and after to decide causes and effects.
02:16:25.000But if there was no before, then we have to change our notions of a cause and effect.
02:16:29.000And that's awful, but hey, that's what we call learning.
02:16:32.000What about the ideas that the universe is in a constant state of contraction and expansion?
02:18:23.000So, this galaxy is not moving relative to its local surroundings, but it's moving away from us faster than light.
02:18:30.000And like a surfer in an undertow, they can swim really fast in the water, but if the water's moving away from the shore, they'll never make it back to the shore.
02:19:15.000And it could be that there are different regions so far away from us where space is expanding faster than light, which have a very different history than our own.
02:19:43.000We can tell that by measuring the Big Bang expansion of everything we see and working backwards.
02:19:47.000And our visible universe was once smaller and smaller and smaller.
02:19:51.000If we go back in time, we can actually follow the laws of physics back to the earliest moments of the Big Bang until those laws break down, and we can make predictions about what the universe should look like.
02:19:59.000All those predictions agree exactly with the observations we make, which tell us that that picture works.
02:20:04.000But another region, if you wish, could have come from a different Big Bang.
02:20:08.000But is that another universe, or is it a part of the universe that we can't see?
02:20:12.000Here's how we've changed, and this is semantics, but non-trivial semantics.
02:20:16.000Namely, when I was a kid, universe meant everything.
02:20:20.000But we say that's a pretty stupid definition.
02:20:22.000A better definition is an operational one.
02:20:25.000Universe means that region of space with which at one time we could have communicated, or one time in the future, even if the future is infinite, we might communicate with.
02:20:36.000Because that describes the region of space where cause and effect works.
02:20:43.000And so we think of a universe as that region throughout which everything could affect everything else ultimately in an infinitely long time.
02:20:53.000And in that picture, universes can be restricted in size.
02:20:58.000And then other regions which could never have affected us and which will never affect us in the future, we call other universes.
02:21:07.000And now, there are many different versions of a multiverse, but that's the simplest version.
02:21:12.000And this picture we call inflation I just did two little clips associated with the new book.
02:21:20.000One was for a publisher and one was for Big Think.
02:21:23.000One is the universe in under two minutes.
02:21:25.000So you can look up online and look for Lawrence Krauss explains the universe in under two minutes where I talk about this cosmic expansion and how it might mean there's a multiverse.
02:21:32.000But the other is I explain the universe in terms of this beer bottle that I talked about to you earlier.
02:21:40.000But this theory of inflation which actually says The qualities that we see of our universe can best be explained in some early time in the history of the universe when it was a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second old.
02:21:55.000It had a huge expansion suddenly and increased in size by 30 orders of magnitude in size in a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.
02:22:05.000Which is, by the way, particle physics suggests is highly plausible.
02:22:10.000And then it would produce a universe that looks more or less like we look like.
02:22:15.000And it's right now the only explanation of how that would cause the universe to look like what it looks like.
02:22:22.000But the neat thing about inflation is it's eternal.
02:22:26.000So inflation, that puffing up ended in our universe, and then boom, a hot big bang followed it.
02:22:31.000Okay, so the universe puffed up by a huge amount, then all of that energy, which was stored in empty space, got released, like the beer bottle, and we got a hot big bang, and the rest is history.
02:22:56.000That region of space has suddenly left inflation.
02:22:59.000And maybe a gazillion years in the future there'll be another region of space that's expanding away from us so much faster than light so we'll never know about it.
02:23:06.000Where suddenly that region leaves inflation and boom!
02:23:11.000And it turns out in each of those hot big bangs after the inflation ends, depending upon how it ends, the laws of physics could be different in that universe.
02:23:20.000So we tend to think it's quite likely that there are many, many separate regions of space, and in fact it's eternal, so such regions are forming eternally for all time, and there are hot Big Bangs happening in many regions, and the properties of each of those regions,
02:23:36.000whether they're conducive to forming galaxies and stars and planets and people, may be different.
02:23:42.000So we could say, logically in that picture, that the reason the universe looks like the way it does is because we're here to measure it.
02:23:53.000Oh my God, we should leave it at that.