In this episode, I speak with Lawrence Krauss about his new book, The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far, which tells the story of how we have come to understand the universe to the degree that we have. He also talks about the dangers of AI, nuclear war, and terrorism, and why he thinks the New Yorker should be a better place to write about science than it is right now. And, of course, he gives us his thoughts on the new movie, The Unbelievers, starring Richard Dawkins. And, as always, thank you for listening to the Making Sense Podcast. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming one of our many platinum memberships. You'll get access to all the latest episodes of Making Sense, unlimited access to our most popular podcast episodes, and access to special bonus episodes, as well as access to the full archive of all our podcasts. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, the podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, who become a supporter by becoming a MMS subscriber. If you're not a supporter, you'll need to subscribe to our premium membership, which includes ad-free versions of our most listened-to podcasts, which are also available on all major podcast directories, like Audible, iTunes, and Podchaser, so you can get the most up-to-date episodes available to your favorite podcatcher and subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts are available. You'll be getting the most of the latest in the newest episodes of the most popular podcasts on the most listened to. and most likely to be most influential in the most influential podcast on the world. Thanks to our podcast, making sense. . Sam Harris - The Making Sense - Sam Harris - and . . Sam's Note: This is not your average podcast. - My apologies for the audio quality is better than yours, but it's better than most other places on the internet. I'm working on improving your experience in the making sense podcast. I'll be trying to improve it. I promise you'll get a better quality of the audio experience in future episodes, so that you won't be able to tell me what you'll be hearing the most important parts of your podcasting experience, and I'll make sure you know what you're listening to it in the future, too! - I'll get back to you soon!
00:05:22.540There's just the problem of there not being enough science or science not being viewed as sexy or as culturally relevant as the humanities,
00:05:33.280but there's also just the problem of scientific error and anti-science being propagated.
00:06:00.720And that slant occurs a lot among certain people, especially in the humanities, for various reasons, which you might get into.
00:06:09.100So I can understand that, but it's sad when scientific error gets into.
00:06:11.980Yeah, and then you also do debates, as I occasionally do, with religious crackpots of one flavor or another.
00:06:21.560So this is just a question about how you divide your time, because it's not even clear to me how much each of these boats you're rowing in gets your weight.
00:06:31.980How would you describe what you do on a weekly or monthly basis?
00:06:35.040Yeah, well, I wish I had a strategic plan, and I did divide my time strategically.
00:07:03.800So if I'm excluding something, if I'm not doing science for a while, I kind of feel like a fraud.
00:07:10.540So I just try and balance it, but really there's no real plan.
00:07:15.400I just do as many things as I can do, frankly, because I enjoy doing all of them.
00:07:21.820And that's really a point that I think is really important to stress, that I do science, like many scientists, not because I'm trying to save the world, but because I enjoy it.
00:07:30.820And the same reason I write and do other things.
00:07:32.420But also because in my own personal perspective, I think something is worth doing.
00:07:38.420If it takes time for something else, if I think it has some background importance, I think it's worth – I do that.
00:07:44.740And to some extent, maybe it's a kind of guilt also, frankly, Sam, in the sense that the physics I do is very esoteric in general and quite abstract.
00:07:54.580And I think it's profoundly interesting because it addresses these fundamental questions about our existence.
00:07:59.720But from the perspective of touching daily the lives of people or in an immediate way improving their lives, it doesn't.
00:08:08.600And so I think part of the reason I get involved politically and socially is to some extent to make up for that aspect of my life, if you understand.
00:08:20.860And so I think that's why I jump around.
00:08:23.140But, yeah, a lot of hats and sometimes too many.
00:08:26.660There's no doubt about it, especially too much travel.
00:08:28.780But I think – but what I try and do is to go from one thing to another intensively.
00:08:33.480And I don't know if you've had this, but, you know, it's true.
00:09:16.460And I guess the point is I think probably because, again, to be quite honest and frank, I think a number of things came over a long time of doing things with no notice for what I was doing.
00:09:29.900And so, therefore, it's hard to turn down things that I think are useful or important.
00:09:35.180And I'm really working on that to try and turn down.
00:10:03.300It's not really meant for education or information.
00:10:06.560It's really based on – it's sort of smoke and mirrors.
00:10:09.480And so from that perspective, I'd much rather have a conversation or a dialogue than a debate.
00:10:16.900But I have found, as you probably found the same thing, that it surprises me when after I've done a debate, like why the heck did I do that?
00:10:24.480That people – I mean you never do a debate to try and beat the person you're – or to try and convince the person you're debating.
00:10:30.260Who you're talking to is, of course, the broad middle, and particularly the people who – it's nice to have the fans on either side, I suppose.
00:10:38.400But the real people you're talking to are the people who've never thought about the issue and who you think would be swayed potentially by a smooth-talking huckster.
00:10:48.000And so if you can reach those people who haven't really thought deeply about it and influence them to start thinking about it, then I think it's worthwhile.
00:11:00.220And I've been surprised, even the debates that I've afterwards gone and say, ooh, I just had this sick feeling, really awful, why did I do that?
00:11:08.380That people afterwards have said, you know, I watched that, and that impacted my thinking.
00:11:16.820The big problem is that there are people who want to debate, people with a relatively high profile, say, because, of course, when the minute they're on stage with you, they get a validation that they wouldn't have otherwise.
00:11:31.320And it's hard to know how to deal with that because you don't want to validate them.
00:11:35.180And often, and Richard Dawkins has done this often, he'll say, I refuse to even debate this person.
00:11:41.080And it's great then that a person goes on stage and has an empty chair and all that.
00:11:44.780But the way I sometimes try and get around it, and it's very difficult to be the bad guy on stage.
00:11:52.260But there were one or two times where I think these people, you know, I don't mind debating people who I think are honestly in error, who believe what they say, and one can have a discussion with them about it.
00:12:04.800But the people that really upset me are the people you know are real hucksters who are just lying because they can, and they have a smooth stick, and they want to sort of fool people.
00:12:19.280And those people, what I've done in a number of debates, and it's not easy, is attack them, is basically point out how they're lying.
00:12:26.280And it's difficult to do because people come to an event, they want to be people of goodwill, and they want it to be sort of collegial in that sense.
00:12:34.500But sometimes I think it's important to expose that too.
00:12:37.480I was on, I did three debates with this guy, William Lane Craig, in Australia that I really wouldn't have, I didn't want to do.
00:12:44.080And it was sponsored by a Christian, large-scale Christian group, which is why I decided to do it.
00:12:49.260Because I thought, here's a person who's not honest.
00:13:28.980And they, I said, you've chosen the wrong person.
00:13:30.780And I, I, I told them, I don't, I think you could, you could choose more honest people and we could have an interesting discussion about science and religion.
00:13:39.700And by the way, afterwards, I will tell you that they said to me, they agreed, they'd made a mistake.
00:13:43.780But what happened was his people found out about the fact that things were videotaped and then said I was censoring it.
00:13:49.240I didn't want the public to know about it.
00:13:50.640So we put it all, it was just a typical kind of thing.
00:13:52.960But, but, so I think those kind of things can be useful if you expose, if you can expose certain people and not take them seriously.
00:14:01.420And the other thing, I guess the very first, one of the very first big debates I did was back, and what got me into that sort of area maybe, was in the early days when they were trying to introduce intelligent design in the classroom.
00:14:13.420And the Discovery Institute was just beginning its efforts to try and do that in 2000 or shortly after.
00:14:19.060And so the Ohio State School Board basically asked for a debate between these two guys from the Discovery Institute and me and Ken Miller, who you may know, is a Catholic, religious Catholic evolutionary biologist whose texts are used in high schools.
00:14:37.320And it was like 2,000 people attended it as well as the school board.
00:14:41.700And it was really a very emotional event.
00:14:44.300But what I tried to say at that point was this is inappropriate because the problem with debates is it always makes, it makes it look like he said, she said.
00:14:53.660It makes it look like there are two people with equally valid views who are discussing this, and it raises the profile of people sometimes whose views are nonsense.
00:15:02.280So I just pointed out that if it was an appropriate panel, there would be 100,000 scientists on one side of the table and two people from a marginal religious lobbying group on the other.
00:15:14.640I think because journalists do this too.
00:15:16.980They always try and make it seem as if there's two sides to every story.
00:15:20.620And to some extent, a debate validates that because it makes it appear as if both sides are valid.
00:15:27.820So I won't, for example, do debates that say, you know, science versus creationism or, you know, because or evolution versus creationism because the very premise of the title suggests they're at equal footing.
00:15:40.320What I will, what I would in the old days when I did more of this, those kind of debates, I would debate the question, should creationism be taught in science classrooms?
00:15:49.880And that's a question that I would have to debate, but not, you know, which is right, evolution or creationism, because there's no question of it.
00:15:56.960And I remember once I was doing a debate in, I think, St. Louis with the, at the time, the head of the Intelligent Design Network, who, by the way, was one of those guys who earnestly believed what he was talking about.
00:16:21.620But I think it's really important, if we're going to debate, that we try very carefully to make it clear what questions are worth discussing and which questions are not even worth raising.
00:16:33.180Yeah, I think there are a variety of problems here because it's, I mean, you've delineated it pretty clearly, but there are insincere performers where it's really, you can't even believe that they believe what they say they believe.
00:16:46.060But they are pushing a certain view for whatever reason.
00:16:48.940So that's the ultimate case where the person you're talking to is really unreachable, and you just have to decide whether it's worth trying to embarrass this person publicly for some greater effect.
00:16:59.920Which always, which reflects badly on you, by the way.
00:17:02.420Automatically, half the audience say, what a prick that guy is.
00:17:06.920But even when someone sincerely believes what they're espousing, it is, again, the optics are often weird because you're dignifying completely unjustifiable claims just by giving them a fair hearing in that context.
00:17:22.880And what's even worse about debates often, and this bothers me about political debates, is that the value of humor is so enormous that the person who gets a couple of laughs often wins, right?
00:17:36.440I mean, it's like that bonds the audience.
00:17:38.180And so that's, and, you know, you and I actually occasionally get laughs, so that tends to work in our favor.
00:17:57.900But, you know, when I really do agree to, I would think, now, as usual, I've thought about the answer after I've said things.
00:18:04.540But when I do agree to do debates now, and it's rare, it's usually because it's an audience that I don't think ever gets to hear the other side.
00:18:14.240So I agreed to do this debate for this Christian organization.
00:18:18.500And I recently did a debate for a Christian organization in Toronto with Stephen Meyer, who's another huckster from the Discovery Institute.
00:18:26.000And, you know, he has a PhD, I think, in philosophy, history of science or something.
00:18:30.580And so he has the veneer of legitimacy.
00:18:37.620And then, as you probably know, I've debated at least twice.
00:18:41.180And one time, in a very emotional way, in London, an Islamic group.
00:18:46.420And I did that because I really thought that it's no—you know, winning a debate isn't fun if you're really—I mean, if you're talking to people who sympathize with you already, it may be good for your ego, but it's not particularly useful.
00:18:58.980But if you can read—if you can at least raise the questions and provoke people to think, and maybe there'll be two people in the audience who'd never even heard the counterpoint.
00:19:07.360If I recall, the best thing about that debate was your refusal to go on stage unless they integrated the audience, because they had segregated women from men in a university audience.
00:19:19.980I didn't—it made a lot of—it got a lot of attention, and I didn't attend it to.
00:19:23.920But I—yeah, I went—I did this—and the group seemed earnest.
00:19:26.960People told me events that they're going to segregate, so I wrote to them, and I said, you know, I'm not going to appear if it is—they said, don't worry, they won't.
00:19:31.920And then I arrived in the auditorium, and, of course, it was segregated.
00:19:36.460And what—and then I went down to the hosts, and I said, you told me it wouldn't be.
00:20:09.780And then what happened, of course, is nowadays you can't do anything about someone filming it, and someone in the audience had a camera.
00:20:15.740And it really—as my friend Steve Weinberg, who's an atheist, would say, I was doing God's work because it turned out to have a really good purpose in the end.
00:20:25.560And, of course, I knew—while I was half hoping the debate wouldn't happen, I knew they'd put too much emphasis and publicity in it not to have it.
00:20:33.720And, by the way, the people who were the most angry—and we can get to this—the people who were really upset were all the women in their bags.
00:20:42.420And there was hate, and one of them spoke up afterwards.
00:20:46.240But what—the good thing that happened from it, in the end, you know, I was sort of surprised it got all this attention in all these British newspapers, is that the university—it shouldn't—I mean, it was a secular—it's a university.
00:20:58.800And the universities learned about this and basically said that—banned that group from having events at a university.
00:21:05.480And, you know, when this—when a woman—when one of the women came up at the end, there was a question-answer period, and chastised me for forcing her to sit near men, I said this is a—you shouldn't have come.
00:21:19.980If you're—I understand if you're uncomfortable with men.
00:21:21.860That's—that's—that's your business, and I sympathize with it.
00:21:24.680And—and—and—and—but you have to realize that you're living in a society that's a secular society.
00:21:30.760And—and therefore, if you choose to come to an event like this, you have to—or go to a baseball game, you might be subject to sit next to—sit next to men.
00:21:38.960And moreover, if you didn't like it, you could have moved.
00:21:50.360Let's touch your book briefly, only to move on to more controversial topics.
00:21:54.520But your book is really this great history of the development of our understanding of the cosmos.
00:22:03.100At one point, you debunk the great man portrayal of science, this idea that, you know, one lone genius goes into his room and comes out with a change in our scientific worldview.
00:22:14.800But you can't help but tell the story in terms of the contributions of the most famous scientists and how they have changed our worldview really in these punctate ways.
00:22:26.820There are some cases where the caricature is true.
00:22:30.720I mean, Newton is pretty close to that, where he went into his room to avoid the plague for about 18 months and came out with calculus and the laws of motion and universal gravitation and the field of optics.
00:22:57.240Most of the time, he was decoding secret messages from the Bible, which he felt were given only to him, and the rest of his time doing alchemy.
00:23:04.800He was far more interested in those subjects.
00:23:06.660And I think I said the other day that, you know, if only he'd spent more time in physics, he could have been famous.
00:23:10.740But he was obsessively solitary in many ways.
00:23:16.820He never, to the extent we know, he never was with a woman in his life or a man, as far as I know.
00:23:21.760And he was a very remarkably interesting character.
00:23:25.700And one of those people, you know, some of my friends who are distinguished physicists, we point out that when you read certain people's work, like, for example, Einstein, who's obviously a great physicist,
00:23:35.880you can see, you can say to yourself, ah, I see how if I was thinking along those lines, I could have gotten to where he got.
00:23:43.280But there's some people like Newton that it's just a mystery.
00:23:46.620I mean, you know, it's just like, where did this come from?
00:23:50.740And again, one of the things I try and point out there, to get back to the religious thing a little bit, is that people often point out to me, they say, well, Newton was religious.
00:24:01.380And, you know, Darwin initially was religious.
00:24:03.460And my point, in counterpoint to that, is that, of course they were, because that's the only game in town at that time.
00:24:09.740The church was the National Science Foundation of the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, and you couldn't go to university.
00:24:34.740I mean, he was an incredibly vindictive character.
00:24:37.080Yeah, his statement about I've only, you know, gotten where I have by standing on the shoulders of giants was a vindictive statement because one of his great competitors was a dwarf.
00:24:48.800Yeah, and of course, as you know, when later on, when he became, I don't know if it was Chancellor of the Executive Checker, but he was head of the Treasury.
00:24:57.520He loved hanging, one of his greatest joys was hanging counterfeiters.
00:25:01.840He loved, he went to everyone and he just enjoyed it.
00:25:04.300So he was a, he was a, he was really a weird character.
00:25:07.440But, but not all, but, but, you know, that's unfortunately a stereotype that some people have that you have to be a solitary genius.
00:25:14.600And I do try in the book to show that things are baby steps.
00:25:17.200And while I reflected in terms of the people who've had perhaps in one way or another, the biggest impact, some of it is due to the fact that these people got it wrong.
00:25:26.080They actually had a huge impact on science by, by affecting the field and moving it in, in what ultimately turned out to be the wrong direction.
00:25:34.540And, and one of the reasons I call it the greatest story ever told, because I, is it's, it is a human story.
00:25:40.320It's a story full of twists and turns and crises.
00:25:43.820And, and, and, and, and the great thing about science is, well, first that scientists are human, which is a little known fact.
00:25:51.760And that, but that means that individual scientists are biased, they're prejudiced, they're pigheaded, they're, they're, you know, they're whatever, they're sexist, they were, or not, they're, you know, some of them may even be Republicans.
00:26:01.020But the science manages to drag scientists along the science, the process of skeptical inquiry, basing your results on empirical evidence, testing, looking at many sources that manages, manages to take people, even when they're deluded, eventually in the right direction.
00:26:19.320And there's lots of times in the story where, where you want, I hope the reader, because I certainly felt like shaking these people and saying, you've got the right answer.
00:26:26.820If you weren't so pigheaded and willing to just focus on this fad at the time, or, or something that interests you, it does one or the other, then you could have, the progress could have been made much more quickly.
00:26:51.140And it is a, it is this community process where, sure, people drive it, but the whole community is, is, is, is affecting things.
00:26:58.580And sometimes the ideas come out of left field and, and it's that story that I find so, so wonderful.
00:27:03.540And of course, the most important part of the title for me is the so far part, because unlike that other supposedly greatest story ever told, which was, you know, written down by R&H peasants who didn't know the earth orbited the sun, this story changes and it gets better.
00:27:18.440And tomorrow it'll be better than it is today.
00:27:20.260And it changes because we learn and that's what's so, and, and it's surprising.
00:27:24.760And, and yeah, I almost, I was going to almost pull a Richard Dawkins and read a, read a quote from the book, but I won't.
00:27:31.000But it's just, what's, it seems to me you have a choice when looking at this human story in the universe.
00:27:37.900You either put us in the center because it makes you feel better, or you're willing to say the universe evolves sort of independently of us.
00:27:43.760And if you do that, you, you check to see if your story's wrong and you're also are willing to be surprised.
00:27:48.720And that's, that's what makes it to me so interesting.
00:27:51.720Yeah. Well, the crucial distinction between science and almost everything else, I guess you could broaden it to include rationality generally, but science is the most focused and disciplined version of that.
00:28:06.860Certainly is that the incentives are aligned in a way where it is self purifying.
00:28:13.780I mean, everyone is trying to prove everyone else wrong.
00:28:42.120And the intellectual journey is really the greatest ones human have taken.
00:28:44.840And, but, but I think it has moral or at least object lessons, not moral lessons, but object lessons for everyday life.
00:28:50.660And one is that the, that you have to, the person you have to question the most is yourself, because you're the easiest person to delude, to delude.
00:29:01.220But the crucial difference here between, let's say this is, it's often pointed out, as you said, that scientists are merely human, they're biased, they succumb to wishful thinking, and there's even scientific fraud occasionally.
00:29:13.440But the antidote to that is always more science, better science, other scientists getting involved, that kind of self-purifying context of scientific discourse.
00:29:25.860And you cannot say that about religion.
00:29:27.900You cannot say that about any backwater in the humanities where dogmatism is moving completely unconstrained by any truth testing.
00:29:38.300It's just, you know, the, the kind of a faddish set of ideas that get foisted on a generation and stay there.
00:29:45.340And there is no, there's no feedback mechanism.
00:29:51.040Because I don't want to give the illusion, and I don't think you have, but some of the listeners may get it, that some of the scientists are better.
00:29:57.400But it's really the fact that we are lucky enough to be able to rely on nature, that, you know, if you spout nonsense long enough, you come up with things where nature just proves you to be ridiculously wrong.
00:30:09.600And so, so it's self-correcting because you have that tool, you know, and it's been a problem to some extent in physics in the last bunch of years where, when I was, I talk about what I think is actually the most, one of the most exciting periods of physics.
00:30:26.200And it's a surprise, I think, for some people that most people think the period 1905 to 1925 in the 20th century was the greatest time because relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics.
00:30:35.440But as I point out, the period from 1955 to 1975, which is largely unheralded now, may in the future by historians of science be viewed as one of the most revolutionary periods of the 20th century because we went from knowing, you know, one force in nature to understanding three of the four forces and understanding the fundamental mathematics that was behind that.
00:30:56.060But it occurred because of the fact that nature kept pushing people in the right direction, that there was a lot of misconception and other things, but experiments were driving things.
00:31:09.960And one of the concerns for some of us, and one of the reasons I'm labeled somewhat incorrectly as a critic of string theory, is that there was a period in physics of almost 50 years, 40 years, where accelerators weren't giving us information about where our theory should be going.
00:31:28.840And as I used to say, under sensory deprivation, you begin to hallucinate, and that's fine.
00:31:48.800And many of us were concerned because those are the same kind of requirements in some areas of, say, literary deconstructionism that are similar,
00:31:56.700where the internal complexity of the argument makes it seem as if it's somehow better.
00:32:36.040String theory was very well motivated in where it came from.
00:32:40.280It just had pretensions which haven't been met.
00:32:43.140And it hasn't been, it has not, I repeat, it has not been successful in doing what many people thought or claimed would be possible in the 1980s,
00:32:51.220that we would have a theory of, quote, everything, which even then was a poor name because it was a theory of very little.
00:32:56.500But, you know, it would have been of fundamental importance to have a theory that unified gravity with quantum mechanics and the other forces.
00:33:02.480But it hasn't done that, and it hasn't demonstrated that it has any direct relevance in its original form to the real world.
00:33:11.200In fact, strings aren't even the most significant thing in string theory anymore, so it's called M theory because now these things called brains are important.
00:33:18.660Now, all of that should not be argued against it in the sense that when you're doing physics at the forefront, it's difficult, it's complex.
00:33:26.960And what's most important to realize is you're often wrong.
00:33:30.160And these, the people we've been working on are very many, very bravely trying to do the right thing.
00:33:34.220They're trying to understand the theory and get it to apply to the real world and see if it makes predictions that are useful.
00:33:40.280So it's well motivated and, but the problem is it did get an incredible amount of hype and indeed draw many people into the field when it was much more heat than light, in my opinion.
00:33:51.680Now, string theory mathematically has produced incredibly interesting bits of mathematics, which have not just been interesting to mathematicians.
00:34:00.540It has driven fields of mathematics forward in profound ways.
00:34:04.440But the tools that have been developed in string theory have been used in other areas of physics to great effect to try and solve problems that could not be solved otherwise.
00:34:13.160It's not, but what it hasn't done is demonstrate that its original purpose is, is, is validated.
00:34:19.020But that's okay because you, when you asked if I had a hope, I think most, you know, most ideas are wrong.
00:34:25.460That's why, you know, anyone could do it if it wasn't that way.
00:34:27.880And so most of my ideas have been wrong and, and, you know, the nature, nature gets to choose.
00:34:33.540And so the likelihood that any proposed theory in advance is right is very small.
00:34:39.220And we, and people should recognize that, especially when they read the papers because the newspapers try and be largely at the fault of universities to some extent to try to publicize work and therefore get grant funding or other things, you know, make every new little development sound like it's the next Einstein and it's revolutionary and it's changing everything.
00:34:55.780And, and most of the time it's wrong and what sort of upsets me is that not only do the newspapers get hooked into basically becoming public relations outlets for, for, for, for the universities, but when it's shown to be wrong, it's not discussed later on.
00:35:09.840And then, and then people will later on read another article, which sort of a new theory that disagrees with the other one.
00:35:14.760And the sense is that science has no objective reality.
00:35:53.360And what they don't realize is that science is not a set of facts.
00:35:56.760It's a process for discovering facts and, and to, and to, I'll be a little self-serving,
00:36:02.240but I really, I really believe what I'm about to say, that I think one of the things I think is important in my book that I try and do indirectly, at least.
00:36:12.180And in my lectures, I've been lately, I've been doing it more directly, is that there's an object lesson that science, the process of science showed us that the universe we see is an illusion.
00:36:22.060It's a complete, at a fundamental scale, it's a complete illusion.
00:36:25.800And it cut through the, the layers of illusion by using this scientific method.
00:36:31.200And I think that is, is an essential tool that we need in our society today to cut through the illusion that we're seeing in, in, in the political world, to cut through the nonsense and garbage.
00:36:42.900Part of the problem is we take, we teach things like science in schools as if they're a bunch of facts or a bunch of things you have to memorize instead of teaching them, teaching science as a process and driving students inquiry with questions rather than the answers.
00:36:56.840So I think there's a real, if people ask me, how can we overcome the alternative propaganda we're seeing in Washington?
00:37:04.300Part of it, I think, has a very deep root in our educational system.
00:37:08.540And I think, I think while, of course, we need to resist and combat in a very real way and speak out and write and et cetera, I think we have to look at the educational system and hope that we can train children differently.
00:37:21.240Because when I was growing up, schools were repositories of information.
00:37:24.460But right now in my iPhone, I have more information than I could get in any school, but I also have more misinformation.
00:37:30.320And what we have to train students to do is to develop a filter.
00:37:33.320And for me, the scientific method is a wonderful filter.
00:37:36.620And that's the kind of thing we should be teaching them in school so that when they become adults, they're able to deal with a world in which they're going to be barraged by much nonsense or maybe more nonsense than sense.
00:37:46.300And they have to be able to make sense of that.
00:37:48.480You just covered a lot there, which is really important.
00:37:50.860So I want to pick up on a few things you said.
00:37:53.220One problem is that some of the most memorable things to come out of the philosophy of science are misleading at best.
00:38:01.840And so people think, for instance, that, as you said, in each generation, our scientific worldview is completely overturned without remainder and nothing thought by your father or grandfather is any longer valid.
00:38:16.260So people have this picture of just wholesale changes in our understanding.
00:38:19.680And it's easy to see how they have that.
00:38:21.500I mean, you have people like Thomas Kuhn who have more or less said that that's how science proceeds.
00:38:26.020But you just have a very different picture when you move from Newtonian physics to relativity, say, and then quantum mechanics and the fact that those theories are as yet imperfectly reconciled and the thing that would reconcile them may look completely different as a structure.
00:38:46.120And so that gives a picture of just radical change.
00:38:50.140And yet, as you said, the data that Newtonian mechanics were conserving have to be conserved by the new theory.
00:39:00.460And just to take one, this is an example I often go to because it's very easy for people to get.
00:39:05.160We could witness wholesale changes in our understanding of biology, say.
00:39:10.920But the idea that DNA has something to do with the physical basis of heredity is not up for grabs.
00:39:21.880Whatever new theory of molecular biology is coming down the pike, it will have to conserve what we know about DNA.
00:39:29.240The probability that DNA is somehow totally irrelevant is extraordinarily low.
00:39:34.560And if, in fact, that were realized, whatever new construal of, you know, how we were wrong about DNA comes to us, it will have to conserve all of the data as we know them, right?
00:39:47.080And there's very little room to move now, given how much data there is.
00:39:51.460The point is that our underlying pictures change tremendously.
00:39:55.760So when we subsume a theory, you know, our underlying understanding of the universe does change, which is great.
00:40:00.460It's one of the things I celebrate in the book, and one of the things we all celebrate as scientists, that our pictures change.
00:40:06.700And that's why I think, by the way, science is like art, music, and literature.
00:40:10.320The greatest benefit of science is to force us to reflect upon and potentially change our view of our place in the cosmos.
00:40:18.140But, as you say, DNA, you know, DNA, what survived the test of experiment, it worked.
00:40:23.300You can do experiments and you can show that it is responsible for the transmission of information.
00:40:28.920And Newton's laws, a million years from now, when I have a theory, if there's a theory of quantum gravity, if I let go of a baseball, it's going to fall, it's going to be described by Newton's laws.
00:40:38.100Whatever we learn at the edges of science, which may, at a fundamental level, change how we think about the universe, nevertheless doesn't make Newton not true.
00:40:46.880Newton will be true now and a million years from now.
00:40:50.700And one of the great, what I spent a lot of time in the book showing is, because I get a lot of email from people, and most of it, it always begins this way.
00:41:00.420Everything you think you know is wrong.
00:41:06.440And then they say, you know, everyone thinks I'm crazy, but everyone thought Einstein was crazy, therefore, and they try and make that connection, because they think Einstein did that.
00:41:17.000And one of the things I work really hard to do in the book is to show that Einstein did exactly the opposite.
00:41:22.380Yes, he revolutionized our understanding, ultimately, of space and time, although the really key revolution didn't really come from him.
00:41:29.100It later on came from his math teacher, Norman Minkowski, but what he did do was show the two pillars of physics, both of which had survived the test of experiment, and therefore, both had to be true.
00:41:40.300They couldn't, you couldn't have a theory that violated.
00:41:42.280One came from Galileo, and one came from Maxwell.
00:41:45.480They were the pillars of our modern theory of the physical universe, but they were inconsistent with each other.
00:41:53.740He managed to make them consistent, because he realized they were both true.
00:41:57.980So whatever theory of nature you developed had to agree with both of them.
00:42:02.960And that was the brilliance of Einstein, was not to throw things out, but to rather recognize the beauty of what worked, and keep that, and force his beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality.
00:42:15.500There's another point of confusion that often surrounds Einstein's work, which is this phrase, everything is relative, which derives from the word relativity.
00:42:25.020Well, it should be, it should be called the theory of absolutes in the end, and it was really, as I say, it was his, his math teacher, Herman Minkowski, that showed that.
00:42:32.600It is true that Einstein reconciled these two things by saying that, in fact, observers measure different things, and they measure different time differently, and length differently, depending upon the relative state of motion.
00:42:45.200And that's remarkable and true, and that's where the word relativity comes from, the fact that your measurements of time and space are relative to your circumstances.
00:42:55.000But the beauty of the theory is, an underlying theory, showing that we live in a four-dimensional universe in which space and time are connected.
00:43:02.260And in the underlying theory, there are things that are absolutely conserved.
00:43:06.020In fact, there's something called a four-dimensional space-time length, which is invariant for all observers.
00:43:10.680That's the beautiful aspect of nature.
00:43:12.860We now understand that we live in a four-dimensional universe, but we don't see it.
00:43:19.100It's part of the story of learning that the universe at its fundamental scale does not resemble what we see.
00:43:24.680What we see is a myopic slice of that.
00:43:27.060So in some sense, the relativity is related to our myopia.
00:43:30.160Now, it's a real fact that we have a myopic that are, well, it's a real fact that every measurement we make about the universe depends upon our circumstances.
00:43:38.060And Einstein was brilliant enough to realize that, that measurement is what determines reality for people.
00:43:44.700It's not what they think, but what they measure.
00:43:47.680And therefore, if two people measure different things, they're just as real for even if those two things are different.
00:43:54.280But the underlying reality shows that those two very different things are different sides of the same coin.
00:43:59.520And that's the other, in my mind, a much greater hallmark of progress in science than what Kuhn might have talked about.
00:44:05.860The real great hallmark of progress in science is when two things which on the surface seem very different are shown to be different reflections of exactly the same thing.
00:44:15.440And that, at least in physics, and it may not be so much in biology, although, you know, that's what Darwin did, too, in a sense.
00:44:21.200So he showed that the diversity of life came from simple beginnings and in a very well-defined way.
00:44:25.880But it's the beautiful aspect of that, discovering that these things that look very different are really the same, that is the hallmark that I try and talk about from Maxwell through Einstein and then Feynman and then right to the discovery of the Higgs particle.
00:44:39.060There's a beautiful continuity that you can ask, when has progress been made?
00:44:45.780And pretty well universally, that's an indicator of it, in my mind, in physics.
00:44:49.100There is a tension, however, between a merely operational view of scientific theory and a realistic picture of the way the world is.
00:45:00.580So one thing that I think people find troubling is that it's easy to talk about these different ways of describing reality, Newtonian, relativistic, quantum mechanical.
00:45:10.300And if they all have their utility, you know, at certain speeds, at certain scales, but they all suggest a very different picture of what's actually going on.
00:45:20.720And like in quantum mechanics, you have the many worlds view, you have the Copenhagen view, you have other views, which suggest a radically different picture of what's going on.
00:45:30.560And yet, you're using the same equations to make the same predictions and account for the same measurements.
00:45:36.920I mean, there's a yearning, and I think this yearning must be shared by most physicists, to get past the merely useful, merely instrumental, merely, yes, we have made a measurement, to what does reality actually look like?
00:45:50.480— Doesn't it matter to you whether the truth is that there are a functionally infinite number of copies of ourselves having more or less identical conversations in parallel universes, or something that doesn't entail that at all, which conserves the data in the same way?
00:46:06.060— Well, you know, that's a really good question. I think a lot of it comes from, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of scientific truth. There is no—science doesn't—science proves absolutely what's false. It doesn't prove absolutely what's true.
00:46:21.640Science presents models of reality, and those models get better. While we tend to often equate the model with reality, it's dangerous to do that, because there's no scientific theory.
00:46:33.820And one thing string theory wanted to do was be different in this sense. But it's really important to point this out. There is no scientific theory that's absolutely true.
00:46:42.660Our best theory of nature right now is something called quantum electrodynamics. It gives—it allows you to compare predictions to observations to 14 decimal places.
00:46:50.560There's nowhere else in all of science you can do that. But that theory only applies over some small scale—not that small, but some limited scale of length and time in nature.
00:47:02.980— And it breaks down, and it has to be replaced by another theory, the electroweak theory, which is it unifies electromagnetism with this weak interaction.
00:47:12.460And so we have to realize that mathematics may be the language of nature, but it's a great way to model nature.
00:47:20.300And it works. That's why we use it. I mean, that's ultimately the result.
00:47:23.820It's the reason mathematics—we use mathematics. It's not that we necessarily have a—you know, we like it more than English, but it works, and English doesn't.
00:47:31.140But there are certain areas where we have to recognize that that model takes us beyond—well beyond the things we can intuitively understand.
00:47:42.420And in those cases, we all create pictures for ourselves because we use them to guide us.
00:47:47.860And sometimes our intuition's better than others, and, you know, that's happened with scientists, too.
00:47:52.260But things like quantum mechanics, for example, all of these different, quote-unquote, interpretations, in my mind, suffer from the fact that what they're trying to do is explain a universe that at its fundamental scale is quantum mechanical in terms of a universe that we experience, which is classical.
00:48:11.220And any classical interpretation of quantum mechanics is going to be incorrect at some level.
00:48:16.240It's going to—as my late friend Sidney Coleman, who was a brilliant physicist at Harvard, used to say, we shouldn't be talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
00:48:23.780We should talk about the interpretation of classical mechanics because the quantum mechanics is the way the world works, as far as we can tell.
00:48:29.120Now, we may be wrong at some scale. Maybe quantum mechanics may break down, but no one's seen any place that that happens.
00:48:35.200And so the world really is quantum mechanical, and classical mechanics arises, in some sense, as this illusion, once again.
00:48:42.380And to try and impose this illusion on the fundamental world the way it may work is to always produce descriptions that seem crazy, in some sense, and are limited, in some sense.
00:48:54.680And that's true not just for quantum mechanics, but that's—as I say, that's the reason we always have these myopic views.
00:49:01.140So I'm worried, of course, what I want to do is get a better picture of how nature works.
00:49:06.320But do I want to—but do I ever have the expectation that I'll have a complete understanding of how nature works?
00:49:12.020Not at this point. Nor do I need it. Nor do I need it.
00:49:15.620It's not so much the dissatisfaction that comes with incompleteness.
00:49:19.600I guess it's the dissatisfaction that comes with two equally valid, in the sense that they conserve the data, pictures that are totally irreconcilable.
00:49:31.580They're not irreconcilable in terms of measurements, because the measurements are the same, and they're not irreconcilable in terms of the math.