The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1216 - Sir Roger Penrose

00:00:02.000 Alright, here we go.

00:00:03.000 Three.

00:00:07.000 Boom.

00:00:08.000 And we're live.

00:00:08.000 How are you, sir?

00:00:09.000 I'm fine.

00:00:10.000 Pretty good.

00:00:11.000 Thank you for doing this.

00:00:11.000 I appreciate it.

00:00:12.000 That's fine.

00:00:13.000 My pleasure.

00:00:14.000 Who roped you into this?

00:00:16.000 I think, I suppose, James Tagg probably.

00:00:20.000 I'm a big fan of your work.

00:00:22.000 I've read much of your work.

00:00:24.000 I've seen many of your interviews and videos online.

00:00:27.000 And one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about that I find quite interesting is consciousness.

00:00:32.000 And your belief that consciousness is not simply calculation, but that there's something more to it.

00:00:41.000 And what you think this more could possibly be, from a scientific perspective, which is unusual, because a lot of people have some theories about consciousness, but they're usually crazy people like myself.

00:00:54.000 Well, I mean, we're all conscious, and so we may have theories about it.

00:00:58.000 Yeah.

00:00:59.000 No, the ideas came by a somewhat roundabout route.

00:01:04.000 I went to Cambridge to do graduate work.

00:01:07.000 It was mathematics.

00:01:09.000 I was working on pure mathematical subjects, algebraic geometry.

00:01:13.000 But I thought, you know, we've got three years, I'll spend some of the time going to other talks that might be interesting.

00:01:20.000 So I went to three talks particularly, which had a big influence on me.

00:01:24.000 One was a talk by Herman Bondy on general relativity, cosmology.

00:01:31.000 Wonderful talk with very sort of animated presentation he had.

00:01:35.000 And then there was a talk by Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

00:01:40.000 And his talk, well, his complete wonderful talk too, wonderful lectures as well, but in a completely different style.

00:01:47.000 He was very quiet and precise in what he said and everything.

00:01:50.000 Anyway, in the very first lecture, he was talking about the superposition principle in quantum mechanics.

00:01:56.000 So, if you have a particle, and it could be in one spot, or it could be in another spot, then you have all sorts of states where it can be in both places at once.

00:02:05.000 And that's sort of strange, but you've got to get used to that idea.

00:02:09.000 And he illustrated with his piece of chalk, and I think he broke it in two to illustrate it could be in one spot or in the other.

00:02:17.000 And my mind sort of wandered at that point.

00:02:20.000 I don't know what I was thinking about, but I wasn't concentrating.

00:02:23.000 And about a few minutes later, he'd finished his description, his explanation, and I had some vague memory of something about energy, but I didn't understand what he said, and I've been totally mystified by this ever since.

00:02:37.000 So I suppose if I'd heard what he said, he would have said something to calm me down and sort of accept it in one way or another.

00:02:44.000 But as it was, it seemed to me this was a major issue.

00:02:48.000 How on earth do you have things that don't behave according to what quantum mechanics says, like cricket balls and baseballs and things like that?

00:02:56.000 Anyway, that's two of the talks.

00:02:58.000 The other course was a course by a man called Steen, who talked on mathematical logic, and he explained things like Gödel's theorem and Turing machines, Turing machines being the mathematical notion upon which modern computers are based,

00:03:17.000 or computers, basically.

00:03:19.000 And...

00:03:23.000 The thing about Gödel's Theorem, you see, I heard, I used to have a colleague when I was an undergraduate, Ian Percival, who also became a scientist later on, and we talked about logic and how you could make these kind of mathematical systems which worked out logic.

00:03:42.000 And I'd heard about this Gödel's Theorem, which seemed to say that there were things in mathematics that you just couldn't prove.

00:03:51.000 And I didn't like that idea.

00:03:53.000 But when I went to this course by Steen, and he explained what it really says.

00:04:00.000 And what it says, suppose you've got a method of proving things in mathematics.

00:04:06.000 And when I say things, I mean things with numbers.

00:04:09.000 The one famous example is Fermat's Last Theorem.

00:04:14.000 There's the Goldbach conjecture, which isn't yet proved.

00:04:18.000 That every even number bigger than two is the sum of two prime numbers.

00:04:22.000 That's the sort of example of the thing.

00:04:24.000 It's just sort of mathematical things about numbers, which you can see what they mean, but it may be very difficult to see whether it's true or untrue.

00:04:34.000 But the idea often is in mathematics you've got a system of methods of proof.

00:04:40.000 And the key thing about these methods of proof is that you can have a computer check whether you've done it right.

00:04:48.000 So these rules, they could be adding A and B, it's the same as B and A and things like that.

00:05:00.000 You say to the computer, say, here is a theorem like Goldbach conjecture, and you see whether it can be proved, and you say, maybe I've got a proof, and this follows these steps.

00:05:11.000 And you give it to the computer and it says, yep, you've done it right, it's true.

00:05:16.000 Or maybe it would say, you've done it right and it's not true.

00:05:19.000 Or it may not say anything.

00:05:20.000 It might just go on forever.

00:05:22.000 But these are the sort of outcomes.

00:05:24.000 And the point about it is that if you believe...

00:05:27.000 That these procedures do give you a proof.

00:05:30.000 In other words, that if the algorithm says, yeah, it's true, then you believe that it is true.

00:05:36.000 Because you've understood all the rules.

00:05:38.000 You looked at the first one and said, yeah, that's okay.

00:05:41.000 You looked at the second one and said, oh, yeah, I see.

00:05:44.000 Okay, that's great.

00:05:45.000 And you go all the way down.

00:05:46.000 And as long as you're convinced all those rules work, then if it says yes, that's something you believe.

00:05:52.000 Okay.

00:05:53.000 Now what Gödel shows is he constructs a very specific sentence, a statement, which is a number thing, like the Fermat's Last Theorem or something, a thing about numbers, which What he shows is if you trust this algorithm for proving mathematical things,

00:06:13.000 then you can see by the way it's constructed that it's true.

00:06:17.000 But you can also see by the way it's constructed that it cannot be proved by this procedure.

00:06:24.000 Now this was amazing to me because it tells me that, okay, You cannot formalize your understanding in a scheme which you could put on a computer.

00:06:37.000 You see, this statement which Gödel comes up with is something you can see on the basis of the same understanding that allows you to trust the rules, that it's true, but that it's not actually derivable by the rules.

00:06:54.000 You see it's true by virtue of your belief in the rules.

00:06:59.000 And this, to me, was amazing.

00:07:01.000 And I thought, golly, you know, what's understanding?

00:07:05.000 What does it mean?

00:07:07.000 Is it something following rules?

00:07:09.000 Is it an algorithm?

00:07:10.000 Well, this more or less says it's not an algorithm, because whatever it was, there would be something that you could still see as true, even though you don't get it through the algorithm that you had in the first place.

00:07:22.000 There are a lot of subtleties about this too, which people argue about endlessly.

00:07:26.000 But it was pretty convincing to me that this shows that we don't think when we understand something that what's going on in our heads is not an algorithm.

00:07:37.000 It's not following rules.

00:07:39.000 It's something else.

00:07:40.000 It's something that requires our conscious appreciation of what we're thinking about.

00:07:46.000 Thinking is a conscious thing and Understanding is a conscious activity.

00:07:52.000 So I formed the view that conscious activities, whatever they are, not just that kind of thing, but, you know, playing music or falling in love or whatever these things might be, are not computations.

00:08:05.000 There's something else going on.

00:08:07.000 And then I thought, because I like to think of myself as a scientist, and I think that what's going in on our heads is according to the laws of physics, and these laws of physics are pretty good.

00:08:20.000 They seem to work well in the outside world, and so I believe that the laws that work in our heads are the same as those laws.

00:08:28.000 So I began to think about it.

00:08:30.000 Well, what about Newton's mechanics?

00:08:32.000 Well, you could put that on a computer.

00:08:34.000 What about Einstein's special relativity?

00:08:38.000 You could do that.

00:08:39.000 What about Maxwell's wonderful equations, which tell you how electricity and magnetism operate and light and radio waves and all these things?

00:08:48.000 That's all follows this beautiful set of equations that Maxwell produced.

00:08:51.000 You can put that on a computer.

00:08:53.000 Okay, you may have to worry about approximations and these depend on continuous numbers rather than discrete things, but I didn't think that's the answer.

00:09:02.000 Then I thought, what about general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity with curved space and all that?

00:09:09.000 We're familiar now with LIGO, this detector which has detected black holes spiraling into each other from distant galaxy.

00:09:17.000 And how do we know that those signals are black holes?

00:09:20.000 Well, because of calculations, people have put this thing on an algorithm, and you know what those signals look like.

00:09:26.000 So, Einstein's general relativity, sure, you can put that on a computer.

00:09:31.000 What about quantum mechanics?

00:09:32.000 Well, there's the famous equation of Schrödinger, which tells you how a quantum state evolves.

00:09:39.000 You could put that on a computer, too.

00:09:41.000 It's difficult in many ways.

00:09:43.000 There's many more parameters you've got to worry about.

00:09:45.000 But it's just as computable as these other things.

00:09:49.000 Well, you see, I then remembered Dirac's lecture, you see, and how it is that these things that work in the quantum world don't seem to work at the level of classical big things.

00:10:04.000 And it all depends on this process of what's called measurement in quantum mechanics.

00:10:09.000 And the measurement process is something you learn how to do, but it's not the Schrödinger equation.

00:10:16.000 It's something else.

00:10:19.000 I'm very intrigued by this fact, that his own equation gives you nonsense.

00:10:25.000 And the famous Schrodinger's cat, where he produces a situation in which the cat would be dead and alive at the same time, he produced that example simply to demonstrate that, roughly speaking, his equation It gives you nonsense under these circumstances.

00:10:42.000 So there's something else.

00:10:43.000 And the something else goes beyond our current quantum mechanics, and it tells you what happens when the quantum state makes a decision between, well, it doesn't follow the Schrödinger equation, it does one thing or the other.

00:10:56.000 Now, everybody knows that who does quantum mechanics, but they think, oh, it's what's called making a measurement, and you're allowed to do something different.

00:11:03.000 But that didn't make sense to me.

00:11:05.000 And so I had the view that, okay, there is a big gap in our understanding.

00:11:10.000 And if there's something in the world which isn't something you could put on a computer, that's where it is.

00:11:17.000 So the view I've held that for a long time, and that there's something non-computable, something beyond computation involved in our understandings of things.

00:11:29.000 So that's a view I held for ages.

00:11:31.000 I didn't do much with it, I just held the view.

00:11:34.000 Until I think there was a radio talk between Marvin Minsky and Edward Fredkin and they were explaining about what computers can do and they were talking about, okay, you have a computer, two computers talking to each other over there and you walk up to the room and the time you've walked up the room to the computers,

00:11:51.000 they have communicated with each other more thoughts than the human race ever has done, you see.

00:12:00.000 And I thought, well, I see where you're coming from.

00:12:02.000 But I don't think that's what's happening.

00:12:04.000 In human communication, human understanding is something different from what computers do.

00:12:10.000 And consciousness is the key thing.

00:12:12.000 Consciousness is something different from computation.

00:12:16.000 So I've held that view.

00:12:17.000 But then when I heard this talk by Minsky and Fredkin, I thought, well, I had ideas of writing a book sometime in a long time in the future when I'm retired.

00:12:28.000 This was some while back, I say.

00:12:29.000 And I thought, well, this gives it a focus.

00:12:33.000 And so I wrote this book called The Emperor's New Mind, which is supposed to be saying, well, you know, everybody seems to be thinking one thing, but the little kid notices that the emperor doesn't have any clothes.

00:12:47.000 So it was that theme of that story which was the basis of the book.

00:12:53.000 So I say, okay...

00:12:55.000 Maybe lots of people think that all we're doing is computing, but if you stand back and you say, well, no, there's something else going on.

00:13:04.000 So that was the basis of my thoughts about consciousness.

00:13:09.000 But I wrote this book thinking that by the time I got to the end of the book, you see, it was mostly about physics and mathematics and things like that, but I was really aiming for this thing about what's going on in conscious thinking.

00:13:22.000 And I thought, well, I'll learn a bit about neurophysiology and so on, and by the time I get to the end of the book, I'll know pretty well what it could be.

00:13:30.000 I didn't.

00:13:31.000 I got to the end of the book, and I just sort of tapered off rather with something a little bit unbelievable, and that was the end.

00:13:38.000 Now, you see, I hoped that this book would stimulate young people to get interested in science and that sort of thing, mathematics, and that was fine.

00:13:48.000 And when the book was published, I didn't get letters from young kids.

00:13:51.000 I got letters from old retired people, the ones who'd had the time to read my book.

00:13:57.000 Okay, well, that was a little disappointing, but okay, I'm glad the old retired people liked my book. 0.86

00:14:03.000 But the other thing was, I got a letter from Stuart Hameroff, and this letter said, more or less, I think you don't appreciate that there's something else going on, not neurons.

00:14:14.000 I mean, the neurons, I could see, you couldn't isolate the quantum effects.

00:14:21.000 What's called environmental decoherence would happen and you get no way of keeping the quantum state to the level that you need in this picture.

00:14:29.000 I realized I didn't have it, but Stuart Hameroff pointed out to me these little things called microtubules, and he'd built up a theory that microtubules were absolutely fundamental to consciousness.

00:14:41.000 He had his own reasons for believing that.

00:14:44.000 I'd never heard of them at that time, but then I checked up.

00:14:47.000 You know, I get lots of letters from people who maybe don't make sense sometimes, the letters.

00:14:53.000 And this one, I thought, well, is this another one?

00:14:56.000 I realized these microtubules are there, and they look like just the kind of thing that could well be supporting the kind of level of quantum mechanics, up to a level where you could expect the...

00:15:09.000 The quantum state sort of collapsed.

00:15:12.000 That's the terminology people use in quantum mechanics.

00:15:14.000 And microtubules, they are inside brain neurons?

00:15:17.000 They are indeed.

00:15:18.000 And this is a recent discovery?

00:15:19.000 No, they're actually in lots of cells, you see.

00:15:23.000 People often complain, oh, they're in your liver too, not just your brain, so why isn't your liver conscious and all that.

00:15:28.000 But it has to do with the organization of them and the nature of them, the particular kind of microtubules, how they're arranged, which is different in the brain.

00:15:36.000 How does it vary in the brain compared to other cells?

00:15:39.000 I think one big difference, although Stuart emphasizes this so much, there are two kinds of microtubules.

00:15:44.000 They're the ones called the A-lattice and the B-lattice.

00:15:47.000 And the A-lattice ones are the very symmetrical ones.

00:15:50.000 They're tubes and they look the same all the way around.

00:15:53.000 They've got a very beautiful arrangement of these proteins called tubulin and they make a very nice arrangement which is connected with Fibonacci numbers and things like that.

00:16:03.000 So they look a bit like fur cones, but they're all parallel.

00:16:06.000 They don't taper off.

00:16:11.000 But the thing is, in the brain, I think most microtubules are probably what are called B-lattice ones, and they don't have so much symmetry.

00:16:19.000 They've got a sort of seam down one side.

00:16:23.000 And they're very important in transporting substances around cells and so on.

00:16:29.000 Microtubles are all sorts of things.

00:16:31.000 They don't just do what Stuart and I think they may be doing in the brain.

00:16:35.000 So the idea is that in the brain they're organized differently and probably the ones that are important are the A-lattice ones, which are the very symmetrical ones.

00:16:45.000 And for a long time people couldn't see the difference because they look very similar.

00:16:51.000 And they may well be the ones that happen to be in pyramidal cells as a particular kind of cell.

00:16:58.000 So, you know, one of the things that interested me a lot is how it is that not all parts of the brain are the same in this respect.

00:17:06.000 You see, you've got the cerebrum.

00:17:07.000 This is the part at the top and, you know, divided down the middle.

00:17:10.000 And that, when you see brains, that's what you normally see with convolutions in it.

00:17:16.000 But right underneath and at the back, there's a thing called the cerebellum, which looks more like a ball of wool or something.

00:17:23.000 And the cerebellum, there may still be argument about this, but it seems to be that it's completely unconscious.

00:17:31.000 And it has comparable number of neurons, far more connections between neurons than the cerebrum.

00:17:37.000 And it's what takes control and maybe when you're driving your car and you're thinking about something else and you're not thinking what you're doing.

00:17:45.000 Because it's unconscious.

00:17:47.000 And the unconscious control, you know, a pianist who's very expert and moves the fingers around and plays a note with a little finger, that pianist doesn't think, well, I've got to move that muscle this way and this bone that way and so on.

00:17:59.000 And it's all controlled unconsciously.

00:18:02.000 And a lot of this unconscious control is done somewhere else in the cerebellum when you get really skilled.

00:18:09.000 So it seemed to me, okay, you've got different kinds of structures, different...

00:18:13.000 And it could well be that these pyramidal cells which have a particular organization of microtubules are the ones where the consciousness is really coming to light mainly.

00:18:25.000 I don't know, there's a lot which is not known about this, controversial and all sorts of things.

00:18:31.000 But the cerebellum seems to be different and organized differently.

00:18:35.000 So it's not just how many neurons, how many connections are there, because there are more in the cerebellum.

00:18:40.000 So it's not that.

00:18:41.000 It's something else.

00:18:41.000 Do they know this from observing the brain through fMRI or something like that during particular activities?

00:18:47.000 I don't know.

00:18:48.000 I would imagine partly just examining it from dead people and looking at brains and trying to estimate how many neurons there are in it.

00:18:56.000 Right, but how would they know which partials are active during particular activities?

00:19:00.000 Well, I don't know that they do know all that well, I guess.

00:19:03.000 But the cerebellum, there is a bit of an argument about that, whether it's completely unconscious or not.

00:19:10.000 But it seems that actions that are carried out by the cerebellum, you're not aware of what you're doing.

00:19:17.000 But I mean, it's...

00:19:19.000 You know, if you're a tennis player who has to think very carefully about the way to tilt the ball.

00:19:24.000 Now, the control of what you're doing, the overall control, is probably done with the cerebrum.

00:19:31.000 But the cerebellum is controlling the detailed motions, how the fingers move and all that kind of thing.

00:19:37.000 And then you make sure that if the player thinks it's going to hit the ball down the line there, and then the rest is done under the...

00:19:47.000 Control of an unconscious procedure.

00:19:49.000 I may be simplifying.

00:19:51.000 I understand what you're saying.

00:19:52.000 So you're saying that we don't totally understand, but we know that there's different parts of the brain that are responsible for different activities, and some activities don't seem to be conscious.

00:20:03.000 Yes, yes.

00:20:04.000 I mean, I think it's probably the case, I don't know, I shouldn't make a statement, I don't really know.

00:20:11.000 But certainly there are lots of different parts of the cerebrum which may be not conscious too.

00:20:19.000 So I'm not saying that the whole thing is capable of being conscious.

00:20:23.000 There seem to be differences in different parts.

00:20:25.000 But are you convinced that microtubules are responsible for consciousness, or it's a primary theory?

00:20:33.000 I think they're one of the best candidates.

00:20:38.000 You see, I don't think it's only microtubules.

00:20:40.000 I don't know.

00:20:40.000 I'm not sure what Stuart Hamroff's view on this is.

00:20:43.000 He certainly thinks the microtubules are exceedingly important in consciousness, and I think he's right.

00:20:48.000 That's the feeling I get.

00:20:50.000 And he's done a lot of work on trying to find what anesthetic gas is.

00:20:54.000 It's an important, one of the important ways you can tell things about consciousness.

00:20:58.000 Most of it you can't, it's just hearsay and whatever it is.

00:21:02.000 But one of the important ways you can tell something about consciousness is what turns it off in a reversible way.

00:21:10.000 In Stuart's job, he's an anesthesiologist.

00:21:15.000 He puts people to sleep.

00:21:17.000 Well, I think he would complain if I say putting it to sleep because under anesthetic is actually different from sleep.

00:21:23.000 But you make them unconscious in a reversible way.

00:21:26.000 You want to make sure that you can wake them up again.

00:21:29.000 And it's obviously a very skilled thing.

00:21:33.000 But I guess a lot of his colleagues might be skilled at doing it, but they ask the questions about what they're actually doing from the point of view of the biology and the physics and so on.

00:21:43.000 So Stuart was really interested in that question.

00:21:46.000 Partly, I think, things like mitosis, cell division.

00:21:50.000 And he was very struck by the way that the chromosomes all line up and that there's these microtubules which are pulling them And they're a really big part in the structure of cells and how they behave and so on.

00:22:04.000 But why their consciousness?

00:22:07.000 Well, I guess it was an experience with putting people under anesthetics and the fact that the gases which They put you to sleep and they're, again, I shouldn't say to sleep, but put you on.

00:22:20.000 Anesthetic are very unconnected chemically.

00:22:23.000 They're different kinds of things, yet they still seem to have the same effect.

00:22:28.000 And to understand what it is that they affect is, you know, a lot of his interest is to do with that.

00:22:35.000 So just by putting someone unconscious and registering what parts of the brain are no longer active, this is what they're using to sort of reverse engineer by turning those parts on?

00:22:47.000 That's what enables consciousness?

00:22:50.000 Is this the...

00:22:50.000 Well, I think it's probably simplification of what's going on.

00:22:54.000 But that's a good first step, yes.

00:22:58.000 Consciousness becomes, as a subject, it's very susceptible to woo, right?

00:23:05.000 Indeed.

00:23:06.000 It's one of those weird ones where people want to start talking about souls and universal consciousness, and they start – it gets – Yeah.

00:23:17.000 It's a murky area.

00:23:19.000 Yes.

00:23:19.000 And there's no clear borderline.

00:23:21.000 Well, you see, Stuart runs these consciousness conferences, and he's very broad-minded.

00:23:25.000 He has people with all sorts of different views like the ones you mentioned.

00:23:28.000 And it's not necessarily his view, but he likes to get a broad perspective on what's going on.

00:23:34.000 I'm a bit more narrow-minded than he is on these matters.

00:23:37.000 Yeah, I am too.

00:23:38.000 I'm very skeptical because I understand the inclination that people have to lean towards the woo.

00:23:43.000 It's very fun.

00:23:45.000 For whatever reason, people are inclined to lean towards...

00:23:50.000 You saw that movie, I don't know if you saw it, What the Bleep Do We Know?

00:23:54.000 Oh, yes, I did.

00:23:55.000 People love that kind of stuff.

00:23:57.000 That was a little worrying to me.

00:23:58.000 A little bit.

00:23:59.000 Yes.

00:24:00.000 Yes, indeed.

00:24:00.000 No, that did worry me.

00:24:02.000 Yeah, well, it's just, you know, it was written, the movie was made by a cult leader.

00:24:06.000 And it gets a little squirrely, right?

00:24:09.000 You're absolutely right.

00:24:10.000 And I was, as I say, I was distinctly worried about that movie.

00:24:14.000 I'm sure you were.

00:24:15.000 A lot of people that I know that were like yourself were worried.

00:24:18.000 But this is something that everyone contemplates.

00:24:22.000 Like, what makes you conscious?

00:24:23.000 What is the soul?

00:24:24.000 Is it a real thing?

00:24:25.000 What is your consciousness?

00:24:27.000 Is it simply just your own biology trying to calculate your environment and looking out for its best interests and trying to procreate and move forward with the genes that it has?

00:24:37.000 Or is it something almost mystical?

00:24:40.000 Or far more complicated, maybe even.

00:24:42.000 Instead of, the word mystical might be tainted.

00:24:44.000 Maybe something far more complex than we're currently able to understand.

00:24:48.000 I think to some extent I would agree it is, because it's certainly different.

00:24:53.000 I mean, to have some internal perception of the external world and being able to think abstractly and all these things, it's surely different from the way baseball runs through the air and what makes it spin and And different than every other conscious animal.

00:25:12.000 I'm not so sure about that.

00:25:14.000 No?

00:25:14.000 I think the difference isn't that big.

00:25:16.000 Really?

00:25:17.000 I mean, okay, we use language to a degree.

00:25:21.000 I mean, some animals use language to some kind of degree.

00:25:24.000 There's a huge difference in degree.

00:25:26.000 I'd agree with that.

00:25:27.000 But whether it's a difference in kind, I'm not at all sure.

00:25:32.000 You know, you watch these nature movies and I remember seeing one about elephants and this was about how the elephants were...

00:25:41.000 And they're always led by a female elephant, and that's not relevant to the story, but they were trying to go from A to B. I don't remember what it was.

00:25:50.000 And there was a whole herd of them.

00:25:52.000 They'd be doing that.

00:25:52.000 But then at a certain point, they made a detour.

00:25:55.000 And they went off to a place where the leader of the elephant heard her sister had died.

00:26:02.000 And the bones, the tusks I suppose, were there, the bones anyway, were there, and the elephants picked them up, handed them around, and seemed to caress them and move them around, and then they went back, joined to the route that they were at before.

00:26:18.000 Now what does that tell us?

00:26:19.000 There's something going on which is not just some machine behaving like a robot.

00:26:26.000 There's some feelings there that we can appreciate.

00:26:30.000 Another one I remember was one with these African hunting dogs.

00:26:36.000 And the dogs...

00:26:37.000 You see, there was a route where some antelopes would tend to go, and they had to go across the river.

00:26:41.000 And when they got to the point where they crossed the river, it might slow down and make their way to get across.

00:26:46.000 Now these hunting dogs, you could see them.

00:26:49.000 I think it was taken from the air, and they would go along towards this place where the river was, and then they would break into two.

00:26:56.000 So half of them would go one way, and they would hide just where the river starts.

00:27:02.000 And the other half would go and chase the antelopes.

00:27:04.000 They'd go and bark and make an awful noise, chase them right there, and then the other ones would pounce on them.

00:27:09.000 I mean, there's something there which is, you know, they've been working it out between themselves, how to do it.

00:27:16.000 Communication of some kind.

00:27:18.000 And I think there's what you call understanding, okay, at a more primitive level than in human understanding, but nevertheless, there is something, there's no sort of clean dividing line in my view.

00:27:33.000 It's pretty continuous.

00:27:35.000 Yeah, and this exists in wolves as well.

00:27:37.000 Very, very similar behavior.

00:27:39.000 And they do seem to have not just verbal but non-verbal communication.

00:27:44.000 They seem to have some understanding of what the task is and what their roles are in the task.

00:27:49.000 And even though there's not as many variables maybe as human life, there definitely seems to be a conscious awareness of, first of all, their position in the hierarchy of the tribe.

00:28:01.000 Yeah.

00:28:01.000 Of the pack, rather, but also what their objective is.

00:28:06.000 This is not a selfish objective, it's a group objective, and they operate as a group, and they do move like those African dogs that you were talking about. 0.71

00:28:15.000 Yeah.

00:28:16.000 No, it's fascinating, all that, yeah.

00:28:18.000 And there's a lot of indication that, well, certainly chimps and elephants and things, and dolphins, we know about them, but I imagine it goes quite far down, I should think.

00:28:28.000 How much have you studied octopi?

00:28:30.000 They're fascinating, aren't they?

00:28:32.000 Yes.

00:28:32.000 No, I haven't.

00:28:33.000 There's a new book about them, which I haven't gotten the chance to read yet.

00:28:36.000 I want to read it.

00:28:37.000 I think they're highly intelligent.

00:28:40.000 Yes.

00:28:40.000 Yeah, I've only been really paying attention to them for a few years.

00:28:44.000 I have a good friend, my friend Remy Warren, was doing a television show called Apex Predator, where he studied the way different animals hunted.

00:28:53.000 And he started studying the way octopus and cuttlefish and all these different...

00:29:02.000 Different octopi and the way they could adapt to their environment by changing their actual, not just the look, but the texture of their skin instantaneously.

00:29:11.000 And how this is not really understood, not only how they do it, but how they know what's below them, what they're copying.

00:29:20.000 That they somehow or another can figure out how to blend in almost perfectly with their environment.

00:29:25.000 It's amazing, isn't it?

00:29:26.000 They also can open jars and they can climb out of tanks.

00:29:30.000 There was one guy, he had a camera on his tank because he had two tanks.

00:29:36.000 And one of them had very expensive tropical fish and the other one had his octopus.

00:29:41.000 And he was trying to figure out what was happening to his expensive tropical fish, so he put a camera on it.

00:29:45.000 And the octopus was climbing out of the tank, walking across the ground, climbing into the other tank, killing one of the fish, eating it, and then going back into his tank.

00:29:56.000 That's heavy.

00:29:58.000 Indeed.

00:29:58.000 Well, there's one I saw about octopus.

00:30:00.000 I think I heard the description, or I read it.

00:30:02.000 I think I read it.

00:30:03.000 About some experiments on testing the intelligence of octopuses.

00:30:08.000 And they had a little thing.

00:30:10.000 They had to pull a chain and then open a door and get food out.

00:30:13.000 And this octopus was thinking, I'm getting fed up with this thing.

00:30:16.000 And so it yanked the chain and it came right off.

00:30:19.000 And then it rose to the top and started squirting all the people in their white coats.

00:30:24.000 I thought it was pretty good.

00:30:26.000 There's something else going on.

00:30:28.000 There is something going on.

00:30:29.000 Absolutely.

00:30:30.000 Now, if you weren't pressed to figure this out in some sort of a paper that you had to display in front of scientists, if you were trying to figure out, what do you think it is?

00:30:46.000 What do you think consciousness is?

00:30:48.000 Well, you see, I mean, to...

00:30:51.000 It's going too far to think, you know, I know what the answer is or anything like that.

00:30:55.000 I just think that this issue of having some kind of quantum state which preserves itself up to a certain level.

00:31:04.000 And the microtubules at least suggested something where you could isolate them from the outside and the symmetry of these things is important.

00:31:13.000 And there are other structures.

00:31:14.000 I suspect it's not just microtubules.

00:31:17.000 I suspect there are these things called clathorins.

00:31:21.000 These are molecules which inhabit the synapses.

00:31:27.000 And the thing about these ones is that they're incredibly symmetrical.

00:31:32.000 They're like a soccer ball.

00:31:34.000 You know, you have these pentagons and hexagons, and at each vertex you've got a protein.

00:31:39.000 It's called a triskelion.

00:31:41.000 And they join themselves along the edges of the pattern of the soccer ball.

00:31:45.000 Okay, but it's just a substance.

00:31:50.000 I mean, it's made of these proteins.

00:31:52.000 And what are they doing hanging around in the synapses?

00:31:56.000 I don't know.

00:31:56.000 But the symmetry has a key role.

00:31:59.000 There's a thing called the Jan Teller effect in quantum mechanics, which tells you that when you have a highly symmetrical structure like that, then there can be a big gap between the lowest energy level and the next one.

00:32:12.000 And there can be information in this lowest energy level, which can be...

00:32:16.000 It's shielded from the higher energy levels.

00:32:19.000 So this is a sort of suggestion that some kind of quantum phenomenon is going on in a serious way, and there's a lot to understand there.

00:32:28.000 I mean, synapses themselves are kind of strange things.

00:32:31.000 You might think, if you were going to build a brain, why don't you just solder the wires together, the connections you see?

00:32:36.000 What are you doing having this thing with all the chemicals transferring this information from one side to the other?

00:32:42.000 I don't know, but it's something very...

00:32:44.000 Needed by the system.

00:32:46.000 And it's all tied up with these clathorins there and cytoskeleton structures, which microtubules are one of the main constituents.

00:32:55.000 So you see, I don't know, there's a lot to learn, I'm sure.

00:32:58.000 So it seems like there's a bunch of different factors.

00:33:01.000 There's the biological understanding of the brain itself, and then there's the understanding of the actual nature of cells and of reality itself, that this is being more illuminated by science with every new discovery, and we're getting a better understanding deeper and deeper as to the very nature of matter and of these structures themselves.

00:33:24.000 I think it is getting deep into the way the physical world operates and things that we don't understand about it just yet.

00:33:32.000 Yes.

00:33:33.000 I mean, the biology is one side of it.

00:33:35.000 You know, coming as an outsider, I get struck by certain things.

00:33:38.000 I mean, quite familiar with the fact that the right side of the cerebrum controls the left hand and the left hand the right hand.

00:33:45.000 But then you look at this and it's not just that.

00:33:48.000 What about the soles of your feet, right at the top?

00:33:51.000 What about your eyes, the signals right at the back? 0.98

00:33:55.000 You'd think this is the most ridiculous construction. 0.99

00:33:57.000 You're going to the worst possible place. 0.99

00:34:00.000 There must be a reason.

00:34:01.000 And the cerebellum is different.

00:34:03.000 The cerebellum is the left side, controls the left side, and the right side, the right side.

00:34:08.000 So there's something going on which involves these signals having to cross each other or whatever it is.

00:34:13.000 I don't know.

00:34:15.000 Well, we'd like to think that there's a reason, but then we look at other biological life forms and they look kind of preposterous, like a platypus, for instance.

00:34:22.000 You look at that and you go, what is that?

00:34:23.000 Is that an experiment?

00:34:25.000 Is that a prototype that just ran wild?

00:34:29.000 Well, I guess you've got to think of it in terms of natural selection of some sort.

00:34:33.000 I guess the circumstances there, I don't know, in Australia, wherever you find it.

00:34:39.000 It must be specific.

00:34:41.000 I guess a lot of that was because they were...

00:34:44.000 Isolated from the rest of the...

00:34:47.000 So you get sort of strange animals in Australia and in New Zealand where a lot of isolation from the rest of the evolution.

00:34:55.000 So they did their own thing there.

00:34:57.000 Yeah, marsupials.

00:34:58.000 Yeah.

00:34:59.000 It's just intriguing, isn't it?

00:35:01.000 Well, the phrase quantum is another one that's fraught with woo.

00:35:07.000 Indeed.

00:35:08.000 Right?

00:35:08.000 And some people, like Deepak Chopra and the like, they love to use that word.

00:35:14.000 Because as soon as you use that word, you can kind of get away with almost anything afterwards.

00:35:18.000 That's right.

00:35:19.000 Yes, I have to say I have… Quantum mechanics is a strange thing, and I sort of blame it for certain things.

00:35:28.000 I don't want to be unfair here.

00:35:29.000 I'm not saying...

00:35:30.000 When I say I blame it, it gives some people the impression, okay, the fact your theory doesn't make any sense, there's nothing against it.

00:35:36.000 You say crazy things.

00:35:38.000 Quantum mechanics is crazy, so why don't you accept some other crazy theory?

00:35:42.000 Of course, quantum mechanics has the virtue that it does agree with an awful lot of experiments.

00:35:47.000 It gives you huge insights into things that one didn't have before.

00:35:51.000 So just the fact that it's crazy isn't enough to make it something you should study seriously.

00:35:59.000 Well, it's very, very difficult to understand, even for people who study it.

00:36:04.000 Yes, indeed.

00:36:05.000 So, for someone like myself, I'm trying to pay attention to this without devoting my entire life to it, and it becomes a big problem.

00:36:15.000 In one of my books, I tried to explain, there are actually two mysteries in quantum mechanics, and they get muddled.

00:36:24.000 One of them is the whole subject is pretty crazy.

00:36:27.000 Yes.

00:36:28.000 But it's coherent, and it makes sense.

00:36:31.000 And if you study it properly, you say, okay, that makes sense.

00:36:35.000 And this includes things like non-local effects, where you can have two things, now even thousands of kilometers apart, and you can see these quantum entanglement effects.

00:36:45.000 So they're still, in some sense, connected with each other, even though they're that far apart, which is pretty amazing.

00:36:51.000 That's baffling.

00:36:52.000 That's baffling but that's part of the comprehensible part of quantum mechanics.

00:36:56.000 It's muddied up because there's the other part which has to do with this collapse of the wave function.

00:37:01.000 And standard quantum mechanics really doesn't make sense.

00:37:05.000 But people get them muddled in my view.

00:37:07.000 You think because this doesn't make sense and that doesn't make sense, well it's all a bit crazy and so anything crazy is up for grabs.

00:37:14.000 But it seems to me that quantum mechanics, the things which are crazy and they do hang together and the theory works and you understand that, that's fine.

00:37:21.000 But the things which involve the collapse of the wave function, that's not fine because we don't have the right theory yet.

00:37:28.000 That's why.

00:37:29.000 It doesn't make logical sense because it's not the right theory yet.

00:37:34.000 That's my view.

00:37:35.000 I mean, I'm a minority in saying this.

00:37:37.000 Most people who study the foundations of quantum mechanics say, well, we haven't got the right interpretation yet.

00:37:42.000 We have to think what it means and so on.

00:37:45.000 They don't think, well, maybe it's not quite right.

00:37:48.000 Maybe there's something, when these effects get big enough, something else comes in and we need a new insight, a new theory.

00:37:56.000 So that's what I think.

00:37:58.000 Now, in something like superposition, where something can be both still and in motion at the same time, as soon as you say that to the common person like myself, my brain glazes over and my eyebrows raise up and I go, okay, what is...

00:38:14.000 And then you're talking about entanglement, things hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart that are somehow or another interacting with each other in a way that we don't totally understand or we don't have a theory that absolutely explains in a concrete way.

00:38:26.000 Well, it does as long as you don't get to the measurement.

00:38:29.000 Ah, the measurement.

00:38:30.000 The entanglement part is pretty well understood.

00:38:32.000 But the measurement is a problem.

00:38:33.000 The measurement part is not.

00:38:34.000 You see, the puzzles about the entanglement is when you come to the measurement.

00:38:38.000 You make a measurement over here and a measurement over there, and they can be, well, now 1,000 kilometers apart.

00:38:45.000 Right.

00:38:45.000 The record was only 143 or something a little while ago.

00:38:48.000 Wow.

00:38:48.000 But it's a long distance.

00:38:51.000 But there's hardly any movement of material.

00:38:56.000 See, in the scheme I have, which involves the collapse of the wave function, involves a certain amount of displacement of mass.

00:39:05.000 Now, if it's just photons that's light, and these experiments tend to be just light, then there's no mass displacement in the state.

00:39:14.000 And so, sure, what quantum mechanics says is fine by me.

00:39:17.000 Okay, it's hard to get your mind around, and I certainly agree with that.

00:39:21.000 But it's logical.

00:39:23.000 What's not logical comes apart when you worry about the measurement issue and the collapse of the wave function and poor old Schrodinger was very upset by this quite right.

00:39:34.000 Yes.

00:39:35.000 Now when you discuss consciousness and the mystery of consciousness and then you Do you think that perhaps some of them are interchangeable or similar to consciousness itself,

00:39:54.000 that there is some sort of a connection that human beings share in some strange, unique, and not understood way yet?

00:40:06.000 I think one has to be careful about these things and sometimes do.

00:40:09.000 Well, even Niels Bohr, who is one of the founders of these ideas, he tried to make a philosophy out of quantum mechanics and complementarity.

00:40:24.000 I think that's going a bit far.

00:40:26.000 I don't really see...

00:40:27.000 Because there's no evidence for it.

00:40:29.000 I don't think so.

00:40:30.000 I think it's a bit misleading.

00:40:32.000 You can see analogies between things, but I don't see myself that it should be taken much further than that.

00:40:42.000 But maybe there's more there.

00:40:44.000 But you're open to the possibility should new information be...

00:40:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:40:49.000 I mean, if it comes to things like, you know, when people talk about entanglements and things, quantum states can spread to long distances, does that mean that human beings' minds can stretch to long distances and so on?

00:41:03.000 So these people will raise questions like that.

00:41:05.000 I don't think so myself.

00:41:06.000 I think that's pretty far-fetched.

00:41:08.000 But, you know, you might worry, well, could it be that there's some...

00:41:14.000 Quantum state, which is shared between different individuals.

00:41:18.000 It's hard to see that could be unless they were, well, I mean, if they were identical twins, I suppose they were once in one cell at one time.

00:41:24.000 But you'd have to preserve that information all the way through, and I just don't see how that could happen.

00:41:29.000 So I'm not a fan of trying to use quantum ideas sort of directly in, say, human behavior or something.

00:41:38.000 I think those analogies are pretty far-fetched, partly because the sort of mathematics you use in quantum mechanics is very specific to quantum mechanics and doesn't really apply to macroscopic behavior as far as I can see.

00:41:55.000 Is this something that you're asked about most often?

00:42:02.000 You mean in my research altogether?

00:42:04.000 Just amongst common people like myself.

00:42:07.000 It's only one of them.

00:42:09.000 But you see, it's slightly misleading when you're thinking about what my interests are.

00:42:14.000 Because I had this, as I say, I explained more or less the history of my ideas there, and I did write a book or at least another one after that too.

00:42:21.000 In fact, I guess I've written three books about that, although one was taken down lectures and so on.

00:42:26.000 But it's not what I do, mainly.

00:42:29.000 My main research is on cosmology, Well, there's this area called Twister Theory, I won't necessarily go into that, but it's meant to be foundational quantum mechanics, foundational physics, not necessarily, but general relativity.

00:42:45.000 I mean, I guess the work I did originally was people paid attention to is in general relativity and black holes, what a black hole is, why we have the idea that they're there at all, that sort of thing.

00:42:59.000 I worked on that at one point.

00:43:01.000 Cosmology as a whole is one of the most terrifying concepts to me.

00:43:06.000 Because when I start thinking about the size and scale of everything, I get to a certain point and my brain just shuts off.

00:43:16.000 There's not enough juice.

00:43:18.000 Well, it's pretty huge.

00:43:20.000 One has to think on a pretty huge scale.

00:43:22.000 But it's like so many things.

00:43:24.000 It looks sort of mind-boggling at first, and then when you get used to the idea, you can sort of play around with the ideas and maybe forget how mind-boggling it should be.

00:43:34.000 I was watching a documentary on supermassive black holes and they were discussing how the size of...

00:43:40.000 I don't know if this is still a current theory.

00:43:43.000 This documentary was a few years old.

00:43:45.000 But they were saying that there's a supermassive black hole inside of every galaxy that's one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy.

00:43:52.000 And that one of the theories was that inside these supermassive black holes could be an entirely different universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with their own black holes, and that it's infinite.

00:44:05.000 Well, you see, I have a fairly, an idea which I think the mainstream does still regard as a bit crazy, but not like that.

00:44:13.000 I don't think you're going to have much fun inside a black hole.

00:44:17.000 No parties in there?

00:44:19.000 Not much.

00:44:20.000 Well, you could have a really big black hole, and there's a lot of time in there, a really big one.

00:44:24.000 If you were in a spaceship, you could have a few parties before you.

00:44:29.000 Singularity, yes.

00:44:30.000 But I'm not sure I recommend it.

00:44:34.000 No, yeah, I mean, black holes are remarkable enough, but the thing I did, which was in, well, 1964, published in 1965, It was to show that black holes—well,

00:44:50.000 I'm using a terminology that wasn't around at that time—that the black holes—it was gravitational collapse.

00:44:57.000 You see, the history went back to, originally, I guess, Chandrasekhar, an Indian scientist when he was not quite 20, I think.

00:45:05.000 I can't remember if he was 19 or 20. And he was going to England to study physics, astronomy, and so on.

00:45:11.000 And he worked on this problem about what holds white dwarfs apart.

00:45:15.000 These are these very massive stars, the companion of Sirius.

00:45:19.000 Sirius is a white dwarf.

00:45:21.000 And he was doing calculations to find out whether the interior is particularly a structure of matter.

00:45:31.000 And he came to the conclusion that if they had a bigger mass than a certain amount, which is about a bit less than one and a half times the sun's mass, They wouldn't be able to hold themselves apart.

00:45:43.000 And so they would collapse.

00:45:46.000 And he didn't speculate on what had happened.

00:45:50.000 There was some very modest comment he made.

00:45:53.000 We are left speculating on possibilities or something.

00:45:57.000 But then that was in the 1930s, I guess around about 1930s.

00:46:01.000 And much later, just before the war, Second World War, 1939, there was a paper by Oppenheimer of atomic bomb fame, and Schneider,

00:46:18.000 which is a student of his, Hartland Schneider, And they produced a model which was a solution of the Einstein equations which describes a cloud of dust which collapses and becomes what we now call a black hole.

00:46:35.000 So this was the first clear picture of collapse to a black hole.

00:46:41.000 Now in their picture they made two huge assumptions.

00:46:45.000 Well, one of them is dust.

00:46:47.000 The material, that means it didn't have any pressure.

00:46:49.000 And so you could imagine when it gets close to itself, it might push away if it had pressure in it in any way.

00:46:54.000 But this was just dust.

00:46:55.000 That was one thing.

00:46:56.000 But more important, that the model was exactly symmetrical.

00:47:00.000 So it was just spherically symmetrical.

00:47:03.000 All the matter falling in, the dust particles, would be focused right into the central point.

00:47:08.000 And so it's not so hard to believe that you get a singularity where the density goes infinite, the curvatures go infinite, and your equations go crazy.

00:47:18.000 So at that point, when the dust reaches the middle point, okay, it's not so surprising because it's a very contrived situation.

00:47:26.000 So I think a lot of people thought, well, perhaps we shouldn't take it seriously.

00:47:30.000 I think they weren't sure.

00:47:31.000 But then there was a paper by two Russians called Lifshitz and Kholatnikov, and they seemed to have proved that you didn't get singularities in the general case, that somehow it would swirl around and swish out again, you see.

00:47:46.000 So that was a possibility.

00:47:48.000 And then there was this discovery, I think, in 1962, when Martin Schmidt, a Dutch astronomer, a Dutch-American, I think, where he was living there at the time, I don't remember.

00:48:00.000 But he observed what became what we call the first quasar.

00:48:05.000 So this was an object which was...

00:48:08.000 We're radiating an awful amount of energy, far more than an entire galaxy, but it seemed to be a very small thing.

00:48:15.000 It couldn't be much bigger than the size of the solar system, if even that big, because variations in brightness indicated that the speed of light, the size of it had to be comparable with the speed at which the variations in brightness came about.

00:48:35.000 So it seemed to be an object That was enormously energetic, producing more energy than the whole galaxy, and varying with such a degree that it must be fairly small.

00:48:47.000 And this raised the question of whether it was small enough to be what we now call a black hole.

00:48:53.000 In other words, there's a thing called the Schwarzschild radius.

00:48:58.000 Schwarzschild was the man who first discovered the solutions of Einstein's equations, which described this spherical body.

00:49:05.000 But he didn't extrapolate it inwards to what's called this horizon.

00:49:10.000 We call it a horizon now.

00:49:11.000 It used to be called the Schwarzschild singularity.

00:49:13.000 And people began to realize that it wasn't really a singularity.

00:49:17.000 It's more something you could imagine falling through.

00:49:19.000 I guess it was Lemaitre who first...

00:49:23.000 Make that clear, but not many people paid attention.

00:49:27.000 But that was the idea of a black hole, and it looked then that these quasars could be having some black hole in the middle of them.

00:49:35.000 And I remember John Wheeler, who was at Princeton then, a very distinguished scientist, And he got very worried about these things, and he talked to me, and he wanted to write about it, and do we believe, is there a singularity in the middle?

00:49:46.000 Do we believe, Lifshitz and Klatenkopf, that they sort of swirl around and bounce out?

00:49:50.000 What are we supposed to think?

00:49:52.000 So I started thinking about this problem, and since at that time, Well, you see, either people, when you want to solve the Einstein equations, either you make a lot of assumptions and it's asymmetrical, like the Oppenheimer-Snyder model,

00:50:07.000 you assume it's got very special properties, and then you can maybe solve the equations.

00:50:12.000 But only very, very special cases.

00:50:14.000 And the computers weren't powerful enough to tell you very much about what happened.

00:50:19.000 So I started thinking about this problem and realizing that I'd have to think about it in a different way.

00:50:25.000 And so I used ideas which involve ideas from topology and things like that to show that there had to be a singularity in the middle, provided that the collapse had reached a certain point of no return.

00:50:39.000 I guess to get some idea, I don't know, it's not too misleading.

00:50:43.000 There's a mathematical theorem called the hairy dog theorem.

00:50:48.000 Hairy dog theorem.

00:50:49.000 Yes.

00:50:50.000 I mean, that's just a jocular terminology.

00:50:53.000 But you think of something which is...

00:50:56.000 Topologically a sphere, that means, you see, you imagine a dog shape, but you could sort of move it around with a piece of plasticine until it looked like a sphere.

00:51:05.000 It doesn't have holes in it.

00:51:06.000 Okay, forget about this digestive system, you see.

00:51:08.000 You're thinking about the surface outside.

00:51:11.000 And then the problem is you try to comb the hair on the dog all the way around, and the theorem says there's got to be somewhere where the hair doesn't lie flat.

00:51:20.000 And you try it on a sphere, there's got to be a point where the hair makes a kind of singular point.

00:51:25.000 So it's a bit like that.

00:51:27.000 You have no idea where the singularity is, but you know from general topological reasons that there's got to be one somewhere.

00:51:35.000 And that was the sort of argument that I produced.

00:51:41.000 I guess a lot of people had a little bit of trouble because they'd never seen this kind of argument.

00:51:45.000 And a lot of people picked up on it, in particular Stephen Hawking.

00:51:49.000 And it became, for a while, many people working on it.

00:51:55.000 I guess it's not so popular now because probably we've run out of theorems.

00:52:01.000 The idea of a singularity is when you see something like a quasar or the center of a galaxy, and we were talking about a black hole, when you say a singularity,

00:52:16.000 what exactly do you mean by that?

00:52:19.000 Well, the normal expectation is that you have a place, like in the middle of the Oppenheimer Snyder dust cloud, a point there where the density becomes infinite, and so the curvature of space-time becomes infinite.

00:52:36.000 So you have a place where the equations run away and they go to infinity and you say, well, something's gone wrong.

00:52:43.000 But maybe initially it was in these very symmetrical cases.

00:52:46.000 But what you could show by these indirect arguments that somewhere something's got to go wrong.

00:52:52.000 You can't continue the equations of Einstein and they got stuck to the place where they go infinite or What in detail happens, the theorems don't tell you.

00:53:03.000 They just say that something goes wrong.

00:53:05.000 And that's what we call a singularity.

00:53:08.000 And if a black hole is larger or smaller, the singularity remains constant?

00:53:13.000 It remains in there.

00:53:15.000 Remains in there, but it's not measurable in terms of its actual size?

00:53:18.000 I don't know whether you can measure its size very well, because its size, that's an intriguing question.

00:53:25.000 You might say the size has gone to zero, but it could be quite complicated and irregular, not like the original Oppenheimer Snyder one.

00:53:35.000 Even then, a point is the wrong point of view, but let's not go into that.

00:53:38.000 No, there is something about the structure of these things you can say.

00:53:42.000 They're not all the same, no.

00:53:44.000 The singularities are not all the same, but the black holes are not all the same.

00:53:47.000 They're not all the same, but that's one of the strange things about black holes is that if you let them settle down, they're not all the same to begin with, but there are not many different things they can settle into.

00:53:59.000 They can have rotation, they can have a certain mass, and the mass translates into the size of the diameter of the hole.

00:54:08.000 And you've also got rotation, so they can rotate.

00:54:13.000 Schwarzschild found the non-rotating ones and it was Roy Kerr, an Australian who first produced the solution for a rotating black hole.

00:54:21.000 Rotating?

00:54:22.000 Yes, a rotating one.

00:54:24.000 But then you see the remarkable thing is that's what they settle down to.

00:54:27.000 So there are good theorems which tell you that a general black hole, which is very complicated, fairly rapidly will settle down and become one of these Kerr solutions, the rotating black hole.

00:54:37.000 I remember when I first saw that documentary and I saw when they were discussing the shape of these galaxies and the center of it, It's an unbelievably beautiful yet simultaneously terrifying idea.

00:55:00.000 Infinite power in the center of infinite mass that's absorbing slowly but surely everything around it.

00:55:07.000 Yes, but it's not infinite mass.

00:55:09.000 The mass is quite well-defined, and it's not infinite.

00:55:12.000 But yeah, oh, it's a good question.

00:55:13.000 I mean, if you wait forever, how much of the mass actually gets swallowed by the black hole?

00:55:19.000 You see, I think the picture is, I think, not just of one galaxy, but a cluster.

00:55:24.000 You see, our galaxy has this 4 million solar mass black hole, and we are on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy.

00:55:33.000 And I don't know how long, but many...

00:55:35.000 But some time in the future.

00:55:37.000 Yes, the black holes will probably spiral into each other, and there'll be one big one.

00:55:41.000 So it's definable mass, but in infinite density, and that this point, which where they were speculating that this could possibly be in the center of these supermassive black holes, if you could go through that, there would be another universe.

00:55:55.000 Is that just total speculation?

00:55:58.000 It's a nice romantic thought.

00:56:00.000 Ah, it's more woo.

00:56:01.000 Is it more woo?

00:56:02.000 I'm afraid so.

00:56:03.000 It sounds so good, though.

00:56:05.000 Yes, I know.

00:56:05.000 Well, it's a shame for science fiction, because it makes a nice story.

00:56:08.000 Well, it's interesting that we try to make things more complicated than they are, because they're so complicated as it is.

00:56:13.000 Like dark matter, for instance.

00:56:16.000 It boggles the mind that we don't really totally understand, what, 90-plus percent?

00:56:21.000 Well, that's a good question.

00:56:23.000 What is that stuff?

00:56:24.000 Well, you want me to tell you my theory?

00:56:26.000 Yes, please.

00:56:28.000 Well, you see, it's part of a story which, I don't know, about 15 years ago, I must have...

00:56:35.000 Years are passing by, I can't remember how long ago now.

00:56:38.000 So I had this idea...

00:56:40.000 You see, the universe as a whole is expanding.

00:56:47.000 Now...

00:56:49.000 Early in this century, don't ask me dates again, some people, by observing supernova stars, exposing stars very, very far away, they found out that the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion.

00:57:06.000 And some people found this very mysterious.

00:57:09.000 On the other hand, it's in all the cosmology books because there is that expectation.

00:57:16.000 You see, in 1915, Einstein produced his general theory.

00:57:21.000 In 1917, he introduced what's called the cosmological constant.

00:57:27.000 So you think of a...

00:57:28.000 It was called lambda.

00:57:30.000 You think of a V-shape turned upside down, which is a lambda.

00:57:34.000 And he introduced this term for the wrong reason.

00:57:38.000 Because at that time, people weren't...

00:57:40.000 There was some indication the universe was expanding, but not very clear.

00:57:44.000 And Einstein, I guess, maybe didn't know or didn't believe it.

00:57:49.000 The Hubble's observations hadn't yet come to make a convincing case of the expansion.

00:57:55.000 So Einstein thought, well, maybe the universe is static.

00:57:59.000 It's kind of philosophically nice to think that it's sitting there all the time.

00:58:02.000 And he couldn't make it do that, so he had to introduce this term called the cosmological constant.

00:58:10.000 And he did that, and then not much longer after this, Hubble showed that the universe does seem to be expanding.

00:58:20.000 And Einstein regarded this lambda term as his biggest blunder, which is an irony because it turns out that this term is probably the explanation for the expansion of the universe that we now see.

00:58:35.000 So it's what people call dark energy.

00:58:37.000 I don't like the term very much because it's neither dark nor proper energy in any clear sense, but still, let's not worry about that.

00:58:45.000 Right.

00:58:45.000 It's an odd term.

00:58:48.000 Yes, I think so.

00:58:49.000 It's a little confusing because there's dark matter as well, which is quite different.

00:58:53.000 You mustn't get them confused.

00:58:54.000 But the dark energy, as it's called, or the cosmological constant, which, as far as we can tell, is completely consistent with the observations.

00:59:03.000 It's a positive number.

00:59:05.000 It's very small, but it seems to be producing this expansion.

00:59:10.000 And I'm quite happy with that viewpoint because it leads to a picture which I've been trying to plug for a while now, maybe up to 15 years, I can't remember.

00:59:23.000 The idea, and I said it's hard to explain, but let me try.

00:59:28.000 It came about because I was worrying about the remote future.

00:59:33.000 And I was thinking, okay, when these black holes are around, they swallowed up all the stars and they're just sitting around.

00:59:40.000 And what's the most next exciting thing happening?

00:59:43.000 Well, the Hawking evaporation.

00:59:45.000 They're going to radiate away.

00:59:47.000 Stephen Hawking showed that black holes had this Temperature, extremely cold.

00:59:51.000 I mean, these enormous ones are absurdly cold, much colder than anything made on the Earth.

00:59:58.000 But when the universe expands and expands and expands, it gets colder than the black holes.

01:00:03.000 And so those black holes become the hottest things around, and so they radiate away very, very slowly, this Hawking radiation.

01:00:12.000 And that carries energy, and so they shrink, and they shrink, and they shrink.

01:00:16.000 And finally, they disappear with a pop.

01:00:19.000 I say a pop is probably a pretty big explosion, but not that big from the cosmological astrophysical scale.

01:00:27.000 So they disappear.

01:00:29.000 Well, it may have been pretty boring when you're sitting around waiting for the black hole to go pop, but afterwards, that's really boring.

01:00:36.000 So this was a picture I thought of, being rather depressed by it, thinking that's our fate.

01:00:43.000 You see, the fate of all the interesting things happening, ultimate fate, is this unbelievably boring final state.

01:00:50.000 Okay, this is an emotional argument, but give me a bit of leeway.

01:00:54.000 So I began to think, well, it's not going to be us who are going to be bored, because we're not going to be around.

01:01:01.000 But the main things that will be around will be photons.

01:01:05.000 And it's pretty hard to bore a photon.

01:01:08.000 For two very good reasons.

01:01:10.000 One is it probably doesn't have conscious experiences, not that sure.

01:01:14.000 But the other is more the science point, that they don't measure time, because a photon has no mass.

01:01:21.000 It travels at the speed of light, and the way relativity works, it means that clocks stop, if you like.

01:01:28.000 So, if it had experiences, the moment of its creation would be one moment, and the next moment would be infinity.

01:01:35.000 And so they just zip out to infinity without noticing a thing.

01:01:39.000 Now you see, I'd been doing work on this kind of thing, thinking more about gravitational radiation and how you measure its energy and things like that.

01:01:46.000 And it was a very useful picture to squash down infinity A useful thing to think about here, if you've seen these pictures by the Dutch artist MC Escher, and there are those which are called circle limits, and there's a very famous one with angels and devils interlocking,

01:02:03.000 and they get all crowded up onto the edge.

01:02:06.000 Now what you've got to think about is that this is a kind of geometry called hyperbolic geometry, and the angels and devils live in that geometry.

01:02:15.000 And the ones right close to the edge think they're the same size and same shape as the ones in the middle.

01:02:20.000 Oh, you got it.

01:02:21.000 Great.

01:02:22.000 And so the idea is that if you look at it from the angels and devils point of view, that's infinity, that boundary.

01:02:32.000 But from our point of view, we can look at it and we have what's called a conformal map.

01:02:38.000 That picture is a conformal map.

01:02:40.000 What that means is that little shapes are quite consistently drawn, but they can be big or small.

01:02:47.000 And you don't care about whether they're big or they're small, as long as small shapes are accurate, or angles, if you like, are correctly drawn.

01:02:56.000 So it's what's called a conformal map, and that conformal map describes infinity.

01:03:01.000 Now, you can do the same thing to the universe.

01:03:05.000 Well, I say do it.

01:03:06.000 I mean, you can imagine it.

01:03:07.000 Where this remote future, you can squash it down, just like in the Escher picture, to a finite boundary.

01:03:15.000 And as far as the things with no mass, they don't have a way of measuring how big or small it is.

01:03:20.000 The Maxwell equations don't know the scale.

01:03:22.000 They don't care.

01:03:23.000 It's worked just as well for small as for big, and you can stretch it in some place and squash it somewhere else.

01:03:28.000 As long as the stretching and squashing is isotropic, so just as much one way as the other way, which means more or less that you keep what I call the light cones there.

01:03:36.000 Let's not go into details here.

01:03:38.000 But it means that if you have things without mass, and most particularly the photons, Then that boundary is just like anywhere else, and the photons go zipping up to it, and so you might think they've got to have somewhere to go.

01:03:54.000 Okay, well, you don't have to think that, but that was the point of view I had, that the photons need somewhere to enter, in a way.

01:04:02.000 But then, where does it go?

01:04:04.000 But then there's the other picture, which is the opposite end, there's the Big Bang.

01:04:08.000 Now you can do a similar sort of trick there, which is stretching it out and making it into a boundary.

01:04:15.000 And that can be done to, I played around with these ideas for a long time, and the standard cosmology models you can do it with.

01:04:23.000 But the more complicated cosmology models, you might have one which is a very complicated Big Bang.

01:04:30.000 The general ones don't look like that at all.

01:04:32.000 So you need a condition which tells you that the Big Bang was the very special kind that it was.

01:04:39.000 It's all tied up with this thing called the second law of thermodynamics and it all ties together with physics in a way which perhaps we don't have time to talk about.

01:04:46.000 But it seemed to me a really good idea to have the condition on the Big Bang that you could continue it in the same way.

01:04:55.000 I should say the idea of doing this was a former student of mine, Paul Todd, who was a colleague of mine, and he used this conformal continuation as a nice way of saying what the condition is on the Big Bang to give you what you want.

01:05:11.000 But that's a huge condition.

01:05:13.000 But nevertheless, it's what starts our universe off in a very special state, which is what we live off in a way.

01:05:22.000 It's the second law of thermodynamics that needs that to get going.

01:05:25.000 Anyway, I don't know if you want to worry about that.

01:05:27.000 But anyway, the point was that it looks as though it's a good condition on the Big Bang, but it also should be conformally like a boundary which, if you had no mass, you wouldn't notice it.

01:05:42.000 Okay, you've got particles with mass running around near the Big Bang.

01:05:45.000 But as you get closer and closer and closer, the energy goes up, the temperature goes zooming up.

01:05:50.000 They're zipping around at such a speed that the energy of their motion is much bigger than the E equals mc squared mass, Einstein's mass.

01:06:02.000 The energy in the mass is a certain amount.

01:06:06.000 But when they get so hot, you can forget about the mass.

01:06:10.000 So they, like photons, behave like particles without mass, and so they're just interested in conformal geometry.

01:06:19.000 So the crazy idea I had Not just only you stretch out the Big Bang and you squash down the infinity, but maybe our Big Bang was a squash-down infinity of a previous eon.

01:06:34.000 So I'm saying our eon began with the Big Bang, ended up with this exponential expansion, there was another one before us, there will be another one after us, there was another one before that, and so on.

01:06:46.000 So it's an infinite cycle of Big Bangs.

01:06:49.000 That's the picture.

01:06:49.000 And constant expansion to the point where there's no more energy and then somehow or another a Big Bang comes out of that again?

01:06:54.000 Yes, that's right.

01:06:55.000 Well, that's the tricky part that people have trouble with.

01:06:57.000 It's universally accepted that the Big Bang was an event.

01:07:01.000 There's no conflicting theories that are attractive.

01:07:07.000 I would say nothing terribly popular.

01:07:10.000 There are certain ideas which say you can continue before the Big Bang.

01:07:15.000 Paul Steinhardt and...

01:07:16.000 And what do they think that was?

01:07:19.000 It has things in common with my model, but it's not quite the same.

01:07:23.000 And you see, it's still...

01:07:25.000 You see, there wasn't it right...

01:07:27.000 Not long after Einstein produced his theory and this Alexander Friedman, who was a Russian mathematical physicist, and he produced the first cosmology models.

01:07:38.000 And one of these was a one which has sort of bounces.

01:07:41.000 Big bang, it expands out and then it contracts again.

01:07:44.000 And then it bounces and contracts.

01:07:45.000 So that was one of his models.

01:07:47.000 The only trouble is if you put irregularities into these models, you get black holes, and these black holes form an incredible mess at the end, and that doesn't join onto a nice smooth big bang of the next one.

01:07:58.000 So you have trouble with those models.

01:08:00.000 But still, people take these things seriously.

01:08:03.000 And as I say, Starnhart and Turok have a model which is like that.

01:08:06.000 So these are the things one has to think about.

01:08:09.000 My own view is that they don't take into account the black hole problem, which is that my one gets rid of that because the black holes all evaporate away by Hawking evaporation.

01:08:23.000 So it forms a model.

01:08:25.000 I used to give talks about this feeling quite happy nobody would ever prove it wrong so I can go on talking away at it.

01:08:31.000 But I wasn't quite happy with that.

01:08:33.000 I thought maybe you could see signals coming through.

01:08:36.000 So I had one idea about that.

01:08:37.000 But more recently, and this is only just this year, I have two Polish colleagues, that's Christoph Meisner and Pawel Nirowski, and there is a Korean who works in New York called Daniel Ann, and we,

01:08:54.000 the four of us, have a paper which I think today or tomorrow will be, the new improved version of this paper should be on the archive.

01:09:03.000 And this, the title of the paper is, Are We Seeing Hawking Points in the CMB Sky?

01:09:09.000 Now, what's a hawking point?

01:09:11.000 You see, I talked about the black holes.

01:09:14.000 See, in the previous eon to ours, assuming it's more or less like ours, there would be black holes in clusters of galaxies, huge, enormous ones, swallowing up pretty well the whole cluster.

01:09:24.000 And what happens to the energy in those black holes?

01:09:27.000 Well, it goes out in Hawking irradiation.

01:09:29.000 It takes an age, ages and ages and ages, maybe 10 to 100 years, Google years, or something, ages and ages.

01:09:39.000 But all that energy in the picture comes out basically in one point.

01:09:44.000 Think of that Escher picture, and right at the very edge, you see there are an awful lot of angels and devils squashed together there, so that the entire radiation from that single black hole will be squashed into that little point.

01:09:58.000 Now, we're on the other side.

01:10:00.000 What do we see?

01:10:01.000 Well, there will be a big release of energy at that point, and that's what we call the Hawking Point.

01:10:07.000 And it spreads out.

01:10:09.000 You see, what we see in the cosmic microwave background, this is radiation coming from all directions.

01:10:16.000 And this radiation doesn't come from the Big Bang exactly.

01:10:20.000 It comes from 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

01:10:23.000 So there's a sort of last scattering surface where photons which are trying to get out finally can escape and we see them.

01:10:32.000 Now, that spread out from the Hawking Point to what you see in the cosmic microwave background in the last scattering surface is something of the diameter of about eight times the diameter of the Moon.

01:10:50.000 No bigger, no smaller.

01:10:53.000 Now you wouldn't see the whole thing because our pass cone, what we see, cut across it, we don't see the whole thing.

01:11:00.000 But we see probably most of it.

01:11:02.000 So you could imagine something from about four to eight times the moon's diameter, which is a small region which is Highly energetic, more energetic in the middle, and it tapers off as you go to the edge.

01:11:17.000 And we seem to see these things.

01:11:18.000 The analysis that the poles, they have the techniques, and the actual We're analyzing the data.

01:11:28.000 This is the Planck satellite data.

01:11:30.000 It was done by Daniel Ann.

01:11:32.000 And then we look at the data and we seem to see an effect.

01:11:37.000 See what you do is we've got only one universe.

01:11:39.000 That's what you complain about.

01:11:40.000 So how do you know if something's real or not?

01:11:42.000 Well you make zillions of fake universes and you compare this with them.

01:11:47.000 There's a lot of technique about how you do this.

01:11:50.000 But Daniel first did a thousand of these fakes.

01:11:54.000 And there were sort of two sizes of these.

01:11:57.000 You look at these rings to see whether the temperature goes out from the outside to the middle.

01:12:01.000 And there were two sizes, both within the size that I say, about four degrees across the sky.

01:12:08.000 And there was no evidence of them at all in the simulation.

01:12:13.000 So this is a real effect.

01:12:15.000 Okay, then people were skeptical of this for one reason or another, so Daniel did another, well, 10,000 altogether.

01:12:24.000 And occasionally there are one or two which do, well, two or three to be precise, where you see this effect in the simulations.

01:12:30.000 But if you work out the probability that this is a real effect, you come up with a confidence level of 99.98% that this is a real effect.

01:12:40.000 So we're waiting to see what people say about this.

01:12:44.000 What are your thoughts on multiverses?

01:12:46.000 Well, you see, this is different, because this is sequential.

01:12:51.000 So I don't call it a multiverse.

01:12:53.000 They each influence the next one, and so they're not independent worlds.

01:12:58.000 Right, but the possibility of independent...

01:13:01.000 Yeah.

01:13:02.000 Well, you see, there are two reasons for believing in multiverses.

01:13:07.000 One of them is the quantum reason that maybe you have the Schrödinger's dead cat and the live cat, they're in different worlds and they're separate universes.

01:13:16.000 I don't believe that argument.

01:13:18.000 I don't think that's the right way to look at quantum mechanics, but many people do.

01:13:21.000 And that suggests that you might have these multiple universes in some sense.

01:13:25.000 What's unattractive about that to you?

01:13:27.000 It doesn't explain what we see.

01:13:29.000 So you want a theory which explains the world we see.

01:13:32.000 And the world we see, you get collapse.

01:13:35.000 The state does.

01:13:37.000 And to explain that, well, it's only because we've drifted off into some world and another version of ourselves is drifting to another one and some see one and the others see the other and they're all in superposition.

01:13:49.000 It doesn't explain why you see one world.

01:13:54.000 It has this kind of coherence.

01:13:57.000 I mean lots of people try and there are many attempts at this sort of thing.

01:14:00.000 It's quite a widely held view.

01:14:02.000 And if you believe quantum mechanics that the collapse is not real and it doesn't happen, And all the alternatives, the dead cat and the live cat, coexist in different worlds.

01:14:13.000 That's the interpretation.

01:14:14.000 That's a view.

01:14:15.000 I don't think that...

01:14:17.000 I want an explanation for the world we live in.

01:14:20.000 And you don't see cats in different worlds with cats and cats.

01:14:25.000 Well, it's a long story.

01:14:27.000 Clearly it's a view you can hold to, and if you don't want a monkey with quantum mechanics, it's where you're led.

01:14:33.000 So that's right, that's the alternative.

01:14:36.000 Either you don't make a single try to change quantum mechanics at all, and then you are led to this multi-world, many-world picture.

01:14:47.000 I think it even doesn't make that much sense.

01:14:49.000 So you've got to be careful about it.

01:14:51.000 That whether they are really like distinct worlds, I don't think it really...

01:14:56.000 My view is it doesn't really work.

01:14:57.000 But let me not try and attack that.

01:14:58.000 I think I have a different view, which is that the theory is not quite quite right.

01:15:04.000 And that there is something which makes the collapse into a physical process.

01:15:10.000 And...

01:15:14.000 There's only one world.

01:15:15.000 Now, the other many worlds view, which comes from a different reason, and that is that there seem to be various accidents in, well, maybe one of them being that the neutron is just slightly more massive than the proton.

01:15:32.000 There are lots of other accidents.

01:15:34.000 We see that if they were a little different, then life as we know it couldn't happen.

01:15:38.000 And so how do you explain this?

01:15:40.000 Well, some people say, well, all these universes with different values of these constants all coexist.

01:15:47.000 It's just we only see the one that we're in because the numbers come out right for us.

01:15:52.000 So that's what's called an anthropic argument.

01:15:56.000 Okay, I can see the argument.

01:15:58.000 I don't like it much.

01:16:00.000 It's sort of, I think we need a better explanation for why the numbers are what we see and so on.

01:16:05.000 But that one makes more sense to me than the other one.

01:16:09.000 So I think maybe he has to take that seriously.

01:16:13.000 But it's certainly not the view I'm presenting here with this picture.

01:16:18.000 For someone like me, it's so interesting to know that there's still a considerable amount of speculation.

01:16:24.000 Yes.

01:16:25.000 Oh, yeah.

01:16:27.000 Well, it's...

01:16:29.000 There's a lot of speculation, but a lot of it is pretty off the wall, and a lot of people think mine are off the wall, you see.

01:16:36.000 Right, well who's to say?

01:16:37.000 Okay, I'm an old man now, and so, okay, you know, I did decent things in the past, but you shouldn't trust this abuse now, you see.

01:16:47.000 So I guess that's what people think.

01:16:49.000 I don't know.

01:16:49.000 But you see, if it's just me, I could understand that.

01:16:52.000 Right.

01:16:52.000 But I've got these Polish, and I've got an Armenian colleague who's done things on this too.

01:16:58.000 And it can't be that we're all off the rails, I think.

01:17:01.000 No, it can't be.

01:17:02.000 There's something out there, and now with the hawking points, there's something people can really go out and look for.

01:17:07.000 And if they don't see them, there's something funny going on somewhere.

01:17:10.000 If they do see them, there's something else going funny on, which they'll have to think of another explanation.

01:17:15.000 Unless it's my explanation, they'll have to think of a different view from the current inflation view, which is in real trouble with these observations as far as I can see.

01:17:24.000 Do you anticipate in any foreseeable time in the future a better understanding of dark matter and dark energy?

01:17:30.000 Or perhaps a better definition of what those things are?

01:17:36.000 Yeah.

01:17:37.000 You see, I think my own current view is that dark energy, as it's called, is the cosmological concept.

01:17:43.000 Now that's not an explanation, if you like, because why is it got the value it has?

01:17:47.000 Why is it there at all?

01:17:49.000 And there are certainly questions about that, which I agree with.

01:17:53.000 Dark matter, I didn't go into this, but in this scheme of mine, it has to be there.

01:18:00.000 When I say it, I mean that if you want the equations to make sense, which cross over from our remote future to the big bang of the next eon, you have to have a creation of a dominant new material, which is scalar.

01:18:16.000 As I say, it doesn't spin, it's just ordinary particles.

01:18:22.000 And that they only interact gravitationally.

01:18:25.000 And that's what we see.

01:18:26.000 But the theory that I'm putting forward would make these things very massive.

01:18:32.000 They're about what's called the Planck mass.

01:18:34.000 I don't know exactly because there's some freedom in this.

01:18:37.000 Something like the Planck mass which people describe as the mass of a flea's eye.

01:18:44.000 I don't quite know why they make it.

01:18:46.000 But that's about 10 to the minus 5 grams.

01:18:49.000 So you're looking at a one hundred thousandth of a gram.

01:18:53.000 So it's sort of an appreciable size.

01:18:56.000 It's not like basic particles in physics.

01:18:59.000 It's measurable.

01:19:00.000 It's the sort of measurable thing you could imagine you could get hold of in some way.

01:19:05.000 But that's huge for a fundamental particle.

01:19:09.000 So it's a wild idea from that point of view.

01:19:12.000 But also they should decay.

01:19:14.000 And they should decay into gravitational signals which maybe could be seen by LIGO, maybe have been seen by LIGO and thrown in the rubbish bin.

01:19:26.000 Because there'd be different types of signals from what people would expect.

01:19:30.000 I wouldn't like to put my money anywhere there, but I'm hoping that these dark matter particles are the ones that come from the theory that I'm putting forward.

01:19:42.000 So that would be another consequence of this particular point of view.

01:19:47.000 And they've observed, correct me if I'm wrong, entire galaxies that they believe that consist of dark matter.

01:19:54.000 Let me see if I remember what it is.

01:19:56.000 There are some galaxies the other way around which don't seem to have any dark matter.

01:20:01.000 It's puzzling.

01:20:02.000 There are other galaxies which have huge amounts.

01:20:04.000 That's probably what you're referring to.

01:20:06.000 Whether they were only dark matter, you'd have trouble seeing them because dark matter after all.

01:20:11.000 It was just a measured thing, right?

01:20:13.000 Yes.

01:20:13.000 It may be.

01:20:14.000 I don't know that one.

01:20:15.000 It's quite possible.

01:20:16.000 Yeah, I don't see why not.

01:20:20.000 They just have to have some reason why they clump together in this way.

01:20:24.000 You see, it's quite possible if galaxies collide.

01:20:29.000 Then when you see the stars tend to go through, so they would accompany the dark matter.

01:20:35.000 The dust in the galaxies tends to stay where it is.

01:20:39.000 So if two collide, then you'd have a big pile of dust in the middle.

01:20:43.000 But I think the dark matter tends to carry on through with the stars.

01:20:48.000 I don't know.

01:20:49.000 There may be some process which could produce just islands of dark matter.

01:20:53.000 I don't know.

01:20:54.000 When you discuss the cosmos, maybe the single most intriguing possibility to us as human beings is what other intelligent life, if any, is out there.

01:21:06.000 And how interesting is that to you?

01:21:07.000 Because you spend so much time studying the fundamental particles of the universe itself.

01:21:13.000 How interested are you in the possibility of other intelligent life forms?

01:21:19.000 Or have you just like...

01:21:21.000 Put that out into the...

01:21:23.000 It's just so ridiculously unlikely or so far away from us that we're probably never going to make contact.

01:21:29.000 Well, you see, it's not so...

01:21:32.000 There's this SETI program where they're looking to see whether they can see signals from distant civilizations.

01:21:37.000 The problem there, from my perspective, is that although they might be out there, they've got to have had a real head start on us before you would see them.

01:21:47.000 Of course, they might have done.

01:21:48.000 But then, I don't know.

01:21:51.000 You see, actually, Vahir Guzajan, who's my Armenian colleague and who looked also for these ring-shaped things and looked at them in a different way from the Polish people, But we seem to have seen something there.

01:22:05.000 But we wrote a paper in which we speculated on beings from the previous eon communicating with us.

01:22:13.000 And the advantage there is that you're looking at the really advanced civilizations, right at the very end, you see.

01:22:20.000 Billions of years ago, their universe disappeared.

01:22:27.000 And then had to come back to a Big Bang state again? 0.84

01:22:30.000 Oh, the signals could come through, yes.

01:22:31.000 And somehow or another, those signals remain.

01:22:34.000 It's conceivable.

01:22:35.000 I agree it's pretty far-fetched, but, you know, who knows what...

01:22:39.000 So eons, how many billions of years are you talking about?

01:22:42.000 The Big Bang was 14 billion?

01:22:45.000 Yes.

01:22:45.000 But you see, that's way...

01:22:48.000 We're at the beginning in a sense, or it's three quarters of the way through in another sense.

01:22:53.000 It depends how you draw the pictures.

01:22:55.000 In the sense of interestingness or in the conformal picture, we are already three quarters of the way through.

01:23:03.000 So 14 billion to now, so we have how many billion left?

01:23:07.000 You can't count it as years, you see.

01:23:08.000 The trouble is it's a cheat.

01:23:10.000 It's a cheat.

01:23:11.000 The year count is as much as you like.

01:23:14.000 It depends on something else.

01:23:17.000 The mass has to fade out, and how you measure time becomes problematic.

01:23:23.000 And it's either infinity, you see, which isn't much use, or you might have different definitions of time, which depend on what particle you're using as your clocks and things like that.

01:23:33.000 So are you essentially saying that it's entirely possible that we are the furthest in terms of our technological achievement and our understanding of the universe itself?

01:23:43.000 It's possible that we're at the front of the line.

01:23:46.000 There might be some other intelligent life forms in the universe, but they might be behind us.

01:23:51.000 Well, they would have been...

01:23:52.000 I mean, I'm not saying they got through, you see.

01:23:55.000 Well, maybe they have techniques for getting through, but that's a bit hard to imagine.

01:23:59.000 But maybe information from them could get through.

01:24:02.000 You mean from the previous eon?

01:24:04.000 Yes, yes.

01:24:04.000 Oh, they might have got through, like, somehow or another survived.

01:24:07.000 Yes, but it would have to be in the form of photons or something.

01:24:12.000 I'm talking about ridiculous speculation now.

01:24:15.000 Sure, but encoding information into photons?

01:24:18.000 Yes.

01:24:19.000 Wow.

01:24:20.000 It's conceivable.

01:24:21.000 I don't want to say that I see it happening or anything, but it's not out of the question that they could develop some technology which would get information, which might be them in some sense, across in the form of photons.

01:24:36.000 But you're not optimistic about current intelligent life somewhere in the universe?

01:24:41.000 Not too optimistic just because...

01:24:44.000 Well, maybe it took us a long time to get going because the dinosaurs were there for a while and somebody might have got in there earlier in their different planet and they could have got there quite ahead of us.

01:24:56.000 It's conceivable.

01:24:57.000 I'm not going to rule it out.

01:24:59.000 I'm just not terribly optimistic about it.

01:25:02.000 No, I think it's worth doing.

01:25:04.000 It's worth looking.

01:25:05.000 Yes, but it's not something that you're really curious about.

01:25:08.000 It's not so much I'd be curious, certainly, but I'm not expecting it, I guess.

01:25:12.000 Is it just because of the overall lack of real evidence and it's just not an attractive thing for you to pursue?

01:25:21.000 It's quite attractive.

01:25:22.000 It certainly would be if it was here.

01:25:24.000 I don't know.

01:25:24.000 I've just been doing other things and I don't know if there's enough to do in the world.

01:25:29.000 I haven't really...

01:25:32.000 We've come to terms with it very hugely.

01:25:36.000 I know there's this activity, and I'd be interested to see if there was this thing that came past that some people speculated was sent there by a different intelligence, which came quite close in our solar system.

01:25:50.000 Oh, that was that strange looking cigar shape?

01:25:53.000 Yes, that's right.

01:25:54.000 I mean, I don't see any real reason to believe it's an alien spaceship.

01:25:58.000 Was it because of the way it was traveling that was the idea?

01:26:01.000 Yes, it was something.

01:26:02.000 Something curious about it?

01:26:03.000 Serious people did suggest it might be something sent by an alien civilization.

01:26:08.000 Well, it's worth, you know, if one could connect with it in some way.

01:26:14.000 But I don't know.

01:26:15.000 I guess it's too far away now.

01:26:17.000 Well, it's another thing that's so uniquely fascinating for us, the concept of another life form out there.

01:26:23.000 Oh, sure.

01:26:24.000 Yes, yes.

01:26:25.000 No, you see, there are lots of things I'm interested in.

01:26:29.000 The ones I talk to you about are perhaps some of the main ones.

01:26:32.000 Although the consciousness one is...

01:26:35.000 I'm glad that there are people doing it.

01:26:38.000 And, you see, this is one of the things.

01:26:41.000 There's this institute that's being created using my name.

01:26:46.000 And James Tagg is involved with this and started it.

01:26:50.000 And I was...

01:26:53.000 I was a bit worried about having my name attached to this thing when I didn't know much about it.

01:26:57.000 But it seems to me a really important thing where you can, which the deliberate purpose of it is to develop ideas which make sense but are not mainstream.

01:27:11.000 And one of these was the consciousness thing.

01:27:13.000 So, you know, Stuart Hameroff is doing it, but it's not an activity that's taking part, people researching it in detail in other parts of the world.

01:27:24.000 So to have a place which supports that kind of thing is great, and I think that's very good.

01:27:31.000 But when I heard about it first, I thought, well, most of my interests are on the physics side, and not so much in biology, which I'm pretty ignorant about.

01:27:40.000 And there are lots of ideas on that side, not just the cosmology, but ideas and building...

01:27:49.000 Experiments which might detect the collapse of the wave function.

01:27:54.000 And one idea is to look at Bose-Einstein condensates.

01:27:57.000 See, I have a colleague that's Yvette Fuentes, who I knew about and who had these ideas of how to use Bose-Einstein condensates to detect gravitational waves.

01:28:10.000 And that's also very, you know, not a mainstream way of looking at it, but a very clever idea.

01:28:16.000 And the Bose-Ionstein condensates, because it's so quantum mechanical and they're so cold, they're almost virtually absolute zero.

01:28:25.000 And they can keep external disturbances from causing problems.

01:28:33.000 And you can manipulate them in ways to make them in two places at once.

01:28:36.000 People have done this kind of thing.

01:28:38.000 And so it might well be a good way of testing the Schrodinger-Cat thing, whether state reduction or the collapse of wave function is a phenomenon which is the kind which I hope might be,

01:28:53.000 like gravitational effect.

01:28:55.000 And in that case, if it is, then that would be relevant to the consciousness problem.

01:28:59.000 So all these things tie together in various ways.

01:29:02.000 And so the hope was that these things which are, you know, could be supported.

01:29:07.000 And I thought it was important because there's always the danger of such an institute being regarded as flaky because you're doing weird things.

01:29:15.000 Who cares?

01:29:16.000 So the important point from my perspective is that there should be things which can be...

01:29:22.000 Either now, immediately, tested experimentally or within a few years.

01:29:27.000 So they're things which are really, you can get and test them and see whether they're right or not.

01:29:35.000 So this would be a protection against thinking, well, these are crazy ideas that are being pursued.

01:29:40.000 They have to be ideas which are capable of tests and have a reasonable chance of showing evidence in their favor or against, you know, whichever would be interesting and important to know.

01:29:55.000 From the outside looking in, to me, it's so fascinating to watch intellectuals like yourself that are bouncing these ideas around that are possible but are not mainstream.

01:30:06.000 And it seems to me that it's a precarious sort of tightrope walk.

01:30:10.000 Like, you don't want to say anything ridiculous that's not true. 0.59

01:30:13.000 But you would love to say something that seems to be ridiculous but turns out to be, in fact, accurate and provable. 0.79

01:30:19.000 And so there's this dance. 0.78

01:30:21.000 I absolutely agree.

01:30:22.000 Yes, that's absolutely right.

01:30:24.000 And of course, you've got to play with ideas which are on the sort of edge of what we know.

01:30:28.000 Otherwise, you're stuck with what we know.

01:30:31.000 And these things will simply get channeled down the old roots and you need to be able to break free of those from time to time, but not in a way which is too crazy to be examined to see whether there is truth in these ideas or not.

01:30:47.000 Because of this inclination that people have to go towards woo or towards crazy ideas, it is important for the skepticism, right?

01:30:54.000 It is important for the scrutiny.

01:30:56.000 Yes.

01:30:57.000 Oh, absolutely.

01:30:58.000 So there's real danger in that ledge.

01:31:00.000 I agree.

01:31:01.000 Well, you see, there's a strange kind of problem, you see, because with these observations, not about the hawking points, which I was just describing, but the earlier ones about black hole collisions.

01:31:12.000 And my Armenian colleague and I had written a couple of papers on this, and we hadn't got any response at all.

01:31:20.000 And the Polish people, and they'd written papers, two of them accepted by respectable journals, and And Christoph asked me, you know, what kind of response have you got?

01:31:32.000 And I said, zero.

01:31:33.000 So I asked him, what about you?

01:31:34.000 How about what response have you got?

01:31:36.000 Zero.

01:31:37.000 So this is kind of spooky, you see.

01:31:39.000 We've got these things out there in the literature, refereed, accepted publications.

01:31:45.000 And instead of people saying, this is a load of nonsense.

01:31:48.000 Look, it doesn't make any sense for this reason and this disagrees with this observation and so on.

01:31:52.000 That was fine.

01:31:53.000 If I see that, I might be unhappy with it.

01:31:56.000 But you've got something to work on.

01:31:58.000 You say, oh, I see what's wrong.

01:31:59.000 Something needs modifying here.

01:32:01.000 Ah, that doesn't explain properly.

01:32:02.000 That's what's needed.

01:32:03.000 Or, yes, no, you're right.

01:32:05.000 I better abandon this idea.

01:32:07.000 All these things come from criticisms.

01:32:10.000 And to have absolutely no attention whatsoever paid to these papers is something I find spooky.

01:32:17.000 Why do you think there's no attention paid?

01:32:21.000 I don't know.

01:32:22.000 I don't really know.

01:32:24.000 I mean, one of the things is there's so much information and that people don't have time.

01:32:30.000 They've got their own projects and they don't want to pay attention.

01:32:33.000 And they think it looks crazy because it's too much outside the picture of the world that they have.

01:32:41.000 And I think a lot of it's that.

01:32:44.000 And they maybe say, well, look, I'm an old guy now, and maybe I did good things in the past, but maybe I've gone a bit off the rails.

01:32:54.000 But I think that, you know, I've got colleagues.

01:32:56.000 It's not just me.

01:32:57.000 And these respected people who work on these things, too.

01:33:00.000 So I don't think that can be a complete explanation.

01:33:03.000 Maybe it's part of it, but...

01:33:04.000 The sheer volume of papers that are published, it's got to be impossible to keep up with all of them.

01:33:09.000 I think that's a big part of the trouble.

01:33:11.000 Because there are other ideas which to me look crazy and to other people don't look as crazy as my ideas, you see.

01:33:18.000 So maybe that's why.

01:33:20.000 A lot of them have more attention paid to them than the ones we have.

01:33:23.000 Actually, I'm curious to know whether the Hawking points will take off or not.

01:33:27.000 Well, I'm so happy there's people like you doing this kind of work and then someone condensing it down to an understandable point that someone like me can absorb and just try to get a better picture of this insane reality that we're living in.

01:33:43.000 Well, it is pretty weird, you're right.

01:33:45.000 It's so weird.

01:33:46.000 Absolutely.

01:33:47.000 And it seems like the more I talk to people like yourself and the more you study this, it doesn't get less weird.

01:33:54.000 It gets more weird.

01:33:55.000 Yes, I think that's right.

01:33:57.000 Well, I don't know.

01:33:58.000 With more information it seems to be more fantastic.

01:34:01.000 There's certainly a lot of very weird things, but the point about them is that they've got to make sense.

01:34:07.000 They've got to make mathematical sense.

01:34:09.000 They've got to agree with observational facts.

01:34:12.000 And that rules out a lot of the really weird ones.

01:34:15.000 It does, but even the ones that are observable and do adhere to the facts, they're so fantastic.

01:34:25.000 It's one of the things that's most frustrating about people's Inclination to lean towards the woo, and I've been guilty of it myself. 0.97

01:34:33.000 It's so attractive.

01:34:34.000 But what's frustrating about it is that provable reality is so titanically bizarre That's true.

01:34:42.000 No, I agree.

01:34:43.000 That it's almost like, why bother with the woo?

01:34:46.000 The provable reality is...

01:34:48.000 You make a very good point.

01:34:49.000 It's woo in and of itself.

01:34:50.000 You're absolutely right.

01:34:51.000 No, it's very, very strange.

01:34:53.000 And quantum mechanics in so many ways is.

01:34:56.000 But you see, you've got to...

01:34:57.000 I think there's a little bit of a danger of...

01:35:02.000 Separating the things which are...

01:35:04.000 Well, first of all, they could be just wrong.

01:35:07.000 Secondly, there are things which do require quantum mechanics to be changed in some way.

01:35:12.000 And there'd be other ones which are within quantum mechanics and are just weird.

01:35:15.000 And that's absolutely true.

01:35:18.000 There are these things which I believe have to be true as much as the died in the womb quantum mechanics people who follow the party lines and so on.

01:35:29.000 Yeah.

01:35:30.000 I mean, these quantum entanglements, the fact that things can be, whatever it is, a couple of thousand kilometers separated, and yet know each other in a way you can't explain that they're separate individuals.

01:35:46.000 They behave as though they're one, what are called an entangled state.

01:35:52.000 And you can make experiments which reveal that.

01:35:56.000 I mean, it was John Bell, who was an Irish theoretical physicist, who really made all this very clear that these things are real manifestations of the peculiarity of quantum mechanics and really out there in the world.

01:36:12.000 Was it J.D.S. Haldane that said, the world is not only queerer than you suppose, it's queerer than you can suppose?

01:36:18.000 That's correct, he did, yes.

01:36:20.000 That's what this is, right?

01:36:21.000 Indeed.

01:36:22.000 Yes, it is that kind of thing.

01:36:23.000 Well, listen, sir, thank you for your time.

01:36:25.000 I really appreciate it.

01:36:26.000 I really appreciate talking to you, and thank you for all your work and your contribution to our understanding of what we're looking at here.

01:36:36.000 Well, I hope it helps a bit.

01:36:38.000 It helps a lot.

01:36:38.000 I appreciate you very much.

01:36:39.000 Thank you.

01:36:40.000 Thank you, sir.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 18, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1216 - Sir Roger Penrose

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript