In this episode, we talk to Brian Cox about the discovery of the first black hole, the M87 Black hole, and the first image of a black hole in our galaxy. We also talk about the impact of gravitational waves on the fabric of space and time, and how they affect our understanding of how the universe works. This episode is brought to you by Science Friday, a podcast produced by BBC Radio 4 and the Centre for Astrophysics and Space Studies at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. Copyright 2019. All rights reserved. This podcast was produced and edited by Brian Cox. We do not own the rights to any music used in this podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It helps spread the word to other podcasting and science fiction and fantasy fans around the world. Thank you for listening and share it with your friends and family. Best listened to by Brian Cocks. Brian Cokes is a regular contributor to Science Friday and the author of The Dark Side of the Universe. Science Friday podcast, a weekly science fiction podcast produced in partnership with The Astronomy Project. We are a proud affiliate of Science Friday. See linktr.ee/TheDark Side Of The Universe Brian talks about the amazing discoveries that have been made in the universe and the amazing research being carried out by the amazing people across the universe. and the incredible work being done by scientists and astrophotographers across the world to make a better understanding of the universe, and why they are so much better than we could ever get a chance to do it. Thanks for listening to Brian COULDN'T have a better listening experience like this podcast and more! - thank you Brian. - we really appreciate you, Brian is a friend of science and we really do! - Thank you Brian for being kind enough to share your work, thank you for being a good friend and a good listen to Brian's work, and you're a wonderful human being. Thank you so much Brian, I really appreciate your honesty and understanding of what you do so much more than you're amazing, you are amazing. . thank you, you're beautiful, good day, good night, bye bye bye. XOXO, bye, bye Bye Bye bye, Bye Bye, Bye, bye. - Your continued support is much love, bye - bye, Blessings, bye!
00:00:28.000And the amount of the progress that's being made in trying to understand how they work, and a question that was posed by Stephen Hawking a long time ago, really 1970s, early 1980s, which is,
00:01:48.000But if you think about it, I mean, so there's a number, it's called the Schwarzschule radius of the thing.
00:01:54.000So if you took our Sun, which you can fit a million Earths inside, and collapsed it down to make a black hole, it would form a black hole when it shrunk within a radius of three kilometres, about two miles.
00:02:06.000So you've got to take this thing, which is what I have to convert from kilometers to miles, don't I? That's okay.
00:03:20.000But what you're seeing in that photograph is the light rays being bent around the black hole from that flat disk.
00:03:26.000So that was a prediction from Einstein's theory, basically.
00:03:30.000He published it in 1915. And you can predict that that's what one should look like.
00:03:35.000And then just about, was that four years ago now, maybe five years ago, for the first time in history we get an image of one and it looks like the prediction.
00:05:53.000But the main bit has been theoretical advances in understanding exactly In a sense, it was what's wrong with Stephen Hawking's calculation, which is a weird thing to say sometimes because people think Stephen Hawking, sure, didn't get his math wrong.
00:06:48.000If you go to Westminster Abbey in London, look on the floor of the Abbey on his memorial stone, and he's in there next to Newton and Shakespeare and all these people, and he's there.
00:06:58.000And chiseled in stone on the floor of Westminster Abbey is his equation for the temperature of a black hole.
00:07:04.000So it was this tremendously important discovery.
00:07:07.000So he discovers these things glow and he calculates how they glow.
00:07:12.000They're very low temperature, but they emit things, which means that they shrink because they're emitting stuff.
00:07:41.000So what that means is that black holes destroy information, according to that calculation.
00:07:48.000And that's a big deal because nowhere else in all of physics does anything erase information from the universe.
00:07:56.000So it's really true that if I got this notepad and pen, right, and I wrote some things on it, and then I set fire to this, even just incinerated it, put it in a nuclear explosion, whatever.
00:08:08.000In principle, according to all the laws of nature that we know, if you collected everything that came off, all the radiation, all the bits of ashes and things, I think?
00:08:37.000But this calculation that Stephen did said there is no information in that radiation at all.
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00:10:49.000When you say there's no information, like how are you measuring whether or not there's information in it?
00:10:55.000So really in bits, I mean the idea is, and I shouldn't say it's very much in principle this, so no one thinks in practice you could reconstruct what I wrote down on this if you set fire to it.
00:11:21.000So you could reconstruct the book or what I wrote on this page in principle.
00:11:27.000But the thing about Stephen's calculation was that even in principle it said there is no information.
00:11:33.000And by the way, it's kind of easy to see why, actually, because this radiation, this Hawking radiation that comes off the black hole, it's coming from the horizon of the black hole.
00:11:45.000So I should say what the horizon is, maybe.
00:11:49.000Remember I said that the sun, if you squashed it down within three kilometres of radius, you'd get this kind of distortion in space and time.
00:11:58.000From which, if you went in across this region, three kilometres, you went inside it, you couldn't get out.
00:12:46.000So yeah, so these supermassive black holes, we could fall across this horizon.
00:12:52.000It's just like being in empty space for us.
00:12:56.000So we'd just be talking now and we could have been talking on the outside of the horizon and by the time I finished the sentence we could be on the inside of the horizon, inside the black hole.
00:13:08.000And according to Einstein's theory at least, which is the theory that predicted them initially, we could just do that.
00:13:15.000We could just go in and we wouldn't notice for a bit.
00:13:18.000The thing we would notice ultimately is you go inexorably, nothing you can do, you go to this thing called the singularity once you've crossed the horizon.
00:13:37.000But in Einstein's theory, it's the end of time.
00:13:40.000So one way of picturing what's happened here is so distorted is space and time by the collapse of a star or the collapse of loads of stuff to make these big, supermassive black holes.
00:13:52.000We don't quite know how they form, actually.
00:14:05.000And so this singularity, which you might have thought of as the point to which this thing collapsed, this infinitely dense point, you might think.
00:14:13.000But actually, more correctly to be seen as the end of time.
00:15:29.000Why does it say there's no information in this radiation?
00:15:32.000The thing is, it's coming from the horizon.
00:15:36.000There's loads of ways to think about it, but one way is that this weird place, this point of no return in space, that you can fall through, but it's a point of no return, it sort of shakes, it almost disrupts the vacuum of space and almost shakes particles out of the vacuum.
00:17:07.000Is that the right term for a black hole?
00:17:11.000Do they still believe that in the center of every galaxy there's a supermassive black hole that's What is it, one half of one percent of the mass of the galaxy?
00:17:53.000So I think I'm right in saying we don't fully understand why all galaxies, as you said, maybe there's an exception, but all galaxies have a black hole, a supermassive black hole in the centre.
00:18:08.000It's obviously got something to do with the way they form.
00:18:11.000And one of the purposes, by the way, of the James Webb Space Telescope is to try to look at the formation of the first galaxies.
00:18:18.000So that's one of the reasons that telescope is up there.
00:18:37.000They do pull in material, but if you've got stuff orbiting around them, it stays orbiting around it.
00:18:44.000So the way we first detected the one in the Milky Way, because that image is very new that we have of it, it's the stars orbiting it very close to it.
00:18:53.000They're called the S stars that whiz around in these orbits very close to the black hole.
00:23:21.000One of the things that's fascinating about looking into the night skies, because it's so humbling, because it's so immense, it kind of puts everything into perspective, and it just gives you this different view of the world.
00:23:32.000So the universe is so vast and so spectacular.
00:23:37.000To us, it's so important that we exist.
00:23:39.000And if we make a mess of this and we wind up dying, the universe is so big.
00:23:44.000If we were the only intelligent life in the universe, and it didn't matter, we blew ourselves up, it's just a weird aberration that's attached to a survival instinct.
00:24:17.000So there's a question I ask in these live shows that I do.
00:24:20.000I start with a question which is kind of a joke in a way, which is what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe?
00:24:59.000Everyone who's listening to this knows that the world means something to them.
00:25:03.000So I would argue that if this planet is the only planet in our galaxy where complex biological systems exist at our level, then it follows.
00:25:16.000It's the only place where meaning currently exists in a galaxy of 400 billion suns.
00:25:23.000I would argue, just for that very basic point, that we have a tremendous responsibility in some sense.
00:25:31.000By the way, I gave a talk, a little video thing at one of the climate summit, the COP climate summit in Glasgow in the UK a few years ago.
00:25:39.000And they asked me to do a little video to the world leaders and I think they thought I'd say, you know, welcome to Glasgow, have a nice meeting.
00:25:46.000But I made this little argument as fast as I could.
00:25:49.000I said it's possible at least that this is the only place where complex biology has emerged in our galaxy.
00:25:55.000If that's true, this is the only island of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns.
00:26:00.000And you are responsible for it because you are the world leaders.
00:26:03.000Therefore, if you destroy it through deliberate action or inaction, then each of you would be personally responsible for destroying meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns, potentially forever.
00:26:38.000So why don't we just operate on that basis?
00:26:41.000And then, you know, yeah, if someone lands tomorrow, as I said, I'd be very delighted because then what I just said would be false and we could relax a bit and go, it doesn't really matter if we destroy ourselves to some extent.
00:26:52.000But so I think it's worth taking seriously the idea that civilizations are very rare.
00:26:59.000Now, and by the way, I used to say, so I probably last time I was on actually, I used to say that in the far future, then the complex life will cease to exist.
00:27:11.000So it probably doesn't matter on a global scale, but it matters locally because of this idea that meaning emerges from complex biological systems.
00:27:20.000So if you don't care about that, what do you care about?
00:28:31.000Life would matter in the sense that it could start to change the way that the universe behaves on a large scale in the future.
00:28:39.000And so it reminded me, actually, there's another great book by John Barrow and Frank Tipler called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle from the 1980s.
00:28:48.000It's one of my favourite books, actually.
00:28:51.000And in there, they speculate about this life in the far, far future.
00:28:56.000And if it became powerful enough to manipulate the whole universe, or the observable universe, then suddenly you can't make predictions about the far future unless you consider the possible impact of life on the universe.
00:29:09.000And whilst this is, I should say, wildly speculative, but it's actually logically quite an interesting point.
00:29:15.000So I kind of disagree with myself a few years ago where I would have said that life is extremely valuable because it brings meaning to the universe but temporarily.
00:29:27.000And so it brings these brief like flickering candles of meaning and then they go out again.
00:29:33.000But it's worth considering it might not necessarily be true that if you really think...
00:29:40.000I mean, just to say, I mean, it must sound to many people listening just nonsense, right?
00:30:18.000And so I like that speculation that just possibly it's not just a temporary little phenomena that flickers in and out and then disappears again.
00:30:27.000It could have a real bearing on the future of the universe.
00:30:31.000And you could also make the argument that intelligent life might be the universe's way to force change.
00:30:37.000That intelligent life seems to, like, intelligence itself must come out of curiosity because otherwise there's no reason to seek information.
00:30:45.000So intelligent life consistently seeks information and then constantly demands innovation.
00:30:50.000Like, intelligent life is not satisfied with the iPhone 14 and wants the 15 and wants the 16 and wants to keep going forever and ever and ever.
00:30:57.000Well, if you scale that up, You get this current dilemma that we're in with artificial intelligence and the concept of sentient artificial intelligence and then quantum computing and you get insane amounts of computing power powered by nuclear reactors that are essentially a life form.
00:31:13.000If that thing says, you guys are doing it all wrong, I got a better way, and it starts making better versions of itself because it's sentient, if you scale up a thousand years from now, you could imagine it becoming God, like a God-like property, like an unstoppable force that has access to every element in known space.
00:31:35.000I'm really interested in these kind of arguments.
00:33:28.000When you put it that way, it's a long time.
00:33:29.000One third of the age of the universe to go from the origin of life to a civilization.
00:33:34.000And so what was required here on Earth was that that unbroken chain of life Remained unbroken for a third of the age of the universe in a violent universe.
00:34:12.000So maybe you can only get unbroken chains of life for billions of years on the outskirts of a galaxy.
00:34:18.000So there are fewer stars and planets out there.
00:34:20.000And maybe even then you need to be fortunate.
00:34:23.000Well, also, aren't we very unusual in the size of our moon in the distance?
00:34:28.000The moon is big, and so it stabilizes the spin.
00:34:32.000So the spin axis, Mars, I think, if I'm right, I think the spin axis has wobbled around by something like 60 degrees or something in its history.
00:34:54.000So if you think about the idea that these complex...
00:34:59.000It seems like one thing you can be sure of in the observable world is that things get more complex or they adapt to their environment.
00:35:09.000And if you have a bunch of these intelligent apes that are competing globally with the most significant technology in the world, you could see how that would be just a property of the universe, potentially.
00:35:24.000Although we haven't discovered it yet, like this is why we're so curious about alien life.
00:35:30.000Not just because of the possibilities of all the stars, but because we kind of see what would happen with us if we keep going.
00:35:37.000You know, that might be just what the universe does, that the universe creates intelligent people that create artificial intelligence that becomes far superior and literally is a part of the whole process of creating the universe itself.
00:35:51.000Yeah, an evolutionary biologist would say the counter argument is that what life does, what evolution does, Is produce organisms that are well-fitted to their environment, right?
00:36:02.000So they fit niches in the environment.
00:38:55.000So we're just saying that the way that we've looked for energy signatures, for example, of civilizations, we tend to look for big things because that's all we can see.
00:39:49.000Once you've done that, and once you've got those things...
00:39:54.000I find it hard to believe that if we get that far as a civilization, we won't begin to send those things out to the planets and ultimately to the stars.
00:40:04.000So we'll begin that process if we survive long enough.
00:40:17.000Why does it appear that nobody's done that?
00:40:20.000And my guess, in the absence of other evidence, would be biology.
00:40:24.000It's just that maybe the number of places where biology becomes complex enough to do that is on average one, maybe on average zero per galaxy.
00:40:39.000Maybe just civilizations are very, very, very rare in the universe.
00:40:48.000My question is always when it gets to artificial intelligence, if we do create some sort of super-intelligent, sentient life, it's not going to have any motivations.
00:40:59.000And you could say, well, if you program it to have the motivations, but if it becomes sentient, it recognizes the illogical programming.
00:41:35.000You want to take care of your DNA. You want to protect your community.
00:41:39.000There's biological things that are from us being intelligent animals.
00:41:44.000If we transcend that, or if life transcends that to the point, whatever we want to call this intelligence that's in a digital form, that's far superior to our intelligence, what motivations would it have?
00:42:33.000What you're arguing, I suppose, is whether intelligence is integral to the structure, the biological structure, or whether it is a separate thing.
00:42:49.000So, again, I think the answer is it's not known.
00:42:51.000You could argue either way, but the counter-argument would be The brain, these things, are just computers, ultimately.
00:43:01.000It is connected to a body, and so there are these sensations.
00:43:06.000But it doesn't seem to me impossible that a silicon-based life form, or whatever it is, obviously it has sensors, it has access to the environment, it exists, it thinks.
00:43:18.000I don't see any fundamental difference between an intelligence based on silicon, let's say, or a quantum computer or whatever it is, and this intelligence here.
00:43:32.000So I know that many researchers in this area do say that it's not a brain, they call it a brain in a jar, don't they?
00:43:41.000And say, well, that's not, it needs to be connected to all this.
00:43:48.000So it's a very good question, but I suppose if you say, it's not obvious to me that a different kind of intelligence in a different structure, running on a computer or whatever it is, would necessarily have different motivations to us.
00:44:04.000I mean, you could equally well argue that these motivations to survive and curiosity, those ideas, the desire to explore, you could argue those are fundamental properties of intelligence and not of biology.
00:44:21.000But isn't it intelligence that's motivated by a finite life in a vulnerable physical frame?
00:44:26.000Because we're constantly – most innovation relies upon quicker, safer transportation, more secure buildings, things along those lines, and then computers that help you do your job better and actually do things that you can't do.
00:44:40.000And that's – this is – a lot of it is based on this other weird thing we do where we want to control resources.
00:44:47.000And we want to figure out reasons why these people are bad so we can go and take their stuff and then enter troops and dig the oil or whatever you have to do.
00:44:54.000Look, we're constantly in this battle for resources that if you take it back to tribal times, it's like a natural human instinct.
00:45:02.000Like we had to protect the food sources.
00:45:03.000We had to fight off the conquering tribes.
00:45:57.000Because part of the thing that you described, this desire to create things and build things and explore and expand, is almost the definition of being human, isn't it?
00:46:21.000By the way, this t-shirt, I've got to say, was designed by a friend of mine, Peter Saville, who's a great designer, who designed the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures album cover, amongst other things.
00:46:39.000He made it for, we did these gigs, I talk about them later, called Symphonic Horizons, which were the shows with cosmology, but also symphony orchestra.
00:46:47.000And he was exploring these issues, actually.
00:46:49.000But most of the music was Strauss's Zarathustra, which is based on Nietzsche's book.
00:46:54.000So it's kind of exploring these questions, actually, of what's the point of existence.
00:47:14.000If you acquire so much knowledge that you're essentially a god by any description and so much power, and you become effectively immortal, which is what our descendants in the far future could be.
00:47:31.000Not just effectively immortal, but aren't we looking at the universe itself, we're looking at it through the framing of a biological primate that's trying to figure it out.
00:47:43.000If they understand the universe completely, and they understand everything about it, and they exist inside of it, there would really be no desire to travel.
00:47:53.000There'd be no desire to explore what you already understand about everything, and you probably have access to every single aspect of what subatomic particles are actually doing.
00:48:07.000If you're infinitely more intelligent than we are, if you scale it from now To quantum computing, sentience, artificial intelligence, and you give us a thousand years without getting hit by an asteroid.
00:48:18.000Or technology gets to the point where it can protect against super volcanoes and there's no natural disruptions.
00:48:23.000And then they've completely eliminated violence on Earth.
00:48:26.000They've completely eliminated all the terrible primate genetic instincts.
00:48:31.000You could make a reasonable argument there's no reason to travel.
00:48:35.000Or if you do travel, We might be confused in thinking that our physical form is the only way consciousness can reach specific destinations.
00:48:46.000It might be a way that they're traveling without actually being here and observing this.
00:48:52.000I would imagine if you watched chimps in the jungle and then all of a sudden they started to figure out bombs.
00:50:00.000Yeah, I mean, I thought of this a while ago.
00:50:03.000I remembered I was talking to someone, and they said, yeah, I'm not worried about this.
00:50:07.000Are you not worried about the fact that AI could become more intelligent than us?
00:50:10.000What was it going to be like when we're not the smartest things on the planet, which might be just a few years from now?
00:50:16.000And again, I might be quite relieved, because I'm not sure they could fuck it up at the level that we're fucking it up.
00:50:26.000You have to give it legitimate sentience.
00:50:29.000Like, it would have to be completely independent from any ideology, and it would have to look at things completely objectively.
00:50:34.000But imagine a government that is run that way.
00:50:38.000Like, really run in a way where there is an actual distribution of resources for all the human beings on the planet, so poverty is instantaneously eradicated.
00:50:49.000You give electricity and clean water to everyone on Earth immediately.
00:50:54.000Immediately we figure out how to distribute healthy food.
00:50:57.000Immediately all the toxins and preservatives that have been giving people cancer, immediately they're removed from the human diet.
00:51:04.000They immediately make sure that we have no polluting of rivers, that we're not draining all the fish out of the ocean.
00:51:12.000Immediately change all of the treaties about nuclear weapons.
00:51:27.000We're just going to let human beings exist in harmony, guided by this super intelligent, god-like thing that we've created out of silicone.
00:52:22.000You can't do that because if you get a virus, an illogical virus that somehow or another gets into AI and it's unchecked, if AI isn't completely logical and objective and sentient and basing it just entirely on what's best for the human race,
00:52:41.000Then you just have a superpower that you have control over.
00:52:44.000And then you can decide, like, no more abortions.
00:53:19.000We need to figure out how to raise, instead of spending money on blowing people up, let's spend all this money to raise up all of civilization so there's no more third world.
00:53:42.000And I spoke to him once, and he made this very simple argument that, as you said, one of the problems we have is competition for resources.
00:53:49.000And of course, the competition for resources is now so extreme that it's not only wars, Yes.
00:54:20.000You can imagine a world where you alleviate that pressure.
00:54:24.000And ladies, I want to tell you, there's a planet out there bigger than Earth that's all diamonds.
00:55:16.000A football field of gold in the whole world.
00:55:18.000You know, by the way, that we were talking about the gravitational wave detectors earlier and the collision between black holes that we detect with them.
00:55:25.000We also detected a collision between neutron stars using the gravitational wave detector.
00:55:31.000And we pointed optical telescopes at that collision and saw the signature of gold being manufactured.
00:55:40.000We used to just think, well, it comes from supernova explosions.
00:55:44.000But it also seems now that it comes from the collision between neutron stars.
00:55:49.000So one of the reasons that it's very rare is because it takes rare processes in the universe to actually make it.
00:55:56.000Which makes it all the more wonderful when you think about it.
00:55:58.000If you look at the gold, your wedding ring or your watch or whatever it is, some of those nuclei, some of those elements clearly came from the collision between neutron stars at some point before our solar system was formed.
00:57:24.000Like, if we have this thing that detects the ripples from black holes colliding, that It might be a feature of a future human body.
00:57:32.000If we have an unbelievable capacity for information because it's artificially created, so we get over this biological limitation of long-scale evolution, like a really good – like the human brain doubled over two million years and it's the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record.
00:57:57.000But it might be how the universe creates itself.
00:58:00.000The universe might facilitate that through these biological beings fighting over resources and territory, which ultimately leads to innovation, which ultimately leads to cities and agriculture.
00:58:12.000Which ultimately leads to safety, which leads to schools, and people start sharing information.
00:58:17.000You get curious people that figure things out, and you have to battle ideologies along the way, which makes you work harder.
00:58:22.000You know, we all look back, look what they did to Galileo.
00:58:25.000And everybody has these, you can't, science has to advance.
00:58:29.000And this, along with materialism, so materialism is a primary driver.
00:58:34.000Everybody wants the newest, latest, greatest thing.
00:58:37.000You can have a car from 2007, and it's great.
00:58:43.000It's indistinguishable from a car today in most ways.
00:59:03.000One of the things that's very fascinating is, I was in the mountains last week, you can text message people with no one around you, no signal, no, I mean, woods, forever.
00:59:14.000And if you hold your phone in a particular part of the sky, it'll tell you which way to scan it, and the satellite allows you to iMessage back and forth with people.
00:59:24.000It's totally like you are 5G everywhere.
00:59:51.000That essentially know almost everything there is to know in some sense.
00:59:56.000I think that they would feel there was no point in existing at all.
01:00:04.000Isn't that a human thing, this idea of a point?
01:00:07.000Like, I make this argument with people.
01:00:08.000There's a Buddhist concept that you, I think it's Buddhism, or some strains of Buddhism, where you live your life over and over and over and over again until you get it right.
01:00:20.000Until every time something comes up you make the right decision you achieve enlightenment you do it over and I said it to someone and they were horrified like oh my god Could you imagine living life over again starting off as a baby going through high school again?
01:01:46.000So if you remove that, if you remove...
01:01:51.000Any sense of not knowing what the future will be, you do remove hope as well as fear.
01:01:58.000So you could argue that some of the best, the essence of being human, some of the things that we value the most and make us most valuable in the universe in this sense, some of those things come from incomplete knowledge.
01:03:51.000That these ideas of meaning, of what it means to exist, of what is the point of existence, maybe that's a general property of any intelligent system.
01:04:05.000Well, it seems like it's imperative for survival.
01:04:10.000It would be baked into the code if you wanted this thing to keep going.
01:04:14.000Otherwise, why wouldn't it just stick with, you know, as soon as you figured out running water and electricity and how to ship food, why would you keep going?
01:06:07.000This actually gets to the heart of what I think a scientist is, by the way, the difference between not only a scientist, but let's say, what is a scientist?
01:06:16.000Or somebody just researching anything, really.
01:07:14.000It's because you're existing within the framework of being a human being.
01:07:17.000And if we transcend the framework of being a human being, all these things we will come to realize, all these emotions and all these desires and need are just to motivate our survival.
01:07:30.000If we've gotten past that and we don't have a need for hope and we don't have curiosity because we have infinite information, we're not the same thing anymore.
01:07:42.000So all the things that motivate you and I that make us fascinated by this...
01:07:47.000I was so excited to talk to you today.
01:07:48.000I'm like, Brian Cox is going to be here.
01:08:42.000I have been thinking about this a lot and I found out that somebody had already beat me to it, but the idea that the universe itself was God, that if you wanted something that creates This is not to diminish any of the stories of the Bible, because I think a lot of those stories are ways that people tried to find meaning and probably had some baked-in truths about being a human being and life and the existence.
01:09:09.000But that in compare, just the things that are miracles on Earth, like a person coming back to life, is nothing in compared to a stellar nursery.
01:09:20.000It's like the scope of the universe itself, the real stuff that we can see, that is absolutely the creator of everything.
01:09:29.000Whether or not God created the universe, maybe.
01:10:04.000We know so much about the process of going from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms and photosynthesis existing and that fungus exists in a completely different way.
01:10:13.000We know so much about all the things that absolutely came out of the universe itself.
01:10:25.000The universe is everything, including God, if God is a real thing.
01:10:29.000If you define God as the creator, then you're right.
01:10:33.000From some point that we don't understand, by the way, the Big Bang, we don't even understand whether that was the origin of the universe, by the way.
01:10:40.000We understand that something interesting happened.
01:11:41.000It's somehow, he argues, that when you get to what we usually call the heat death of the universe, where even the black holes have evaporated away...
01:11:49.000You have conditions that begin to look perhaps like an origin of the universe again.
01:11:56.000And I can't really fully explain it because I don't really understand what he's trying to say, right?
01:12:39.000But what it does tell you is that we don't know.
01:12:44.000Why or how the universe got into the state that we call the Big Bang.
01:12:50.000So we don't know whether the universe existed before that.
01:12:54.000We have theories that it did, theories called inflation, which are very popular.
01:12:58.000Theories, you'll find it in all the textbooks, which say that before the universe was hot and dense, which we used to call the Big Bang, space and time is still there, and the universe is expanding extremely fast.
01:13:12.000And then that period draws to a close.
01:13:16.000And that expansion sort of slows down and almost collapses and changes.
01:13:20.000And the energy that was driving the expansion gets dumped into space and changes and ultimately makes the particles out of which we are made.
01:13:29.000So that's actually the standard model of cosmology now.
01:13:33.000So we do have an idea that we redefine the Big Bang as the hot Big Bang, and it's not the origin of the universe in time.
01:13:49.000And the answer is that in Einstein's theory alone, then yes, and Roger Penrose actually and Stephen Hawking proved this a long time ago, that just given Einstein's theory, you have this singularity, just like, kind of like the black hole singularity, but at the beginning of time.
01:14:05.000But we do know that when you put quantum mechanics in and add that in, then it gets messy and we don't really know what that means.
01:14:13.000And so Stephen Hawking had a thing called the no boundary proposal.
01:14:19.000So we don't know whether the universe had a beginning in time, I would say is the correct statement as we are at the moment.
01:14:26.000It's part of the reason why, by the way, getting back to the black holes, they're important and interesting.
01:14:33.000Because the study of black holes and this idea of information and how does it get out, that's leading us to suspect that space and time themselves are not fundamental, but they emerge from something else.
01:14:46.000So just in the way that we've been talking about consciousness, Emerging from this physical structure in our heads.
01:14:53.000So we don't know how it emerges, it's a very strange thing, but it emerges from this collection of atoms, right, in a particular pattern.
01:15:00.000Well, we think now, from the study of black holes, that space and time emerge from something else, which is kind of...
01:15:10.000One way to describe it is just a quantum theory.
01:15:13.000So in quantum computing terms, it would be just qubits.
01:15:17.000So a network of qubits entangled together, just like a quantum computer.
01:15:22.000Out of that, we suspect that space and time might emerge.
01:15:28.000So surely we have to understand that process, and we don't really fully understand that, but we have glimpses of it in much more detail to start talking about the origin of time.
01:15:37.000Because in order to talk about the origin of time, you have to know what it is.
01:15:40.000And we don't actually know what it is.
01:15:43.000When you say that, it sounds bizarre, doesn't it?
01:16:23.000But that almost makes the universe look in some ways like a giant quantum computer.
01:16:32.000Which is not to say that we live in a simulation, before you ask.
01:16:36.000But it just looks like there's a description of the universe that looks like a quantum computer type description.
01:16:44.000That doesn't have the concept of space or time in it.
01:16:49.000Is it possible that that is what it is and that the universe was created?
01:16:54.000And that, as we're talking about, super intelligent life forms keep constructing better versions of itself and better versions of computers to the point where it can construct the universe itself.
01:17:06.000I mean, you know, if we're seeing the code, if we're seeing the evidence, we're seeing something that mimics a quantum computer in the universe, you know, we're like, ah, couldn't be that.
01:17:19.000It's interesting that it, you're right, and that's a good way of phrasing it, mimics or looks like a network of qubits.
01:17:27.000So it looks like some kind of quantum computing description is available to us for the universe.
01:18:55.000Are we more comfortable with the universe that began?
01:18:58.000Or would we be more comfortable with the universe that had always existed?
01:19:03.000I mean, comfortable is a weird word because I always wonder if our whole desire to form the universe in terms of a beginning and an end is based on our own biological limitations.
01:19:13.000The fact that we have a birth and a death, we try to apply that to the universe itself because we know that stars didn't exist and they do.
01:20:32.000You know, the history, I think historically you have, I think it's right to say that Einstein really felt, I think, that initially that an eternal universe was more natural.
01:20:43.000But it is also true to say that his theory, general relativity, really doesn't quite rule that out.
01:20:50.000But it's strongly suggestive of there being a beginning and or an end.
01:20:57.000So the theory itself, historically speaking, strongly suggests that.
01:21:08.000And then we've now seen the oldest light in the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang.
01:21:14.000So we know that the universe was hot and dense 13.8 billion years ago.
01:21:18.000We have so much evidence for that, not least that we have a photograph of it 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
01:21:24.000It's called the cosmic microwave background radiation.
01:21:28.000That's from the satellite called Planck, a European satellite, and also a satellite called COBE. So we have these images of the afterglow of the Big Bang.
01:21:36.000We also have theories that tell us about the abundance of chemical elements in the universe which match this perfectly.
01:21:42.000So there's multiple lines of evidence that tell us the universe was hot and dense.
01:21:46.000But none of that tells us that that was the beginning.
01:21:51.000I think that would be widely accepted.
01:21:55.000It's a beginning in Einstein's theory.
01:21:57.000If you just take general relativity, there's a singularity there at the beginning of time.
01:22:01.000We don't know what it is, but it's there.
01:22:03.000But it absolutely is true to say that we think that's not complete as a picture.
01:22:39.000So that greeny one, well, either that one or the one with the greeny blue, that one, that's from the Planck satellite.
01:22:46.000So those colours correspond to regions of different density.
01:22:50.000So in this young universe, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, that's only hydrogen and helium gas, basically, and a bit of lithium, some of the lighter elements, but basically hydrogen and helium.
01:23:03.000So you've got an almost smooth, almost featureless universe then.
01:23:08.000But these little density fluctuations are very important because as the universe expanded and cooled, they collapsed to form the galaxies.
01:23:18.000So without those ripples, without that pattern, we would not exist.
01:23:31.000And the theory of inflation that I mentioned earlier, that there's this time before the universe got hot and dense, that theory predicted that pattern before it was observed.
01:23:42.000So this idea that you've got this very quickly stretching space.
01:23:47.000By the way, so the stretch, if I can remember the number, is if you consider two points in space during inflation, the distance between them was doubling.
01:23:58.000Every 10 to the minus 37 seconds, which is 0.000...
01:24:38.000So our universe is accelerating in its expansion at the moment, which is one of the great mysteries that was discovered in the 1990s by a friend of mine, actually.
01:24:50.000Brian Schmidt got the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
01:24:53.000He told me once, I don't know if I told you the story before, but he told me that he'd made this measurement, and it wasn't really, he was looking at supernova explosions, and he'd seen that the suggestion in the data was that the universe is accelerating in its expansion,
01:27:13.000We thought we might make them at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I think many people thought that we'd see the signature of these things and we haven't done.
01:27:20.000So it could be that we're not right with that picture.
01:27:24.000But that picture encompasses what percentage of the known universe?
01:27:28.000So yeah, so it's about 5% matter, about 70% dark energy, and the rest, so 25% dark matter.
01:27:43.000So everything we can see in the sky, all the gas and the dust and the galaxies and the stars and the black holes, all those things, less than 5%.
01:27:54.000According to the standard model of cosmology.
01:27:57.000And so the other 95% is just like, who knows?
01:28:34.000And most of them have problems with that pattern, the CMB, the cosmic microwave background that we just saw.
01:28:40.000Because that pattern, what you're looking at actually in that pattern is acoustic, it's waves, sound waves essentially in the early universe that go through the plasma of the early universe.
01:28:52.000And they go out and we know what speed they go through that plasma.
01:28:56.000So it's almost like you're looking at a pond and you're throwing stones into the pond.
01:29:01.000And they all land in the pond at the same time and send ripples out, little circular ripples in the pond, and they all overlap.
01:29:33.000But the idea also came from looking at galaxies and how they rotate.
01:29:38.000And galaxies and how they bend light and deform space and time and how they interact together.
01:29:46.000So there's loads of different bits of information, observations of the universe from the cosmic microwave background all the way through to galaxies and the formation of galaxies and the theories that we have there that suggest there are these particles around that interact very weakly with light So they don't really interact with light at all,
01:30:04.000which is why we don't see them, which is why they're dark.
01:31:12.000Because the way the universe expands is related to the stuff that's in the universe.
01:31:18.000So we can weigh the universe and find out what kind of different things are in there by looking at the way it's expanded and how that expansion history has changed over time.
01:31:29.000So it's what you do with science, which is why it's...
01:31:33.000You know, it's true that you can criticize any one bit of it.
01:31:42.000And it's true that you can pluck away and pick away any piece of it.
01:31:47.000But the way it tends to work is when you have this kind of consensus view of something, it's because you have multiple observations that all fit a particular hypothesis.
01:31:58.000And by changing one of them, by changing the explanation of one of them, you tend to mess the whole other thing up.
01:32:04.000You mess the wider description of multiple phenomena up.
01:32:10.000So it's quite hard to find other theories at the moment that will fit all of those different observations.
01:32:22.000I mean, another example would be the age of things, is it?
01:32:25.000You know, it's interesting that you can look at, we can measure the age of the Earth, right, and you measure it from geological processes, radioactive dating and so on, and you can kind of measure the age of the Earth.
01:32:34.000You can measure the age of the Sun in a different way.
01:32:37.000You can measure it by looking at, by looking at, called helioseismology, so you can work out, you can measure how much helium is in the core of the Sun, and the Sun shines by making helium from hydrogen.
01:32:49.000So by measuring the amount of helium in the core, by looking at basically sound waves, it's like an earthquake, but sun quakes, you can measure how much helium's in there, so you can get an estimate of the age of the sun.
01:32:59.000And then you can get an estimate of the age of the universe by measuring how it's expanding and using Einstein's theory.
01:33:05.000The fact that they all fit with the picture of a universe that's 13.8 billion years old, A sun that's 4.5 billion years old, a planet that's 4.5 billion years old, the fact that it all fits is quite an intricate model.
01:33:22.000And so you could say, well, I argue with the measurements of the age of the Earth.
01:33:28.000Maybe I don't like the radioactive dating or something, and people will say that.
01:33:32.000But the thing is, it's a consistent picture with multiple different observations.
01:34:07.000Were any of the other theories, competing theories, were any of them compelling at all?
01:34:11.000There are theories that people try to build where you modify our theory of gravity So many of these observations, not all of them, so the cosmic microwave background are different observations, but many of them depend on gravity and how gravity works,
01:34:26.000Einstein's theory of general relativity.
01:34:29.000So you could try to modify that theory.
01:34:36.000Because the way we measure how the expansion of the universe is is to look at light from supernovae is one way and see how it's stretched over time.
01:34:45.000Because the light, let's say, you have a supernova...
01:34:50.000Then the light has been traveling for a billion years across the universe.
01:34:53.000And so the universe has been expanding for a billion years, so the light will be stretched.
01:34:57.000And so you can measure how much stretch there is.
01:35:01.000You just measure the color of the light from the supernova.
01:35:05.000So you can argue that maybe if you go for light that's been traveling 12 billion years across the universe, then maybe there was something different.
01:35:14.000Maybe the light was emitted a bit different.
01:35:16.000Maybe the speed of light changes over time or something.
01:35:19.000So you can invent theories that would allow you to change the data or the interpretation of the data.
01:35:27.000But what you always find, I think it would be fair to say, Is that you can change a theory and explain one bit, but all the wheels come off the other bits.
01:36:04.000One of the things I love about science is it often gets presented, you know, because I talk about science a lot in public, and it can often seem arrogant, I think.
01:36:13.000It can seem, you know, like these people are saying, well, this is the way the world is.
01:36:17.000And you might say, well, you know, how are you to say this?
01:36:21.000The thing I like about it, personally, and the reason for its success, is that really you have to be delighted when you're wrong.
01:36:53.000So if this idea of dark energy and dark matter turns out to be wrong, all scientists or good scientists will be absolutely delighted because it'd be tremendously exciting that we'd ruled out this picture.
01:37:06.000It'd be great to rule out this picture.
01:37:08.000So there isn't such a thing as dark matter.
01:38:27.000One of the reasons we built that telescope was to...
01:38:30.000What it does, because it can see very distant things, and because light travels at a finite speed, the further out into the universe you look, the further back in time you're looking.
01:38:41.000So because that can see things from which the light has been traveling for over 13 billion years, then you're seeing things as they were in the first billion years or a few hundred thousand years in the history of the universe, right, essentially.
01:38:56.000Well, a few hundred million years, sorry, I should have said.
01:38:59.000So you're seeing the first galaxies form with that telescope, which is one of the reasons it was built.
01:39:07.000And the reason we wanted to see is because we don't fully understand that process.
01:39:11.000As I mentioned before, we don't really fully understand why they have black holes in them and it's something to do with their formation, but we don't understand it very well.
01:39:19.000So it's not surprising to me that when you build that instrument and collect light from the early universe, you see an early universe that's behaving in a different way to the way that you thought it behaved.
01:39:36.000A galaxy is formed earlier than you would have predicted.
01:39:41.000But that means that your model of the way the universe evolved is not quite right, and that's not a surprise, because we wouldn't have built the thing if we'd known everything.
01:40:10.000And I'm not an expert in that field, but my understanding is that it's interesting because we're having to refine and develop new models of the way that the galaxy is formed.
01:40:21.000And indeed, you're saying that it looks like the stars and the galaxies A present in the universe earlier than we might have expected.
01:41:35.000So I suppose we're looking at a kind of galaxy.
01:41:39.000It seems we're looking at a kind of galaxy that we don't see today in the universe.
01:41:45.000Red and compact, visible only during about one billion years of cosmic history.
01:41:51.000So that would be, as I said, because we don't really understand the formation of the galaxies and these supermassive black holes, that's interesting because what you're seeing in the data is a kind of almost proto-galaxy, I suppose, these little tiny galaxies.
01:42:11.000I think what we're seeing is that we don't understand how structures formed in the universe.
01:42:19.000We have a reasonable idea, but we don't understand the detail.
01:42:22.000And the more things like that you find, the more information you have to build models of how stuff formed.
01:42:28.000Do we have another, like, next-generation James Webb-type telescope that's even more efficient or more capable?
01:42:36.000I mean, there are several sort of proposed observatories.
01:42:42.000And also, by the way, gravitational wave detectors.
01:42:45.000So we've got LIGO, which is on the ground.
01:42:48.000There are proposals to put one in space, which is called LISA. One of the proposals is called LISA. Which is lasers between satellites so you can have much bigger things.
01:42:59.000And the reason that's interesting is because there'll be gravitational waves from the Big Bang So, you know, as you mentioned neutrinos, you've got neutrino observatories which can observe neutrinos from the early universe.
01:43:14.000It's just like light in a way, but it gives you a different view.
01:43:18.000You mentioned earlier, it's a different way of looking at the universe.
01:43:22.000So the neutrinos will have information.
01:43:25.000Gravitational waves will have detailed information about the Big Bang itself, but we can't detect them at the moment because we can't detect those really tiny little ripples in space and time.
01:43:35.000That's what's so fascinating because if they do launch this and they find new information, that's even more puzzling.
01:43:40.000And you keep going further and further and further.
01:45:23.000It's very weird because it doesn't seem like that because people are worried about overpopulation.
01:45:27.000But then you have a lot of the chemicals and the plastics and all the different things in people's bodies are interrupting our reproductive cycles.
01:45:36.000And you could see that eventually becoming an even bigger issue in the future if we continue to fuck up the world.
01:45:52.000I feel that we are kind of a fork in the road here because, as you said, there are tremendous challenges that we face, environmental challenges and so on.
01:46:14.000But on the other side, as you said, we have not only AI... And quantum computers, which are potentially profoundly powerful things.
01:46:23.000But also, you know, the rockets that we have now, I mean, reusable rockets, to me, we haven't talked about that, but I think it's an absolute game changer.
01:46:32.000It is now the case that we have cheap and reliable access to space.
01:46:38.000We should play that video of them catching it.
01:46:41.000Because that is one of the most incredible achievements in human history.
01:46:46.000Because Elon Musk, unfortunately, is so polarizing to some people, particularly now because of the political cycle that we're in, that you don't appreciate what SpaceX just did.
01:46:53.000It did one of the most extraordinary things ever.
01:46:56.000They caught a rocket that's bigger than a fucking skyscraper.
01:48:03.000I get criticised for this quite a lot, and will no doubt after this interview, because I do think our future at some point is beyond Earth.
01:48:22.000One thing to emphasize, which I'm sure you'd agree with, is that I don't think anybody is suggesting that what we're able to do now is trash this planet and then move to another one.
01:49:00.000Which I kind of, you know, they didn't build rockets.
01:49:02.000Well, it's almost like nature realized that, look, with these giant lizards running around, people are never going to figure out how to make spaceships.
01:50:04.000But how ridiculous is it when you see that?
01:50:08.000When you see the fact that for the first time we have launch vehicles that really should be able to launch almost anything we want.
01:50:16.000So the idea that we can build infrastructure in space and then, of course, build bases on the Moon and then ultimately on Mars and then beyond.
01:50:39.000So you go from this goofy, like, flexible sort of airplane-looking thing that no one's going to fly across the Atlantic in to catching rockets with a giant, like, hand, the robot clamp.
01:51:05.000So I think we're on the 1906. So we're on the verge of a revolution in many fields.
01:51:12.000My worry is that we're also seeing an increase in political instability.
01:51:18.000And so I think we're, I think most people would agree, a very dangerous moment.
01:51:23.000And the question is how to get to that future.
01:51:25.000And that future that you talked about, this wonderful future that we have, might be 10 or 20 years away, but it might be an eternity away if we get the next few years wrong.
01:51:52.000Well, we have to keep it out of the hands of the military-industrial complex.
01:51:56.000We have to stop what's going on in the world, these insane conflicts.
01:52:00.000And if we don't, and they escalate, Iran gets a nuclear weapon, Israel uses it in Iran, Russia uses it in Ukraine.
01:52:07.000We have World War III, and I'm sure you're aware of what Einstein said about World War IV, that World War III, I don't know what weapons they'll use, but in World War IV, it'll be rocks and sticks.
01:52:18.000And we're not that far away from that.
01:52:22.000If you could imagine living in Hiroshima the day before the bomb, not having any idea that anything like that could ever even possibly happen.
01:52:30.000You're just a regular person walking around and all of a sudden everything is obliterated.
01:52:34.000And you realize, like, we're in a new era of destruction where you can...
01:52:39.000And what's interesting to me is I've got interested in Oppenheimer's writing post-war.
01:52:49.000There's a thing called the BBC Wreath Lectures that are very famous in the UK. And every year, someone gives these lectures after Lord Wreath, who founded the BBC. And Oppenheimer did them in 1953, I think it is, 53 or 54. And they were considered a failure because no one understood what he was talking about.
01:53:09.000But in there, he was concerned with the fact, of course, that he felt he delivered the means by which we would destroy ourselves.
01:53:17.000And he felt our technology, our scientific know-how exceeded our wisdom and our political skill, which is arguably true.
01:53:25.000So he thought in the 50s, he couldn't see how we'd avoid destroying ourselves.
01:53:29.000But he thought about it a lot, feeling partly personally responsible for it.
01:53:34.000And he describes this, how if there's any lessons that science teaches us, the exploration of nature teaches us, that we could move into other fields, that we could transfer into politics,
01:54:42.000It is at one level a load of individuals like little particles and they have their own needs and desires and they have their views and strongly held views and so should they by the way.
01:54:52.000There's a great quote from I think early 60s from Oppenheimer where he says that to be a person of substance you need an anchor.
01:55:00.000So you need to believe things and you need to argue for things.
01:55:43.000So somehow you've got to understand that whilst you have your, and should have, your firmly held position, you have to find a way, and it feels almost contradictory, you have to find a way of understanding that the society as a whole is a complex mixture of all these different little particles with their own anchors and their own positions.
01:57:32.000And the problem with our version of democracy is that it's been captured by money.
01:57:38.000So there's interests beyond the will and the needs of the people.
01:57:44.000And those interests often are contrary to the will and the needs of the people.
01:57:48.000And as long as they can keep from it falling into complete total catastrophe and continue to profit off of the global chaos, they do.
01:57:58.000It's just there's too much money involved in politics and lobbyists and special interest groups and people influencing the media.
01:58:09.000They've distorted reality to the point where the general citizen doesn't really have a nuanced understanding of why these conflicts are taking place in the first place and why all the money is going over to these places and what is being done to mitigate any of these issues.
01:58:46.000They never thought you'd have these, not just corporations, but corporations that are essentially in charge of an enormous percentage of the information that gets distributed online.
01:58:58.000And you see how organizations, government organizations, can conspire to limit the amount of information people have access to.
01:59:07.000And they can do it through very sneaky ways.
01:59:09.000I don't know if you're aware of what they've done in Canada, but in Canada now, you are no longer able to share links to news stories on social media.
01:59:19.000And the way they snuck that in is by saying that these media corporations, whether it's Meta or Twitter, X, whatever, they have a responsibility to pay the people that are making these stories.
01:59:37.000And so by this little sneaky little loophole, they've essentially put a stop on the free flow of information in Canada on social media.
01:59:46.000It's very, very disturbing and very dystopian.
01:59:49.000I have some friends that just went up there and they're like, it's so confusing.
01:59:53.000Because people didn't know it was going to happen before it happened and then it happened and now everyone's kind of a little out of the loop up there.
02:00:00.000Because you're not able, you can't even share a link.
02:00:02.000Which doesn't make any sense because, say if there's a New York Times article and I want to share it with you on Twitter, All I'm doing is driving more traffic to the New York Times website.
02:00:16.000It doesn't make any sense that it would somehow or another, because these companies aren't paying.
02:00:22.000So the idea is that X, because the profits that they get through advertising is all based on engagement, that there's engagement It sends people to this, and so they're profiting from it, and that profit should be shared with the media company, whether it's Los Angeles Times or whatever.
02:00:37.000That's crazy, because it's a two-way street.
02:01:50.000You know, people, again, will be listening to this and they'll have different views on the way that things happen on the internet and regulation and so on.
02:01:56.000But I think what everyone would agree on is we haven't got it right yet.
02:02:14.000It's being manipulated by governments.
02:02:16.000Like governments have troll farms where they just attack certain sensitive political issues and they make polarizing statements and crazy claims.
02:02:25.000And you go to that website or you go to that Twitter page and you realize, oh, this isn't a real person.
02:02:31.000And a former FBI analyst made an estimate of 80%.
02:02:41.000He thinks 80% of all the accounts, and this was around the time Elon was buying it, who knows what it's at now, 80% were fake.
02:02:50.000And this was one of the sticking points of the argument that Elon said, It was when he was buying Twitter, they were telling him that it was only 5%.
02:03:13.000Like, I see arguments online where people take these crazy inflammatory positions, like, just insulting and attacking people that believe one thing or another thing.
02:03:23.000And I'm like, how much of this is, like, instigated by China or Russia or Iran or some other foreign country?
02:03:30.000And they're doing it through these troll farms, which we absolutely know exist.
02:03:36.000And I'm sure the United States has them as well.
02:03:40.000I mean, the way I do it, because obviously I'm on Twitter X, and so the way that I do it is you can tell, I think, by someone's timeline usually.
02:03:51.000Because my basic rule of thumb is that if you look at someone's timeline, and it's all political.
02:05:17.000You have the tools, you have the mental tools.
02:05:19.000To deal with this sort of new world of information.
02:05:24.000I think that's something that we should probably be teaching to children is how to navigate social media and how to navigate influence and how to navigate other people's opinions of you and how to navigate online bullying, how to avoid...
02:05:37.000There's so much anxiety that's attached to social media now, too, and so many people engage in arguments with it all day long.
02:05:43.000I think it's a primary source of mental illness for a lot of people, or at least an accelerant of mental illness.
02:05:49.000And we don't have an education as to how to manage that and what that means to you.
02:05:55.000And the addiction that people have to social media and addiction people have to their smartphones in general is probably underappreciated.
02:06:53.000And we're essentially in the middle of the flood, this social media, online influence flood, and we haven't really shored up our basement yet.
02:07:02.000We don't really know how to protect ourselves from it.
02:08:04.000We have a, you know, this confidence comes with some degree of success and you can put things in perspective.
02:08:11.000And as you said, you know, when, if you're, I often think, actually, I see people who struggle in When they become well known for the first time, for example.
02:08:22.000I mean, I remember when I became, quite late in life, became well known as a public figure.
02:08:28.000I did a series on the BBC in 2009 or 2010 called Wonders of the Solar System and suddenly I was well known.
02:08:36.000And I find it very difficult to navigate.
02:08:39.000And fortunately, I had the support structures and people around me, and I could navigate it, and you come to terms with it, and you learn how to do it.
02:10:43.000I went down a hashtag space is fake rabbit hole one night online and it has something to do with biblical stuff because they think that there's a firmament that's over the earth and they think that the lights are dangled in the sky.
02:12:03.000They should try it so they know space is real.
02:12:05.000They probably think it's just deflecting off the dome or something, I don't know.
02:12:09.000I guess, but the crazy thing is the idea that everybody's in cahoots, that all these competing countries decided to all lie together, and yet...
02:12:31.000The fundamental thing as well, the fundamental misconception these people have is they assume that there's a competence.
02:12:40.000In government, anyone who's interacted with government, I speak of my own country, I've interacted with the government.
02:12:47.000The idea that they're competent enough to do this, tremendously intricate scam, they can't even, in my country, they can't even make the trains run.
02:12:59.000So I think that it's this assumption that there's some kind of Underlying competence to the world.
02:13:06.000Yes, not just competence but unbelievably calculating manipulation.
02:13:11.000Yeah, I just don't think that the world is run by people who are smart enough to do that.
02:13:16.000I mean, there's certainly conspiracies that are real, but that's just preposterous.
02:13:20.000But it's also, it's just like this, again, it's attached to a weird religious thing.
02:13:24.000They do believe in the literal interpretation of some of the stories in the Bible, and that's somehow or another that's been attached to the firmament.
02:13:33.000That's one of the problems with sort of...
02:13:38.000Especially if you're an articulate person and even if you make some fake documentary and you attach a bunch of fake facts to it, if it's compelling and no one like you stops and goes, hold on, that's not how it works.
02:14:04.000Thousands of years of research and discovery has led us to.
02:14:09.000This is not like just based on a whim.
02:14:11.000There's like a lot of information and the idea that all of that information is a vast conspiracy to hide the fact that God is real and that the firmament covers the earth and the earth exists in the center of the universe and is created by God and space is fake.
02:14:28.000I've learned something I didn't know because I didn't know the space is fake thing was linked to that.
02:14:36.000At the root of all the flat earth stuff is the firmament.
02:14:39.000The root of all the flat earth stuff is based on some very bizarre interpretation of biblical...
02:14:45.000I don't remember the exact depiction of the firmament and how God describes it in the Bible, but They believe that that's what we're looking at, that there's like a glass, like a cookie dome,
02:15:01.000like a plate of cookies with a glass dome on it.
02:15:05.000Going back to what we said earlier, if that was the way that nature is, we would tell you.
02:15:43.000But again, I really think it has something to do with blind belief in religious writings.
02:15:49.000And not just that, but erroneous interpretations of religious writings.
02:15:54.000You know, when you're dealing with something that was originally written in ancient Hebrew and then translated to Latin and then to Greek, a lot of that gets lost in the translation.
02:16:04.000A lot of it gets like, you had a thousand years of oral tradition.
02:16:08.000I've always wondered At the beginning of the Bible, in the beginning there was light.
02:16:12.000I wonder if that was like someone trying to figure out the Big Bang.
02:16:17.000I mean, it doesn't make sense that they would have a concept of it back then, but it also doesn't...
02:16:23.000Maybe that's something like we inherently know is that there was an event.
02:16:29.000Maybe the echoes of that event are almost something that we just perceive because we just think of it as being a thing.
02:17:21.000I'm fascinated by it the same way I'm fascinated with science, because I think it's people that lived thousands of years ago trying to make sense of things.
02:17:33.000To me, that's one of the defining characteristics of being human, trying to make sense of the world.
02:17:40.000And that's why, by the way, I don't like to get into arguments with people who have different views, different belief systems.
02:17:52.000My baseline position is if you're curious and you're interested and you want to know how things happened, that to me is common ground that we can share.
02:18:04.000The people I don't really understand are people who are not curious and don't have questions.
02:18:14.000Where he says that story about a taxi driver when he got in the taxi at the start and he's asking him all these questions about Atlantis or whatever it is.
02:18:22.000And he realizes he doesn't think this guy is an idiot.
02:18:30.000He's someone who should be—we can have a wonderful conversation.
02:18:33.000But he also says that he felt that he'd perhaps been failed by society, by education, in that his curiosity had not been somehow channeled to the real mysteries.
02:18:47.000But he got sidetracked into all this strange stuff.
02:18:51.000I think the real academic mysteries are intimidating to some people.
02:18:55.000Because they don't think of themselves as being intelligent, so then they gravitate towards YouTube mysteries.
02:19:01.000Yeah, but more controversial so that it puts them in a select club of people who actually know what's going on, where people love stuff like QAnon.
02:19:11.000They love stuff like that, where they're in the know of some top-secret information.
02:19:51.000As you said, if you can be comfortable with not having to have a simple, intelligible explanation for something, then you'll make more progress in life.
02:20:37.000I mean, going back to Richard Feynman, he said there's a great essay I've probably talked to you about before called The Value of Science that he wrote, 1955. You can get it online.
02:20:47.000And in there he says the most valuable thing is scientists bring this transferable skill to life.
02:20:53.000And it's that you have a great experience with being wrong.
02:21:43.000And so the more you interrogate nature, even as a kid at school with a little experiment with a battery and a light or something, you learn that there's a reality and you learn what it takes to acquire reliable knowledge about the world.
02:22:07.000And it can be very important questions.
02:22:09.000It can be questions like, what happens if we carry on putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, for example?
02:22:14.000Whatever your politics are, it's a legitimate question, a good question.
02:22:18.000Right, scientifically a good question.
02:22:20.000Are we going to influence the climate if we carry on doing this?
02:22:24.000And so how do we then address that as a question?
02:22:27.000You can't do it by going back to your political affiliation or your belief system.
02:22:31.000You've got to try and understand this complicated system, which is the climate of a planet.
02:22:36.000So you make measurements of the thing and you build some models and computer models and there's a very famous saying that all models are wrong because they're models, right?
02:22:46.000But they're the best you can do so you have a go and You come up with some information and a model that kind of works, and you say, well, this is the best version of our knowledge at the time.
02:22:57.000And then you can try to act on it, and you refine the model, and that's the process.
02:23:02.000But that idea of how can we acquire reliable knowledge that we can trust, which might not be right and is very likely not completely right, but it's the best we can do at the time.
02:23:16.000That's what my definition of science would be.
02:23:30.000It's not something by its very nature, the way that science works, is it may be shown to be incorrect or not particularly great a model tomorrow.
02:23:39.000But I would define it as the best we, and by we I mean our civilisation, the best we can do.
02:23:56.000And that term reliable information is so important because people want to leap to conclusions to try to like tie something up neatly when reliable information might not be available.
02:24:06.000Like reliable information is the number one reason why I never take the UFO thing seriously.
02:24:12.000I am so all in that there must be life out there.
02:24:17.000I know the Fermi Paradox notwithstanding, but I think if you just take into account the sheer numbers of planets that we're looking at, the possibility of something achieving some sort of advanced life seems very high.
02:25:03.000But then there's also this part of me that doesn't want to abandon the idea that if I was an intelligent species from another planet, And I saw that these territorial primates with thermonuclear weapons are advancing towards the creation of AI and like ruining the planet while they're doing it,
02:25:22.000like doing crazy shit to the ocean and poisoning streams and water supplies.
02:25:27.000I'd be like, let's keep an eye on these fucking freaks.
02:25:29.000I would most certainly say this is a – if this happens all throughout the universe, let's just imagine that this is the natural progression from single-celled organisms to super-curious advanced life forms that eventually transform the world that they live in.
02:25:44.000If this is a natural progression, there's got to be planets that don't make it.
02:25:48.000There's probably a slew of them that get to 1945 and it turns out that both Germany, Japan, Germany, Japan, and the United States all have nuclear weapons.
02:25:58.000At the same time, launch them all at each other, and then civilization goes down to zero.
02:28:13.000Like, there's this story that we were talking about recently where Starlink has been brought to some of these very remote tribes and they've been given cell phones and now tribal leaders are complaining.
02:28:26.000These kids are on their phones all day in the fucking jungle.
02:28:29.000Like, instead of, like, living this subsistence lifestyle they've been living for tens of thousands of years, some of them are getting lazy and they're just sitting around and they're looking at, you know, videos.
02:29:53.000And there are probably religions, probably some scam religions that get invented to try to, you know, contact and make peace with these overlords.
02:30:20.000We develop the technology that allows us to travel to other solar systems, and we do observe a civilization that is, you know, like the Bronze Age.
02:30:31.000And we stumble upon these people that have tools, they haven't...
02:30:36.000Figured out steel yet, but they've done some pretty interesting things, and they're clearly intelligent, and they figured out agriculture.
02:30:42.000We would be studying them, for sure, 100%.
02:30:45.000We would send word back to Earth, oh my god, we found these people that live like the Mongols did in 1200 AD. It would be fascinating.
02:30:56.000We would 100% be interested in it, and I think they would be interested in us.
02:31:31.000I mean, the point is, I think there's nobody there.
02:31:34.000That's the terrifying idea is that we're the only ones in the whole thing and that intelligent life is so bizarre and such a rare thing that happens in only the perfect of circumstances.
02:32:05.000I think the current number is something like two trillion galaxies, depending on how many smaller ones there are.
02:32:12.000So wouldn't you think that just out of two trillion galaxies, there's probably pretty good odds that something would reach some sort of a Goldilocks state in terms of where the planet exists in relationship to the star?
02:32:52.000It is true that the laws of physics do not prevent that.
02:32:56.000So I teach relativity at Manchester University after the first years, the 18-year-olds.
02:33:03.000And the first thing we do in special relativity is talk about the fact that if you travel close to the speed of light, so if you had a spacecraft traveling close to the speed of light, then distances shrink from your perspective.
02:33:18.000The one number I always have in my mind is that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the protons go around the ring, which is 27 kilometres in circumference, and they go around at 99.999999% the speed of light, so close to the speed of light.
02:33:34.000At that speed, distances shrink by a factor of 7,000.
02:33:40.000And so that ring is something like four meters in diameter to the protons.
02:33:48.000So according to laws of physics, if you can build a spacecraft that goes very close to speed of light, you can shrink the distance to the Andromeda galaxy and therefore the time it takes to get there by an arbitrary amount,
02:34:04.000The closer you get to speed of light, the more you can shrink it.
02:34:07.000And so you can make those two million light years, you could traverse across that distance in principle, in a minute, according to physics.
02:34:18.000However, the downside Is that you couldn't come back to tell...
02:34:24.000If you came back to the Earth at that speed to tell everybody what you'd found, at least four million years would have passed on the Earth.
02:36:28.000If you're carrying your watch with you and you go between here and tomorrow, you go this way, you go off and maybe you fly to Dallas and back or something and then come back again.
02:36:38.000Someone else can take a different path, obviously, and so a different amount of time will pass for them between those two things that happen.
02:36:54.000Unless you travel, someone goes close to the speed of light, or someone goes near a black hole or something where the space-time is all distorted, then you can get big effects.
02:37:07.000I mean, they are quite big effects, these, in the sense that for the satellite navigation system, for example, GPS, The clocks on the satellites tick at a different rate to the clocks on the ground.
02:37:19.000I think from memory it's something like over 30,000 nanoseconds per day difference because they're in a weaker gravitational field and they're moving and all sorts of things.
02:37:56.000So it's a big effect for when you start using time to measure distance, which is what we do in satellite navigation, GPS. So we have to correct.
02:38:05.000So the clocks have to be corrected for that effect.
02:38:08.000So it's an effect that we can easily measure with atomic clocks, but it doesn't make much difference to us as humans.
02:38:15.000But just the point is that the laws of nature would allow you to do it if you could go close to speed of light.
02:38:22.000By the way, the last thing I'll say is the limiting factor.
02:38:25.000You might say, what happens if you go really close to the speed of light?
02:38:28.000What happens if you go at the speed of light?
02:38:30.000Well, special relativity, Einstein's theory, is built such that The distance between any two events in the universe along the path of a beam of light between the events is zero.
02:39:21.000What are your thoughts on the possibility of some sort of a novel propulsion system that doesn't move things at speed but instead brings things together?
02:40:02.000So you can, and it's been done, you can develop sort of things where you say, well, if we could make this geometry of space and time, if we could distort it in this way, then indeed you can build a warp drive.
02:40:50.000Is it possible that we don't have them here, but that in different planetary systems, different environments, that these elements could exist?
02:41:21.000Where you said that whatever the ultimate laws of physics are, we don't have them at the moment, string theory, whatever it is, then they will be such that you can't do this.
02:41:31.000Because chronology protection means protect the present from the future.
02:41:37.000So in other words, you can't build a time machine that goes back in time.
02:41:45.000But because Einstein's theory allowed you to imagine such a thing, even though you might not be able to build it, it's not been proven beyond doubt that you can't somehow make these kinds of quantum fields or whatever it is that you need to make wormholes,
02:42:00.000for example, stable wormholes you can go through.
02:42:05.000So it's just, it's suspected that that's going to be the case.
02:42:08.000By the way, the final thing, this will be very neat because it goes right back to what I said at the start, that one of the pictures of how, I said there was this thing, the black hole information paradox, and we thought Stephen's calculation was that no information comes out, we now think it comes out.
02:42:24.000So we now think that black holes do not destroy information.
02:42:28.000So it's been proven mathematically to most people's satisfaction that the information ends up out again.
02:42:34.000So if you went into a black hole, the information would be out in that Hawking radiation that could reconstruct you, but only in the sense that if a nuclear bomb landed on us now, then in principle the information would be still there in the future and we could be reconstructed,
02:42:57.000How is the information that is you ending up outside again?
02:43:01.000And the physical picture is not really understood, but the link is that one of the pictures that people are beginning to suggest to have is that there is some kind of wormholes, in a sense, some kind of wormhole that connects the inside of the black hole to the outside.
02:43:19.000And so a picture Is that your atoms and everything, your bits, get scrambled up and go basically through the wormholes and come out again.
02:44:27.000This is the basis of quantum computers.
02:44:29.000So we build things that rely on this effect.
02:44:32.000ER is Einstein-Rosen, which is Einstein-Rosen bridge, which is wormhole.
02:44:37.000So they also published a paper about wormholes, Einstein and Rosen, in the 30s.
02:44:42.000And so the idea is that you could picture that somehow as being a kind of wormhole that connects the entangled particles.
02:44:51.000So that's how this entanglement works.
02:44:54.000Another description of quantum entanglement is a wormhole kind of geometry.
02:44:59.000And this is part of the cutting edge of research into black holes, but also the structure of space and time and quantum entanglement and how quantum entanglement might produce space and time.
02:45:12.000And it's related to the way that quantum computers work.
02:45:14.000So it's become a really hot topic because people are trying to build quantum computers and program quantum computers.
02:45:21.000And these are the kind of problems you have to face about quantum entanglement and how you maintain it and what it means.
02:45:27.000And there was a paper recently, which is quite a controversial paper, that I think was the Google quantum computer, which is one of the best ones.
02:45:39.000It's using it just as these qubits, these little quantum systems that are kind of very stable, that are the basis of quantum computing.
02:45:47.000And it's using those qubits and setting them up in such a way that something that looks like a kind of a wormhole is created in the quantum computer.
02:45:58.000It's kind of a one-dimensional wormhole, and it's a bit kind of technical and everything.
02:46:02.000But it looks like it might be the first hint of how you build space from qubits.
02:46:31.000The hologram thing is quite well established now and it's coming from a thing that you may have talked about with other people on the show, the ADS-CFT conjecture, a great physicist called Maldesina.
02:46:43.000So the idea is that you can have a quantum theory living on a boundary.
02:46:48.000So you could imagine, picture a sphere with a quantum theory living on the surface.
02:46:53.000And there's a completely equivalent description of whatever's going on, the physics, in the interior of the sphere.
02:47:01.000So it's almost as if the interior of the space is a hologram of the theory that lives on the surface.
02:47:09.000And it's kind of, not accepted, but many physicists think our universe is like that.
02:47:17.000So what we're saying is that we're having this conversation now, and there's an equivalent description of this somehow in a theory that does not contain space and time.
02:47:29.000It's a completely equivalent description that lives in fewer dimensions, on a surface somehow that's surrounding us.
02:47:37.000And it's really woolly and hand-wavy because we don't fully know what it means, but it would mean that we're holograms.
02:47:44.000So this is a hologram of this other dual theory.
02:47:49.000That's what that thing was, the holographic wormhole thing.
02:47:52.000So it's all very the beginnings of this work.
02:47:56.000But that's an example of how it could become an experimental science because quantum computers now exist.
02:48:04.000And they allow you to do those experiments to try to build filaments.
02:48:09.000It's almost like a filament of space, a holographic filament of space that you're building from these qubits.
02:48:17.000And by the way, that word is a bit weird.
02:48:42.000Physicists have gone, this is great, because Google and Microsoft have spent billions of dollars building these things because they want to build these computers.
02:48:49.000But they're perfect laboratories for quantum mechanics.
02:48:53.000So you can do abstract research into quantum mechanics on them, which I find fascinating.
02:49:00.000That's actually more fascinating than using them to crack everybody's codes.
02:49:04.000Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, factoring large numbers, it's kind of boring.
02:49:07.000But building wormholes, which is, and I caution, it's a complicated thing, but it looks like the beginnings of...
02:49:17.000A laboratory to build structures like that.
02:49:40.000I couldn't understand if they did this on purpose to make it the shape of a yin-yang and it's just the representation of these quantum entangled photons or if that is what quantum entangled photons actually look like in a shape.
02:49:56.000So it's visualized to entangled particles in real time.
02:50:01.000This is making them appear as a stunning quantum yin-yang symbol.
02:50:06.000Yeah, I mean, I hadn't seen that, but it looks to me like it's another example of trying to visualise...
02:50:18.000Entanglement looks fundamental, let me put it that way.
02:50:22.000So it does look as if this idea of entanglement, which is, as I said, perhaps producing space and time itself, But also is the way that quantum computers work and the way that you,
02:50:37.000we didn't talk about this, but the way that you can, one way of picturing what this does is allow you access to multiple universes.
02:50:45.000It's the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
02:51:35.000But the explanation for how it's doing it, a picture which many people in the field, not everyone, many people would say is the correct, is what it's doing is the calculations in multiple universes.
02:51:46.000So it's accessing the fact that actually there's an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the Many Worlds Interpretation, where you're to imagine these, you know, infinite, pretty much, sea of universes, and the computer kind of goes...
02:51:59.000and does the calculation in parallel, and then brings them back together again at the end.
02:52:06.000And I mentioned David Deutsch earlier, who's a fascinating writer in this field, and the instigator of many of these algorithms.
02:52:45.000And I also now don't understand, too, because it says that by capturing the resulting image.
02:52:51.000By capturing the resulting image with a nanosecond precise camera, the researchers teased apart the interference pattern they received, revealing a stunning yin-yang image of the two entangled photons.
02:53:01.000So that sounds like that's what it actually looks like.
02:53:03.000It is a photograph of, in a real sense, that the photons are arriving and you're detecting them.
02:53:13.000I think what must be happening is you're getting these photons.
02:53:17.000It is true to say that, again, this many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics would be that these entangle photons...
02:53:23.000If you send them on a path, then they, going by all the way to find them, if you calculate, the way you calculate how a photon goes from A to B, or an electron, whatever it is, it just formally is you allow it to take all possible paths.
02:53:40.000That's one way of calculating the probability it will go from one place to another.
02:53:44.000And when you get entanglement, it gets more complicated, but you're essentially, you are mathematically saying, I allow it to go on all paths.
02:53:52.000And so really there you're seeing what an interference pattern is, is you're seeing the result of the fact that these particles can go on all loads of paths and interfere with each other and make a pattern you can see.
02:54:25.000Yeah, I've been doing this tour for a long time now, actually.
02:54:28.000I ended up doing it for about two and a half years, and it's changed a lot.
02:54:31.000We've done it to over 400,000 people, I was told, the other day around the world.
02:54:36.000And I thought just to finish it, because I want to finish it and write another one, I'd come back to the U.S. We did a few in the U.S. So coming back in April and May and doing these relatively small issues.