00:00:20.000I was trying to talk about black holes to some high school students just seriously earlier this week, and I kept saying, you know, what the fuck?0.99
00:00:29.000So I got nothing to pitch, but I, um, The Shorewood Men's Club, I was giving a talk there.0.99
00:00:34.000The Shorewood, Wisconsin is where I live.
00:00:36.000The Men's Club invited me to give a talk about astronomy last week.
00:00:39.000And when I mentioned I was coming to the show, they just freaked out.
00:00:42.000And so the only thing I have is my Shorewood Men's Club waterboard.
00:00:46.000Well, shout out to the Shorewood Men's Club.
00:01:35.000If the size of Earth, if the Earth was the dot of an eye in a book in regular print, that the Milky Way galaxy would be as large as the Earth itself.
00:02:13.000So if the Sun were the size of a dot of an eye on a page of text, so you could fit a million Earths inside that dot of an eye, then the Milky Way galaxy would be bigger than the Earth.
00:02:35.000The Sun is about 800,000 miles across.
00:02:37.000You could fit about 110 Earths across it, the diameter.
00:02:40.000We do those things where you show the differences between our sun and different stars and immense stars, and you go bigger and bigger and bigger, and you get to the point where you're like, I can't, this is not working.
00:02:58.000I mean, one of the really kind of things about demystifying scientists is the idea that our brains somehow work any differently, and like we can visualize what a light year is, right?
00:04:43.000It's wonderful that we have all this electricity and that we can see things at nighttime.
00:04:46.000But boy, we have done ourselves a massive disservice by not being able to see the stars all the time.
00:04:51.000And I think people have kind of lost the wonder of it when you're only looking at it as images on your phone or when, you know, the only time you get it is on vacation.
00:04:59.000Occasionally you look up in the sky, wow, look at all the stars here.
00:05:33.000It's exciting when someone's excited by it because I'm like, more people need to get the Fuck away from the cities and just go see how crazy this is that we're flying through space.0.61
00:06:13.000The only way the universe makes atoms, the only way that makes the chemicals all around us the aluminum, the iron, the oxygen, the carbon, the phosphorus, everything that makes me up the only thing in the universe that makes atoms is the interior of a star.
00:06:29.000It's the only place where nuclear fusion puts atoms together.
00:06:32.000So everything that you are, the story is up there.
00:06:36.000And so you're not looking at something separate and distant.
00:06:40.000I mean, astrophysics is the story of the end of your nose, literally.
00:06:44.000I mean, we are part of this beautiful, bigger thing.
00:06:59.000That's what we are, and that's what all life is.
00:07:01.000And that's just a very strange thing for people to wrap their heads around as we're sort of slowly getting a greater and greater understanding of the complexity of the universe itself, which is relatively recent in terms of human history.
00:08:42.000One of my favorite pictures NASA ever took, if you look at the little dot in the middle of that, the sort of little eye of the storm, we actually have a picture from Cassini where you can see the sun glinting off of hundreds of miles high.
00:10:04.000They have done computer simulations of very fast moving jet streams under the conditions of Saturn, and you can get this sort of shape to set up.
00:14:20.000So for the most part, we don't have images, but that doesn't mean we don't have really cool observations, including the chemistry of their atmospheres.
00:14:47.000We find the stars twinkling as little planets go around them again and again.
00:14:51.000They have to come back three times for us to say it's a planet.
00:14:54.000Otherwise, it could be a spot on the star or something else.
00:14:57.000And the amazing thing is that the starlight will shine through the atmosphere of that planet, and we can actually We could actually probe the chemistry of the atmosphere.
00:15:07.000So we find planets that have, you know, they're the size of the Earth, about the temperature of the Earth.
00:15:12.000They have evidence of water vapor, carbon dioxide, oxygen.
00:15:14.000And then last year there was this fantastic controversial discovery.
00:15:23.000We think we're starting to see the evidence of organic molecules.
00:15:25.000It's not, you know, a very strong signal yet.
00:15:29.000And this was a press release from the James Webb Space Telescope.
00:15:33.000And there were some scientists that wondered.
00:15:35.000If these could be organic molecules that might someday be traceable even to the presence of life, they resembled something that plankton might give off on an ocean world.
00:16:02.000I mean, I would never have thought the first evidence of life outside the Earth, like really hard chemical scientific evidence, would be on a planet around another star.
00:16:11.000I thought we'd maybe find it on Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
00:16:15.000But now with the James Webb Space Telescope and the telescopes that will come afterwards, We might be able to actually get enough of a sense of the atmosphere of these planets to start looking for life signs.
00:16:26.000So the sun, the star, is passing light through this little tiny thing that's smaller than a pixel and through the atmosphere where the light passes through.
00:18:12.000This is actually in the Carina Nebula, and one of the most luminous stars there is.
00:18:17.000And we pass the light through a rainbow, and then looking really, really carefully at how much light comes at every color, you can pick apart exactly what it's made of.
00:18:26.000Did you know that, you know, helium, you know the element helium, right?
00:18:30.000You may be familiar that the Greek sun god's name is Helios.
00:18:34.000Helium is an element we discovered on the sun before we ever knew it was here.
00:18:39.000In the turn of the last century, in the late 1800s, when they were passing sunlight through a prism and they were looking at all these patterns of light, there was one chemical that we'd never seen before here.
00:18:48.000And so they named it after the sun, helium.
00:20:30.000The idea that the faster you go, the slower time is, is so hard to wrap one's head around.
00:20:37.000And one of the things that I heard you talking about, you were talking about GPS satellites, and you were saying that GPS satellites, because they're going about, what are they going like, 20,000 miles an hour, something like that?
00:20:46.000So actually, if we want to break this down a little bit, There are a couple different effects about time.
00:20:52.000And one of the things that NASA does is calibrates the GPS satellites and the signal coming.
00:20:58.000And you wouldn't I mean, I think I heard that within a day, if we didn't take into account the time difference these things are in, that we'd be about six miles off in a single day.
00:21:39.000We have clocks that are so accurate that if you move about two feet above where, if we had a clock on this desk and then if we moved it up about two feet, we could actually detect time flowing differently.
00:21:51.000Because you're just that far away from the Earth's gravity, just two feet.
00:21:56.000Your head and your feet, we spend most of our lives, say, standing up, are actually going through time at slightly different rates.
00:22:04.000The farther away you are from a gravitational source, I mean, you probably like movies like Interstellar, right, with Matthew McConaughey.
00:23:52.000And in the case of the satellites, you wouldn't get the right location.
00:23:55.000The data wouldn't be right unless we take into account two things: how fast they're going, the closer to the speed of light you go, the slower time goes, but also how far away from the gravitational pull of the Earth they are.
00:24:06.000The closer you are into gravity, the slower time goes.
00:24:09.000I think the weirdest thing that I've ever heard anybody say is that all time exists.
00:24:21.000We don't know if it's true, but it's I mean, Einstein really thought there wasn't much of a way around it because he said, okay, well, if everything is going at different velocities compared to everything else, right?
00:24:32.000I mean, it's a great question a kid can ask How fast am I going through space?
00:24:37.000You know, and the Earth, if you're on the equator of the Earth, that goes around at about, you know, about a thousand miles an hour.
00:24:45.000And then we go around the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour in our orbit.
00:24:50.000The sun's going around the galaxy about half a million miles an hour around the galaxy.
00:24:54.000The galaxy is going towards a galactic cluster at more than a million miles an hour.
00:25:47.000I mean, that's sort of the way modern physics thinks the universe may be is a big whole thing that started from beginning to end and is all now ish.
00:25:57.000But if that's the case, so subjectively we can measure things.
00:26:35.000I mean, in a famous thought experiment, Einstein made a clock by setting up two mirrors and having light bounce between the two mirrors.
00:26:41.000And that was the tick of the clock tick, And the problem was that that's how he started thinking about the speed of light if you had this thing in a spaceship that was going a huge fraction of the speed of light, Then a person standing watching it go by would actually watch the light kind of trace out a pattern like this.
00:26:57.000Because it's actually ticking between the mirrors, but the mirrors are moving along.
00:27:01.000And so you see the light make this sort of bouncy movement.
00:27:04.000And that means it's actually traveled farther than the person on the ground who thinks that the mirrors are just sort of, the light is making just a straight up and down line from mirror to mirror.
00:27:13.000That question that you asked is what completely, I mean, it completely revolutionized physics.
00:27:39.000So, the clock in Einstein's experiment so, the clock has two mirrors and there's light bouncing between it, and that's the distance that it travels in one tick.
00:27:52.000But now you put that clock on a spaceship, and the spaceship's going really fast.
00:27:56.000And as it goes by, you see that clock, as it streams by you really fast, you see the light make this motion.
00:28:03.000And this line is actually longer than that line.
00:28:07.000This line, if you measure it, that's actually a longer line that I drew than the original one between just the two mirrors.
00:28:15.000And this is what made Einstein say time has to change.
00:28:19.000If anything moves, the tick of a clock changes.
00:28:22.000However, you measure time, whatever time is, whether you measure it with a bouncing clock or whether you measure it with a vibrating atom like we do in the Bureau of Standards, or whether you measure it with a spring that's slowly unwinding in a wristwatch, anything you can do to measure one moment to the next changes when motion is involved.
00:30:22.000It takes more and more energy each little tiny step you make.
00:30:25.000It's basically you never get to the speed of light.
00:30:28.000It takes an infinite amount of energy.
00:30:30.000So, you know, when it comes to things like interstellar travel, I don't think we're ever going to take a spaceship and accelerate it to the speed of light.
00:31:49.000It's amazing because once again, let's go back to the idea that this is a real experimental fact, right?0.99
00:31:54.000I mean, a lot of times this is crazy stuff that scientists will say this stuff and people hear it for the first time and they say, well, that sounds like idiotic.1.00
00:32:19.000Quantum entanglement was something that even Albert Einstein 100 years ago understood that quantum mechanics was pointing that way, but he really didn't like it.
00:32:29.000He called it spooky action at a distance.
00:32:32.000He hated it because he realized that quantum mechanics had this implication that if things could somehow be connected quantum mechanically, you could take them any distance away from each other and they.
00:32:43.000Would somehow be able to respond to each other instantaneously with no time difference.
00:32:47.000And he didn't think that would ever actually happen.
00:32:51.000And then back in the mid 1990s, we started to do experiments with atoms and we found out that it was real.
00:33:32.000So if you take these electrons out of the atom, and you can do that, you know that they're in different spins because they had to be to be in that orbit together.
00:36:54.000When we observe things orbiting close to a black hole, you can tell that that happens.
00:36:58.000The idea that this advanced civilization that we never actually see In the movie, somehow communicates through basically space and time itself, through gravity.
00:37:07.000That's how Matthew McConaughey is able to even go back in time and space to help his daughter solve gravity and all that.
00:37:16.000I was like, I wonder if that's really more what it would be like.
00:37:24.000You look around the earth and there are things like grasshoppers and hamsters that are fantastic, incredibly complex beings.
00:37:30.000But you try to teach them quantum mechanics or ask them to.
00:37:35.000You know, crochet a blanket or whatever, they don't have the capacity.
00:37:38.000And you've got to think that there's the similar jump where, I mean, we don't even know the right questions to ask that sort of civilization.
00:37:45.000You know, I mean, can they see the universe as a whole thing?
00:37:50.000Do they know that they're connected to everything and can they somehow use that to travel?
00:37:55.000And if you just extrapolate, if you just think about where we've gone from primitive man to what we're currently experiencing and you take that.
00:38:05.000Thousands of years, millions of years, whatever it is.
00:38:10.000And as long as civilization gets rid of war and figures out a way to not die of disease and natural disaster, you could potentially continue this process of technological innovation for millions of years.
00:38:25.000And you would imagine that it would go exponentially greater and greater in its ability to do things.
00:38:30.000And its ability to not just, not even things that we can imagine.
00:38:38.000Like, we have a crude understanding, an amazing understanding of the universe, but crude in comparison to what's potentially out there.
00:38:49.000We could potentially be observing in a physical way every planet on every star one day.
00:38:58.000But we're not, we can't even think of that as being a possibility now.
00:39:04.000But what we're doing right now is insane to people that live in the 1400s.0.99
00:39:09.000If you showed someone from the 1400s a nuclear power plant, they'd be like, What the fuck are you guys doing?0.99
00:39:52.000I mean, I do wonder if the human brain is just kind of limited.
00:39:55.000I mean, if you say there are multiple dimensions and time is something that changes.
00:40:00.000I mean, I just said that, you know, I mean, scientists are no better than anybody else at comprehending a big number or a big amount of space.
00:41:10.000It has to go to some sort of a human created new kind of life form that exists out of the components of the earth, but instead of being born out of evolution and out of, you know, natural mutation and natural selection, it's a random mutation.
00:42:12.000I think sometimes we lack imagination about what might be possible.
00:42:14.000I've always enjoyed science fiction where the AIs also learn about love or about the arts or about creativity.
00:42:23.000I mean, whether you want to go with like the new Battlestar Galactica or whether you want to go with a pretty profound experience I had with a friend of mine who's an author who has cochlear implants.
00:42:33.000And he realizes that he doesn't hear like a human.
00:42:37.000I mean, the cochlear implants don't replicate perfectly what it means to hear.
00:42:45.000They wire directly into his brain and stimulate the experience of sound.
00:42:50.000So he's hearing, in his words, like a cyborg.
00:42:53.000This is Michael Chorist, a wonderful man that did some essays about this.
00:42:58.000He talked about how much emotional response he has to music now, something he could never experience.
00:43:04.000How being a cyborg, quote unquote, and experiencing something in a non human way has added joy and depth and passion.
00:43:16.000Are we so sure that technology makes us more and more kind of 1950s robot like?
00:43:22.000Or could it take us into new experiences of being connected with each other, new ways of loving each other, new ways of understanding things?
00:43:29.000I mean, does it have to be all bad, this?
00:43:32.000Well, all of our differences fall apart if we realize we're all one thing.
00:43:54.000If you wanted to survive and you wanted your genes to be passed on to the next generation, you had to be selfish because other people were being selfish too, and that's the game that humans were playing.
00:44:02.000If we get to a point of universal telepathy, like universal telepathy with a universal language where all human beings are sharing thoughts, there are no secrets, we are all one thing.
00:44:20.000Well, I don't either because it would be people doing that, and those people have their own ulterior motives, and it's gross that they would have control of it.
00:44:48.000You are that person, and we're all one thing.
00:44:53.000That could be possible through technology.
00:44:56.000And this is where I have hope, where a lot of people are very Fatalist with AI, and they look at it in this dystopian sense that these oligarchs, these technology oligarchs, are going to be controlling through AI and they're going to have access to it and power.
00:45:11.000I don't know if anybody's going to control it.
00:45:14.000I have a feeling it's going to be kind of like the internet in a way where I don't think they really thought what the internet was going to be.
00:45:20.000I think they had this understanding of being able to exchange information through universities.
00:45:25.000I think it got to a point where if they knew what the internet would.
00:45:29.000Be today, and how little control they would have over the population and narratives.
00:45:34.000I think they probably would have shut it down a long time ago.
00:45:36.000I have a feeling that's going to be the same way with AI, and especially AI as it integrates with us, which I think is the only way that the human species really truly survives.
00:45:49.000Otherwise, we're just this archaic biological entity living in this new world of this ultra superior life form.
00:45:58.000But if we integrate with that thing, Through wearables, implants, engineering, if we figure out a way, and this is going to sound terrible to anybody who loves being a person, but all the flaws of being a primate.
00:46:15.000There's a lot of these biological reward systems that are built into us that are really problematic for progress.
00:46:23.000Well, because there are people with certain ideologies and there are resources and there are people that are making money from their military contracts.
00:46:31.000And there's politicians that are beholden to certain interests, and then what are we doing?1.00
00:46:35.000We're doing the same stupid shit that we've been doing for thousands and thousands of years.1.00
00:46:56.000Like we said, I mean, when we were little tribal groups, you know, the little wars we had, the skirmishes didn't really hurt the planet as a whole.
00:47:02.000I mean, now we're getting there's so many people.
00:47:05.000And we're still having these little tribal skirmishes, and now we're in danger of massive destruction.
00:47:11.000I mean, we can't just keep going this way.
00:47:16.000So, I mean, could AI help us tap into some kind of group consciousness?
00:47:20.000I mean, we're talking about Einstein's idea that the universe may all be this one big thing.
00:47:26.000And this is pure metaphysics, pure conjecture.
00:47:29.000But even from when I was a little kid and I heard that, I wondered well, if all time and space happen at once, is there need for more than one consciousness even?
00:47:37.000Are we all just looking out of one consciousness looking out of everybody's eyes simultaneously?
00:47:43.000And not just humans, but everything in the universe.
00:47:49.000That if there is a moment, if the universe is just one big thing, we are part now, even now, of beings we have no names for, super advanced beings that have figured all of this out and can span the universe with their consciousness.
00:48:30.000Our survival instincts are attuned to maintaining what we are.
00:48:36.000There's this thing, I don't want to lose being a person.0.98
00:48:39.000But I guarantee you, if you went to an Australopithecus and you could somehow communicate to them listen, you're going to change and you're going to be this thing that gets sick seven times a year, and maybe you're obese and maybe you have a Problem with cigarettes, and you know, maybe you drink too much and you like to gamble, and you're gonna fuck your life up here and there, but you're gonna have a cell phone and you're gonna live in a city and you're gonna be breathing brake dust every day, and you know, your doctor's gonna give you a bunch of stuff you don't really need because he's trying to make money.0.99
00:49:08.000The Australopithecus are probably like, fuck that.0.99
00:51:41.000And like you said, I mean, maybe instead of all of the dystopia and all the worry and all the panic right now, going forward with gratitude.
00:52:25.000And so I think kids today that are graduating from college and graduating from high school, they probably have the most amount of anxiety about the future.
00:52:34.000That, and then there's people that, you know, they haven't saved any money up.
00:52:39.000They don't even know if money's going to be valuable in the future.
00:52:45.000Like, what is it going to mean when AI completely controls all of the resources, all of the government, all of everything, all transportation, and you don't have to do your job anymore?
00:52:55.000You just get some funds from the government where you can buy food.
00:52:59.000This is what people are talking about.
00:53:01.000Like, this is a potential 100 years from now future.
00:53:06.000Which is terrifying to people that are thinking, hey, I want to do what my dad did and what my mom did, and I want to go out there in the world.
00:53:16.000And I want to find something that I'm passionate about and make it a career, and like maybe that's not possible.
00:53:21.000That to kids right now, I think, is really freaking them out because the adults, the people like us that are supposed to be the ones that say, Well, let me tell you how it all works.
00:53:51.000There's no one that can explain what this is.
00:53:53.000And so they're entering out into the world, having to take care of themselves for the very first time with this real possibility that there might not be any jobs.
00:54:01.000On the flip side of that, are you in fact describing the Star Trek universe?
00:54:08.000You know, a time where people do not work for everybody has, you know, anything they need as far as, you know, apparently survivability, you know, food, whatever.
00:54:16.000And now you have a chance to say, Am I going to be a writer or an explorer or an artist or a captain or a musician?
00:54:30.000And I've talked about this as well, that this idea that you have to toil and you have to be a hunter gatherer or, you know, you have to do this in order to find meaning in life is kind of crazy because we could find.
00:54:42.000There's very wealthy people that never have to work that have tremendous meaning in their life because they're doing things all the time without thinking about work at all.
00:54:50.000They're not thinking about it as work.
00:54:51.000Whatever hobbies they're pursuing or interests or education they're pursuing, they're doing it just at a pure Interest and fascination and love and passion.
00:55:04.000But there's going to be a tremendous transition period where people are going to have to rethink what it means to be a human being in society.
00:55:13.000And that's what's weird because our entire society is structured out of getting up in the morning, putting in the work, working towards a future.
00:55:21.000You got a 401k, you got investments, you got this, you got that, you got a mortgage.
00:55:26.000And this is how we've structured our entire existence and what meaning we gather from life.
00:55:56.000Maybe that comes with whatever this technological interface is.
00:56:00.000Maybe that comes with when we become what's essentially a cyborg, that you get a much greater understanding of what it means to exist.
00:56:09.000And that this idea that you exist only because the insurance company you work for is kind of ridiculous, and we abandon that.
00:56:16.000I mean, in the way that now, when you open up your phone and you use perplexity, you have access to something that's as smart as every human being on earth in every field.
00:56:30.000You can ask it about anything, and it'll give you the state of the art.
00:56:34.000And whatever the science is, whatever the understanding of history, whatever mathematics, Tax law, whatever it is, it can give it to you on your phone instantaneously, and we've just sort of accepted that.
00:56:50.000I think this is like a baby step into what this technology could potentially, if you're looking at things with a glass half full, it could potentially change the way we look at everything, the way we look at ourselves, the way we look at what it means to be a person, and what we find meaning out of.
00:57:09.000The problem is meaning and the Feeling like you matter, feeling like you're important.
00:57:14.000And I think part of that is because we're also isolated from each other.
00:57:17.000But that might go away entirely if the boundaries between all thought and consciousness, if we realize, like, oh, consciousness is just a thing that we're all enveloped in, and what our brain is, is just an antenna.
00:57:33.000And depending on how good your antenna is, you're going to be a little bit better about how you interface with the world and whatever thing you desire and whatever thing you decide to.
00:58:04.000I think that, as, like you said, as the Australopithecus, as people that used to exist in these little tribal groups and families, the modern isolated life.
00:58:15.000It's something that I struggle with a lot.
00:58:17.000I'm always wondering where is my family?
00:59:10.000I find meaning in what, well, there's a bunch of things, right?
00:59:14.000First of all, it's the people that are in your life.
00:59:16.000This is a giant factor because without people that you love and people that you enjoy spending time with, life loses all of its value.
00:59:25.000If you're an insanely wealthy, insanely successful person who has no friends, who lives alone, you're living in hell.
00:59:32.000And if you are a poor person that has amazing friends and you're just getting by, you are a happier person.
00:59:38.000But I guarantee you that poor person would switch places with that rich person in a heartbeat because we're programmed to think that success is numbers, that success is what you can accumulate as far as like objects and desired material possessions.
01:00:12.000There's going to be a thing that you enjoy putting yourself into that you feel satisfaction and you feel meaning with, on top of friends and family.
01:00:21.000So, friends and family, I think, is foremost.0.99
01:00:24.000But then they can get in the way too if they don't have their shit together.0.97
01:00:28.000So, they have to have a thing that they're enjoying as well.0.99
01:00:32.000They have to have a thing that's helping them grow as an individual.
01:00:35.000And there's a thing from martial arts my instructor told me that when I was very young that I never forgot.
01:00:40.000That was martial arts as a vehicle for developing your human potential.
01:00:45.000And that if you find things that test you and you find things that are complex and these puzzles that you have to solve, the more you do that, the more you get of an understanding of who you are and what you can do and what you can do out there in the world.
01:00:56.000And the more you do it, the more you can do other things.
01:00:59.000And I think that's where I find meaning.
01:01:02.000I find meaning in doing things and enjoying time with my family, enjoying time with my friends, having joy and fun and laughter, and then also.
01:01:15.000I like things that are complex, the things that are hard to solve.
01:01:18.000I like things that are hard to do where I really have to force myself to do it and then I feel satisfaction afterwards and I understand my ability to force myself to do things.
01:01:29.000In doing that, I find meaning and I'm a relatively happy person.
01:01:35.000I think I'm very happy in terms of the average person.
01:02:32.000You throw a ball past a cat, it goes after it because it's got this biological need to chase things that are running away from it so it could kill it in need.
01:02:40.000I think we're kind of doing a similar thing with our hunter gatherer tribal organism that we're still trapped in, that we're tricking it.
01:02:49.000We're tricking it with complex problems and we're tricking it with community.
01:02:54.000We're tricking it with all these different things that keep it happy.
01:02:58.000Yeah, I think that's a wonderful answer.
01:03:00.000I mean, there's something about the happy poor person, isolated rich person thing that I agree with at the same time, seeing what grinding poverty does to people's minds and breaking them down with exhaustion and demoralization.
01:03:14.000There's obviously some kind of a sweet spot for there.
01:03:17.000I mean, I've had to work quite hard in different parts of my life.
01:03:21.000And I was just very aware of the soul grinding, not having enough, wondering.
01:03:29.000And I have it nowhere near as bad as some.
01:03:33.000But the thing that was absolutely, for me, unbelievable about working for NASA was the idea of solving complex problems with people you trusted and people that you thought really had your back.
01:03:46.000But the idea that there was it's not a zero sum game, right?
01:03:50.000I mean, you want the whole team to succeed.
01:03:52.000I mean, even if there are missions you think should have been lower priority or maybe we should spend more money on this and less money on that, at the end of the day, You want whatever's going on to be fantastic and you want it to succeed and you want all the people around you to succeed.
01:04:06.000And the idea that, again, I mean, this isn't hunter gathering.
01:07:11.000It's the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer.
01:07:15.000And a neutron star, you probably know about these, but when a star dies and the nuclear reactions inside a star cease, all of that gravity, this massive object, comes crushing in.
01:07:27.000And it'll create an object sometimes called a neutron star.
01:07:30.000They're about 20 miles across, but they have about twice the mass of the sun.
01:08:09.000I shouldn't say easy, but I mean, it's actually able to create maps of what the surface of these objects are like.
01:08:15.000They're 20 miles across, they're thousands of light years away.
01:08:20.000And you can actually create a map of what the temperature is like.
01:08:23.000And one of the things we see on these maps is the distortion where space and time curves around these objects.
01:08:30.000You know, they rotate very fast, and there are hot spots we see coming in and off the neutron star.
01:08:35.000But then, as the hotspot goes behind the star, the light bends up and over, and we can actually still see the hotspot because space and time are bending around these objects.
01:08:46.000That's not a mathematical simulation, that's not a theory.
01:08:50.000You can see space and time bending around these objects.
01:08:53.000You can see space and time bending into that event horizon.
01:08:57.000You know, I mean, it's absolutely crazy what we've been able to do.
01:09:02.000And whether it's a huge project like the Event Horizon Telescope, where I would have bet that they would not have been able to make that measurement, and they did.
01:09:11.000There were so many hard drives of data.
01:09:14.000One of the telescopes was at the South Pole.
01:09:17.000You wanted the telescopes to be as far apart on the Earth as possible because then you could basically make a giant telescope the size of the separation of these telescopes.
01:09:27.000There's pretty good email links down to the South Pole, but the email link wasn't fast enough for all of this data.
01:09:33.000They sent back literally a ton, a ton of hard drives.
01:09:38.000They had to play them all at the same time and make sure they caught the same photon.
01:09:42.000If they had caught seriously one photon following behind the other, the image wouldn't have worked.
01:10:16.000I was seated next to one of them at a meal one time, and somebody came by and said, Oh, look at all the brain power here.
01:10:22.000And I actually, in this, I tried to be kind of nice about it, but I said, You know, there's a single mother working three jobs part time, you know, who's waiting tables over there.
01:10:30.000And I mean, the mental capacity and the strength of that person is something that, you know, don't look at us.
01:11:33.000To put it, probably the interior core is denser than the outer regions, but if you had a teaspoon of this material, it would have about as much mass as Mount Everest.
01:11:44.000The reason they're called neutron stars is that the gravity is so intense on these things.
01:11:51.000I hate sort of a simple view of atoms as little balls going around each other because they're not.
01:12:12.000You run our basic laws of physics, our understanding of how particles work, and you get to the density of a neutron core, and the equations don't work.
01:12:21.000They're not making the right predictions.
01:12:23.000We can tell that there is actually a really great NASA video I would suggest you watch.
01:12:30.000It's called The Interior of a Neutron Star.
01:12:34.000can help you find it but it basically says that that the the models we have about how matter works at that sort of density none of them give the right predictions for the the size of the neutron star why is that we don't have the right physics for it yet so So we run our physics and we say if you have this much volume and this much mass, what should that interior be like?
01:12:56.000And none of our current models of how matter works gives us the right observations, gives us the right science.
01:13:02.000Well, for one thing, you know, what you're probably looking at inside a neutron star is some type of interaction of quarks, the actual sort of building blocks of neutrons and protons, the particles that make up protons and neutrons.
01:14:00.000It's made when one of these giant stars explodes.
01:14:04.000The core of the star becomes compressed.
01:14:06.000And then this will take you through us trying to figure out whether you have particles as discrete particles, as neutrons and protons, or whether there's some type of quark soup inside.
01:14:17.000But pretty much every model so far doesn't match what we actually measure from these things.
01:15:02.000And so, you know, they figured that neutron stars are much more exciting than black holes because you could actually, like, do experiments, take a picture, build a telescope.
01:15:09.000And, but this experiment was an inexpensive, small observatory that's up on the International Space Station.
01:15:17.000And, I mean, they're doing incredible.
01:15:20.000Work about the nature of physics and testing where our limits are.
01:15:25.000It's unbelievable what you can do with even a relatively inexpensive mission.
01:15:29.000When you look at the size of some black holes, we were talking the other day about the largest black hole where the event horizon goes past Pluto.
01:15:55.000gather up that much matter to get that big.
01:15:58.000Well, you were talking about these little red dots that the Webb telescope is seeing.
01:16:02.000So, I mean, what you've just done is put your finger on, I think, one of the most fascinating unanswered questions in astronomy right now, that every major galaxy has a big black hole in the center.
01:16:13.000You know, the one in the middle of our galaxy is about 4 million times the mass of the sun.
01:16:54.000And this tremendous crush of gravity as the star collapses creates this.
01:16:58.000Bottomless pit of gravity called a black hole.
01:17:01.000So, how do you get that many stars to die?
01:17:04.000How do you, I mean, in the early universe, how many stars, how many generations of stars had to burn through to actually get that to happen?
01:17:11.000And there was nothing that we could figure out.
01:17:13.000I mean, how do you make that big of a black hole?
01:17:16.000So, these little red dots that we're seeing with Webb, and when we don't know exactly what these are, but right now the observations are pushing us in a very interesting direction.
01:17:29.000They're about a million times the mass of the sun.
01:17:32.000And at first we thought, okay, well, are these whole galaxies?
01:17:36.000And that was the controversy you alluded to, that how could there be galaxies that far back in time?
01:17:41.000We're looking back to a time about 400 million years after the Big Bang.
01:17:46.000We're looking so far away, the light took that long to travel to us.
01:17:50.000So we saw these sort of bright objects.
01:17:53.000At first we thought they were galaxies, and that was like, whoa, how'd they get there so fast?
01:17:57.000But then we took a better look at them, and they don't actually shine in the same light a galaxy would.
01:18:03.000And they appear to have the signature of something inside, some of them rotating very fast, very fast.
01:18:10.000And what we're wondering is if the first generation of stars, the very first stars that existed, were nothing at all like the stars we have today.
01:18:22.000There was probably more of this stuff called dark matter that had gravity pulling everything together.
01:18:27.000So maybe at that time, the universe just there were cores of huge amounts of gas that collapsed together.
01:18:34.000Instead of forming a star, the core basically collapsed into a black hole immediately.
01:18:39.000And it started pulling in material, and all this sort of hot stuff formed what they call a pseudo star.
01:18:44.000There's all this atmosphere of hot gas being heated up by the black hole in the middle.
01:18:49.000As the gas spirals in towards the black hole, it gets hotter and hotter.
01:18:53.000So instead of a nuclear fusion core of a star, you have a black hole heating everything up on the inside, accumulating all this mass.
01:19:01.000And are we looking at, for the first time, the seeds of these giant black holes?
01:19:07.000That instead of there being, you know, the first thing was stars, the way we think of stars, was the first thing huge amounts of gas and dust collapsing into black holes and heating up.
01:19:19.000Sort of a pseudo star around it, millions of times the mass of the sun.
01:19:24.000And then in a dense area like the heart of a galaxy, these things then start to combine.
01:19:29.000Over time, gravity pulls them together and you build bigger and bigger black holes.
01:19:34.000So once again, we don't know yet that these objects are.
01:19:40.000But at the moment, it's one of the best explanations we have.
01:19:46.000So we will keep observing these things, we will keep finding new ones.
01:19:50.000One of the big questions has been why don't they give off more x rays?
01:19:53.000Because if there's matter streaming down a black hole, it should give off very high radiation like x rays.
01:19:59.000And then just in the last couple of months, there are some observations coming out where we're finding some of these are indeed x ray sources.
01:20:06.000So we may have found the answer to where you get these big black holes.
01:20:11.000And that was one of the big hopes for the James Webb Space Telescope that it would help us answer the question of where do you get these giant black holes in the cores of galaxies?
01:20:24.000There shouldn't have been enough time for that many stars to make them.
01:20:28.000I watched a documentary on black holes once where they were talking about that in the center of every galaxy, there's a supermassive black hole that's one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy.
01:20:41.000And what they were theorizing was that if you went through that black hole, you could potentially be in a completely different universe filled with galaxies, all that have black holes inside of them.
01:20:56.000Through that, another universe that you would have an infinite number of universes that exist, and all these black holes.
01:21:04.000And if you can go through them, all of them it broke my brain because I'm just sitting there.
01:21:10.000I'm thinking, wait a minute, how many billions of galaxies are there?
01:21:17.000Well, and I mean, we don't know yet how many.
01:21:21.000I mean, there are these giant black holes in the middle of galaxies, and then there are smaller black holes caused when massive stars die.
01:21:27.000And our galaxy probably has millions of those.
01:21:30.000But the ones in the center of the galaxies are fascinating.
01:21:34.000The one in our galaxy, so we're about 25,000 light years away from this guy, so we're safe.
01:21:40.000But we actually observed stars that are trapped around the black hole that are orbiting the black hole.
01:21:47.000This was the first way we found the location of the black hole.
01:21:50.000Stars were orbiting kind of like this angry swarm of bees almost in every direction, and they were orbiting around something you didn't see.
01:21:56.000And the mass needed to make all these stars orbit was about 4 million times the mass of the sun.
01:22:02.000There was a star called S2 we observed orbiting close to the black hole, kind of like a comet.
01:22:06.000It would come in and whip around the black hole, then go back out again.
01:22:10.000And S2, at closest approach, when it whips around the black hole, this is a star, goes nearly 20 million miles an hour as it whips around the black hole.
01:22:20.000And then just recently, we found another star that actually gets up to over 50 million miles an hour as the black hole whips it around.
01:22:27.000And this is how we test the idea that time is different around a black hole.
01:22:31.000We actually see these stars whipping so close to a black hole.
01:22:34.000We can tell that there are changes in their orbit, that they're actually going through different time.
01:22:39.000And so we see these stars whipping around the black hole of the middle of our galaxy.
01:22:43.000They will probably eventually go down that black hole.
01:22:46.000I mean, maybe everything in our galaxy will eventually kind of spiral down into that black hole.
01:22:51.000But, you know, this is not conjectural.
01:22:56.000These are observations from telescopes.
01:23:18.000There are all kinds of wonderful, fascinating possibilities.
01:23:22.000I mean, people have pointed out this is not observation.
01:23:26.000Now we're going from observation, we see these things, they're real, to conjecture.
01:23:31.000People have said that if you take the entire universe, the entire mass of the universe and the radius, the diameter of the observable universe, almost exactly matches a black hole.
01:23:44.000Could it be that inside a black hole, a new universe forms when a black hole forms?
01:25:20.000They're incredibly bright because if there's gas trying to get around, spinning around a black hole, the gravity accelerates that gas so fast it spins it up to, in some cases, millions or billions of degrees.
01:25:31.000You can see them clear across the observable universe.
01:25:33.000They're the brightest objects in the sky.
01:25:36.000And this is not light coming from inside the black hole, it's light coming from stuff trapped around the black hole as it spirals in.
01:25:43.000And these huge jets, we see some of these jets going, you know, in some cases, more than 100,000 light years.
01:25:48.000I mean, they're huge jets that come out.
01:25:51.000100,000 light years in one light year is how many trillion miles?
01:26:07.000When I was looking for this or someone across this, I saw a theoretical thing called a white hole, which is potentially maybe on the other side of a black hole.
01:26:41.000Like I said, they're the brightest things we know of in the sky.
01:26:45.000And, you know, so that's something you can see, you know, literally billions of light years away is the hot gas going around a black hole.
01:26:51.000You said another thing that broke my brain.
01:26:54.000You were talking about what the Big Bang is, and that we shouldn't think of the Big Bang as an explosion, but that before the Big Bang, Time and space might not have existed?
01:27:11.000Well, pretty much certainly not in the way we experience them, no.
01:27:14.000I mean, once again, you know, no astronomer thinks the Big Bang came from nothing.
01:27:21.000The problem is, once again, we have no description of what that state of matter would be.
01:28:00.000I mean, one of the things that one of my friends has the Nobel Prize for is if you look so far away, the farthest away we can see now, we're looking back to a time about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
01:28:12.000And this is something where we are actually able to see so far away.
01:28:17.000We're looking back to a time when the whole universe was hot and bright.
01:28:21.000It actually was glowing like the surface of the sun, the whole universe.
01:28:24.000The entire universe was so bright, it was like looking at the surface of the sun.
01:28:30.000And this has now, this radiation has traveled a long time to get to us.
01:28:35.000It's now lost energy because it's traveling through the expanding universe.
01:28:39.000And as the universe expands, the wavelength of light gets stretched out by the expansion of space.
01:28:46.000This is what we call the microwave background radiation.
01:28:49.000So there's a microwave, very low energy signal.
01:28:53.000It comes from every direction on the sky.
01:28:56.000And it's coming from a time, it's coming from a distance so far away that the whole universe was as bright as the surface of the sun.
01:29:04.000And that's as far as we can see because any farther away from that, the universe is opaque.
01:29:11.000Literally in every direction on the sky, you eventually look back to a time when the whole universe was so dense and bright, you can't see any farther.
01:29:19.000Is this because of how we're capable of measuring?
01:29:22.000And is it possible that at one point in time, when we get better and better telescopes, that we can look past that?
01:29:40.000I mean, so you look in any direction on the sky, you look back to a time.
01:29:46.000The wonderful thing about the universe changing is we know this is true.
01:29:49.000The farther out we look with a telescope, the farther light has.
01:29:51.000Had to travel, the more time it takes to get to us.
01:29:55.000So, the sun, we see, the light takes about eight minutes to get from us to the sun, the nearest star, about four years, the nearest galaxy to us, about two million years.
01:30:04.000We can see so far away in space that the light took pretty much the age of the universe to get to us, about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
01:30:12.000At that point, the universe becomes opaque to light.
01:30:16.000So, there is a limit to how much we can observe with light, how much time there has been for light to actually get to us.
01:30:24.000Is there a potential for being able to observe something other than light?
01:30:47.000And this is something that, again, we talk about moments in your life where the universe changed, where you thought people did something you thought was impossible.
01:30:56.000And, I mean, going all the way back to the mid 90s, I was a postdoc at Caltech.
01:31:01.000And I wasn't working with this department, but people were starting to measure something called gravitational waves.
01:31:08.000And gravitational waves, again, I never thought they'd be able to actually detect these.
01:31:14.000The universe is constantly, I mean, every time we move, remember how I said time is different from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet?
01:33:24.000They're measuring things thousands of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom.
01:33:29.000But over time, they got this so accurate and they did it so well that what happened, and you can look up the year, but it was something on the orbit about 10 years ago.
01:33:40.000A long ways away, millions of light years away, two black holes spiraled together and actually.
01:33:48.000That was a lot of gravitational energy, and that created a ripple going out into the universe.
01:33:55.000And so, you know, there's all of the detectors have all this noise in them.
01:33:58.000The detectors are detecting all kinds of spurious signals.
01:34:01.000But then, all of a sudden, in Louisiana, there was this the whole detector went womp, boom.
01:34:07.000And then, at the speed of light, the detector in Louisiana did exactly the same thing womp, the exact same waves at the speed of light difference.
01:34:15.000And we realized, oh my God, they did it.
01:34:18.000These tiny waves, we shouldn't even be able to detect them.
01:34:23.000They found them, and now it's a routine thing.
01:34:26.000They've now done this many, many times.
01:34:29.000Waves in space and time itself might be the way we can see even farther back into the universe.
01:34:36.000Even when the universe becomes opaque to light, waves of space and time can come through.
01:34:41.000Gravitational waves can come through that.
01:34:44.000And if we can somehow figure out how to make these detectors better and better, could we detect the gravitational waves of the Big Bang?
01:34:53.000Can we learn something about that moment by the way it actually bent space and time and created waves of gravity?
01:35:00.000And once again, I mean, just step back a sec.
01:35:02.000Detecting waves of space and time traveling at the speed of light is something we do.
01:36:12.000You basically say, this is how the universe is expanding now.
01:36:16.000And let's roughly say that things came together.
01:36:20.000As I mentioned, you mentioned the podcast, the Big Bang did not have a center.
01:36:23.000The galaxies are not flying off into space like an explosion.
01:36:27.000What happened is the galaxies are all kind of sort of standing where they are, but space itself is expanding in every direction between the galaxies.
01:36:56.000They're not flying into space, they are space.
01:36:58.000When I used to teach this, I used to take a board and I used to have a piece of elastic and I would hammer two nails in on either side of the board.
01:37:06.000And then I would say, OK, these two nails are galaxies.
01:37:09.000And the elastic between them represents our universe, in this case, a two dimensional depiction of our universe.
01:37:16.000All of space and time, anywhere light can travel, is just on that elastic.
01:37:57.000The expansion is happening in every direction at once because the elastic of space and time itself in every direction is just getting bigger.
01:38:08.000So if we are looking at something where the Big Bang created space and time, and as space and time is expanding, what was the environment before The Big Bang.
01:38:26.000So, you mean, we have no description of that.
01:38:30.000You know, there are particle accelerators.
01:38:33.000I've had the wonderful chance to go to CERN a couple of times and go to the Large Hadron Collider.
01:38:39.000And, you know, using incredible accelerating magnets, they whip just single protons up to very, very high temperatures.
01:38:50.000I mean, they're trying to recreate conditions where, you know, I mean, they can't recreate the conditions of what things were like before the Big Bang.
01:38:58.000But can you get matter to such a high energy state that it can recreate what things were like a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, or maybe even further back?
01:39:09.000But the idea of what was that state of matter before that expansion, we have no description of yet.
01:39:19.000But there's nothing about our current physics.
01:39:22.000I mean, it would be like taking somebody from the 1400s and saying, You know, describe to me what the interior of the sun is like.
01:39:30.000They would have no knowledge structure to even attempt it.
01:39:35.000That doesn't mean we didn't figure it out eventually.
01:39:38.000And, you know, so like I said, there's nothing about that I think that's completely off limits, but we'll have to understand space and time very differently.
01:39:46.000And we'll have to understand what, you know, you can't even really call it matter or even energy.
01:39:53.000All of the energy of the universe in a subatomic space, we have no idea what that would behave like.
01:40:08.000Where this subatomic thing that contains everything that's in the known universe, how is it existing?
01:40:16.000And of course, of course, I have no answer to it.
01:40:21.000I mean, you're asking the question that I hope someday humanity will have a chance to explore and we'll know more about.
01:40:28.000Then I think what will happen is that once we can describe what happened before the Big Bang, There'll be a whole series of other questions.
01:40:34.000So, if the Big Bang is the wrong way to think about it, of a bang, what's the right way to think about it?
01:40:50.000When people first began back in the 1920s, when they discovered the universe was expanding, and this was a big surprise.
01:40:58.000I mean, famously, Albert Einstein didn't think that it was.
01:41:01.000And then he saw the evidence that all of a sudden, with our telescopes, we saw the universe is expanding in every direction.
01:41:07.000It was actually Fred Hoyle that said at a conference, as a way of making fun of this, people were saying, well, maybe everything went back to sort of a common, denser structure.
01:41:18.000It was actually a Belgian Jesuit father, a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître, who came up with the idea that if the universe was expanding now, if we run time backwards, maybe it all becomes one big, he called it the primordial atom.
01:45:35.000The only evidence we have is that the stuff we can see was once in a very close area.
01:45:40.000And that goes back to that radiation, that microwave background.
01:45:44.000The microwave background has been a wonderful story.
01:45:49.000It was discovered back in the 1970s by two scientists from Bell Labs called Penzias and Wilson.
01:45:56.000And they were trying to categorize, they were dealing with Bell Labs, they were trying to deal with microwave signals, microwave communication.
01:46:04.000And they built a big microwave telescope.
01:46:06.000And they started to catalog what objects in the sky naturally produce microwaves.
01:46:11.000The sun produces some, other things produce microwaves.
01:47:10.000And what they had discovered was the afterglow of the Big Bang, the energy left over from that time when the universe was so hot, it was opaque to light.
01:47:20.000And the crazy thing is, it is exactly the same down to fractions of a degree in every direction on the sky.
01:47:28.000It's sort of like, you know, you look all the way the age of the universe in one direction.
01:47:32.000It's exactly the same temperature as the age of the universe in that direction.
01:47:36.000And there shouldn't have been time for those two areas of space to ever get to know each other.
01:47:58.000Everything comes to the same temperature.
01:48:00.000You wouldn't expect your coffee cup to be like, you know, 300 degrees on one side and, you know, minus 50 on the other.
01:48:07.000Somehow, the universe had a chance to all come to the same temperature, even though those areas of the universe were so far apart, they should never have had a chance to touch each other.
01:48:17.000And that became part of the thinking that maybe at one point when the universe was that large, things were much smaller.
01:48:23.000The universe did have a chance to come to this exact same temperature all over.
01:48:28.000Boy, I hope I can see by your expression, I should do a better job of explaining this.
01:49:01.000And they measured this down to hundreds of thousands of a degree.
01:49:06.000I mean, they measured it to tiny little amounts.
01:49:09.000And the incredible thing was that it was almost exactly the same temperature, but there were these beautiful, large variations in the temperature.
01:49:20.000And the variation in the temperatures corresponded to sound waves propagating across the whole universe at that time.
01:50:12.000I mean, again, as an experimental scientist, there are all these wonderful theories about what things happened like a millionth of a second and a billionth of a second after.
01:50:23.000And I'm going to take all that with a grain of salt.
01:50:26.000I don't think we understand it well enough to be all that confident about that.
01:50:31.000There's a great book called The First Three Minutes, which has been around since the, oh, geez, probably since the 1970s, maybe even longer.
01:50:38.000And it sort of outlines how we think that the universe in the first three minutes basically went from the Big Bang.
01:50:44.000To just sort of all the hydrogen and helium that we have.
01:50:48.000And in the first three minutes, pretty much everything was done.
01:50:51.000The whole sort of process of the Big Bang was done in those first three minutes.
01:50:56.000The actual Big Bang itself goes back to something called the Planck epoch, which you see there 10 to the minus 33rd seconds, 10 to the minus 43rd seconds.
01:51:04.000So take a decimal point, draw 42 zeros, and then a 433.
01:51:10.000Singularity, infinite density, and temperature.
01:52:39.000I mean, some of the best ideas about the Big Bang is that the expansion never stops, it kind of pops off universes, like you said, almost fractally all the time.
01:53:32.000Well, it's got to be so fascinating to you to know so much and yet still have so many things that we have no idea.
01:53:41.000You know, that's, I think, you've just hit it on the head about one of the most beautiful and one of the most frustrating and even scary things about being a scientist.
01:53:52.000You have to be honest about what you don't know.
01:53:56.000I mean, you have to say, we made this measurement and it's real.0.98
01:54:01.000We fucking managed to see the event horizon of a Black hole.0.95
01:54:04.000We caught the same wavelength of light over thousands of miles.0.99
01:54:09.000You can say what's real, and then you can say these are the things we do not know.
01:54:25.000We don't have the ability yet to know.
01:54:29.000And it's hard for humans to stop there.
01:54:32.000And of course, we make better experiments, find a better theory of physics.
01:54:36.000But for the moment, you need to sit with that uncertainty.
01:54:40.000There is no one who knows what happened.
01:54:43.000And there are so many things in our life that I've had to confront where you have to become comfortable with stopping there, at least for now.
01:54:55.000I do not have the answer to this, and I don't think anybody does.
01:55:00.000And I think we'd actually benefit a lot more in humility and joy and maybe even compassion with each other, you know, if we can respect that stop and say, you know, you may not have the same answer as to what comes next.
01:55:15.000About life or death or the beginning of the universe or the inside of a black hole.
01:58:29.000I mean, maybe when we understand the brain better, maybe when if AIs are sharing minds, you know, we're talking, you know, incredible, fun conjecture here.
01:58:41.000At the moment, we're limited with the tools of what is reproducible.
01:58:45.000You know, I mean, if you observe in one direction with your telescope for a certain amount of time at a certain wavelength of light, you should see pretty much the same thing, you know, whoever does the experiment.
01:58:56.000You know, if you're doing an experiment with atoms or quantum mechanics or, you know, whatever, it has to be reproducible.
01:59:04.000That doesn't mean that profound things that are real are not there.
01:59:08.000They're just not in the realm of science right now.
01:59:10.000When you're communicating with people that supposedly have had experiences with intelligent life from somewhere else and you spend so much time looking up at space, like how much time and how much effort do you spend even considering that possibility of life somewhere else?
01:59:29.000Or of whether or not these people have actually experienced visitation or whether or not it's some sort of mental illness or whether there's some kind of an experience that's available to people occasionally here.
01:59:42.000defies our understanding of what is measurable and what's reproducible, that there's something else out there.
01:59:55.000And I think this may give you a little bit of a snapshot of the culture of science and a mind of a scientist, because it's an odd little tightrope to walk.
02:00:58.000At the same time, there are the fantastic scientists of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, who are scanning the skies looking for mathematical signals from civilizations.
02:01:08.000The question for me comes down to again, what is a reproducible observation?
02:01:15.000And with the advent, I mean, the recent release of these videos from fighter jets and all of that, I think an interesting thing is that scientists at NASA and the universities, I mean, we're not getting together over a beer and looking at these videos and really getting excited.
02:01:52.000But as I said, that's a deliberate training of a scientist, is that skeptical stop.
02:02:01.000The people who have had experiences, and no, I'm not willing to dismiss them as being mentally ill necessarily, I honestly don't know what it is they experience.
02:02:12.000It is certainly within my realm of possibility that what they're describing actually happened.
02:05:49.000I've never actually done any hallucinogenic drugs.
02:05:52.000I have been tempted because I do sometimes wonder if, under that sort of influence, the filters of our brain are different.
02:05:59.000I mean, could you actually have an experience of something that could be real because your filters, how we perceive space and time in the universe, are changed by the drug?
02:06:08.000Like I said, I'm too much of a chicken, but I've always been curious about that.
02:06:13.000Is it possible different people have seriously different ways of experiencing the universe?
02:07:31.000You're trying to control it for the most part.
02:07:33.000Most people that describe bad trips, it's they're trying to resist it because you're flooded with anxiety and fear and the unknown, and it seems very strange, like bizarre, beyond reality.
02:07:47.000One of the craziest things about the most prevalent psychedelic is that the mind produces it, which is dimethyltryptamine.
02:08:35.000In that, what these things may be able to do, especially something that the actual body, the human body produces on its own, that you might be able to experience things that are there all the time, but you just lack the ability to interface with them.
02:09:45.000What a, I mean, I don't want to do it, but could you imagine if you've got some guy ranting and raving on the street corner, if you say, just let me in there for five seconds?
02:12:56.000Can you imagine being in an interview and somebody's like, you got 30 seconds, tell me about the most profound experience you've ever had?0.95
02:13:01.000Yeah, that's the most ridiculous aspect.0.83
02:13:03.000Of those shows is that they're constricted by time.0.86
02:13:37.000Restricted by the propaganda that made all that stuff illegal in the first place, unfortunately.
02:13:45.000I recently went to the White House to help make these things available for veterans and for first responders and people dealing with traumatic experiences.
02:13:56.000The only reason why they were illegal was because of the Nixon administration, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
02:14:03.000What they did was they were targeting the civil rights movement and the anti war movement.
02:14:07.000Knew that these people were taking these kind of drugs, and this is part of the fear of like the hippie movement and all these people.
02:14:13.000And so they just made all these things Schedule One, meaning they had no medicinal use whatsoever, highly addictive, very dangerous.
02:17:31.000I think it was Dennis McKenna's quote of the bonfire.
02:17:37.000Once the bonfire of information is lit, it exposes more surface area of ignorance.
02:17:43.000That the brighter the fire gets, the more you realize, oh, there's so much I don't know yet.
02:17:50.000Maybe we would think that interfacing with this technology and having all the information that every fucking human being that's ever lived has, it's still, you just go, there's not enough.
02:19:30.000But this technique called interferometry, Where you basically catch the same wavefront of light in several detectors, and then you bring that light all together and you have it interfere with itself.
02:19:42.000It's one of these things I always think people should be a little bit more, in a good way, kind of scared about because it's another thing that really chips at our idea of reality.
02:19:53.000Because, I mean, honestly, what you're doing to some extent is you're catching the same particle of light in many different telescopes at once, literally.
02:20:02.000You're catching the same photon in many different locations at once.
02:20:06.000And when you can measure, Accurately, that accurately, a wavelength of light traveling at the speed of light, when you're measuring down to the accuracy of the quantum world, where quantum mechanics becomes the prevalent description of reality, the universe just doesn't care that these are different space points that the photon was in.
02:20:26.000Let me put it this way it is really kind of true that when you do this experiment, the same particle of light is measured in eight different places at once simultaneously.
02:21:26.000I mean, that's very quickly becoming an experimental fact.
02:21:30.000Well, that's one of the most bizarre aspects of quantum computing's results, is that they're interpreting its ability to solve equations so fast, the way Marc Andreessen described it, that if you took every molecule of the universe and converted it into a supercomputer, the universe would die of heat death before it would be able to solve this equation, and yet these quantum computers are able to do this in minutes.
02:22:31.000I mean, the idea, you're talking sort of about a superposition of states.
02:22:35.000So, the faster a quantum computer works, the more it's able basically to not have one solution, but have the solution be a probabilistic distribution.
02:22:45.000In some ways, you're talking about multiple universes where there are different solutions, and then finally at the end of the calculation, popping out the one you want.
02:22:54.000And as weird as that sounds, it's hard to get around that.
02:23:00.000I mean, if it's not that, Then it's something like reality has many different versions all connected at once, and that's just what we call reality.
02:23:08.000I mean, it's not going to get any less weird.
02:23:13.000So the idea that you keep the solution in this undefined form, in a way, means that every solution that's possible exists somewhere, possibly in one interpretation in another universe where each solution exists, or the one some say is that space and time is just like that.
02:23:31.000Nothing is certain, everything is just waves of probability.
02:23:35.000So, yeah, I mean, we're in for a ride because that's going to become something that we manipulate.
02:23:43.000We want to actually get this to work better.
02:23:46.000I wonder if quantum computing is going to have us really have to confront what reality is, how different reality is from how our senses tell us it is.
02:24:26.000I mean, you started the interview with looking up at the Milky Way.
02:24:29.000And one of the things I remember was how Galileo went through this kind of profound spiritual crisis when he was one of the first people to take a telescope and look at the Milky Way, that sort of white haze.
02:24:44.000It was made of millions of stars that you couldn't see with the human eye.
02:24:47.000And his question was why did God put stars up there that we can't see, that we need an instrument, that we need this little glass tube to see?
02:25:00.000And you start this journey away from the human consciousness being the center of the universe.
02:25:07.000And then you get farther and farther away.
02:25:11.000Farther away, and quantum mechanics and relativity now is challenging us to say we now have scientific proof, even among skeptical solid scientists, that space and time is definitely not how we perceive it.
02:25:26.000We don't know what it is yet, but it's not as simple as the human brain makes it.
02:26:32.000If we're evolving and if conscious life and intelligent life is continuing to expand its capacities, it just makes sense that we're going to realize how one day people will look back at people that lived in 2026 and go, what a bunch of.0.96
02:26:53.000I mean, and that's one of the things about AI, again, that I don't like the idea that if something becomes super intelligent, it'll just want to kill us.
02:26:59.000I mean, you probably saw that movie, Her with Joachim Phoenix, which came out years ago.
02:27:43.000And, you know, I mean, just like we can be incredibly impressed with what an ant is, I hope what's coming next has some compassion for us and some love.
02:28:38.000If they really did come from an insanely evolved and insanely advanced civilization and they have the ability to come here, they probably have the ability to do whatever they want.
02:29:33.000One of the most profound discoveries of the last, say, 10 years at NASA, I mean, this was even more recent than that, was there was a mission called OSIRIS REx.
02:29:42.000And I'm doing pretty well with my NASA acronyms today.
02:30:16.000And Bennu is about half a kilometer across.
02:30:18.000It is an asteroid that comes in and intersects the orbit of Earth.
02:30:22.000We don't have any idea that it will ever impact us.
02:30:25.000It may hit Venus before it hits us, but at any rate, we sent a probe out there to bring back a real pristine sample of an asteroid because Which is just nuts, by the way, that they could land on an asteroid and then return back to Earth.
02:31:57.000They open up the sample, and all of the nucleobases of our DNA, not just little molecules, the letters of our DNA and our RNA are in that sample.
02:32:09.000We don't think that's a coincidence, right?
02:32:12.000You know, the reason our biology is based on those molecules is that they're available, they're falling from the sky.
02:34:11.000And so space itself is very good at making our chemistry, carbon based organic chemistry.
02:34:18.000So then, in the icier outer reaches of the solar system billions of years ago, the planets are forming, but there are some smaller bits of ice and rock that never quite got built into the larger planets.
02:34:31.000They're still floating around out there.
02:34:34.000And then they occasionally come in and hit us and deliver water, deliver organics.
02:34:41.000The Earth was once pretty much a Dry hot ball of lava after it formed.
02:34:46.000You know, all of the, you know, a lot of the lighter stuff probably arrived from collisions coming in later.
02:34:54.000And I mean, the engineering, the audacity of reprogramming this thing shouldn't have worked, and they saved it and they made it work.
02:35:05.000This brilliant team of people, you know, I mean, it just, I mean, as somebody who was a minor manager at NASA, you know, and a minor scientist, I mean, just what a team can accomplish.
02:35:20.000You know, one of the big things that I really respected at NASA was once you had your team of people, and like I said, nobody's perfect.
02:35:26.000Some people are higher functioning, some people don't contribute as much.
02:35:29.000But once you have your team identified, trying to make sure you get an input from everyone, and they're not going to give it to you the same way.
02:35:36.000There are the people that are really assertive in meetings and they've got an idea immediately.
02:35:40.000They speak up and they give it to you.
02:35:42.000And then there are the quieter people that are going to take longer to process.
02:35:46.000They're going to need a little more time, they don't like to be put on the spot.
02:35:50.000You know, trying to make sure you get an input from everybody on your team, and sometimes the solutions come from the people that you might not have even asked.
02:35:58.000You know, that sort of respect for everyone on our team has something to contribute.0.81
02:36:04.000You know, give me what you got, even if you don't think it's good enough, even if you think it's a stupid idea, even if you think it, you know, give me what you got.
02:36:13.000The power of that I saw over and over at NASA.0.97
02:36:16.000It's not just one type of mind, not just one person that's going to solve the problem.
02:36:36.000I'll try to do a little more and have some fun with it because, like I said, I'm retired now and I have a chance to be a little more creative with it.