182. From the Beginning to Now ｜ Lawrence Krauss
Summary
In this episode, My Dad is joined by Lawrence M. Krauss, an internationally known theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose work has been highly recognized through a number of projects and the publication of several popular books such as The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe From Nothing. Lawrence Krauss has contributed a great deal to the field of research on particle physics and cosmology, and has focused for 30 years on the interface between elementary particles and the structure of the universe. Among his many contributions to physics is his numerous contributions to the evolution of our understanding of quantum physics and the nature of systems of matter and energy. This episode is also brought to you by Green Chef, a meal kit subscription service that delivers certified organic ingredients and step-by-step instructions for creating delicious, clean meals. Green Chef completely eliminates the need to think about what your next meal is, and you don t have to waste time at the supermarket. They also have a sweet deal going on for listeners of the podcast. Use code JBP100 at checkout to get $100 off, including including free shipping! Make sure you go to GreenChef.org/JBP100 to get a $100 discount code. This is the number 1 meal kit delivery service, and it s the most nutritious meal kit I ve ever heard of! I vetted them very carefully because I m hyperconcerned about diet, so I wasn t going to worry about anything going to waste. so I m not going to be worried about what I could be eating. I ve ve been making delicious, healthy meals that I ve made in the kitchen. and I ve vetted them to make sure they re going to taste good enough to be healthy and balanced and balanced enough so I can eat them in a way that I can feel good enough so they don t need to feel good, enough that they ll be enough of a good day, they ll feel like they ll all be healthy enough to eat well enough, they ve got it all day, enough of it s going to eat enough of that, and they ll eat it in the best way they ll get a good night out in the most of their best of the best of my day, I ve been eating enough of their day, too they ve been getting it all of their rest and they ve ve ve got a good rest so they can sleep enough of the rest they can be that they can get it all their rest, they re not only that, they can have it all they ve s got it
Transcript
00:00:00.940
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
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We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
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With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
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He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
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If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
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Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
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Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
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In this episode, my dad is joined by Lawrence M. Krauss.
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Lawrence Krauss is a well-established theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose work has been highly recognized through a number of projects
00:01:10.320
and the publication of several popular books such as The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing.
00:01:16.980
Krauss has contributed a great deal to the field of research on particle physics and cosmology.
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Lawrence Krauss and dad sit down and explore the world of quantum physics with its complex nature
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as well as the complexity in systems of matter, time, and energy.
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I hope you enjoy this episode and have a good week.
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00:04:38.960
I'm pleased today, really quite pleased, to have Dr. Lawrence Krauss with me.
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He is an internationally known theoretical physicist, and I've wanted to talk to an internationally known theoretical physicist for about 30 years,
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whose research has focused on the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology,
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including the fundamental structure of matter and the evolution of the universe.
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Among his numerous important and interesting scientific contributions was his 1995 proposal,
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that most of the energy of the universe resided in empty space.
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During his career, Professor Krauss has held endowed professorships and distinguished research appointments
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at major institutions all over the world, including Harvard, Yale, and CERN.
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He is the author of 500 publications and 11 popular books, including the international bestsellers,
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The Physics of Star Trek, and A Universe from Nothing.
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His most recent book, The Physics of Climate Change, was released in February of this year, 2021.
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He won a major award from all three of the U.S. National Physics Societies,
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as well as the 2012 Public Service Award from the National Science Board for his contributions to the public understanding of science.
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He currently serves as president of the Origins Project Foundation, which celebrates science and culture
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by connecting scientists, artists, writers, and celebrities with the public through special events,
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online discussions, and unique travel opportunities.
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The Foundation produces the Origins podcast, featuring dialogues with some of the most interesting people in the world,
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discussing issues that address the global challenges of the 21st century.
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Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.
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Okay, so I have a question, and I'm going to jump right into it.
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We tried to relate the experience of anxiety to a physical property, to entropy,
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which I suppose might be well-defined as a physical property.
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And the idea was, so you tell me what you think of this as a physicist, if you would.
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The idea was that human beings are always trying to calculate a path from one point to another.
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And the length of the path is going to be proportionate, in some sense,
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Now, we generally take a path to something that we regard as valuable,
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and sources of energy, for example, are extremely valuable to us.
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And so that might be a shortcut to doing some work, because that's translatable into goods.
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Anyways, the cost of the voyage is an important consideration.
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And so whenever uncertainty is added to a plan, it becomes more and more difficult to formulate a map that lays out the trajectory appropriately.
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And you need a marker for that, a psychological marker.
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And so we assume that as the certainty of the path that you're going to take, according to, you know, given a particular reward,
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is as the uncertainty that increased, you experience this unease.
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And the unease was a marker of the increased complexity.
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So, and that would be the increased entropy, in some sense, of either of the landscape or of your representation of the landscape or maybe of the disjunction between the two.
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So, the first question I would have is, I guess, first of all, was that a comprehensible explanation?
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And second of all, is that a reasonable way of construing entropy?
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The answer is it's not unreasonable in a general sense.
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I remember, you know, when I was a kid, actually in Canada, and I took, I remember I was always interested in science, but I, in university, I took sociology.
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And I remember becoming fascinated at the time by various sociologists' attempts to define concepts, borrow from physics to define concepts.
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As I got to know more physics, I became more wary of that application, because certain things that are well-defined and appropriate in physical context become less well-defined and perhaps have less utility.
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They sound good in a social science paper, but whether they actually allow predictive value is the important question.
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Right, well, that's exactly why I'm asking the question, is because I'm aware of that problem, and that's, I wanted to see if there's some bedrock there.
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Well, you know, I think that there, it's, I think you've got something in a sense that, in physics, actually, in different contexts,
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there's trade-offs between energy and entropy, and different, and, and, and, and, and they're well-defined thermodynamic quantities that, that, that are, are defined depending upon what you hold fixed and what, and what you don't,
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and how the system evolves, whether it evolved to a system, a situation of least energy, or at least what's called free energy, which depends on, or enthalpy, which, which includes that entropy aspect,
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depends upon the specific circumstances of the physical situation, but that, that the complexity of a path is related to the entropy is, is, is a really, is an, that is appropriate,
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because entropy really describes, and maybe it's probably useful for your listeners who may not be as aware of entropy as you are,
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that, that what it really describes is a macroscopic system has many different internal states it can be in,
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and entropy really just describes how many internal states a system has for a given macroscopic configuration of, of, say, temperature and overall energy.
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You know, a single particle in a, in, in a box may have a, a restricted configuration, but the atoms in my body and your body can be in very many different configurations
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and still be at the same temperature, so there's a lot of entropy associated with, with a, with a, with a macroscopic object,
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and the more, if you wish, the more internal possibilities that a system has to explore within the confines of some external parameter that's restricting it,
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like the total energy of the system, or its heat content, or, or, or some other aspect, or its volume,
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the more internal configurations a system has to explore, the bigger its entropy.
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So, okay, so I was thinking, for example, I'll give you a narrative example,
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it's actually apropos, because my car did break down today, but when you're in your car,
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and you're driving along, and everything is going according to your desires and expectations,
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then you're generally in a low anxiety state, but then imagine that the car emits a unexpected noise and starts to buck.
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Now, one of the things I've proposed is that, at that point, you're actually no longer in a car.
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And that's why you get upset, because the car is actually functionally described as a category,
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the car is something that gets you from point A to B.
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And as long as it's performing that function, then that category was a very low resolution category,
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But as soon as something goes wrong, same thing happens when your computer does something you don't want it to.
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And there's so many different states that that thing could be in, that your body signals that,
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that emergent complexity, and it signals the fact that you can no longer compute the cost of being where you are.
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And, you know, there's fantasies that are associated with that, that seem like attempts to map it, right?
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Like, this could be wrong, this could be wrong.
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I might go to a crooked mechanic, I might get ripped off, I might not be able to fix this car,
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Like, the whole, the whole panoply of possibility expands very, very suddenly,
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and that produces an intense physiological response, which it should do.
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I mean, we should have physiological responses to fundamental physical realities.
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Most of us ignore them, and I think that's the point.
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The physiological response you're talking about is real.
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But in fact, when the car is operating well, all of those possibilities also exist.
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Right, well, that's, but that's an interesting thing too, right?
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Because, but it's appropriate in some sense, we were trying to understand to some degree
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the conditions under which it's appropriate to block them out of your mind.
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And it's something like, as long as your predictions, but they're based on your desires,
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but we won't get into that, as long as your predictions match the ongoing flow of events,
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then you can take all of the presuppositions that order things for granted.
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I mean, I agree with you completely that all those things could be going wrong at any time.
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The same is true of the complexity of your body, right?
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I mean, it isn't necessarily the case that just because you feel good right now,
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And there's an endless number of things that can go wrong,
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but it's also not helpful to be aware of all of those possibilities
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It's that you assume their functional significance is zero,
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And well, yeah, but I think, you know, it goes back to human reason being the slave of passion.
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It's, it's not worthwhile assuming all the negative things that can happen.
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If you want to take any action, if you assume all the negative things that could result from it,
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One of the things that I think we do, and one of the problems we have as a society,
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in fact, it's related to even my last book, is that, is that we tend,
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one of the things that science does, which I think is so useful, is it quantifies uncertainty.
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And often, too often, journalists and other people talk about uncertainty as if it's a bad thing.
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In science, it's actually a very good thing, because we can say,
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we can define, we can quantitatively say how accurate our result is, or how, how likely or unlikely a bunch of possibilities are.
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I think psychologically, and that, I would say that's an anxiety reduction phenomena.
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I mean, when you enter into a contract, you're doing that with someone, too, because what you're saying is,
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well, I could be any number of possibilities, but contractually, I'll limit myself to this manifestation,
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and that can make you calm, and it can make us able to cooperate.
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And so, I think that it's not only a scientific theory that provides that function,
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it's a, it's a, science would be, what, a subset of practical theory,
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and practical theories, they're very useful, exactly, for that reason.
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They are, but I think, I personally think more people would, could be,
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I think it would be a better, it would help people,
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if they accepted the existence of uncertainty, most, you know, in a more open way.
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I think we, we, people are afraid of, of uncertainty, and I think if we, you know,
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including death, and the universe, and all sorts of other things we may talk about,
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and I think accepting it as a realistic likelihood is a, is a healthy thing,
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because, again, it relates to some extent to some of the, I think, social problems that are happening now,
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If you accept that bad things can happen, then it, when you do any, you know, it's part of living,
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then you won't be so anxious when they do, I think.
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I mean, you won't be so fearful of, of that possibility.
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Okay, yeah, your car can break down, but the world isn't over.
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You know, there's a whole series of, of, of other activities you can take place
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that will allow the world to go on, that will allow you to continue to function,
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but recognizing it, recognizing at some level, a spectrum of possibilities in advance,
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in my opinion, and I'm not a psychologist, but in my opinion,
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and certainly, personally, I, I find it psychologically helpful.
00:16:21.720
Well, you do, it is definitely the case that that's promoted among psychologists,
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You may imagine that one thing you want is a theoretical configuration that encapsulates uncertainty.
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That's a belief system, let's say, and, and you measure it by its functional utility.
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Does it allow you to, to acquire what you desire when you act it out?
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But you need a, a codicil along with that, which is, well, what do you do when your theory goes wrong?
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And one of the answers that's been provided to that question from the behavioral perspective,
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it's coded in narrative as well, though, is approach uncertainty voluntarily and cautiously, don't avoid it.
00:17:02.620
And that triggers another mechanism, which is the capacity to explore, to generate new theories,
00:17:08.760
to select among them, especially in, in what, in, in collaboration with other people,
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So you need the model, and you need a system for updating the model,
00:17:19.960
and I see, you see that expressed in, pretty formally in science, in the scientific technique.
00:17:25.020
Oh, it's a central part of the scientific method, and I would also argue in business
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and many other areas of human activity that people don't realize.
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What I try and convince people of, they don't realize, is scientists actually really like to be wrong.
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At least, you know, and whether personally they do is a different question,
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but the process of science, it's exciting to be wrong, because it means there's more to learn, first of all.
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It means, it often means you've discovered something, and one of the things, you know,
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I was chairman of a physics department for a long time, and, and then we started a program,
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a master's degree in physics entrepreneurship, which the business school dean said was an oxymoron,
00:18:05.340
but I don't think so, because I think scientists and business people are very similar,
00:18:09.640
because often what I realize we don't do well enough for children, for, for students, or whatever,
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We give them problem sets that they're guaranteed, that have direct answers,
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and they can get the correct, and we even give them PhDs where they're more or less guaranteed
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But in the real world of research and business and many other things, you may find that you
00:18:31.940
have to learn how, well, the question I was asking was really not a good question.
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How can I use what I've already accumulated to nevertheless provide me something useful,
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And so I think the training, training to fail effectively, namely to find that the thing you
00:18:48.880
were trying to show is wrong, but nevertheless, the process by which you discover that is very useful
00:18:55.060
and can be useful somewhere else is, is, is a central part of science, but I actually think
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it's probably very useful again in real life, and I think most business people, you know,
00:19:03.000
when I, when I learned about entrepreneurs, I asked, I asked the physicists who become entrepreneurs
00:19:07.660
what they hadn't learned, and it was just that, how to fail effectively, because often
00:19:11.980
startups, you know, well-known entrepreneurs have a three or four or five startups that have
00:19:17.060
failed before they get to where they're going, and I think, but it's the same of any researcher
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There have been many false starts, many, many roadblocks, many times when you just discover,
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hey, this problem is really not amenable to being solved, but maybe I can ask a slightly
00:19:34.640
So I think being aware, being less anxious of, of the fact that your planned trajectory
00:19:43.340
is not going to go where you took it is actually a wonderful part of life.
00:19:47.280
As a, as a, again, as a scientist, I often say when I write, you know, you probably had
00:19:54.280
this problem too, you know, you write grant proposals and you write some fiction of what
00:19:57.940
you're going to be studying in three years, and my, I always say that if I'm really doing
00:20:02.300
what I thought I was going to be doing in three years, it's pretty boring.
00:20:04.940
Because what I really hope will happen is I'll be looking at something completely different
00:20:08.820
because some new discovery will have come up either from the outside world of experiment
00:20:15.000
Well, is it, is it reasonable to ask you, can you remember times when that specifically
00:20:19.060
happened in your career where you had to reconfigure and, and you discovered something that was,
00:20:28.040
It's hard to imagine when it hasn't happened in some sense.
00:20:32.880
The, the, the, the one you mentioned, the discovery that the, the energy of empty space
00:20:39.760
Because I was, I was studying cosmology and, and of course, and the amazing thing about
00:20:47.560
cosmology is it's over the last 30 years turned from, or 40 years from an art to a science.
00:20:52.300
Um, um, uh, you, I think people used to say cosmologists were, were never right, but never in doubt.
00:20:59.020
And, uh, and, and, and, but wonderfully what's happened, because science is an empirical discipline,
00:21:03.800
is that all new, whole new data sets were coming on new machines and new telescopes,
00:21:08.660
which were allowing you to make precision tests of the universe and therefore derive models that could be disproved,
00:21:16.660
And when I was trying to understand, and I'd been working on, on the subject called dark matter for many years,
00:21:23.240
how to detect it, the fact that the, most of the mass in our galaxy, in all galaxies, appears to not shine.
00:21:28.920
And, and now we're reasonably certain it's made of some elementary particle that's different than the particles that make you and I up.
00:21:34.800
It's a fascinating thing, and I've spent a lot of my career thinking about it.
00:21:38.180
But one of the reasons we became confident that that was the case, that these particles,
00:21:43.520
well, this dark matter was not made of protons and neutrons and the same stuff as you and I,
00:21:50.740
And we found that if this dark matter was just snowballs or, you know, or, or something that you couldn't see,
00:21:56.740
then plugging them into our models, you couldn't get a universe that looked like what we look like today,
00:22:06.300
And so dark matter, it turns out if dark matter doesn't interact with light,
00:22:11.360
it, it, it, it, it, it's easier for it to collapse early on in the history of the universe.
00:22:15.220
And that gives a jumpstart to galaxies and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:22:18.800
So we're trying to come up with a model that really was in agreement with observation.
00:22:22.700
The problem was the observations ultimately weren't in agreement with that model.
00:22:27.280
And so the question then becomes, do you, you know, what, what do you do?
00:22:33.220
And so I was reasonably convinced at the time that the, that the reason that was the case that some of the observations are wrong,
00:22:41.920
which is also something very important to realize in science is that if there are many different observations,
00:22:47.840
And again, too often journalists don't hit on that fact.
00:22:50.440
You know, they concentrate on this one exciting observation, which is likely to be wrong.
00:22:54.060
And when it's later on shown to be wrong, they never report on it.
00:22:58.180
But so I, I basically was convinced that some of these key observations were wrong because they're very difficult.
00:23:04.300
And so somewhat heretically, I made this proposal.
00:23:08.440
I looked, looked with, there was a colleague of mine at University of Chicago.
00:23:11.080
And I spent a year or two looking at, at all the data and saying,
00:23:15.720
how could it be consistent with, with, with what we, with dark matter and, and, and what would be required?
00:23:22.500
And the answer was, if none of the observations are wrong, then it looks to us, it looked to me at the time,
00:23:29.840
like you'd have to have most of the energy in the universe reside in literally nothing.
00:23:35.100
Because it, it, observations weren't consistent with, with, with, with the picture otherwise.
00:23:39.680
And I was convinced at the time that the reason I was doing that was to, so that people could focus on which observations were wrong.
00:23:47.220
And so they could see that because the result, because the proposition was so ridiculous that empty space actually weighs something.
00:23:53.840
You get rid of all the particles and radiation, everything that's there, and yet empty space weighs something.
00:24:04.120
Yeah, well, it seems to violate the very, the very presupposition that enables us to identify mass.
00:24:09.480
I mean, mass by definition appears to be something.
00:24:14.600
And, and, and energy, and, and if you put energy in empty space, it's very, and Einstein realized this, if you put energy in empty space, it behaves very differently than it does if you put energy in matter, like particles.
00:24:27.880
In fact, what general relativity tells us is that mass isn't the key part that produces gravity, it's energy.
00:24:34.980
So there's this relationship between energy and gravity.
00:24:39.140
And energy in different forms produces different types of gravitational attraction.
00:24:44.700
And in fact, that's relevant to the history of the universe.
00:24:47.200
Early on in the history of the universe, most of the energy in the universe resided in radiation, hot stuff, like particles of light moving at the speed of light.
00:24:55.480
They gravitate very differently than if most of the energy in the universe resides in planets or galaxies, you know, matter.
00:25:03.100
And so the expansion of the universe, which is gravity's response to, to the presence of energy, is different early on in the history of the universe when it's dominated by radiation.
00:25:12.880
Is that one of the things that contributes to the rapid inflation at the beginning?
00:25:20.780
It turns out rapid inflation happens if at very early times in the history of the universe, empty space gets energy.
00:25:27.920
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Empty space gets stuck and somehow it possesses energy,
00:31:03.720
even if in the case of inflation, eventually it's going to release it
00:31:10.200
empty space carries with it this property we call energy,
00:31:13.360
that energy is gravitationally repulsive, not attractive.
00:31:18.540
That's the key difference between energy when you put it in matter
00:31:23.680
Okay, so you said a couple of things that I want to follow up on.
00:31:28.580
So you said in the last 25 years that cosmology has transformed itself
00:31:37.200
That's what, 14 billion years and walk through it.
00:31:39.400
And because I'm sure that, well, I certainly don't understand
00:31:42.500
the role of dark matter or anything about dark matter.
00:31:44.880
And I kind of had some sense of what the current cosmological theories
00:31:48.740
were 20 years ago, but I really don't know what they are now.
00:31:51.740
So let's go back 14 billion years and start at the beginning,
00:31:56.140
Sure, we'll try and spend less than 14 billion years in describing it.
00:31:59.740
By the way, before we get there, let me just end the last story by saying
00:32:02.780
we made this crazy proposal because we're sure the experiments are wrong.
00:32:06.440
It turned out the experiments are right and the craziness was true.
00:32:09.700
And no one was more surprised by it than me, that this proposal
00:32:13.180
that the energy of empty space dominates the energy of the universe was right.
00:32:18.980
It was so surprising that eventually the observers who confirmed that fact
00:32:25.280
Well, in your book, The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far,
00:32:28.380
you document a large number of cases where theoretical physicists
00:32:32.480
were driven to posit something they regarded as completely absurd
00:32:35.860
because it seemed to fit the data, assuming that something was wrong
00:32:39.520
and were later shown to be right, even though they wouldn't necessarily
00:32:45.620
In fact, one of the founders of quantum mechanics,
00:32:52.940
Dirac, who was a very interesting man psychologically, among other things,
00:32:58.160
once said his equation was smarter than he was because he developed this equation
00:33:02.060
and it predicted this new particle in nature, antimatter, and he didn't believe it.
00:33:06.140
And he said it was the equation and it turned out to be true.
00:33:10.620
And, well, when we go back to the beginning, this is an important difference
00:33:16.380
between, in my mind, science and, say, religion.
00:33:19.460
When I go back to the beginning, I go back to as far as I can extrapolate
00:33:27.740
And science, we can make, and part of my job as theoretical physicist
00:33:31.500
was to make speculations, but to recognize that they were just that
00:33:34.800
and look for signatures that might suggest whether those speculations
00:33:38.600
So, for example, I actually wrote a book called Atom,
00:33:41.860
which takes you back to the, for an individual oxygen atom
00:33:46.920
one that's in your glass of water that you're drinking right now
00:33:55.460
because literally we don't know what happened at T equals zero,
00:33:57.760
because the laws of physics, as we understand, them break down.
00:34:00.980
Because the universe, if we extrapolate it back,
00:34:03.280
our universe becomes infinitely dense, and that seems crazy,
00:34:07.180
and the laws of gravity don't work with quantum mechanics.
00:34:13.600
but it's not more than talk, in my opinion, right now.
00:34:22.700
there's no reason to suspect that the current laws of physics
00:34:25.680
don't describe what happened in the history of the universe.
00:34:27.780
So as soon as it comes into being, the laws come into being as well.
00:34:32.660
Yeah, well, in fact, in the universe or nothing,
00:34:40.680
But what I did show in that book, which is fascinating to me,
00:34:46.120
we wouldn't even have been able to ask the question,
00:34:49.020
is that it's quite likely that our universe could and did
00:34:58.540
what would be the properties of a universe today,
00:35:06.640
the properties of that universe would be precisely
00:35:16.920
30 years ago, we didn't have the tools to even,
00:35:20.740
And we're still estimating the birth of about 14 billion years ago?
00:35:41.780
The fact that you can get beyond one decimal place in cosmology
00:35:48.780
When I was even a young assistant professor at Yale,
00:35:51.940
I remember talking to an older colleague who said that nature would always conspire
00:35:57.120
so that we could never measure the fundamental quantities of the universe
00:36:02.640
Because that had always been the case up to that point.
00:36:04.540
Every time someone claimed to have a better measurement,
00:36:06.840
you'd go out and look at astrophysical uncertainties and realize it was wrong.
00:36:10.400
And now we're talking about measuring things to four or five or six decimal places.
00:36:15.660
it's really a transformation and one worth celebrating,
00:36:20.500
but the early picture that the fact that we evolved from a big bang is,
00:36:28.940
just like evolution happened and the earth is round and all the other things we know.
00:36:34.440
that the early history of the universe was a hot big bang.
00:36:44.280
all the galaxies we now see and all the particles in those galaxies,
00:36:52.180
all of that material was contained in a region,
00:37:03.000
is it reasonable to conceptualize something like that as having a size?
00:37:14.700
when you say that the universe at the beginning had a size,
00:37:17.860
it was an object in a universe that had a size,
00:37:35.420
but what I do know is how big is the visible universe.
00:37:42.700
which now comprises the visible universe today at an earlier time,
00:37:54.880
it could have been an infinitely dense universe that was infinitely big.
00:38:00.880
and this is really a big change also from when I was a student,
00:38:08.480
we talk about universe and universe would mean everything,
00:38:17.960
a good definition of our universe is that region with,
00:38:21.580
with which we could have interacted in the past and with which we will be able
00:38:34.140
That could be just a small region of a much bigger thing,
00:38:38.860
so it's reasonable to describe our universe as that region into which we could
00:38:52.460
that's might as well not be considered part of our universe,
00:38:58.960
that's defined or limited by the speed of light?
00:39:01.660
The speed of light and the age of the universe.
00:39:12.920
and we call the causal horizon that region with which light could have
00:39:16.660
traveled to interact with us since the beginning of time.
00:39:19.720
and obviously that's the universe as far as we're concerned,
00:39:22.220
because nothing outside of that can affect us in any way.
00:39:25.700
it's a much better definition of a universe to be that,
00:39:34.280
that's what is our observable universe changes with time.
00:39:37.000
And we'll get to it because things have changed a lot in,
00:39:41.320
are the universe that causally affects us is we're at the center of it?
00:39:48.860
We're always at the center of our own universe,
00:39:54.400
because of the causality argument that you just laid out,
00:40:04.140
this is one of the confusions that many confusions,
00:40:11.320
when we look out at this thing called the cosmic microwave background radiation,
00:40:15.440
it's a residual radiation left over from the hot big bang.
00:40:34.400
It wasn't free to travel because all the universe was charged and light would interact and bounce off things.
00:40:46.140
Protons captured electrons to form hydrogen for the most part.
00:40:49.880
And neutral matter doesn't interact with light as strongly as charged particles.
00:40:55.760
which was kind of trapped early on when the universe was 300,000 years old,
00:40:59.640
could suddenly travel free freely through the universe without really interacting.
00:41:12.680
when we look out and if we look out in that direction,
00:41:15.900
back to a time when the universe was 300,000 years old,
00:41:21.760
because we can't see before that time because the light,
00:41:25.180
couldn't have propagated out just like it can't propagate out through a wall.
00:41:28.600
Only from the surface of the wall can we see it.
00:41:31.600
so when I look at the microwave background from earth,
00:41:38.620
actually it's because the expansion of the universe,
00:41:41.700
it's about 26 billion light years in each direction because the universe has expanded during the time that the light has been traveling.
00:42:00.460
But the sphere we're looking at depends upon where we are.
00:42:02.960
So that if we were doing the same experiment on an intelligent species in another galaxy,
00:42:13.180
the literally the cosmic microwave background that they would see would be slightly different because they'd be sent.
00:42:23.500
the predictions we can make in some sense as cosmologists are somewhat statistical because we're talking about a thermal distribution and galaxies and lots of disorder.
00:42:34.880
and we've taken pictures of the microwave background.
00:42:36.880
It's won at least two Nobel prizes for those pictures.
00:42:39.880
The picture that we see has statistical properties,
00:42:43.400
which would be identical to those observed by another observer a hundred million light years away.
00:42:50.240
the hotspots on the cold spots would be different because they'd be looking at a,
00:42:54.460
at a different slice of a statistical distribution.
00:43:11.060
And so I move halfway across the universe and the globe is still there,
00:43:17.120
And so then I could move another halfway and it would shift again.
00:43:27.760
And that certainly seems to imply that it extends beyond the globe that we see,
00:43:41.980
I think that the point is that even before the weirdness of empty space and
00:43:50.140
we was recognized that the part of the universe we see is unlikely to be the
00:43:56.420
We're limited in what we can see because of what's seeable,
00:44:01.720
And it's limited because of the speed of light and,
00:44:05.620
but also because of the way the universe was constituted in 30 stages.
00:44:10.640
And the way it's expanded and the way it's expanded ever since.
00:44:37.640
but we thought at the time that that expansion was slowing down.
00:44:44.340
the more we'll see because light from further and further objects can get to
00:44:49.120
What's really crazy now is because we recognize that apparently empty space is
00:44:57.580
that's causing the universe to expand ever faster,
00:45:03.820
And what it means is there are parts of the universe that are literally escaping from
00:45:16.720
there are parts of our universe that we could see now that if we were a
00:45:21.020
civilization that developed 5 billion years from now and real telescopes that
00:45:24.740
we couldn't see then because regions of the universe are eventually moving away
00:45:34.820
the less we'll see because more and more galaxies will be literally
00:45:46.240
and I think some of my books that eventually the far future of the universe,
00:45:51.520
but the far future is kind of poetic because up till about 1925,
00:45:56.560
the picture of the universe was quite natural based on observation.
00:46:12.980
who was famous for discovering the universe was expanding,
00:46:21.520
These things called nebulae in our galaxy with the new 100 inch telescope
00:46:25.500
at Mount Wilson could be discerned and be seen as other island universes.
00:46:29.920
So already that was a revolution in our picture of the universe.
00:46:36.520
later on he discovered the expansion of the universe.
00:46:38.560
The interesting thing is that observers who evolve,
00:46:48.700
And you can imagine planets around those stars and intelligent life evolving on those planets.
00:46:54.660
And astronomers would look out from our galaxy.
00:46:58.260
it'll be a very different looking galaxy because the Andromeda galaxy will have collided with it
00:47:06.360
all other galaxies would have disappeared behind the horizon by then.
00:47:10.620
So observers 10 trillion years from now will think they live in the universe we thought we lived in 1925,
00:47:18.000
And there'll be no evidence that the universe is expanding,
00:47:21.560
because the galaxies that are now markers that we can measure their motion away from us,
00:47:28.340
the cosmic microwave background will have become invisible by that time,
00:47:31.340
which is another bit of evidence for the Big Bang.
00:47:33.640
And while some really smart scientists may come up with some pictures to say,
00:47:38.180
I can understand what we're seeing if we assume our universe began in a Big Bang,
00:47:43.640
basically all the current observational markers of an expanding universe will have disappeared.
00:47:49.840
they'll think we lived in the mistaken universe we thought we lived in in 1925.
00:47:57.200
Conventional wisdom in 1925 scientifically was that the universe was static and eternal.
00:48:02.020
And you may know that it was actually a Jesuit priest who was also a physicist,
00:48:21.060
because they argued that here was observational evidence that there was a beginning to the universe,
00:48:28.820
it doesn't provide any such evidence for the universe they discussed.
00:48:34.400
the model was that the universe was more or less static and eternal on large scales,
00:48:44.660
how do we know our current model isn't completely wrong?
00:48:56.300
one of the biggest misconceptions about science,
00:49:01.900
is the misconception that scientific revolutions do away with everything that went before them.
00:49:08.340
They're more like Piagetian revolutions, right?
00:49:10.700
I would argue that even political revolutions never do away with everything that went before them.
00:49:15.680
what survived the test of experiment before that revolution remains completely true.
00:49:20.760
Newton's laws of gravity and motion may have been subsumed in quantum mechanics or relativity.
00:49:31.660
calculate how astronauts are going to go to orbit without needing anything beyond Newton.
00:49:35.620
the developmental psychologist Piaget studied Kuhn's scientific revolutions,
00:49:42.060
was that when a child undergoes a cognitive restructuring,
00:49:44.680
the new structure incorporates all of the knowledge of the old one plus some new knowledge.
00:49:56.580
So we have a lot of data with which we can test ideas,
00:49:59.320
and I'm certain that there's much more we don't know about the universe than we do.
00:50:12.680
will not be able to disagree with the observational evidence that the universe is expanding,
00:50:17.680
that there's a hot-causing white-caused background,
00:50:19.480
all the things we now have discovered that we didn't know about in 1925.
00:50:23.980
And so whatever our picture is of the beginning of time,
00:50:34.160
We're not going to ever say that the age of the universe is no longer 13.7 billion years old.
00:50:42.160
What happened at the beginning could be completely revolutionarily different.
00:50:46.320
And what happened, if you want to think about before the beginning,
00:50:51.220
and it may not make sense because time itself could have originated...
00:50:57.620
Well, I thought a lot about time a long time ago.
00:51:09.260
And so then I thought, well, why not dispense with time as a concept if we mark it by change?
00:51:22.440
So if there's nothing happening, there's no time.
00:51:28.080
And then if there's no event till the next event,
00:51:35.720
So, I mean, is there any reason to assume that there's anything about time
00:51:45.160
And a lot of people spend a lot of time on time,
00:51:52.140
They're both, if you wish, parameters that simply describe when events happen and where they happen.
00:52:02.600
And it turns out that that's the playing field on which the laws of nature play out.
00:52:12.240
And time is no different than space in principle,
00:52:14.820
except in fact, in practice, time seems very different than space.
00:52:18.440
We can go backwards in space, but it's not clear we can go backwards in time.
00:52:22.000
And that's caused a lot of people, a lot of philosophers and then physicists,
00:52:25.660
a lot of problems and a lot of mental gymnastics.
00:52:36.420
and I could replace that parameter by some other parameter that is equivalent to time.
00:52:41.540
And you could say that that parameter was change, like the parameter you talk about.
00:52:51.920
You could say that that parameter isn't changing, and you can call that time...
00:52:58.080
Because there's changes happening all the time at the microscopic level, right?
00:53:01.500
I mean, there's an indefinite number of changes.
00:53:03.640
And so statistically, you can extract out an average from that,
00:53:06.960
and you can experience that as duration, and you can define that as time.
00:53:11.020
But if there isn't anything there, except one event and then the next event,
00:53:18.720
There's an event, and then there's the next event.
00:53:20.620
Well, that's where I disagree with you, I guess.
00:53:25.380
Because if nothing is happening, literally if nothing's happening,
00:53:30.080
then time is an irrelevant concept, but to some extent it's space,
00:53:37.040
Because really what we're interested in is describing the process of events,
00:53:44.940
And that process of going from event to event is parametrized by a useful quantity called time.
00:53:52.100
But if nothing's happening, you're right, it's completely arbitrary,
00:53:55.600
but then we wouldn't be having this conversation because nothing would be happening.
00:54:00.700
So in a universe in which nothing was happening, there would be no time,
00:54:03.360
but there'd be no reason to talk about it either.
00:54:07.800
Now, my understanding, I don't understand why there is something once something is created,
00:54:13.160
because as far as I could tell, and I don't think I was disabused of this notion,
00:54:17.220
with the—I've finished reading the greatest story ever told so far this week.
00:54:22.780
Why weren't there equal amounts of matter and antimatter produced at the beginning,
00:54:34.420
Does that have anything to do with uncertainty,
00:54:40.660
I'm wondering if there wasn't equal numbers produced?
00:54:46.620
Well, look, the point is that we don't have an answer to that question.
00:54:50.060
And by the way, I think that's really important as a scientist.
00:54:55.540
and people are always disappointed when they say,
00:54:57.740
But I think it's probably one of the most important things that we,
00:54:59.980
and parents, and teachers should get more used to saying,
00:55:07.160
It's one of the biggest questions that's really provoked
00:55:09.700
much of the field of research that I've been involved in since I was a student.
00:55:13.840
I remember Steven Weinberg wrote about it when I was a graduate student
00:55:20.200
We now know that we live in a universe that's made of matter.
00:55:24.400
We try and measure antimatter, and there's minuscule amounts of it.
00:55:28.020
And we think most of it's caused by high-energy collisions
00:55:34.060
For a while, people thought maybe we'd lived in a universe
00:55:37.140
that had equal amounts of matter and antimatter,
00:55:40.220
You know, there were matter regions and antimatter regions.
00:55:42.720
But it turns out there are tests you can do to test that.
00:55:45.100
And all of those tests demonstrate, as far as we can tell,
00:55:48.220
that there are no—that the universe is made of matter, not antimatter.
00:55:51.940
Which, again, is arbitrary, because, of course,
00:55:53.660
if we lived in a universe made of antimatter, we'd call it matter.
00:55:56.900
And, you know, and there'd be antilovers living in anti—
00:55:59.060
sitting in anti-cars making anti-love and all the rest.
00:56:03.260
But the paradox here is, at early times, the universe is very, very hot.
00:56:11.160
And when it's so hot, one of the central parts of relativity
00:56:16.080
is that energy can turn into matter, and matter can turn into energy.
00:56:19.720
So particles of light with enough energy can collide together
00:56:25.000
But when they do that, if they have enough energy,
00:56:27.780
but since antimatter and matter have exactly the same mass,
00:56:31.180
particles that collide will produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
00:56:39.020
and they don't collide very easily, but if they do,
00:56:42.380
they'll produce particles and antiparticles in equal numbers.
00:56:45.880
Partly because of the conservation of charge, right?
00:56:50.020
and therefore whatever comes out of the collision has to have no charge.
00:56:53.260
So if it produces an electron, it'll have to have a positron.
00:56:56.060
So all those interactions, elementary particle interactions,
00:57:02.280
don't really distinguish between matter and antimatter.
00:57:05.500
And therefore, at very early times, if you were a creator,
00:57:10.900
if you were creating a universe, and it was very hot and dense,
00:57:14.660
the most reasonable thing would be for it to have equal parts of matter and antimatter, okay?
00:57:20.600
But somehow—so that's the reasonable assumption for the beginning of time,
00:57:25.620
that the universe had equal amounts of matter and antimatter in a very hot, dense plasma.
00:57:29.440
How do we get to a universe that just has matter?
00:57:39.660
and I know you're interested in what you would call Soviet things.
00:57:45.740
And you probably—and Alexander Solzhenitsyn—
00:57:53.460
But Andrei Sakharov was a very famous Soviet physicist
00:57:56.480
who's actually probably the father of their hydrogen bomb.
00:57:59.300
But he was also, as you know, won the Nobel Peace Prize because he became a dissident.
00:58:03.600
Interestingly enough, one of his major—well, in retrospect,
00:58:07.040
one of his major contributions to science was he—he actually asked in,
00:58:10.940
I think it was 1967, well before any of the physics actually allowed any of the—
00:58:16.060
he came up with three criteria by which a universe that started out
00:58:19.620
with equal amounts of matter and antimatter could evolve into a universe
00:58:29.540
One is that you have to depart from thermal equilibrium.
00:58:34.120
Because if you're in thermal equilibrium, everything remains the same.
00:58:38.580
Thermal equilibrium, like the air in this room—
00:58:40.340
Okay, so there's a place where uncertainty seems to be relevant.
00:58:49.180
Well, no, but you have thermal—well, you—no, you do have local thermal—
00:58:53.320
in thermal equilibrium in this room, there's local variations.
00:58:56.920
The thing about thermal equilibrium is—and you're right.
00:59:02.140
Normally, we talk about thermal equilibrium being a global thing.
00:59:04.760
But we can also talk about microscopic equilibrium.
00:59:14.540
But what happens is that in thermal equilibrium,
00:59:17.760
one particle turns to another particle, you know, a collision,
00:59:20.560
but an equal number of collisions happen in the opposite direction.
00:59:25.640
but they're all happening in equal opposite ways.
00:59:31.980
And certainly the amount of matter in the universe is a global property.
00:59:38.080
The second is that you have to have some physical process
00:59:44.180
that tells the difference between particles of matter and antimatter.
00:59:52.540
Because if the physical processes don't tell the difference,
00:59:54.880
then nothing is going to start a situation that has equal numbers
00:59:57.400
and change it to a situation that has unequal numbers.
01:00:01.020
This—this property is called—it happens to be a—
01:00:06.700
the laws of physics that tell you matter and antimatter,
01:00:10.000
the laws of physics are the same for matter and antimatter,
01:00:15.520
Something called charge conjugation invariance,
01:00:17.700
which tells you that—that—that positive and negative—
01:00:21.400
there's no difference between positive and negative.
01:00:25.220
And it turns out there's no difference between left and right.
01:00:28.300
If those—if the laws of physics at a microscopic level obey both of those properties,
01:00:32.980
then the laws of physics will not distinguish between matter and antimatter.
01:00:35.780
Only if that's violated—that's called CP, charge and parity—only if CP is violated can you,
01:00:44.260
by some microscopic physical law, can you evolve from a system with an equal number of particles
01:00:50.900
And the third is something called—well, we call it baryon number non-conservation,
01:01:02.940
And, you know, electrons are a little—obviously, protons and electrons wake up atoms,
01:01:08.500
Most—most of the mass in your body is protons and neutrons.
01:01:13.600
And clearly, if you want to end up with a universe full of protons and neutrons,
01:01:17.520
and more protons and neutrons, if you wish, than—than antiprotons and antineutrons,
01:01:23.720
then there has to be some process that makes protons when there weren't protons to begin with.
01:01:30.120
So those are three—so it's thermal equilibrium, CP, and violate—so violation of thermal equilibrium,
01:01:37.200
violation of CP invariance, and some process that violates what are called baryon number.
01:01:43.360
And he wrote those down, and what's amazing is at the time he wrote them down,
01:01:46.380
the laws of physics obeyed thermal equilibrium in the universe, obeyed CP, and obeyed baryon number.
01:01:53.100
So there is no evidence that you could ever do that.
01:01:54.980
And what's been remarkable is that over the last 50 years or so is as we've studied the microscopic laws of physics,
01:02:03.300
we've discovered both that CP is violated by microscopic laws,
01:02:09.040
and we've discovered processes that could have happened in the early universe
01:02:15.260
that would violate that thermal equilibrium, that nice, general, what you call adiabatic expansion of the universe.
01:02:21.180
There could have been abrupt processes during which the universe departed from thermal equilibrium
01:02:31.380
We know—if you read my book, we know, for example, now that the two forces of nature,
01:02:37.840
electromagnetism and the weak interaction, that now appear very different,
01:02:42.320
early on in the history of the universe actually represented two different sides of the same coin.
01:02:46.920
They were really part of a single, more unified force.
01:02:49.580
And the point where the universe cooled down enough so that suddenly electromagnetism began to behave differently
01:02:56.640
than the weak interaction, as the universe cooled down and things suddenly began to behave differently,
01:03:04.780
And phase transitions are places where you can depart from thermal equilibrium, right?
01:03:09.380
If I—I think—I don't know if I use the example in the book, but it—and I grew up in Canada,
01:03:14.120
so the example is beer, but if I—if you—if you have a party, a beer party,
01:03:18.460
and you forget to put beer in the refrigerator, you put it in the freezer,
01:03:22.680
and—and—and—and then you forget that you put it in the freezer,
01:03:24.900
and the next day you take it out of the freezer and it's frozen solid.
01:03:28.520
I mean, it's not frozen solid, it's still—it's still liquid, but you—you click the—you take off the top,
01:03:33.680
and suddenly it freezes instantaneously, and the bottle breaks.
01:03:36.640
That's a phase transition, because when the—when the beer was being held under high pressure,
01:03:41.240
it wasn't in—at a low temperature, it wasn't really in thermal equilibrium.
01:03:45.220
When you opened it up, then it could suddenly go into thermal equilibrium,
01:03:48.700
and the preferred state to be in the thermal equilibrium was ice, and suddenly, boom, it'd break it.
01:03:53.420
So thermal—so—so phase transitions are points where you can violate—you can depart from thermal equilibrium
01:04:02.260
So there's a—there's a theoretical, uh, explanation for how the antimatter matter, uh, uh—
01:04:09.140
Well, there are—the point is there's no one theoretical explanation, but we now know all the parts,
01:04:13.180
the Sakharov—OK, OK. —exists, but we don't have any good model that puts them all together.
01:04:18.500
We thought we did in the 1980s when I was a—when I was at Harvard.
01:04:21.400
We thought we—we thought there were—even before that, when I was doing my PhD at MIT,
01:04:26.000
we—we thought there—there's a model called grand unification.
01:04:28.460
It all looked like it was falling together, and we thought we had the answer to everything,
01:04:31.980
and it turned out the experiments have told us that that—those pictures are not quite right.
01:04:36.220
There's a host of possible ways of starting out with a universe that—that is—that has
01:04:42.160
equal amounts of matter and antimatter and ending up with a universe that has unequal amounts,
01:04:46.300
but we don't know if any of the proposals that we've now made are correct.
01:04:51.040
And if history is any guide, my feeling always is most likely—the most likely answer is one
01:04:56.300
I mean, I've written papers, lots of models that can make that happen, but nature probably
01:05:02.180
isn't smart enough to use any of the models that I've written down, and I suspect it.
01:05:06.520
But so there are lots of ways—but what's neat is that experiments have shown—and that's
01:05:12.280
It's not just theoretical, you know, mumblings of physicists who like to have nothing better
01:05:19.460
to do—experiments have shown all the components of the Sakharov requirements for generating
01:05:27.720
matter, a universe that had an asymmetry, are possible in nature and are suggested.
01:05:36.780
We know phase transitions happened in the early universe.
01:05:43.440
But all of our models that extend what's called the standard model of particle physics naturally
01:05:48.600
produce, at very early times, models where Baryon number is violated.
01:06:00.120
And our current picture is really quite—having said all of that, that's complicated.
01:06:04.620
The current picture is a little simple, and it's really remarkable.
01:06:10.140
It says that what happened is there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and a physical
01:06:15.960
process happened sometime between the Big Bang and the time when the universe was about
01:06:21.960
a millionth of a second old, that caused a very slight excess, one part in a billion
01:06:36.160
Because we now live in a universe that's just matter.
01:06:38.160
Well, if I have one extra—let's say there's a billion and one particles of matter and
01:06:42.400
a billion particles of antimatter, what will happen as the universe evolves?
01:06:46.660
The particles of matter will annihilate with the particles of antimatter, producing radiation.
01:06:52.680
But there'll be one leftover particle that couldn't find the particle of antimatter annihilate.
01:06:57.280
So what you'd expect is roughly a billion particles of radiation in the universe for every particle
01:07:03.760
And when we look out, that's exactly what we see.
01:07:07.360
The cosmic microwave background contains roughly a billion to 10 billion photons going throughout
01:07:18.180
So in fact, while we think we really live in a universe of matter, what we really live is
01:07:23.180
a universe that's mostly radiation, polluted by a little teeny, teeny bit of matter, one part
01:07:29.640
But that teeny bit of matter is enough to make all of the stars and galaxies in you
01:07:34.100
So one of the things that I'd like to think of in physics is it makes us more and more
01:07:39.200
insignificant as human beings in a cosmic sense.
01:07:42.180
We realize we used to think we're the center of the universe, we're the center of the sun,
01:07:46.920
It's been a series of these kind of Copernican revolutions where the earth isn't the center
01:07:52.100
of our solar system, but the sun isn't the center of our galaxy, but our galaxy isn't
01:07:57.620
the center of a cluster of galaxies, and our cluster of galaxies isn't the center of the
01:08:01.660
And now we find that most of the particles in the universe aren't even made of the same
01:08:06.140
So it pushes us more and more to feeling marginal.
01:08:09.620
And I find that, and a lot of people say, well, that should make us feel sad.
01:08:14.640
But to me, it makes me feel more precious rather than less precious.
01:08:18.640
It's like, obviously, we're getting into the realm of psychology.
01:08:21.020
But my psychological response is, hey, the fact that the universe is accidental as far
01:08:27.260
as I can see and was created without any supernatural shenanigans, the fact that we're cosmically
01:08:31.460
irrelevant, the fact that the universe is going to go on without us, all that doesn't
01:08:35.960
It makes me feel I should enjoy my brief moment of the sun.
01:08:38.640
I should enjoy my brief, you know, four score and ten or hopefully more years.
01:08:43.360
And it makes this accident of life on Earth remarkable that evolution has endowed us with
01:08:50.200
a consciousness so you and I can have these discussions.
01:08:52.800
So I don't find a pointlessness of the universe to be depressing.
01:08:58.680
And I often, and this may be an area we disagree in, I don't know, but one of the bits of
01:09:05.060
semantics that I've tried to fight is this notion of loss of faith, like losing your faith
01:09:12.620
But to me, losing my faith in those fairy tales, at least, or those incorrect explanations
01:09:23.400
And using that terminology makes it seem like people always write to me, I now recognize,
01:09:29.560
you know, that I don't believe the Bible stories.
01:09:34.320
And I think they're conditioned to feel like they have a loss.
01:09:39.500
I think you can, at least, you can psychologically create a picture where you don't feel that's
01:09:48.260
And actually, it's the way I feel about many things in life when I'm being well-adjusted,
01:09:52.940
which is a small percentage of the time, to be clear.
01:09:55.580
When I have a loss, I often reflect on it afterwards and realize, in fact, how I've
01:10:01.060
gained, that what seemed to be a traumatic experience, or in the end, produced something
01:10:07.860
And of course, it's a rationalization, probably, but it allows me to deal with those things
01:10:13.740
Anyway, that's my little bit of psychology, my little bit of pop psychology for our discussion.
01:10:18.700
I'm tempted to take it in that direction, but I think I'm going to continue to torture
01:10:24.580
I could do that, because one of the things that I hope your listeners will know is that
01:10:28.700
you and I are going to have a podcast on my podcast.
01:10:39.340
That sounds like I'm looking forward to that a lot.
01:10:41.820
Okay, so matter pops into being, essentially, after things cool down to some degree.
01:10:49.480
And there aren't exactly different laws governing the universe before that, but what would you
01:10:58.940
The allowances that the current laws make have a remarkably powerful effect before that.
01:11:05.860
The form that the laws, I mean, the laws of physics do evolve at energy scales, and which
01:11:12.280
laws are important at different energy scales are different.
01:11:15.600
So certain laws of physics, even if they don't change at all, certain things are more important
01:11:20.860
early on, and then other laws become more important later on.
01:11:24.100
Like now, obviously, electromagnetism on small scales is incredibly important.
01:11:29.460
It governs all the biology, all the chemistry, all of the things that we see in the world around
01:11:34.960
At early times, it was nuclear physics and particle physics, the laws of the strong and
01:11:39.000
weak interaction that were determining what was going on.
01:11:41.260
But you're right, eventually, and it took a while, it took a long time before the universe
01:11:48.140
Even when the universe was one second old and a temperature of about 10 billion degrees,
01:11:57.300
All of the, that's the other thing that's remarkable.
01:11:59.980
Until the universe was, even protons didn't exist until the universe was about a, somewhere
01:12:06.060
about a millionth of a millionth of a second old.
01:12:10.960
All of the light elements, hydrogen, helium, and lithium, were, if you wish, created by nuclear
01:12:17.960
reactions in the first five minutes of the universe, which is why Steven Weinberg's book
01:12:22.040
called The First Three Minutes talks about that.
01:12:24.160
So, and those were the only elements created at the beginning of time.
01:12:28.820
Hydrogen, and they're created from the lightest upward.
01:12:31.760
And that's, that's basically the way that things go across the entire period.
01:12:35.560
Yeah, yeah, you start with protons, and, and in fact, and it's kind of, protons and neutrons,
01:12:40.300
but neutrons are actually unstable, so they decay into protons.
01:12:44.400
It turns out, if you want to believe in coincidence, this is really quite amazing.
01:12:52.880
I mean, if I had a neutron here and held in my hand in 10 minutes, on average, it would
01:12:56.880
Well, you and I have more neutrons in our body than protons.
01:13:00.820
We've been talking for a lot more than 10 minutes, and I'm sure your listeners are quite
01:13:05.760
But the reason is, if you put a neutron in the nucleus, it can become stable, okay?
01:13:11.540
And it's really quite fortunate that all the neutrons that are more or less, many of the
01:13:16.300
neutrons that are now existing in the universe got trapped in this form of helium and lithium,
01:13:21.180
because protons, hydrogen just has a proton and electron, okay?
01:13:25.000
There's a heavy hydrogen, which is deuterium, which is a proton and a neutron electron, and
01:13:31.540
But helium has two protons and two neutrons, and so by those neutrons being, by helium forming
01:13:37.360
by a series of remarkable nuclear reactions, the universe, if you wish, stored the neutrons
01:13:41.580
that otherwise would have decayed away into protons, and there'd be no neutrons left in
01:13:45.020
And so they've been stored ever since that time?
01:13:46.980
For the most part, yeah, they have been, exactly.
01:13:49.780
And so those neutrons, and of course, other neutrons have been created in the fiery cores
01:13:55.260
So what happens is, and I talked about it in the Universe or Nothing in a lecture I gave
01:14:00.320
that sort of was the formation of that book, and I'm not the first person to say that.
01:14:04.320
I know Carl Sagan talked in different ways, but it is really true.
01:14:07.040
What's important for the psychology that you study is carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus,
01:14:15.980
None of those elements were created in the Big Bang.
01:14:19.460
All of those elements were created much later, literally billions of years later, or hundreds
01:14:24.880
of millions of years later, in the fiery cores of stars where nuclear reactions happen.
01:14:28.480
And that means something that is really, truly the most poetic thing I do know about nature,
01:14:33.220
that every atom in your body in the first approximation, all the carbon, all the oxygen
01:14:42.960
And not just forged inside of a star, but in order to get into your body, that star had
01:14:47.800
So all the atoms in your body, and in fact, probably they've been in many stars, because
01:14:53.280
They've experienced the most catastrophic explosion in nature, a supernova.
01:14:59.220
Every atom in your body has experienced that at least once, if not many times.
01:15:16.020
But you know, what makes it less remarkable for me as an analogy I gave, is that the atoms
01:15:19.300
in your left hand could have come from a different star than the atoms in your right hand.
01:15:27.480
Okay, so now we're at the point in the story where atoms are beginning to form, and they're
01:15:38.900
And so it's hydrogen first, and then it's helium, and then it's...
01:15:49.520
But in fact, there were no atoms until the universe was 300,000 years old.
01:15:56.400
Atoms exist when protons and neutrons capture electrons, right?
01:16:00.720
But in the early history of the universe, it was so hot that when an electron got captured,
01:16:05.460
So there were only these nuclei, which were charged of protons, and electrons, and it was
01:16:13.420
Only when the universe cooled down to about 1,000 degrees or so, maybe 10,000 degrees,
01:16:23.560
somewhere in that region, was the universe cool enough so that protons could capture electrons
01:16:30.020
And those were the first atoms, literally atom, neutral atoms that existed in the universe.
01:16:34.520
And that's when, if you wish, the causing microwave background separated from matter.
01:16:39.100
Because then once matter became neutral, instead of being a bunch of charged objects, then light
01:16:46.920
And that was the first moment that neutral atoms began when the universe was 300,000 years old.
01:16:54.900
I mean, and then, you know, from 300,000 years, what happened is the universe cooled
01:17:00.260
And really, it was the dark ages, if you wish, because, you know, there were no stars.
01:17:10.440
And it's fairly uniformly distributed, and it's expanding and cooling.
01:17:16.800
Einstein, in order to make a model of the universe, your models are simple.
01:17:21.800
So, you know, Einstein and others would make models in which the universe was uniform,
01:17:25.540
because only then could you do the calculations.
01:17:28.220
But then when we look out, we discovered empirically this remarkable fact, which for a long time
01:17:33.720
was quite surprising, and now we have this idea of inflation that in principle explains
01:17:38.540
it, but it's that the universe is uniform across regions that could never have been in
01:17:45.800
The region way over there could not have communicated that region over there before today, but they
01:17:50.120
have the same temperature to one part in 100,000.
01:17:57.120
And that's the cosmic background microwave radiation that you're talking about.
01:18:02.660
And since matter was coupled to radiation, the more or less distribution of matter is uniform
01:18:07.760
But now it's not, because you and I are, you know, in different places, and the distribution
01:18:11.800
Well, it sounds like it's another one of those situations where small discontinuities at the
01:18:16.020
beginning were enough to produce very large differences across time.
01:18:22.540
So if you have small lumps anywhere, a little small excess here will begin to grow.
01:18:33.360
And this is another amazing fact, which is not appreciated enough.
01:18:36.560
The small fluctuations in the microwave background, we think, were due to quantum mechanics.
01:18:40.840
That's where I was thinking about the quantum uncertainty story.
01:18:49.680
Because there's quantum discontinuity, uncertainty...
01:19:00.980
The point is that we don't see quantum fluctuations on our scales.
01:19:04.160
But remember, the entire observable universe was once inside a region that's the size of
01:19:09.380
And those scales, quantum fluctuations are very important.
01:19:11.520
And what's amazing is those quantum fluctuations got frozen in, into the microwave background
01:19:18.300
characteristics in ways that we can predict and describe.
01:19:22.080
And those quantum fluctuations later formed all the stars and galaxies and everything else
01:19:27.320
So we really are macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics, if you want to think of
01:19:32.000
Okay, so let me ask you a question about that quantum fluctuation.
01:19:47.760
Okay, but that uncertainty is real enough so that in that relatively uniform background,
01:19:55.640
There were discontinuities of position that were sufficient to cause...
01:20:14.760
But what's even weirder is when you go to the smallest scales, there's another uncertainty
01:20:23.540
There's a position and momentum uncertainty, but there's an energy and time uncertainty.
01:20:27.540
And the uncertainty is if you can measure a system for only a short time, then your ability
01:20:36.200
So if you can measure it for a longer time, your uncertainty energy goes away.
01:20:39.800
If you measure it for a small time, your uncertainty in energy gets very large.
01:20:44.640
And that means for very short times, empty space can burp out particles.
01:20:52.600
You say, well, that violates the conservation of energy because there was nothing there to
01:20:57.000
And, you know, when I burp out an electron and a positron, suddenly there are particles.
01:21:05.100
That is a mechanism by which black holes can be thought of as evaporating if you want to
01:21:15.160
That's one way of describing Hawking radiation.
01:21:32.920
Anyway, so this says that particles can suddenly spontaneously burp out of nothing.
01:21:39.080
Because as long as they disappear again in a time so short that we can't measure their
01:21:47.540
They don't really violate energy conservation if we could measure them.
01:21:50.500
Now, that sounds crazy, and it sounds like angels dancing on...
01:22:01.160
But to be less generous, they sound like talking about how many angels can dance on the
01:22:06.080
If you can't see them, if you can't see them, then what the hell does it matter?
01:22:09.780
The point is we can't see them, but they have indirect effects.
01:22:14.280
So we know that process is happening, not just because physicists like me say it's happening,
01:22:18.680
but because if you take, say, a hydrogen atom, you got a proton and electron.
01:22:24.200
Laws of quantum mechanics that Dirac developed allow you to calculate the energy levels that
01:22:28.880
that electron can have around a proton, and that determines the colors of light that's
01:22:34.240
We can compare those predictions with observations, and that's one of the basis of knowing that
01:22:40.220
quantum mechanics works, this discrete set of light that's emitted by hydrogen.
01:22:45.360
Well, it works, but it doesn't really work, because it turns out at a gross level, it works,
01:22:50.760
but when you try and measure things at the level of one part in a thousand or so, it doesn't
01:22:59.160
It turns out the energy levels aren't exactly what you'd think they were.
01:23:04.680
That is because the hydrogen atom isn't just a proton-electron.
01:23:10.180
It's a proton-electron, but in the atom, virtual particles are popping in and out of existence.
01:23:16.240
And say an electron-positron pair pops into existence.
01:23:24.120
In that region, well, it's happening everywhere in space, but it's also happening in an atom.
01:23:27.120
But in that region, during the time before that electron-positron pair disappears, the
01:23:32.480
electron in that pair will want to hang around close to the proton, because negative charges
01:23:37.580
are attractive positive charges, whereas the positron will be kind of repelled.
01:23:41.860
And that'll change the charge distribution inside the atom in a way that we can calculate.
01:23:54.380
Every atom is experiencing the same thing, because what's happening is the particles, I mean,
01:24:01.160
what's happening again statistically is that all those virtual particles and antiparticles
01:24:06.780
are changing the spectrum of hydrogen, of all hydrogen atoms, by the same amount, because
01:24:12.140
they're happening so fast, they're changing that spectrum in a way that we can calculate.
01:24:16.080
And it is one of the triumphs of theoretical physics, that using a theory called quantum
01:24:22.920
electrodynamics developed by Feynman and others, and building on what Dirac did, we can calculate
01:24:28.380
to 14 decimal places, 14 decimal places, from first principles, what the spectrum of hydrogen
01:24:37.920
should be, and how those virtual particles could change that spectrum.
01:24:41.020
And when we compare with observation, it's bang on.
01:24:44.240
There's no other place in science that we can make a theoretical prediction from first
01:24:47.800
principles and compare it to 14 decimal places with observation and get the right answer.
01:24:52.080
So that tells us that those virtual particles that we can't see are really there.
01:24:58.140
And that means empty space is much more complicated than we had assumed before, which is the reason...
01:25:05.080
Is that part of what led you to the hypothesis that empty space was...
01:25:09.020
Okay, so that's all part of the background for that.
01:25:11.040
So empty space is a seething pool of virtual particles popping in and out of existence constantly.
01:25:17.680
So that does sound a lot like potential, like a potential source.
01:25:20.420
And that means not only is it potential, but it can have, but those, but that effect can
01:25:26.640
In fact, generically, you would expect empty space to have energy.
01:25:32.580
So it's not surprising that empty space has energy.
01:25:35.240
What's surprising, in a sense, is that empty space has so little energy.
01:25:39.980
Why does it have energy if the particles sum to zero over a short time?
01:25:44.880
Well, that's a really good, that's a really good point.
01:25:48.060
And the, the, um, the answer is a little more complicated.
01:25:52.380
And it is that, um, let me give you an example from quantum mechanics.
01:25:57.840
So if I have a, what the famous quantum mechanical example of a potential well, I have a little
01:26:05.260
And, and if I have a, a ball on that well, you know, it'll roll down the ball, but the
01:26:11.700
well, but friction will eventually cause it to rest at the bottom.
01:26:18.900
It turns out in quantum mechanics, because energy states are quantized in such a potential
01:26:25.840
well, the lowest energy state is not at the bottom of the potential well.
01:26:33.380
And so the ground state, the lowest energy state that an electron can have trapped in
01:26:40.940
It's actually, it's actually has a little bit more energy than the bottom.
01:26:50.340
That's a generic property of an electron in a potential well.
01:26:55.380
So that's called the ground state energy in quantum mechanics.
01:27:03.200
Well, I presume that's an explanation, but it's not an explanation I understand.
01:27:08.220
Okay, let me give you a heuristic explanation that you might like better.
01:27:13.260
You might not like it as much, but it's one that I use in my own mind, so maybe it'll help.
01:27:18.680
Remember, we tell us in quantum mechanics, particles are also waves, right?
01:27:40.320
Because that string has a certain length, and there are vibrations that can be on that string.
01:27:45.620
But the only vibrations that persist are ones that have a very specific relationship with
01:27:54.860
So, and that's why, because the wave goes along the string, it comes back, then it bounces
01:28:02.120
But only when the wavelength, in that case, is exactly equal to the length of the string
01:28:12.480
And the way to think about a stationary state of an electron is it's like a resonant note
01:28:20.960
So I have a potential well, and the electron can only exist at those distances where its
01:28:27.340
wavelength is an exact relationship to the width of the potential well.
01:28:32.460
So is it reasonable to say that, I mean, an electron can't exist and have zero energy?
01:28:42.480
Let me, let me think if that's a good, a good, if it were, the only way it could is
01:28:52.380
Because it turns out the wavelength of an electron is related to its total energy, inversely
01:28:58.100
So if you want to think about this, an electron that's at rest, if you want to think about
01:29:02.300
it, would have a wavelength that, what's called the Broglie wavelength, which is infinitely
01:29:08.280
So if the universe, so only in an infinitely big universe can electron really have a ground
01:29:18.340
Now, I'm going to ask one more question about this, then I'm going to shut up about this.
01:29:21.940
Um, is that also a uncertainty issue is because it's, if it's at zero, you can specify it
01:29:29.260
So then it has to have an infinitely large wavelength.
01:29:37.300
If you do, if you more or less, if it's at rest, its momentum is exactly zero.
01:29:43.980
And therefore, you don't know where its position is.
01:29:45.100
And therefore, it can, its position is equally likely anywhere in the universe.
01:29:54.020
Well, these are more like descript, they're like, they're like concurrent incomprehensible descriptions
01:30:01.540
Except the theory, that's what you can predict, obviously.
01:30:06.320
But, but I mean, but, but there's something you've hit on, which is really important.
01:30:09.960
A lot of people get hung up on the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
01:30:13.320
And people write books about it in many worlds.
01:30:15.680
And they, you know, lately there's somebody who wrote a book and tried to sell books.
01:30:18.360
But the point is that it's nice to talk about all that, but it's really irrelevant
01:30:22.660
because as actually a brilliant, I first realized it due to a colleague of mine at Harvard
01:30:27.480
who was really the smartest person there in the physics department.
01:30:31.660
He said, the proper thing to talk about is not the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
01:30:35.800
It's the interpretation of classical mechanics.
01:30:40.800
And any classical picture we impose on it is going to be crazy.
01:30:45.280
And, and, but you don't have to think of them as real.
01:30:47.040
They're all just different approximations to a reality, an underlying reality, which can't
01:30:53.500
So that's why all these classical pictures seem crazy, because that none of them is complete.
01:30:58.360
Well, you know, if you look at, well, if you look at this psychologically, I'm going
01:31:03.860
I mean, Piaget pointed out that we derive our concepts from our practical, our practical
01:31:10.800
So for example, you know, you might ask why, well, why is this one thing?
01:31:28.840
But it's, it's, it, the concept itself is predicated on our interactions at this scale.
01:31:34.920
And so we're going to derive our sense of reality from our practical interactions at
01:31:39.720
And your claim, the claim of the quantum mechanics in general, is that that doesn't apply at the
01:31:45.120
So our intuitions are gone because our intuitions are predicated on our embodiment at this level
01:31:51.380
In fact, the purpose of the greatest story we're told so far, that particular book is
01:32:00.240
Now, I, I know, I hate to say it because it breeds all sorts of mumbo jumbo and people
01:32:04.480
start doing, but at a fundamental scale, at the small scales, everything that, that defines
01:32:10.780
our universe, including matter and, and, and mass, really the things that make the universe,
01:32:20.460
the universe we experience are really accidents of our circumstances rather than fundamental
01:32:28.660
Yeah, well, that's something, that's something I would like, and we can do this again when
01:32:33.140
we talk again, because I, I'm, I'm, I'm always curious about that leap into purposelessness.
01:32:38.680
And one of the things I would like to ask you just briefly on that subject is, as the universe
01:32:44.500
cools, we do see a gradual increase in at least one sort of important complexity, right?
01:32:50.960
And that's the building of the, let's say the building of the periodic table.
01:32:54.460
And so atoms become more and more complex and sophisticated as the universe cools.
01:32:58.880
That seems like a kind of directionality that's built into the structure itself.
01:33:02.880
And it isn't, I mean, do you think that's discount?
01:33:06.700
Is that necessarily discontinuous with the radical increase in complexity that you start
01:33:12.840
to see 3.5 billion years ago when life emerges?
01:33:15.940
Or is that the same process of complexification?
01:33:28.420
It is true that the stars, as a, as star individual stars evolve, they build up heavier and
01:33:35.700
They do it at the expense of their surroundings by increasing the disorder in their surroundings,
01:33:42.620
So there's localized, okay, there's localized increase in complexity like us.
01:33:49.680
If you follow it long enough, the heavy elements are going to disappear.
01:33:54.520
And the long term, the universe will look, will just be pure radiation again.
01:33:58.700
So we are, so this buildup of complexity, which you're absolutely true, is not a, is not
01:34:04.620
It's a momentary, but fortunate imbalance that will exist for a while until the universe catches
01:34:11.840
Well, that's now that's a real problem in discussing concepts, isn't it?
01:34:15.360
Because you can take a timescale and change the timescale.
01:34:20.000
And all of a sudden the phenomenon changes completely.
01:34:22.580
And that's what people do to themselves often when they think about the meaninglessness of
01:34:29.220
I've made this with my clients approximately is if you're thinking on a timescale that makes
01:34:40.380
That's the, the hopelessness is an indication that you're using the wrong frame.
01:34:47.300
And I would say, well, the hopelessness is the proof of that.
01:34:49.680
Now you might not regard that as proof, but it's a point that's at least worth considering,
01:34:54.340
you know, because you could say, well, what good is a Beethoven symphony across a span of
01:35:00.080
It's like, well, none, but why, what good is posing that question?
01:35:08.540
The fact that, that we have, there's no obvious purpose in the universe.
01:35:11.240
The fact that we and everything we've created will long be gone, that can depress you.
01:35:15.840
But the, the, the opposite sign of the coin, it seems to me, if I were a clinician that
01:35:21.620
I would try to argue to my clients is that it makes every moment of that accident of
01:35:26.400
your own existence special, and every instant is more special because it's finite, because,
01:35:35.500
And therefore, you're right, there may be no cosmic purpose to your existence, but you
01:35:41.160
I know you write about meaning, you wrote a whole book about meaning, but, but I would
01:35:44.740
argue there's no objective meaning to the universe.
01:35:48.220
And to the extent we make our own meaning, our lives are more or less valuable to us and
01:35:57.100
And then maybe it's not just a quibble, because I don't think meaning is something we create.
01:36:01.140
I think it's something that manifests itself to us.
01:36:03.500
Now, look, I know, I know it's not that simple, because we do make decisions, but it's very
01:36:08.560
frequently the case, and you know this, you know, this as a scientist, for example, you
01:36:12.880
may have an in moment of insight into some phenomena.
01:36:17.240
But it isn't so much that that is something you create, although you can seek it out.
01:36:21.960
It's more like that's something that bursts on you.
01:36:26.140
Well, it'll be an interesting question to see if we're debating semantics here or not.
01:36:32.240
And well, I mean, I guess at a fundamental scale, and maybe we can follow this up in
01:36:39.400
our in when we talk in my podcast, but I, I tend not to think that there's any objective
01:36:49.460
Well, it may be that objective and meaning aren't well suited for one another, right?
01:36:53.500
Because you could also make the case that the objective viewpoint precludes meaning as
01:36:59.580
And I think it, I mean, you can make a strong case that the scientific method is designed
01:37:06.580
That's actually, and that's actually one of its remarkable strengths, but it has a cost.
01:37:11.340
The cost is, well, what do you do with the phenomena of meaning?
01:37:16.280
Well, that is something we could talk about for a long time, because that'll pull us into
01:37:21.780
the question of whether what's constituted, conceptualized as objective reality is a sufficiently
01:37:33.340
And it isn't obvious to me that it is, because it does have this tendency to include, to exclude
01:37:41.060
Okay, that's good, because I, yeah, I would say it's, for me, it's perfectly fine.
01:37:44.260
Um, the fact that it excludes its objective is its strength, not its weakness, in my opinion.
01:37:49.840
There's no doubt about that, because the subject, because by excluding the subjective, you can
01:37:58.040
But, but that also may mean that there are things you exclude that are real, that, that
01:38:04.360
You know, you will, to, to, you know, I used to read, well, there's a, I like Oliver Sacks,
01:38:10.300
And one of his last books before he died was on hallucinations.
01:38:13.300
And one of the things that really, at the beginning of his book that really hit me, and it was
01:38:18.420
relevant to something I was working on at the time, and I honestly forget it, but is his
01:38:23.240
point that to people who are experiencing hallucinations, they're real.
01:38:28.180
And, and yeah, well, that's the thing about real, real is real is, there is objectively real,
01:38:35.700
But it isn't obvious to me that objective and real are synonymous.
01:38:39.780
Well, when it comes, when it comes to our own, our own psyche, I couldn't agree with
01:38:45.060
you more, which is why I tell people, by the way, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a, what
01:38:49.060
I would have, if my, my, neither of my parents went to university, so I didn't know the term
01:38:52.500
neuroscience, so I wanted to be a brain surgeon.
01:38:54.880
My mother wanted me to be a doctor, a nice Jewish boy.
01:38:57.060
And, and, and I wanted to be, and what interested me most was the brain, and I thought, well,
01:39:06.120
But, but the reason I, one of the reasons I do physics is it's so much damn easier.
01:39:11.960
It's just so much easier than psychology or neuroscience.
01:39:14.920
It's because, because of these complexities of, of psyche.
01:39:18.880
And, and so I do go back to this reason is a slave of passion.
01:39:22.880
I mean, the fact that we, that our, that our, our whole understanding of our own existence
01:39:32.740
Well, it's certainly not based on our capacity to, to, uh, what would you say, to conceptualize
01:39:39.540
Christ, we've only thought like that for 500 years.
01:39:42.880
No, it's really powerful, but, but it's not the way we naturally, and that's also something
01:39:49.340
Well, you know, but it's, that's, what's so wonderful about science to me is it is the
01:39:52.600
recognition that scientists are people, which is a secret that most people don't realize.
01:39:59.620
They're subject to all of the, the whims and, and slings and arrows of fortune.
01:40:04.960
And, and so the scientific method is developed to realize that scientists are bound to make
01:40:13.080
And the scientific method is to catch those mistakes.
01:40:15.800
I, I, I argued recently, in fact, at, at Oxford union, and they didn't get the point
01:40:20.960
because they're all woke, but, um, the students, but, but there were, you know, there was a
01:40:31.180
There was a debate on, the question was, we are all religious.
01:40:37.720
My colleagues, my atheist colleagues who, people, you know, uh, were on the anti side and they
01:40:42.280
were shocked that I wanted to speak on the pro side.
01:40:45.740
If we weren't all religious, we wouldn't need science.
01:40:55.420
And, and I, well, that was part of what I was trying to point out to Sam Harris is
01:40:59.220
that, and this is something I learned at least in part from reading Jung.
01:41:02.160
Like his claim was that alchemy, the, the ideas of alchemy grew out of a religious foundation
01:41:12.640
Science is nested inside an alchemical fantasy.
01:41:20.540
Like I, I, I was born from my mother and father who, you know, and I, I like to think
01:41:24.740
that I grew that a lot of what I, who I am is that, but I grew out.
01:41:28.260
But I, here's why I think it has to be nested still now.
01:41:31.900
And this is something we could talk about a lot.
01:41:48.140
Is that like you, you get interested in some things and you pursue those.
01:41:52.780
Now that's informed by your scientific knowledge, but it's, it's.
01:41:56.060
So Jung's point, for example, was that science was a materialist, redemptive myth that grew
01:42:04.540
up as a counterposition to the spiritualist, redemptive myth, right?
01:42:08.300
So you imagine there was an idea, which was that we could redeem our inadequacy through
01:42:21.580
So there's a fantasy emerges over thousands of years.
01:42:24.060
Maybe we should investigate the transformations of matter.
01:42:27.440
There's redemptive information residing in the transformations of matter.
01:42:31.460
We could investigate that and that would make life better.
01:42:34.940
And so the motivational goal behind science is the expansion of human competence.
01:42:46.240
But where I guess that we disagree and we could have this discussion is that I think
01:42:53.980
They're motivated by greed, by fame, by jealousy, as well as by facts.
01:43:00.720
I mean, I would, you know, I want to point out, I mean, we're all, you know, that's why
01:43:03.520
I'm demonstrating by awe and wonder and fascination.
01:43:06.900
But, but I'm also, the questions I ask are totally determined by the time in which I live.
01:43:10.880
So, but I don't want to be postmodern because the point is that what's great, so that's
01:43:17.880
So you may say that the motivations of science are kind of a personal fantasy.
01:43:22.460
But what's great is the science overcomes that so that you're right.
01:43:26.880
There are, in fact, if you, in my book, in the, in the book you read, The Greatest
01:43:30.380
Story I've ever told so far, I make a big point of saying scientists were all moving
01:43:33.520
in this direction and it was the wrong direction.
01:43:40.420
It overcomes the, it overcomes the contamination of the theory by the motivational impulse.
01:43:45.540
But the motivation changes because the, because the results force it upon you.
01:43:49.760
Scientists are forced kicking and screaming to change their minds.
01:43:54.660
They don't want to, but that motivation of the kind of questions you ask come, and that's
01:43:59.620
the greatness of science because it's empirical.
01:44:01.800
Because it's not based on just what I want, but what nature tells me is the case.
01:44:06.900
And so eventually all the scientists who want this and are, and no doubt we're driven
01:44:11.940
in that direction because they wanted that, find out that that one is wrong and they have
01:44:20.820
Ultimately, you know, I, you know, I, there was a while when string theorists talked about
01:44:30.700
And eventually we get drawn until we eventually come to a picture where we think it's beautiful.
01:44:35.340
But it was nature, you know, something that was incredibly ugly in the beginning that we
01:44:39.120
thought was ugly ends up being beautiful because we force our picture to understand that that's
01:44:45.180
And then we, we develop an understanding of it.
01:44:48.960
It's that, I guess I, I don't think of it as a fantasy in that sense.
01:44:52.940
Maybe the motivation is fantastic, fantastical.
01:44:55.540
And even the process of some level, there's a prop, there's a proposition, right?
01:44:59.920
Which, which I think be, look, let me, let me give you another example of this and you
01:45:13.060
We have a hypothesis that it's a fantasy, I would say, that the increase of knowledge
01:45:20.580
through technical means will be of benefit to us as individuals and as a species.
01:45:31.880
It's the fantasy that we've staked ourselves on, but there's, it's not provable.
01:45:36.300
And we're actually ambivalent about it because we generate apocalyptic nightmares all the time.
01:45:41.140
And we know that our technological prowess has a Frankenstein element.
01:45:45.500
So it's not like we're a hundred percent convinced that this nonstop onslaught of knowledge
01:45:50.600
generation is necessarily in our best interest.
01:45:53.140
And you could also make a case, an evolutionary case that most species are stunningly conservative.
01:45:59.460
If something works, man, they do not deviate from it.
01:46:05.220
And so we do have this fantasy, which is we can escape our static destiny by the acquisition
01:46:15.820
You wrote books on the physics of Star Trek to go boldly where no one has gone beyond
01:46:23.300
And that's the fantasy, which, with, when, which this is nested.
01:46:28.680
You know, I mean, I, I understand your point within that there's transformations constantly.
01:46:33.640
I think, but I think it wouldn't, well, look, I agree with you to the most part.
01:46:37.600
And in fact, regarding the, the apocalyptic things you must, one of the things you didn't
01:46:41.400
mention is that I was chairman of the board of sponsors of the Bolton, the atomic scientist
01:46:44.440
for a dozen years that sets the doomsday clock.
01:46:46.620
So every year I'd have to stare apocalypse right in the, in the face.
01:46:50.620
But I think the, the reason that fantasy has persisted, I would argue is that it like
01:46:56.140
many fantasies is that it has an evolutionary success.
01:47:01.520
And the reason that it persists is that we have found that, yeah, when we developed
01:47:12.980
I recognize that when I think I'm being, you know, I'm being driven by pure rationality,
01:47:18.600
I have to recognize that there's, that there's passion behind it.
01:47:24.760
And I think part of that, again, this is something I tried to draw out my conversations
01:47:28.420
with, with Harris is, well, we are evolved biological creatures.
01:47:38.680
Now we can learn to be rational with great difficulty.
01:47:41.980
But fundamentally, and maybe that's a tool, but there is underneath this, you said it
01:47:50.160
So the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex.
01:47:53.780
So the motor cortex enables you to engage in voluntary activity.
01:47:56.980
The prefrontal cortex enables you to abstractly represent motor activity, play it out in an
01:48:03.340
avatar like universe and kill off stupid ideas before they kill you.
01:48:07.880
So we, we've evolved to produce hypotheses, test them through, through dialectic often and
01:48:18.180
And so we've, we've staked ourselves on that attempt and we've evolved to be able to do
01:48:24.580
And science, I believe is a, is the extension of that, the practical extension of that.
01:48:36.840
On the apocalyptic end, let me ask you what you think of this.
01:48:39.860
So we have a particular view of a hydrogen atom.
01:48:47.320
And you can see the power of that because we understand hydrogen atoms well enough to
01:48:53.540
But you, I, you could also argue that it's because of that, it's because of the limitations
01:49:00.120
of that form of knowledge that we were inclined to turn them into bombs, that we separated the
01:49:09.220
It enabled us to manipulate a tiny fragment of reality to exclude the rest of reality
01:49:14.480
from that consideration that bestowed upon us a tremendous power.
01:49:21.120
And, you know, that could be evidence that the theory, however, practically useful for producing
01:49:28.700
deadly machinery was not useful at all at a larger scale of analysis.
01:49:34.000
And that's the, that's the paradox, I guess, of the reductionistic approach.
01:49:38.820
Yeah, I think, well, you know, it's kind of like, reminds me of the, of the Sorcerer's
01:49:42.860
Apprentice, a movie with Mickey Mouse or whatever it was, or, yeah, I think.
01:49:48.120
And, um, is the sense that it's, it is a remarkable, or maybe, maybe I should do Spider-Man
01:49:54.520
with great power comes great responsibility, but, but, um, which may be a summary of your
01:49:59.980
But anyway, um, uh, the, we have this weird, like, I can't agree with you more.
01:50:13.220
When the Greeks didn't have it, they did a lot.
01:50:15.280
But if they'd been able to know about empirical evidence, they would have done a lot more.
01:50:18.680
Um, and so it was a discovery and it's a discovery that was incredibly powerful that
01:50:23.660
But we humans, you know, um, didn't evolve, uh, didn't evolve to discover the scientific
01:50:31.620
I mean, we had the capability and therefore we have all sorts of evolutionary baggage that
01:50:39.680
And so we're on the one hand have this incredible power by using the scientific method, but on
01:50:44.980
the other hand, have the fact that we are human and we have all the slings and arrows
01:50:49.900
that came with being human, all of the evolutionary, evolutionarily positive and negative features
01:50:56.100
of having developed a psyche as you described it.
01:50:59.540
One with, you know, I had a, a podcast with, uh, Joseph Ledoux.
01:51:03.780
And we talked a great deal about fear in the amygdala and, and, and how those things play
01:51:08.300
Um, but so we have, we have this, we have the people that are manipulating the scientific
01:51:14.280
method who are, who are subject to all of the concerns that may, you know, the jealousies,
01:51:19.420
the, the, the insecurities and the wonder all combined.
01:51:23.300
And somehow we have to combine those to keep us safe and, and, and secure and to make in
01:51:29.060
principle a better, again, just saying we want a better future for our children.
01:51:36.020
It doesn't have to be, why do we want to do that?
01:51:37.620
Well, for some reason we think it's a good idea.
01:51:39.800
Um, um, maybe it's for some reason we believe that there's such thing as better.
01:51:45.140
And we, and we quantify it and we, and again, I would argue, see to me, I'm a, I'm a solid
01:51:50.880
If there's not an empirical way of this, of defining why it's better than it's an irrelevant
01:51:55.440
And that's why I have a, I'm this just, I'm a very pedestrian kind of guy.
01:52:10.140
And then it's hard to tell what the hell you're talking about.
01:52:14.080
Then it ends up being pure intellectual masturbation, you know, which is a lot of.
01:52:18.340
And you can shift the concept around at your convenience, which is not helpful.
01:52:22.640
And that's what sort of, I would argue much of postmodernism is all about is that, is
01:52:25.980
that it's lost track of what is real and, and it just sort of intellectual circles.
01:52:30.440
So I, I, I, there's other questions about physics I would like to ask you, but I'm not
01:52:34.520
going to, because we're running out of time, unfortunately, but I will ask you something.
01:52:38.020
I'll ask you something instead that comes out of what we've just been discussing.
01:52:48.400
So, and I know you're also interested in social transformations and, and what's happening
01:52:53.060
in the universities and you described the crowd at Oxford as woke.
01:52:56.060
So I'm going to ask you, I'm going to tell you something I've been thinking about.
01:53:00.140
I'd like you to tell me what you think about it.
01:53:02.640
So, you know, I was thinking for a long time about the advantages of a, of a democratic
01:53:10.840
So imagine, imagine instead of executive, legislative, and judicial, there's four branches
01:53:17.780
Legislative, judicial, executive, and symbolic.
01:53:22.200
And so you need, it's helpful to have the queen because then the president isn't the queen.
01:53:28.300
That's the great thing about a constitutional monarchy.
01:53:29.860
You and I both have lived in Canada and the United States.
01:53:33.080
So you can part, so, so you might say that in a place where there is no fourth branch of government,
01:53:37.620
the president, the executive, tends to take on the symbolic weight of the king.
01:53:46.120
I think it's one of the problems of American politics.
01:53:48.920
And now I would say that's also related to the problem of the separation of church and
01:53:53.140
And one of the things the West seems to have got right is the idea that we should render
01:53:58.040
unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's.
01:54:05.160
You don't, don't, I'll just continue where I'm going.
01:54:10.440
Well, imagine there's a practical necessity for the separation of the religious impulse
01:54:15.140
from the political impulse, but imagine that there's a psychological necessity for that
01:54:19.780
And then if, if there aren't domains specified out for the different domains of, of, of
01:54:26.880
practical thought, political, economic, religious, then they contaminate each other.
01:54:31.600
And what happens is you don't get relative, the rid of the religion, you contaminate the
01:54:39.360
And so now I've been watching what's been happening to Richard Dawkins, for example.
01:54:45.800
And, and, and, and I hadn't, I'm an admirer of Dawkins, but he can think, you know, I mean,
01:54:53.040
I understand what he's doing and why, and I get his argument.
01:54:56.580
I think it's incomplete for reasons we could get into and probably will, but I think there's
01:55:03.140
And then it's playing out is that when you, when you remove the religious sphere and,
01:55:09.380
and you confuse it with superstition, or you fail to discriminate between the valid elements
01:55:15.060
of it and the superstitious elements, you don't get rid of the religious impulse.
01:55:21.400
And I think we're, if you're saying it's going into secular religiosity now, I, well,
01:55:29.080
No, that's, I, I said that I've written a P I've written on it.
01:55:31.740
And I, I, that was my argument is that, is that we're seeing many of the aspects of
01:55:36.560
religion being manifest in, in secular arguments.
01:55:39.920
As someone pointed out, the only difference being in many, unlike at least the Christian
01:55:44.680
religion, there's no possibility of absolution, which is.
01:55:56.260
I know, but, but that also points out what a remarkable achievement the idea of absolution
01:56:01.180
is, because it's like the presumption of innocence.
01:56:07.940
Miraculous constructs of thought, constructs of thought.
01:56:10.840
And I, I, I, you know, I'm glad we're having this discussion.
01:56:14.000
One of the, when you, when you talked about the symbolic, I, one of the problems I sometimes
01:56:18.640
have with, with you from having read you in the past, and we'll talk about this, is,
01:56:22.740
as you say things and I don't really understand what they mean.
01:56:24.940
I mean, they're, seriously, I find them vague enough that, that, that I, I really want them
01:56:32.300
And I've really enjoyed the fact that you've been defining things.
01:56:35.980
And I think the, the, the, the, so I would agree with you completely.
01:56:40.920
We have to realize, and I've had this discussion, as you probably know, Richard and I have had
01:56:47.080
There's a movie about us called The Unbelievers, and we, we spent a lot of time together.
01:56:50.440
And I think our views have, have come together in different ways.
01:56:56.480
I would argue that religion, on the whole, has not been a good thing for people.
01:57:03.500
But, but in order to, but we shouldn't realize, we have to realize that in order, that it does
01:57:08.340
serve an evolutionary purpose, if you want to call it purpose.
01:57:11.620
It's there because it, it has, it has, it has survived all of societies because it does,
01:57:17.980
it meets some human needs in one way or another.
01:57:21.800
And therefore we have to ask what needs does it satisfy and realize what they are and how
01:57:28.100
can we, how can we provide them without the fairy tales?
01:57:32.320
So I guess we definitely do have to ask that question and an extraordinarily serious, you
01:57:36.900
know, one of the things that we might want to do, if we can figure out how to do it is
01:57:41.040
also to have a discussion with Roland Griffith.
01:57:50.160
Well, he's been investigating psychedelics and with psilocybin.
01:57:58.840
Well, there's, there's, there's a mystery there that's virtually unfathomable.
01:58:03.100
And, and, and, and Griffith is a very, very solid scientist.
01:58:06.620
And that's another place that would make an interesting, but it's, it's relevant to this point
01:58:11.200
because, because there are, I think the reason that there has to be a religious domain is
01:58:16.660
because religious questions will never go away.
01:58:19.780
Well, so even if you get rid of the answers, you can't get rid of the questions.
01:58:23.920
Oh, I want, but you never want to get rid of the questions.
01:58:26.100
I would argue that is what, that's my big argument about everything is that we have to encourage
01:58:32.160
In fact, that's what education should be based on.
01:58:36.240
So I don't think wanting to, I have no desire to get rid of those questions.
01:58:39.500
Like why, if you want to call it, why are we here?
01:58:42.460
Why did, I would argue the why questions ultimately, however, the difference may be, and I know Richard
01:58:48.680
has gotten involved in this too, because he wrote the forward for one of my books, but the,
01:58:52.000
the why questions are really all how questions.
01:58:56.080
They only remain why questions if you believe there's some fundamental purpose.
01:58:59.600
And if you, and since there's no evidence of that, ultimately, when you ask why are we
01:59:05.120
When you ask why does your heart pump blood, it doesn't mean that there's some, someone
01:59:08.760
made up, it means how does it, what are the biochemical processes by which, you know,
01:59:15.060
Okay, so, all right, so let me respond to that a bit.
01:59:17.860
And I understand your point, and take it very seriously.
01:59:21.920
And so, but what I've been looking at, because I do look at this biologically to begin with,
01:59:26.900
because I, I try to look at things scientifically, insofar as the science allows those things
01:59:34.120
And so, to the degree that I can look at religious matters from a biological perspective,
01:59:39.880
Okay, so I believe that the religious instinct manifests itself in a variety of fundamental
01:59:46.700
motivations, but they're, they're, they're abstract motivations to some degree.
01:59:51.680
So the experience of awe, that's a major one, the, the experience of beauty, that's another
01:59:59.740
one, the, the experience of admiration, and the desire to imitate, those are, those are
02:00:08.160
And so, so one of the things that I would point out, you can tell me what you think about
02:00:12.280
this, and I've been trying to formalize this idea, and I don't know its extent.
02:00:16.780
So I look at Christianity in particular, although not uniquely Christianity, but Christianity in
02:00:22.860
particular, as a thousands of years investigation into the structure of the abstracted ideal to
02:00:34.020
So imagine, we imitate those we admire, okay, but we're abstract creatures.
02:00:39.400
So we want to know what's the essence of what should be imitated itself.
02:00:46.020
It's not all explicit, we have to represent it in music, we have to represent it in art,
02:00:50.860
we have to represent it in architecture, because we're, we're, we're hitting at it from multiple
02:01:02.660
It's purely, it's purely psychological or a biological argument.
02:01:06.300
Well, where I, look, I, where I would disagree with you, and I like the way you've described
02:01:11.020
it in many ways, but where I disagree with you, I guess, would be the word investigation.
02:01:15.980
My problem with Christianity, and I've said this, you know, I've debated once at Yale many
02:01:20.640
years ago, the, you know, theology, and, and I've argued that, and I've never, I've argued
02:01:27.500
with theologians, I've said, give me an example in the last 400 years of a contribution of
02:01:39.820
Now, if you ask a question, what do you mean by theology?
02:01:42.240
Well, okay, maybe, but, but, but, but I would argue, because I would point to Nietzsche
02:01:47.780
Yeah, yeah, okay, but I would say if you asked a psychologist, or a chemist, or a biologist,
02:01:52.280
what contributions and all, they list these things, but the point is that, yes, my problem
02:01:57.540
with Christianity is it stopped asking questions.
02:02:00.420
It stopped being an investigation, and it was, and it was, it was a dictum, here's the
02:02:04.720
answer, don't ask any more questions, and that is the antithesis of, of what I exist for,
02:02:10.300
Look, look, factor analytic studies of religion reveal something like two factors.
02:02:15.660
There's a dogmatic element, and there's a spiritual element, and if you, if you do large
02:02:20.100
scale surveys of people now, you see that their faith in the dogmatic element has declined
02:02:24.440
substantially, but their spiritual claims have not.
02:02:28.240
But, but again, I'd ask you, I don't know what, whenever someone uses the word spiritual
02:02:31.900
for me, my mind kind of glazes over, because I have no idea what they're talking about.
02:02:35.700
Well, no, I think it's on the investigative side, that's why I brought that up, because
02:02:40.420
I think what you're objecting to, correct me again if I'm wrong, but it's the same thing
02:02:44.500
that you object to as a scientist, you object to dogma as, as de facto dogma.
02:02:52.660
Absolutely, everything is up subject to question, nothing is sacred.
02:02:57.080
Right, right, right, so that's the continued investigation of the creative mind.
02:03:02.300
So, now, but, but, you know, there, that's not, that can't be quite right either, though,
02:03:07.280
because when you move forward, you always move forward on the basis of dogma, but you question
02:03:12.020
it, like you do both at the same time, which is what you said people should be doing at
02:03:16.080
the beginning, because you do assume the validity of your knowledge to move forward until you
02:03:24.000
You have to, sure, you have to, look, you have to make assumptions to move forward, you
02:03:28.900
just, the difference between science and religion is, you can recognize later that those assumptions
02:03:33.000
are wrong, and that's the beauty, that's why, to me, the distinction between science and
02:03:37.020
religion, we all make assumptions, and in fact, I'd love to, the term I've often quoted
02:03:41.480
from the X-Files, where Fox Mulder says, I want to believe, we all want to believe, as
02:03:45.260
a scientist, I want to believe, that's why we're all religious, I argued, in that sense,
02:03:49.260
we all want to believe, the difference is science eventually has a technique, allows us to say,
02:03:55.100
yeah, but that belief was wrong, and, and, and, and that's the beauty, that's what, that's
02:03:59.820
why I like science, it works in that sense, but we all have to make some hypothesis, but
02:04:05.580
the willingness to dispense with it, even if it's central to our being, and that's what
02:04:09.380
I say to everyone, if an education for everyone should exist, should be, if, if it's at, at
02:04:15.920
its best, should comprise one thing, that at some point, you find that something that's
02:04:20.600
central to your being, something you feel that's central to your existence, you find
02:04:24.760
out to be wrong, because that is the liberation that education should provide, and that's part
02:04:30.060
of my problem with the, yeah, and that's part of my problem with the, the getting back
02:04:34.840
with dogma, is that people aren't allowed to ask questions, because, right, and that's,
02:04:39.600
that's, that's the antithesis of knowledge, anyway.
02:04:44.040
So is that the, is that the antithesis as well of the true religious impulse, is, is to
02:04:49.580
question and search, because you don't look, Israel, Israel means those who struggle with
02:04:55.640
God, right, yeah, it doesn't mean those who have got God right.
02:04:59.500
Well, yeah, no, I mean, one of the reasons, you know, but it's, again, I recognize that part
02:05:02.960
of the reason I feel this way is because I was brought up, I wasn't brought up in a
02:05:05.440
religious family, but I was still brought up in a Jewish family, so it's natural to
02:05:08.460
say, hey, there's nice things about the Jewish religion, and one of the things that I like
02:05:12.380
about Jewish religion is, yeah, you can question, you can question God, and, and, and, and all
02:05:17.640
of that, but, but that doesn't make me think that, but at the same time, it's all still
02:05:21.600
based on a ridiculous fallacy that doesn't make it any more legitimate, that culturally,
02:05:27.520
I, I like the, the cultural, it's like genes, okay, I like, I like the expression, the cultural
02:05:34.040
expression, but the underlying basis of Judaism is just as ridiculous, in fact, just as ridiculous
02:05:40.240
as evil, as vicious, as, as, as Christianity and, and, and Islam and, and most other religions,
02:05:46.580
so I guess I, I, I like the, the, the cultural manifestation, so yeah, there are lots of cultural
02:05:54.380
Jews, but I don't even say that, I don't find myself as, people say, why don't you define
02:05:58.260
yourself as Jewish now, and it's because, well, you know, it doesn't mean anything to
02:06:01.720
me, I mean, maybe from a, from the fact that I was brought up in a certain way, but I, I
02:06:06.420
try not to identify myself by, you know, whether I'm Canadian or American, those things aren't,
02:06:10.720
aren't as important to me as what I'm thinking, and so, so, so, yeah, I don't think.
02:06:17.020
It does strike, it does strike me that you are the, someone who's, who's part of Israel
02:06:21.620
in terms of the struggle. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah. I mean, it blew me away when I, when I knew,
02:06:26.700
when I found out that that was what that word meant, it really shocked me to the, to my
02:06:30.500
depth. Yeah, well, it, it does surprise me, but I don't think you should over, I think,
02:06:34.400
yeah, but I don't think you should over, sometimes I think you, you tend to, it's a nice, it's
02:06:38.460
a nice discovery, but don't read into it more than it is. I mean, you know, after all, the
02:06:43.500
Yahweh was a word that you weren't allowed to say. I mean, it's based, it's based at the
02:06:47.980
same time as being based on questioning, it's also based on absolutes that you're not allowed
02:06:51.920
to disobey, and therefore it is evil in the sense that every other religion is evil, because
02:06:56.000
there shouldn't be, there shouldn't be questions you can't ask, there shouldn't be words you
02:07:00.440
can't use, whether it's Yahweh or Ginger, if, in my, well, look, we should probably leave
02:07:08.700
the rest of this, I would say, because we had a good discussion, and it's a really good
02:07:12.500
place to end. It is a good place to end, and we began, and I look forward to following
02:07:17.000
this, it's really been a true pleasure, really, and I think, I hope for me as well,
02:07:22.340
we'll have found something in our two hours of discussion, if it's a science or otherwise,
02:07:27.160
to see that there's a lot more left to discuss, and I look forward, not just to my podcast,
02:07:31.620
but, you know, having more chance maybe to discuss publicly, too, it's been, it's been
02:07:34.940
a real pleasure, and I, great, great, I really enjoyed it, and thank you very much, thank
02:07:39.260
you very much, I have many more questions for you, but they'll wait, yeah, all right,
02:07:43.120
great, I'm looking forward to when we meet again, good, well, thanks a lot, it would
02:07:46.900
be bad if, in two hours, we, we got through everything. Yes, yes, yes, that wouldn't be