The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 182. From the Beginning to Now ｜ Lawrence Krauss

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.

00:00:12.740 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.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.800 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:54.000 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:56.240 This is season 4, episode 36.

00:00:59.820 In this episode, my dad is joined by Lawrence M. Krauss.

00:01:03.780 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.

00:01:22.280 Lawrence Krauss and dad sit down and explore the world of quantum physics with its complex nature

00:01:27.720 as well as the complexity in systems of matter, time, and energy.

00:01:32.060 I hope you enjoy this episode and have a good week.

00:01:35.100 This episode is sponsored by Allform.

00:01:37.820 Allform is the new company launched by the people who made my lovely mattress, Helix.

00:01:42.540 Allform is creating furniture that's super customizable.

00:01:45.040 Visit allform.com slash Jordan.

00:01:47.840 You can pick your fabric, sofa color, color of the legs, sofa size, and shape to make sure it's perfect for you and your home.

00:01:55.100 They have armchairs and love seats all the way up to an eight-seat sectional, so there's something for everyone.

00:02:00.620 You can also start smaller and buy more seats later on if you want your Allform sofa to grow and change with you, maybe as you get bigger.

00:02:10.100 Their mid-century modern style furniture is very attractive.

00:02:13.920 Allform sofas are also directly shipped to your house with fast free shipping.

00:02:19.640 My producer ordered a giant L-shaped sectional, six sections of brown leather with ottomans and pillows.

00:02:25.480 He loves it, it looks really fancy, but it's also comfortable and totally transformed his living room into a room he deserves.

00:02:32.560 And if getting a sofa without trying it feels iffy, you don't need to worry.

00:02:36.960 You get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it.

00:02:40.040 That's more than three months, and if you don't absolutely love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund.

00:02:46.140 They even offer a forever warranty. Forever.

00:02:49.600 To build your custom sofa, check out allform.com slash Jordan.

00:02:53.980 Allform is offering 20% off all orders for our listeners at allform.com slash Jordan.

00:03:01.300 This episode is also brought to you by Green Chef.

00:03:03.760 If you haven't already heard of it, Green Chef is a meal kit subscription service that delivers certified organic ingredients and step-by-step instructions for creating delicious, clean meals.

00:03:14.820 I vetted them very carefully because I'm hyper-concerned about diet, I guess you could say, so I wasn't going to advertise any old meal delivery kit.

00:03:22.660 Every week you get to choose from a wide array of chef-crafted recipes that fit your lifestyle, whether you're gluten-free, keto, paleo, vegan, or whatever.

00:03:31.380 Their protein is high quality, and their produce is fresh.

00:03:34.360 If you want to go the healthiest route, I'd suggest their paleo option.

00:03:38.300 Everything is pre-measured and prepped, so you don't need to worry about anything going to waste.

00:03:42.580 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.

00:03:48.100 They also have a sweet deal going on for listeners of the JBP podcast.

00:03:53.180 Go to greenchef.com slash jbp100100 and use code jbp100 at checkout to get $100 off, including free shipping.

00:04:04.500 Green Chef is the number one meal kit for eating well.

00:04:08.020 Make sure you go to greenchef.com slash jbp100 and use code jbp100 to get $100 off, including free shipping.

00:04:15.920 Check out their paleo option.

00:04:37.080 Hello, everyone.

00:04:38.960 I'm pleased today, really quite pleased, to have Dr. Lawrence Krauss with me.

00:04:43.580 He is an internationally known theoretical physicist, and I've wanted to talk to an internationally known theoretical physicist for about 30 years,

00:04:52.120 whose research has focused on the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology,

00:04:57.720 including the fundamental structure of matter and the evolution of the universe.

00:05:02.340 Among his numerous important and interesting scientific contributions was his 1995 proposal,

00:05:08.660 that most of the energy of the universe resided in empty space.

00:05:14.360 During his career, Professor Krauss has held endowed professorships and distinguished research appointments

00:05:20.140 at major institutions all over the world, including Harvard, Yale, and CERN.

00:05:25.340 He is the author of 500 publications and 11 popular books, including the international bestsellers,

00:05:32.020 The Physics of Star Trek, and A Universe from Nothing.

00:05:36.000 His most recent book, The Physics of Climate Change, was released in February of this year, 2021.

00:05:41.860 He won a major award from all three of the U.S. National Physics Societies,

00:05:45.340 as well as the 2012 Public Service Award from the National Science Board for his contributions to the public understanding of science.

00:05:53.880 He currently serves as president of the Origins Project Foundation, which celebrates science and culture

00:06:00.660 by connecting scientists, artists, writers, and celebrities with the public through special events,

00:06:06.320 online discussions, and unique travel opportunities.

00:06:08.880 The Foundation produces the Origins podcast, featuring dialogues with some of the most interesting people in the world,

00:06:16.000 discussing issues that address the global challenges of the 21st century.

00:06:20.720 Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.

00:06:23.480 It's great to be with you virtually, Jordan.

00:06:26.060 Okay, so I have a question, and I'm going to jump right into it.

00:06:29.120 I wrote a paper with a couple of my students.

00:06:32.480 I was the final author on the paper.

00:06:34.700 We tried to relate the experience of anxiety to a physical property, to entropy,

00:06:43.020 which I suppose might be well-defined as a physical property.

00:06:46.920 And the idea was, so you tell me what you think of this as a physicist, if you would.

00:06:51.200 Okay.

00:06:51.740 The idea was that human beings are always trying to calculate a path from one point to another.

00:06:57.120 And the length of the path is going to be proportionate, in some sense,

00:07:01.500 to the energy used to undertake the task.

00:07:05.700 The longer the path, the more energy.

00:07:07.540 Now, we generally take a path to something that we regard as valuable,

00:07:10.980 and sources of energy, for example, are extremely valuable to us.

00:07:14.440 And so that might be a shortcut to doing some work, because that's translatable into goods.

00:07:19.420 Anyways, the cost of the voyage is an important consideration.

00:07:24.460 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.

00:07:34.340 And you need a marker for that, a psychological marker.

00:07:37.200 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,

00:07:47.760 is as the uncertainty that increased, you experience this unease.

00:07:51.560 And the unease was a marker of the increased complexity.

00:07:55.560 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.

00:08:04.700 So, the first question I would have is, I guess, first of all, was that a comprehensible explanation?

00:08:11.440 And second of all, is that a reasonable way of construing entropy?

00:08:15.700 Well, yeah, okay.

00:08:18.000 The answer is it's not unreasonable in a general sense.

00:08:21.380 I do wear, I'm very wary.

00:08:24.220 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.

00:08:31.280 And I remember becoming fascinated at the time by various sociologists' attempts to define concepts, borrow from physics to define concepts.

00:08:40.820 And I thought, wow, this is fascinating.

00:08:43.080 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.

00:08:55.500 They sound good in a social science paper, but whether they actually allow predictive value is the important question.

00:09:02.520 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.

00:09:10.360 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,

00:09:18.080 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,

00:09:30.900 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,

00:09:42.580 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,

00:09:57.100 because entropy really describes, and maybe it's probably useful for your listeners who may not be as aware of entropy as you are,

00:10:04.220 that, that what it really describes is a macroscopic system has many different internal states it can be in,

00:10:11.240 and entropy really just describes how many internal states a system has for a given macroscopic configuration of, of, say, temperature and overall energy.

00:10:22.280 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

00:10:32.940 and still be at the same temperature, so there's a lot of entropy associated with, with a, with a, with a macroscopic object,

00:10:39.160 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,

00:10:49.680 like the total energy of the system, or its heat content, or, or, or some other aspect, or its volume,

00:10:55.960 the more internal configurations a system has to explore, the bigger its entropy.

00:11:00.640 So, okay, so I was thinking, for example, I'll give you a narrative example,

00:11:05.820 it's actually apropos, because my car did break down today, but when you're in your car,

00:11:11.240 and you're driving along, and everything is going according to your desires and expectations,

00:11:18.460 then you're generally in a low anxiety state, but then imagine that the car emits a unexpected noise and starts to buck.

00:11:27.660 Now, one of the things I've proposed is that, at that point, you're actually no longer in a car.

00:11:33.760 And that's why you get upset, because the car is actually functionally described as a category,

00:11:38.840 the car is something that gets you from point A to B.

00:11:42.800 And as long as it's performing that function, then that category was a very low resolution category,

00:11:48.080 that category suffices.

00:11:49.520 But as soon as something goes wrong, same thing happens when your computer does something you don't want it to.

00:11:53.620 And there's so many different states that that thing could be in, that your body signals that,

00:12:00.840 that emergent complexity, and it signals the fact that you can no longer compute the cost of being where you are.

00:12:07.320 And, you know, there's fantasies that are associated with that, that seem like attempts to map it, right?

00:12:11.840 Like, this could be wrong, this could be wrong.

00:12:14.560 I might go to a crooked mechanic, I might get ripped off, I might not be able to fix this car,

00:12:18.920 maybe I can't afford it, I won't get to work.

00:12:21.540 Like, the whole, the whole panoply of possibility expands very, very suddenly,

00:12:27.320 and that produces an intense physiological response, which it should do.

00:12:31.980 I mean, we should have physiological responses to fundamental physical realities.

00:12:36.540 We should.

00:12:37.380 Most of us ignore them, and I think that's the point.

00:12:40.140 The physiological response you're talking about is real.

00:12:42.680 But in fact, when the car is operating well, all of those possibilities also exist.

00:12:46.700 You just block them out of your mind.

00:12:48.960 I mean, because the car...

00:12:49.800 Right, well, that's, but that's an interesting thing too, right?

00:12:51.900 Because, but it's appropriate in some sense, we were trying to understand to some degree

00:12:56.420 the conditions under which it's appropriate to block them out of your mind.

00:13:00.260 And it's something like, as long as your predictions, but they're based on your desires,

00:13:06.160 but we won't get into that, as long as your predictions match the ongoing flow of events,

00:13:11.080 then you can take all of the presuppositions that order things for granted.

00:13:16.480 I mean, I agree with you completely that all those things could be going wrong at any time.

00:13:20.480 The same is true of the complexity of your body, right?

00:13:23.600 I mean, it isn't necessarily the case that just because you feel good right now,

00:13:27.840 you're going to feel good the next moment.

00:13:29.800 And there's an endless number of things that can go wrong,

00:13:32.480 but it's also not helpful to be aware of all of those possibilities

00:13:35.720 if they're not likely to happen.

00:13:37.440 So it isn't exactly that you ignore them.

00:13:40.700 It's that you assume their functional significance is zero,

00:13:43.940 as long as your plan is operative.

00:13:47.120 And well, yeah, but I think, you know, it goes back to human reason being the slave of passion.

00:13:52.820 I think the point is we, we, you're right.

00:13:56.300 It's, it's not worthwhile assuming all the negative things that can happen.

00:14:00.340 If it did, you wouldn't do anything, right?

00:14:02.220 If you want to take any action, if you assume all the negative things that could result from it,

00:14:05.520 you probably wouldn't act at all.

00:14:07.440 One of the things that I think we do, and one of the problems we have as a society,

00:14:11.560 in fact, it's related to even my last book, is that, is that we tend,

00:14:15.840 one of the things that science does, which I think is so useful, is it quantifies uncertainty.

00:14:20.580 Uncertainty is a central part of science.

00:14:22.460 And often, too often, journalists and other people talk about uncertainty as if it's a bad thing.

00:14:27.300 In science, it's actually a very good thing, because we can say,

00:14:29.680 we can define, we can quantitatively say how accurate our result is, or how, how likely or unlikely a bunch of possibilities are.

00:14:38.320 I think psychologically, and that, I would say that's an anxiety reduction phenomena.

00:14:44.080 I mean, when you enter into a contract, you're doing that with someone, too, because what you're saying is,

00:14:49.060 well, I could be any number of possibilities, but contractually, I'll limit myself to this manifestation,

00:14:54.540 and that can make you calm, and it can make us able to cooperate.

00:14:58.640 And so, I think that it's not only a scientific theory that provides that function,

00:15:03.640 it's a, it's a, science would be, what, a subset of practical theory,

00:15:08.320 and practical theories, they're very useful, exactly, for that reason.

00:15:12.300 They are, but I think, I personally think more people would, could be,

00:15:15.560 I think it would be a better, it would help people,

00:15:18.500 if they accepted the existence of uncertainty, most, you know, in a more open way.

00:15:23.000 I think we, we, people are afraid of, of uncertainty, and I think if we, you know,

00:15:28.700 including death, and the universe, and all sorts of other things we may talk about,

00:15:32.880 and I think accepting it as a realistic likelihood is a, is a healthy thing,

00:15:39.960 because, again, it relates to some extent to some of the, I think, social problems that are happening now,

00:15:44.520 of kids being coddled.

00:15:45.640 If you accept that bad things can happen, then it, when you do any, you know, it's part of living,

00:15:52.260 then you won't be so anxious when they do, I think.

00:15:55.640 I mean, you won't be so fearful of, of that possibility.

00:15:58.520 Okay, yeah, your car can break down, but the world isn't over.

00:16:01.380 You know, there's a whole series of, of, of other activities you can take place

00:16:05.160 that will allow the world to go on, that will allow you to continue to function,

00:16:08.500 but recognizing it, recognizing at some level, a spectrum of possibilities in advance,

00:16:16.040 in my opinion, and I'm not a psychologist, but in my opinion,

00:16:18.220 and certainly, personally, I, I find it psychologically helpful.

00:16:21.500 Yeah.

00:16:21.720 Well, you do, it is definitely the case that that's promoted among psychologists,

00:16:26.780 I mean, behavioral psychologists.

00:16:28.040 You may imagine that one thing you want is a theoretical configuration that encapsulates uncertainty.

00:16:34.020 That's a belief system, let's say, and, and you measure it by its functional utility.

00:16:38.860 Does it allow you to, to acquire what you desire when you act it out?

00:16:44.180 But you need a, a codicil along with that, which is, well, what do you do when your theory goes wrong?

00:16:49.900 And one of the answers that's been provided to that question from the behavioral perspective,

00:16:55.560 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,

00:17:13.480 and to regenerate your pre-existing models.

00:17:16.420 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

00:17:28.400 and many other areas of human activity that people don't realize.

00:17:31.440 What I try and convince people of, they don't realize, is scientists actually really like to be wrong.

00:17:38.040 At least, you know, and whether personally they do is a different question,

00:17:41.220 but the process of science, it's exciting to be wrong, because it means there's more to learn, first of all.

00:17:48.480 It might mean you discovered something.

00:17:50.380 It means, it often means you've discovered something, and one of the things, you know,

00:17:55.020 I was chairman of a physics department for a long time, and, and then we started a program,

00:17:59.040 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,

00:18:15.400 is teach them how to fail effectively.

00:18:17.940 We give them problem sets that they're guaranteed, that have direct answers,

00:18:21.500 and they can get the correct, and we even give them PhDs where they're more or less guaranteed

00:18:24.940 to at least come to some conclusion.

00:18:26.760 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.

00:18:35.300 How can I use what I've already accumulated to nevertheless provide me something useful,

00:18:39.280 maybe ask a different question, and go around?

00:18:41.660 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

00:18:59.460 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

00:19:20.660 in your research, I'm sure, as in mine.

00:19:23.040 There have been many false starts, many, many roadblocks, many times when you just discover,

00:19:29.480 hey, this problem is really not amenable to being solved, but maybe I can ask a slightly

00:19:34.020 different question.

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

00:20:13.120 or from something I'm doing.

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,

00:20:24.240 that was worthwhile as a consequence of it?

00:20:26.340 Oh yeah.

00:20:27.560 It'd be, yeah.

00:20:28.040 It's hard to imagine when it hasn't happened in some sense.

00:20:30.320 I think the, well, let me give you an example.

00:20:32.880 The, the, the, the one you mentioned, the discovery that the, the energy of empty space

00:20:37.860 is the dominant energy of the universe.

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,

00:21:14.600 which is really the central part of science.

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,

00:21:47.800 was because we built cosmological models.

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,

00:22:01.840 starting from a big, a hot Big Bang.

00:22:04.240 You couldn't form galaxies.

00:22:05.480 There wasn't enough time.

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,

00:22:46.600 likely some of them are wrong.

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.

00:22:56.420 And that's part of the problem.

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.

00:23:59.500 That seems so crazy that surely it's wrong.

00:24:03.460 And there must be something else.

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.

00:24:12.280 Well, mass, but mass is different than energy.

00:24:14.360 Okay.

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.

00:25:02.420 That's staying still.

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?

00:25:17.640 Well, in fact, it's not quite.

00:25:20.160 You're almost there.

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 Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.

00:25:34.540 Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.

00:25:36.520 But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?

00:25:42.200 In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.

00:25:46.000 It's a fundamental right.

00:25:47.180 Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.

00:25:56.660 And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.

00:25:59.860 With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.

00:26:07.240 Now, you might think, what's the big deal?

00:26:09.340 Who'd want my data anyway?

00:26:10.880 Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.

00:26:14.740 That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.

00:26:19.580 Enter ExpressVPN.

00:26:21.340 It's like a digital fortress, creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet.

00:26:26.020 Their encryption is so robust that it would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to crack it.

00:26:31.660 But don't let its power fool you.

00:26:33.380 ExpressVPN is incredibly user-friendly.

00:26:35.840 With just one click, you're protected across all your devices.

00:26:38.840 Phones, laptops, tablets, you name it.

00:26:40.940 That's why I use ExpressVPN whenever I'm traveling or working from a coffee shop.

00:26:45.200 It gives me peace of mind knowing that my research, communications, and personal data are shielded from prying eyes.

00:26:51.160 Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash jordan.

00:26:55.900 That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash jordan.

00:26:59.780 And you can get an extra three months free.

00:27:02.280 ExpressVPN dot com slash jordan.

00:27:04.160 Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.

00:27:14.000 Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.

00:27:18.240 From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.

00:27:25.000 Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.

00:27:32.620 With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.

00:27:44.840 Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.

00:27:53.220 No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.

00:27:58.980 Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.

00:28:05.580 Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.

00:28:10.880 That's shopify.com slash jbp.

00:28:16.560 In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace.

00:28:22.060 But here's the thing. Prayer, the most common tool we have, isn't just about saying whatever comes to mind.

00:28:27.920 It's a skill that needs to be developed.

00:28:30.320 That's where Hallow comes in.

00:28:32.020 As the number one prayer and meditation app, Hallow is launching an exceptional new series called How to Pray.

00:28:37.940 Imagine learning how to use scripture as a launchpad for profound conversations with God,

00:28:42.920 how to properly enter into imaginative prayer,

00:28:45.640 and how to incorporate prayers reaching far back in church history.

00:28:49.160 This isn't your average guided meditation.

00:28:52.140 It's a comprehensive two-week journey into the heart of prayer,

00:28:55.460 led by some of the most respected spiritual leaders of our time.

00:28:59.080 From guests including Bishop Robert Barron, Father Mike Schmitz, and Jonathan Rumi,

00:29:03.620 known for his role as Jesus in the hit series The Chosen,

00:29:06.660 you'll discover prayer techniques that have stood the test of time,

00:29:09.860 while equipping yourself with the tools needed to face life's challenges with renewed strength.

00:29:14.540 Ready to revolutionize your prayer life?

00:29:16.520 You can check out the new series as well as an extensive catalog of guided prayers

00:29:20.700 when you download the Hallow app.

00:29:22.880 Just go to Hallow.com slash Jordan and download the Hallow app today for an exclusive three-month trial.

00:29:28.760 That's Hallow.com slash Jordan.

00:29:31.120 Elevate your prayer life today.

00:29:32.660 This episode is also brought to you by Bio-Optimizers.

00:29:39.620 I cannot stress how much certain electrolytes matter to your health.

00:29:42.660 Sodium, potassium, and magnesium.

00:29:44.840 Bio-Optimizers has a product called Magnesium Breakthrough.

00:29:48.760 I like it because there are no synthetic additives or preservatives.

00:29:51.880 It contains all seven essential forms of magnesium,

00:29:54.600 and it can be taken and should be taken on an empty stomach.

00:29:57.640 Taking it without food in your stomach allows for maximum absorption.

00:30:00.360 Magnesium aids in detoxification, fat metabolism, increasing energy,

00:30:04.980 helping you sleep, and reducing cortisol and stress.

00:30:08.400 I recommend trying Magnesium Breakthrough by Bio-Optimizers for at least 30 days

00:30:13.020 to see how it will make a difference in your mood and stress levels.

00:30:16.500 Today you can get 10% off with a special Jordan B. Peterson Show coupon code

00:30:21.620 when you visit magbreakthrough.com slash jbp and enter code jbp10.

00:30:29.080 All their products are gluten-free, soy-free, lactose-free, non-GMO,

00:30:33.000 free of chemicals, fillers, and made with whole, real, natural ingredients.

00:30:36.740 And they offer a 365-day money-back guarantee on all their products,

00:30:41.180 so you don't have to worry about not liking it.

00:30:44.060 Increasing electrolytes like sodium, potassium, and magnesium

00:30:46.620 can also reduce hunger and make it easier to intermittent fast.

00:30:52.180 Magbreakthrough, that's magbreakthrough.com slash jbp

00:30:56.080 and enter code jbp10 to try their magnesium.

00:31:00.020 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

00:31:06.180 in a hot big bang.

00:31:07.500 If that energy gets stuck in empty space,

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

00:31:21.660 and when you put it in nothing.

00:31:23.680 Okay, so you said a couple of things that I want to follow up on.

00:31:26.740 Okay, sure.

00:31:27.180 And maybe you can take us back.

00:31:28.580 So you said in the last 25 years that cosmology has transformed itself

00:31:31.980 from an art to a science.

00:31:33.440 And so maybe you could tell us the science.

00:31:35.220 Let's go back to the beginning.

00:31:36.480 Oh, sure, okay.

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,

00:31:54.940 if you don't mind.

00:31:56.140 Sure, we'll try and spend less than 14 billion years in describing it.

00:31:59.240 But okay.

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.

00:32:17.820 It was just incredibly surprising.

00:32:18.980 It was so surprising that eventually the observers who confirmed that fact

00:32:22.580 won the Nobel Prize 10 years, 11 years later.

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

00:32:42.860 accept that themselves.

00:32:44.820 Yeah, exactly.

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.

00:33:08.160 But anyway, let's go back to the beginning.

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

00:33:22.800 my understanding of the laws of physics back.

00:33:25.520 Before that, almost anything goes.

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

00:33:38.040 were right or wrong.

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

00:33:44.860 from the beginning of the universe to the end,

00:33:46.920 one that's in your glass of water that you're drinking right now

00:33:49.540 or during this podcast.

00:33:52.280 And I took it back to not T equals zero,

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.

00:34:09.560 So we really can talk a lot about it,

00:34:13.600 but it's not more than talk, in my opinion, right now.

00:34:16.720 But very shortly thereafter, after that time,

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,

00:34:34.760 I suggested that's certainly a possibility.

00:34:36.980 Maybe they preexisted, maybe they don't.

00:34:38.620 Those are metaphysical questions.

00:34:40.680 But what I did show in that book, which is fascinating to me,

00:34:44.080 and the fact that 30 years ago,

00:34:46.120 we wouldn't even have been able to ask the question,

00:34:48.060 much less answer it,

00:34:49.020 is that it's quite likely that our universe could and did

00:34:52.520 spontaneously arise out of nothing,

00:34:54.620 no space, no time, and maybe no laws.

00:34:57.400 And if you ask,

00:34:58.540 what would be the properties of a universe today,

00:35:01.320 14 billion years later,

00:35:02.680 that arose from nothing spontaneously,

00:35:04.880 without any supernatural shenanigans,

00:35:06.640 the properties of that universe would be precisely

00:35:08.800 the properties of the universe we observe.

00:35:10.820 Now, that doesn't prove that's the case.

00:35:12.580 That just makes it plausible.

00:35:13.660 But to me, that's a fascinating thing.

00:35:15.740 And again, we never,

00:35:16.920 30 years ago, we didn't have the tools to even,

00:35:19.420 in some sense, ask that question.

00:35:20.740 And we're still estimating the birth of about 14 billion years ago?

00:35:25.520 13.8.

00:35:26.380 Yeah.

00:35:26.680 Now, if you actually look at the numbers,

00:35:28.440 which we can measure,

00:35:29.640 we now know that number,

00:35:31.140 13.8,

00:35:32.300 to an accuracy of,

00:35:33.700 you know,

00:35:34.100 plus or minus of maybe a few,

00:35:36.280 100 million years or two.

00:35:37.560 13.75,

00:35:38.780 I think,

00:35:39.100 is the most recent number.

00:35:40.640 And it's amazing.

00:35:41.780 The fact that you can get beyond one decimal place in cosmology

00:35:44.820 is just remarkable.

00:35:46.460 And I really,

00:35:47.080 it really is a testament to the developments.

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

00:36:00.040 better than within a factor of two.

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.

00:36:14.140 It's really,

00:36:14.780 it's,

00:36:15.380 it's,

00:36:15.660 it's really a transformation and one worth celebrating,

00:36:18.060 which is what I tried to do in that book.

00:36:20.320 But,

00:36:20.500 but the early picture that the fact that we evolved from a big bang is,

00:36:24.080 it is not in dispute.

00:36:25.580 Let me make that clear.

00:36:26.480 The big bang happened just like the,

00:36:28.940 just like evolution happened and the earth is round and all the other things we know.

00:36:32.600 It,

00:36:32.740 there's no doubt that we be,

00:36:34.440 that the early history of the universe was a hot big bang.

00:36:37.820 Now,

00:36:38.640 so,

00:36:40.160 and in fact,

00:36:40.800 everything we now see all,

00:36:43.140 you know,

00:36:43.680 every,

00:36:44.280 all the galaxies we now see and all the particles in those galaxies,

00:36:48.880 the hundred billion stars in each galaxy,

00:36:50.640 the hundred billion galaxies,

00:36:52.180 all of that material was contained in a region,

00:36:55.760 smaller than the size of a single atom.

00:36:57.900 And that's just so,

00:36:59.900 okay.

00:37:00.040 Let me ask you a question about that.

00:37:01.840 Sure.

00:37:02.160 I mean,

00:37:03.000 is it reasonable to conceptualize something like that as having a size?

00:37:10.380 Because we're,

00:37:11.300 we're considering size within the universe.

00:37:13.480 And it's almost when,

00:37:14.700 when you say that the universe at the beginning had a size,

00:37:17.460 it's like,

00:37:17.860 it was an object in a universe that had a size,

00:37:20.340 but.

00:37:21.460 It's a really good question.

00:37:22.620 And I should be clear in my language.

00:37:25.520 The universe could be infinite.

00:37:27.640 I want to ask as a physicist and,

00:37:29.920 and Wheeler would have liked this Einstein,

00:37:31.420 certainly that operational questions.

00:37:33.080 I don't know how big the universe is,

00:37:34.600 whether it's in for not,

00:37:35.420 but what I do know is how big is the visible universe.

00:37:39.560 So if I ask you how big was the region,

00:37:42.700 which now comprises the visible universe today at an earlier time,

00:37:47.180 that,

00:37:47.440 that has a good,

00:37:48.460 that's,

00:37:48.840 that's well-defined that region,

00:37:50.740 the size of an atom could have existed.

00:37:52.400 And a universe would choose infinite.

00:37:53.680 Even then there could have been,

00:37:54.880 it could have been an infinitely dense universe that was infinitely big.

00:37:58.240 Okay.

00:37:59.200 So all we can ask,

00:38:00.880 and this is really a big change also from when I was a student,

00:38:04.100 we,

00:38:04.360 because we used to,

00:38:06.180 when I was a kid or when I was even a student,

00:38:08.480 we talk about universe and universe would mean everything,

00:38:11.300 a kind of ill-defined quantity,

00:38:12.880 everything.

00:38:13.300 What is the heck is everything?

00:38:14.560 Now we're much more well-defined.

00:38:16.100 We say our universe,

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

00:38:27.380 to interact into the future,

00:38:29.640 even if the future is infinitely long.

00:38:31.780 And that may not be everything,

00:38:33.860 right?

00:38:34.140 That could be just a small region of a much bigger thing,

00:38:36.720 which we now call a multiverse.

00:38:38.420 So,

00:38:38.860 so it's reasonable to describe our universe as that region into which we could

00:38:42.080 have had causal contact,

00:38:43.340 namely,

00:38:43.560 which,

00:38:43.920 which cause could have produced effect,

00:38:47.060 right?

00:38:47.300 And if there's any region outside of it,

00:38:49.240 which we can never affect or be affected by,

00:38:52.460 that's might as well not be considered part of our universe,

00:38:54.960 right?

00:38:55.240 And that distance,

00:38:55.880 that causal,

00:38:56.620 causally interactable distance,

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.

00:39:03.920 Right.

00:39:04.020 So for example,

00:39:04.680 in the early history of the universe,

00:39:06.100 that's called the horizon.

00:39:07.720 In analogy with the earth,

00:39:09.000 when you look out at the earth,

00:39:09.940 you can,

00:39:10.400 you know,

00:39:10.580 when it curves,

00:39:11.120 you can only see out to a certain distance.

00:39:12.640 And,

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.

00:39:19.000 Right.

00:39:19.560 And,

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.

00:39:24.880 So operationally,

00:39:25.700 it's a much better definition of a universe to be that,

00:39:28.120 which we can be causally affected by.

00:39:29.920 And so,

00:39:31.000 and,

00:39:31.240 and,

00:39:31.500 and because that,

00:39:32.360 that changes with time,

00:39:33.860 that's,

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,

00:39:39.060 in the last few years.

00:39:40.200 Does that mean that our,

00:39:41.320 are the universe that causally affects us is we're at the center of it?

00:39:46.200 No.

00:39:47.020 Well,

00:39:47.260 we're all,

00:39:47.600 well,

00:39:47.800 actually,

00:39:48.200 yes and no.

00:39:48.860 We're always at the center of our own universe,

00:39:50.980 right?

00:39:51.560 I mean,

00:39:51.960 psychologically and physically.

00:39:53.380 Well,

00:39:53.700 well,

00:39:54.000 but the,

00:39:54.400 because of the causality argument that you just laid out,

00:39:57.320 it seems to imply that directly because.

00:39:59.160 Well,

00:39:59.300 it,

00:39:59.700 it certainly does in the sense that if,

00:40:01.760 if you want to think of it and that,

00:40:04.140 this is one of the confusions that many confusions,

00:40:06.600 which I may add to during this podcast,

00:40:08.500 but we'll try not to is that,

00:40:11.140 you know,

00:40:11.320 when we look out at this thing called the cosmic microwave background radiation,

00:40:14.560 it's,

00:40:15.440 it's a residual radiation left over from the hot big bang.

00:40:19.620 And it comes from a sphere.

00:40:21.940 If you wish,

00:40:22.880 that's located with us at the center,

00:40:24.640 because it,

00:40:26.220 it,

00:40:26.640 it early on in the history universe,

00:40:28.800 when it was hot and dense,

00:40:30.140 light interacted with matter.

00:40:31.720 And basically it followed a,

00:40:33.180 you know,

00:40:33.380 a random walk.

00:40:34.400 It wasn't free to travel because all the universe was charged and light would interact and bounce off things.

00:40:39.280 But at a certain point,

00:40:40.740 when the universe was about 300,000 years old,

00:40:43.740 matter became neutral.

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.

00:40:53.060 And that meant that that radiation,

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.

00:41:04.220 And when we look out,

00:41:05.840 basically we see space and we,

00:41:08.220 and the light,

00:41:08.740 you know,

00:41:09.040 could travel and travel,

00:41:10.140 travel.

00:41:10.300 But if we're looking back further in time,

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,

00:41:19.300 we're kind of sort of going to see a wall,

00:41:21.220 if you wish,

00:41:21.760 because we can't see before that time because the light,

00:41:24.900 you know,

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.

00:41:30.960 And of course,

00:41:31.600 so when I look at the microwave background from earth,

00:41:34.020 I'm looking,

00:41:35.020 if you wish,

00:41:35.460 at the sphere located almost 13.

00:41:38.200 Well,

00:41:38.620 actually it's because the expansion of the universe,

00:41:40.880 it's more than,

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.

00:41:47.560 But don't worry about that,

00:41:49.060 that complexity.

00:41:50.100 We're looking at a sphere located a certain,

00:41:52.740 let's say 20,

00:41:54.100 10 to 20 billion years,

00:41:56.340 light years away from us in all directions.

00:41:58.360 And we literally can't see beyond that.

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,

00:42:07.720 located a hundred million light years away,

00:42:13.000 the,

00:42:13.180 the literally the cosmic microwave background that they would see would be slightly different because they'd be sent.

00:42:19.460 It'd be a sphere centered on different places.

00:42:21.060 And that's why actually the,

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.

00:42:33.120 And so the picture,

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.

00:42:48.820 But the specifics,

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.

00:42:59.100 So,

00:42:59.360 okay.

00:42:59.500 Okay.

00:42:59.800 So,

00:43:00.040 so that does correct me if I'm wrong.

00:43:02.560 That does seem to imply that.

00:43:04.340 So the universe is a globe around us,

00:43:06.720 let's say our visible universe,

00:43:08.380 a visible universe.

00:43:09.160 Sorry.

00:43:09.420 I want to be precise with my words too.

00:43:11.060 And so I move halfway across the universe and the globe is still there,

00:43:15.180 but now it's shifted that far.

00:43:17.120 And so then I could move another halfway and it would shift again.

00:43:20.680 So this globe moves with the observer,

00:43:26.340 so to speak.

00:43:27.760 And that certainly seems to imply that it extends beyond the globe that we see,

00:43:33.280 because if you move it,

00:43:34.600 it moves.

00:43:36.120 So,

00:43:36.720 and exactly.

00:43:37.620 Well,

00:43:37.760 and it wouldn't if there was some edge,

00:43:39.720 but there's no evidence of any edge.

00:43:41.500 Okay.

00:43:41.980 I think that the point is that even before the weirdness of empty space and

00:43:48.580 inflation,

00:43:50.140 we was recognized that the part of the universe we see is unlikely to be the

00:43:54.820 everything there is.

00:43:56.420 We're limited in what we can see because of what's seeable,

00:44:00.300 just like being on earth.

00:44:01.720 And it's limited because of the speed of light and,

00:44:04.360 and the age of the universe,

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.

00:44:14.040 Let me throw in a wrinkle.

00:44:15.580 If that was clear,

00:44:16.720 now let me muddy it.

00:44:19.120 Okay.

00:44:19.760 Because it used to be again,

00:44:21.840 sensible when I,

00:44:23.400 even in my early years as a scientist,

00:44:25.780 that the,

00:44:26.540 that we'd assume the longer,

00:44:28.180 the older the universe,

00:44:29.240 the longer we live,

00:44:30.400 the older the universe is,

00:44:31.500 the more we'll be able to see,

00:44:33.060 right?

00:44:34.080 Because light can travel further.

00:44:36.200 The universe is expanding,

00:44:37.640 but we thought at the time that that expansion was slowing down.

00:44:41.100 And therefore the,

00:44:42.400 the,

00:44:42.640 the longer we wait,

00:44:44.340 the more we'll see because light from further and further objects can get to

00:44:47.880 us.

00:44:49.120 What's really crazy now is because we recognize that apparently empty space is

00:44:56.200 dominating the energy of the universe.

00:44:57.580 that's causing the universe to expand ever faster,

00:45:01.400 faster and faster and faster.

00:45:03.820 And what it means is there are parts of the universe that are literally escaping from

00:45:09.740 our site.

00:45:10.280 There are parts of the universe that we,

00:45:12.220 that we will never be able to see.

00:45:14.840 And moreover,

00:45:15.640 even more so,

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

00:45:29.200 from us faster than the speed of light and,

00:45:32.080 and,

00:45:32.380 and are now invisible.

00:45:33.600 So the longer we wait,

00:45:34.820 the less we'll see because more and more galaxies will be literally

00:45:39.040 disappearing behind the horizon.

00:45:41.040 The longer we wait.

00:45:42.620 I wrote some papers about that.

00:45:44.260 And once a scientific American article,

00:45:46.240 and I think some of my books that eventually the far future of the universe,

00:45:50.060 I know we said we'd start out the past,

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.

00:46:01.860 One galaxy,

00:46:02.700 we saw one galaxy,

00:46:03.640 the Milky Way galaxy.

00:46:05.420 Okay.

00:46:05.860 And beyond that,

00:46:07.160 it was assumed to be eternal,

00:46:08.580 empty,

00:46:09.040 dark space that just was static.

00:46:11.660 And Edwin Hubble,

00:46:12.980 who was famous for discovering the universe was expanding,

00:46:15.840 did something before that in 1925.

00:46:18.020 He first realized that in fact,

00:46:20.100 there were other galaxies.

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.

00:46:32.580 Suddenly our galaxy wasn't all there was.

00:46:34.880 There were other galaxies.

00:46:35.960 And then of course,

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,

00:46:42.080 and there'll still be stars and say,

00:46:44.120 even up to 10 trillion years from now,

00:46:45.760 there'll probably still be stars in existence.

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.

00:46:57.640 At that time,

00:46:58.260 it'll be a very different looking galaxy because the Andromeda galaxy will have collided with it

00:47:02.500 and all sorts of things will happen.

00:47:04.100 But they'd look out.

00:47:05.480 And the interesting thing is,

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,

00:47:16.020 a universe with one galaxy.

00:47:18.000 And there'll be no evidence that the universe is expanding,

00:47:20.040 no direct evidence,

00:47:21.560 because the galaxies that are now markers that we can measure their motion away from us,

00:47:25.900 they'll have disappeared.

00:47:27.080 And even,

00:47:27.860 it turns out,

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,

00:47:37.820 well,

00:47:37.920 really,

00:47:38.180 I can understand what we're seeing if we assume our universe began in a Big Bang,

00:47:42.880 observationally,

00:47:43.640 basically all the current observational markers of an expanding universe will have disappeared.

00:47:48.180 And poetically,

00:47:49.140 in the far future,

00:47:49.840 they'll think we lived in the mistaken universe we thought we lived in in 1925.

00:47:54.200 Because again,

00:47:55.120 it's kind of interesting.

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,

00:48:09.120 who first really suggested the Big Bang.

00:48:13.020 And when it was later shown to be true,

00:48:18.900 for a while,

00:48:19.460 the Catholic Church got quite excited,

00:48:21.060 because they argued that here was observational evidence that there was a beginning to the universe,

00:48:25.480 as they'd been arguing.

00:48:26.960 It doesn't provide,

00:48:28.180 I would argue,

00:48:28.820 it doesn't provide any such evidence for the universe they discussed.

00:48:31.680 But it was an interesting fact that science,

00:48:34.400 the model was that the universe was more or less static and eternal on large scales,

00:48:39.200 and it was completely wrong.

00:48:40.800 And you might say,

00:48:42.180 and this is where people often write to me,

00:48:44.080 they say,

00:48:44.420 well,

00:48:44.660 how do we know our current model isn't completely wrong?

00:48:47.880 You know,

00:48:48.200 that we had a Big Bang.

00:48:50.520 And the answer is,

00:48:51.900 then there was no data,

00:48:54.000 basically.

00:48:54.980 And,

00:48:55.300 you know,

00:48:55.780 whatever,

00:48:56.300 one of the biggest misconceptions about science,

00:48:58.660 and scientific revolutions,

00:49:00.000 in particular revolutions in physics,

00:49:01.900 is the misconception that scientific revolutions do away with everything that went before them.

00:49:06.700 Mm-hmm.

00:49:07.440 Just like political...

00:49:08.340 They're more like Piagetian revolutions, right?

00:49:09.920 Yeah,

00:49:10.100 well,

00:49:10.420 in fact,

00:49:10.700 I would argue that even political revolutions never do away with everything that went before them.

00:49:14.020 But in this case,

00:49:14.920 they certainly don't.

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.

00:49:26.080 But if I hold a ball up now,

00:49:27.320 it'll fall just as well as described.

00:49:29.100 And I can describe a cannonball.

00:49:30.320 I can even,

00:49:30.700 for the most part,

00:49:31.660 calculate how astronauts are going to go to orbit without needing anything beyond Newton.

00:49:35.480 Yeah,

00:49:35.620 the developmental psychologist Piaget studied Kuhn's scientific revolutions,

00:49:39.920 and his objection,

00:49:41.540 essentially,

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.

00:49:50.660 Exactly.

00:49:50.800 So it could be revolutionary,

00:49:51.920 but it still subsumes it.

00:49:53.640 Exactly.

00:49:54.200 And that's exactly what happens in science.

00:49:55.940 So it's not as...

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.

00:50:05.180 What people don't realize is,

00:50:06.700 or don't give credit to,

00:50:07.960 is that there's a lot we do understand.

00:50:09.860 And any new picture,

00:50:11.980 a new understanding,

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,

00:50:27.080 or the end of time in 100 years,

00:50:29.740 may be very different.

00:50:31.460 But we know the...

00:50:33.540 It's not...

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.

00:50:38.240 So, you know, that's going to remain true.

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,

00:50:48.720 if it even makes sense to describe a before,

00:50:51.220 and it may not make sense because time itself could have originated...

00:50:55.180 Well, let me ask you about that for a second.

00:50:57.040 Sure, sure.

00:50:57.620 Well, I thought a lot about time a long time ago.

00:51:02.420 And it struck me that time is...

00:51:06.620 We mark time by change.

00:51:09.260 And so then I thought, well, why not dispense with time as a concept if we mark it by change?

00:51:16.820 Time is average change.

00:51:19.720 If nothing changes, there's no time.

00:51:22.440 So if there's nothing happening, there's no time.

00:51:25.020 There's no before that time.

00:51:26.400 There's an event.

00:51:28.080 And then if there's no event till the next event,

00:51:30.120 there's no duration between those two things,

00:51:32.600 if there's only that event and the next event.

00:51:35.720 So, I mean, is there any reason to assume that there's anything about time

00:51:39.000 that is independent of change?

00:51:41.560 Well, you know, that's a...

00:51:42.820 Obviously, it's a very deep question.

00:51:45.160 And a lot of people spend a lot of time on time,

00:51:47.100 I think far too much time talking about time.

00:51:49.160 In physics, time and space are not different.

00:51:52.140 They're both, if you wish, parameters that simply describe when events happen and where they happen.

00:51:59.820 And that's it.

00:52:02.600 And it turns out that that's the playing field on which the laws of nature play out.

00:52:09.320 The playing field happens to be in space-time.

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.

00:52:28.920 But you could argue that time is a parameter,

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.

00:52:46.620 And then if there's no change, then you'd say,

00:52:50.780 okay, well, that's...

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,

00:53:15.880 well, that's it.

00:53:17.180 There's no time there.

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.

00:53:24.380 That's why I do refine it.

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,

00:53:34.840 and to some extent it's physics.

00:53:37.040 Because really what we're interested in is describing the process of events,

00:53:42.640 and particularly the prediction 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.

00:54:05.940 All right, so back to the beginning.

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,

00:54:27.700 so they just disappeared?

00:54:29.920 Everything just disappeared?

00:54:31.200 That's a good question.

00:54:33.600 And we still ask—

00:54:34.420 Does that have anything to do with uncertainty,

00:54:37.580 with the fact that there isn't—

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.

00:54:53.040 And too few people—

00:54:54.220 You know, journalists always want answers,

00:54:55.540 and people are always disappointed when they say,

00:54:56.880 we don't know.

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,

00:55:02.540 because it means there's more to discover.

00:55:04.320 And that's wonderful.

00:55:05.840 So the answer is, we really don't—

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

00:55:18.000 and got me interested in the whole subject.

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

00:55:30.160 between particles and causing grace.

00:55:32.000 As far as we can see—

00:55:32.640 And there are real tests we can do.

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,

00:55:38.660 and they were separated.

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— 0.78

00:55:59.060 sitting in anti-cars making anti-love and all the rest.

00:56:01.300 It wouldn't be different for the most part.

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

00:56:22.920 and produce particles of matter, okay?

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.

00:56:36.460 If two photons at very high energy—

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?

00:56:48.380 The photon doesn't have any charge,

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?

00:57:33.600 Well, that is the interesting question.

00:57:38.080 And it turns out, by the way—

00:57:39.660 and I know you're interested in what you would call Soviet things.

00:57:43.860 You would like the art and everything else.

00:57:45.740 And you probably—and Alexander Solzhenitsyn—

00:57:49.060 No, I collect it. I don't know if I like it.

00:57:50.920 Yeah, okay, you collect it.

00:57:52.300 But I do collect it.

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

00:58:24.620 which just had matter.

00:58:26.620 They're called the Sakharov conditions.

00:58:28.060 And there are three of them.

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.

00:58:36.660 So nothing's going to happen, right?

00:58:38.220 Okay?

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.

00:58:43.560 Because if the principle of uncertainty holds,

00:58:45.860 you wouldn't have thermal equilibrium.

00:58:47.120 You'd have unavoidable variation.

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.

00:59:00.500 In fact, what you just said there is 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.

00:59:10.820 And there are variations.

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.

00:59:23.660 So there's lots of things happening,

00:59:25.640 but they're all happening in equal opposite ways.

00:59:28.160 So then no global properties are changing.

00:59:30.940 Okay?

00:59:31.800 Okay.

00:59:31.980 And certainly the amount of matter in the universe is a global property.

00:59:35.520 Okay?

00:59:36.120 So thermal equilibrium—but you—okay.

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.

00:59:52.060 Okay?

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.

01:00:00.820 Okay?

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,

01:00:13.360 are related to two symmetries of nature.

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.

01:00:22.900 It's just an arbitrary thing.

01:00:25.220 And it turns out there's no difference between left and right.

01:00:27.300 Okay?

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

01:00:49.460 and antiparticles to one that has none.

01:00:50.900 And the third is something called—well, we call it baryon number non-conservation,

01:00:57.940 but basically, matter is made of protons.

01:01:01.920 Okay?

01:01:02.940 And, you know, electrons are a little—obviously, protons and electrons wake up atoms,

01:01:06.820 but electrons are very little mass.

01:01:08.500 Most—most of the mass in your body is protons and neutrons.

01:01:11.760 They're called baryons.

01:01:12.920 Okay?

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.

01:01:42.520 That—okay?

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

01:02:26.740 by natural processes that we could describe.

01:02:30.100 In fact, we know there were some of them.

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,

01:03:01.840 that's what we call a phase transition.

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

01:03:59.320 momentarily before the transition completes.

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.

01:04:18.300 I see. I see.

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

01:04:55.440 we don't yet have.

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

01:05:11.760 what's important.

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.

01:05:34.820 I should be a little more careful.

01:05:36.780 We know phase transitions happened in the early universe.

01:05:39.140 We know CP is violated.

01:05:41.120 Baryon number, we don't know to be violated.

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.

01:05:54.080 So it's not implausible.

01:05:55.960 It's certainly not implausible.

01:05:57.500 And so all those things exist.

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

01:06:29.280 more particles of matter than antimatter.

01:06:32.620 And that's all you need.

01:06:34.140 You might say, why is that the case?

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

01:07:03.220 of matter.

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

01:07:14.640 all of space for every proton in the universe.

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

01:07:29.200 in a billion.

01:07:29.640 But that teeny bit of matter is enough to make all of the stars and galaxies in you

01:07:33.140 and I.

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,

01:07:45.840 you know, the sun went around us.

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

01:08:01.220 universe.

01:08:01.660 And now we find that most of the particles in the universe aren't even made of the same

01:08:05.280 stuff as we are.

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

01:08:35.160 make me feel sad.

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.

01:08:56.100 I find it rather the opposite.

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

01:09:11.680 is a loss.

01:09:12.620 But to me, losing my faith in those fairy tales, at least, or those incorrect explanations

01:09:20.660 is not a loss, it's a gain.

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.

01:09:31.320 But what am I to do?

01:09:32.400 I mean, how can I deal with this loss?

01:09:34.320 And I think they're conditioned to feel like they have a loss.

01:09:38.480 I don't think so.

01:09:39.500 I think you can, at least, you can psychologically create a picture where you don't feel that's

01:09:45.760 a loss.

01:09:46.100 You feel, in fact, you've gained something.

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

01:10:06.320 which is much more valuable.

01:10:07.860 And of course, it's a rationalization, probably, but it allows me to deal with those things

01:10:12.240 anyway.

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

01:10:22.680 you about the structure of the universe.

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.

01:10:31.300 I can't wait to have you on my podcast.

01:10:33.160 Maybe we'll be together in the same room. 0.95

01:10:35.220 And then I will torture you, okay? 0.93

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

01:10:58.560 say?

01:10:58.940 The allowances that the current laws make have a remarkably powerful effect before that.

01:11:05.120 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

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

01:11:34.160 us.

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

01:11:46.180 became dominated by matter.

01:11:48.140 Even when the universe was one second old and a temperature of about 10 billion degrees,

01:11:53.900 there weren't even elements.

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.

01:12:08.660 But elements didn't exist.

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.

01:12:42.840 It's very fortunate.

01:12:44.400 It turns out, if you want to believe in coincidence, this is really quite amazing.

01:12:47.820 It's very fortunate that it works out.

01:12:50.640 The neutrons live about 10 minutes.

01:12:52.880 I mean, if I had a neutron here and held in my hand in 10 minutes, on average, it would

01:12:56.280 decay.

01:12:56.880 Well, you and I have more neutrons in our body than protons.

01:12:59.640 How can that be the case?

01:13:00.820 We've been talking for a lot more than 10 minutes, and I'm sure your listeners are quite

01:13:03.840 aware of that.

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

01:13:28.800 some of that was created in the universe, too.

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

01:13:44.820 these two neutrons.

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

01:13:54.860 of stars.

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,

01:14:13.460 iron, all of those things.

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

01:14:37.740 was created inside of a star.

01:14:41.020 And that means in order to get into...

01:14:42.180 Forged inside of a star.

01:14:42.960 And not just forged inside of a star, but in order to get into your body, that star had

01:14:46.280 to explode.

01:14:47.800 So all the atoms in your body, and in fact, probably they've been in many stars, because

01:14:51.600 you've probably been in many generations.

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.

01:15:02.960 You are a stardust.

01:15:04.400 I mean, you know, it sounds... 0.91

01:15:07.480 It's so remarkable that it sounds cliched.

01:15:10.160 Yeah, exactly.

01:15:10.880 It's like a discussion of love.

01:15:14.440 Yeah, exactly.

01:15:15.020 It is the case.

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.

01:15:22.080 I just find that amazing.

01:15:23.920 Anyway, it doesn't matter.

01:15:24.840 Whatever turns you on.

01:15:26.400 So what do you think...

01:15:27.480 Okay, so now we're at the point in the story where atoms are beginning to form, and they're

01:15:32.260 starting with their simple forms.

01:15:34.440 And that's within the first three minutes.

01:15:36.520 Yeah, first five minutes or so.

01:15:38.000 First five minutes.

01:15:38.900 And so it's hydrogen first, and then it's helium, and then it's...

01:15:43.900 Let me even correct you again, because it's...

01:15:46.200 Yeah.

01:15:46.220 Well, correct me.

01:15:47.360 The nuclei of atoms form.

01:15:49.520 But in fact, there were no atoms until the universe was 300,000 years old.

01:15:54.400 Because it was so hot that when...

01:15:55.900 Too hot.

01:15:56.400 Atoms exist when protons and neutrons capture electrons, right?

01:15:59.900 Then you get a whole atom.

01:16:00.720 But in the early history of the universe, it was so hot that when an electron got captured,

01:16:04.080 it got knocked out again.

01:16:05.460 So there were only these nuclei, which were charged of protons, and electrons, and it was

01:16:11.860 a plasma of these things.

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

01:16:27.920 and neutral hydrogen would form.

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

01:16:43.040 and matter is kind of decoupled.

01:16:44.920 And that was a momentous period.

01:16:46.920 And that was the first moment that neutral atoms began when the universe was 300,000 years old.

01:16:50.280 Oh, that's at about 300,000 years.

01:16:52.420 Yeah.

01:16:53.100 And then not much happened.

01:16:54.900 I mean, and then, you know, from 300,000 years, what happened is the universe cooled

01:16:58.420 and cooled and cooled.

01:17:00.260 And really, it was the dark ages, if you wish, because, you know, there were no stars.

01:17:07.540 It was just matter and radiation.

01:17:09.500 But the radiation was...

01:17:10.440 And it's fairly uniformly distributed, and it's expanding and cooling.

01:17:14.080 Unbelievably uniformly distributed.

01:17:15.500 This was one of the big surprises.

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

01:17:42.980 causal contact before today.

01:17:45.020 That's really important.

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.

01:17:54.660 It's remarkable.

01:17:55.680 The universe is unbelievably...

01:17:57.120 And that's the cosmic background microwave radiation that you're talking about.

01:18:00.040 It's the same in every direction.

01:18:01.400 It's the same in every direction.

01:18:02.660 And since matter was coupled to radiation, the more or less distribution of matter is uniform

01:18:07.000 around the universe.

01:18:07.760 But now it's not, because you and I are, you know, in different places, and the distribution

01:18:11.540 of matter in our room...

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.

01:18:19.260 Exactly.

01:18:19.660 Because gravity is attractive.

01:18:21.260 That's the key point.

01:18:22.540 So if you have small lumps anywhere, a little small excess here will begin to grow.

01:18:28.140 And then that snowballs, so to speak.

01:18:31.120 And that's exactly the case.

01:18:32.720 There were small...

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.

01:18:40.500 Yeah.

01:18:40.840 That's where I was thinking about the quantum uncertainty story.

01:18:43.880 It's not the earlier...

01:18:45.040 We are literally quantum lumps, if you wish.

01:18:47.860 In order to get those...

01:18:49.680 Because there's quantum discontinuity, uncertainty...

01:18:53.680 Early on, on microscopic scales...

01:18:55.620 That causes clumping.

01:18:57.240 Well, eventually...

01:18:59.100 Or it allows clumping to occur.

01:19:00.720 Yeah.

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

01:19:08.760 an atom.

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

01:19:26.160 because they were lumps.

01:19:27.320 So we really are macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics, if you want to think of

01:19:31.980 it that way.

01:19:32.000 Okay, so let me ask you a question about that quantum fluctuation.

01:19:34.980 Sure.

01:19:35.120 So there is uncertainty of location and speed.

01:19:40.840 Yes?

01:19:41.240 I've got that right.

01:19:42.900 Well, location...

01:19:43.540 You can measure one, but not the other.

01:19:44.980 Yeah.

01:19:45.320 Yeah, there's uncertainty in the combination.

01:19:47.760 Okay, but that uncertainty is real enough so that in that relatively uniform background,

01:19:52.740 there were actual, let's say, fluctuations.

01:19:55.640 There were discontinuities of position that were sufficient to cause...

01:19:59.920 There not only were, but they're inevitable.

01:20:02.500 They're required.

01:20:03.620 Right, right.

01:20:04.080 And the way that gets...

01:20:04.500 But that's a real...

01:20:06.340 That's an actual phenomenon.

01:20:08.000 Oh, it's even more...

01:20:09.000 It's not only more real and more...

01:20:10.800 But it's also more wild than you just said.

01:20:12.920 What you just said may not surprise people.

01:20:14.760 But what's even weirder is when you go to the smallest scales, there's another uncertainty

01:20:22.000 principle in quantum mechanics.

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

01:20:33.520 to measure its energy is very uncertain.

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.

01:20:43.440 Okay?

01:20:44.640 And that means for very short times, empty space can burp out particles.

01:20:51.580 And empty particles.

01:20:52.600 You say, well, that violates the conservation of energy because there was nothing there to

01:20:56.200 begin with.

01:20:57.000 And, you know, when I burp out an electron and a positron, suddenly there are particles.

01:21:02.500 Is that how black holes evaporate?

01:21:05.100 That is a mechanism by which black holes can be thought of as evaporating if you want to

01:21:09.080 get there.

01:21:10.040 Right.

01:21:10.280 Because the particles pop up spontaneously.

01:21:13.580 Some of them fall into the black hole.

01:21:15.160 That's one way of describing Hawking radiation.

01:21:17.580 It's not a bad analogy.

01:21:19.180 It's not a bad...

01:21:19.620 It's got problems, but it's not a bad analogy.

01:21:21.840 But in real...

01:21:22.520 I'm glad I'm not completely off the wall here.

01:21:24.540 No, no, no, no, no, no.

01:21:25.540 You're...

01:21:26.420 Dabbling around.

01:21:27.480 No, you're...

01:21:28.300 So far, you haven't...

01:21:29.420 Accept your questions about time.

01:21:31.060 You're right on track.

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

01:21:44.460 existence, they don't violate anything.

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...

01:21:54.040 It sounds like something like potential.

01:21:56.480 Well, it's...

01:21:56.920 Yeah, or...

01:21:57.620 To be...

01:21:58.320 Well, that's right.

01:21:59.540 They have potential to do things.

01:22:01.160 But to be less generous, they sound like talking about how many angels can dance on the

01:22:04.820 head of a pin, right?

01:22:05.680 Right.

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.

01:22:13.080 That's what's remarkable.

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

01:22:32.900 emitted by hydrogen, right?

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

01:22:58.500 work.

01:22:59.160 It turns out the energy levels aren't exactly what you'd think they were.

01:23:02.300 Why is that?

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.

01:23:19.380 In the atom.

01:23:20.460 In the atom.

01:23:21.120 Within the confines of the electron orbit.

01:23:22.960 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

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.

01:23:47.240 So does that make every atom somewhat unique?

01:23:52.740 Well, no, yes and no.

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.

01:24:57.600 Okay?

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...

01:25:07.640 Of course.

01:25:08.240 It was, it 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.

01:25:16.640 Exactly.

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

01:25:24.520 cause empty space to have energy.

01:25:26.640 In fact, generically, you would expect empty space to have energy.

01:25:30.380 So you might say, what's so surprising?

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.

01:25:39.260 You might say, well, that's...

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

01:26:03.200 U-shaped well, right?

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. 0.74

01:26:14.040 At the lowest energy state, right?

01:26:16.520 It'll lose energy by friction.

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.

01:26:29.940 It's a little bit above the bottom.

01:26:33.380 And so the ground state, the lowest energy state that an electron can have trapped in

01:26:38.340 a well is not at the bottom of the well.

01:26:40.940 It's actually, it's actually has a little bit more energy than the bottom.

01:26:44.040 Because the energy states are quantized.

01:26:46.260 Classically, the energy...

01:26:47.260 So that means it can't get to zero?

01:26:48.940 It can't get to zero.

01:26:50.340 That's a generic property of an electron in a potential well.

01:26:54.120 It's an amazing fact.

01:26:55.380 So that's called the ground state energy in quantum mechanics.

01:26:58.940 And is there a why to that?

01:27:01.420 I mean, you said it's because it's quantized.

01:27:03.200 Well, I presume that's an explanation, but it's not an explanation I understand.

01:27:07.180 I mean, I know that...

01:27:08.220 Okay, let me give you a heuristic explanation that you might like better.

01:27:11.820 Okay.

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?

01:27:23.020 So the electron has a wavelength, okay?

01:27:27.380 I don't know if you play music.

01:27:28.680 Do you play music at all?

01:27:30.140 Badly.

01:27:30.820 Me too.

01:27:31.420 Very badly, but I like to play.

01:27:33.120 Okay.

01:27:34.020 So when I hit a piano key, I hear a note.

01:27:39.700 Why?

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

01:27:50.640 their wavelength to the length of that string.

01:27:52.780 That's called resonance, right?

01:27:54.860 So, and that's why, because the wave goes along the string, it comes back, then it bounces

01:27:59.680 back and comes along and reinforces.

01:28:02.120 But only when the wavelength, in that case, is exactly equal to the length of the string

01:28:06.100 will you have resonance.

01:28:07.720 Will the string be able to persist?

01:28:10.460 Okay, now, electron has a wavelength.

01:28:12.480 And the way to think about a stationary state of an electron is it's like a resonant note

01:28:19.100 in a musical instrument.

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?

01:28:40.460 That's not possible.

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

01:28:48.700 if its wavelength were infinitely big.

01:28:52.380 Because it turns out the wavelength of an electron is related to its total energy, inversely

01:28:57.320 related.

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

01:29:07.440 big in size.

01:29:08.280 So if the universe, so only in an infinitely big universe can electron really have a ground

01:29:14.600 state energy that's exactly zero.

01:29:17.660 All right.

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

01:29:28.520 exactly.

01:29:29.260 So then it has to have an infinitely large wavelength.

01:29:32.360 That's the reason.

01:29:33.120 That's basically the answer.

01:29:34.280 So more or less.

01:29:35.100 Yeah.

01:29:35.240 It's, it's, it's, it's position.

01:29:37.300 If you do, if you more or less, if it's at rest, its momentum is exactly zero.

01:29:41.800 Right.

01:29:42.220 And you can exactly specify that.

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.

01:29:49.260 The only, yeah.

01:29:50.540 So, okay.

01:29:51.160 Okay.

01:29:51.760 Okay.

01:29:52.120 Yeah, I know.

01:29:52.460 It's crazy.

01:29:53.260 It's crazy.

01:29:53.780 Yeah.

01:29:54.020 Well, these are more like descript, they're like, they're like concurrent incomprehensible descriptions

01:29:59.140 rather than explanations.

01:30:01.020 Well, yeah.

01:30:01.200 Well, yeah.

01:30:01.540 Except the theory, that's what you can predict, obviously.

01:30:05.260 And it works.

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.

01:30:30.200 He's now dead.

01:30:31.140 Sidney Coleman.

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.

01:30:38.260 Because the real world is quantum mechanical.

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

01:30:51.500 be described by any classical picture.

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

01:31:02.540 to refer to Piaget again.

01:31:03.860 I mean, Piaget pointed out that we derive our concepts from our practical, our practical

01:31:09.380 manipulations of things.

01:31:10.800 So for example, you know, you might ask why, well, why is this one thing?

01:31:14.760 You know, I can say, well, it's five things.

01:31:17.620 Yeah.

01:31:17.900 Well, the question is, well, what's a thing?

01:31:19.940 Yeah.

01:31:20.060 Well, look, it moves as a unit.

01:31:23.020 Therefore, it's a thing.

01:31:24.100 So that's one.

01:31:25.640 Well, it could be five if I broke it apart.

01:31:27.640 Now it's two.

01:31:28.620 Yeah.

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

01:31:39.120 this scale.

01:31:39.720 And your claim, the claim of the quantum mechanics in general, is that that doesn't apply at the

01:31:44.180 micro scale.

01:31:45.120 So our intuitions are gone because our intuitions are predicated on our embodiment at this level

01:31:49.740 of analysis.

01:31:50.740 Absolutely.

01:31:51.380 In fact, the purpose of the greatest story we're told so far, that particular book is

01:31:54.700 to say something remarkable.

01:31:57.280 The world of our experience is an illusion.

01:32:00.240 Now, I, I know, I hate to say it because it breeds all sorts of mumbo jumbo and people 1.00

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

01:32:27.080 properties of the universe.

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?

01:33:19.560 Well, you know, okay, it's a good question.

01:33:22.040 And the answer is, it's all momentary.

01:33:25.900 It's, it's a momentary accident.

01:33:28.420 It is true that the stars, as a, as star individual stars evolve, they build up heavier and

01:33:34.300 heavier elements.

01:33:35.160 Okay.

01:33:35.700 They do it at the expense of their surroundings by increasing the disorder in their surroundings,

01:33:40.060 right?

01:33:40.880 They're emitting energy.

01:33:41.620 Right.

01:33:42.280 Okay.

01:33:42.620 So there's localized, okay, there's localized increase in complexity like us.

01:33:47.240 Yeah.

01:33:47.740 But it's all momentary.

01:33:49.680 If you follow it long enough, the heavy elements are going to disappear.

01:33:53.440 Matter is 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

01:34:03.320 a direction of the universe.

01:34:04.620 It's a momentary, but fortunate imbalance that will exist for a while until the universe catches

01:34:10.660 up with it.

01:34:11.440 Yeah.

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

01:34:26.320 their life.

01:34:26.800 It's like, well, wait a second.

01:34:28.040 I could make the case.

01:34:29.220 I've made this with my clients approximately is if you're thinking on a timescale that makes

01:34:35.880 your life irrelevant.

01:34:37.580 That's the wrong timescale for the problem.

01:34:40.380 That's the, the hopelessness is an indication that you're using the wrong frame.

01:34:44.620 Absolutely.

01:34:45.020 And you'd say, well, what's the proof of that?

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

01:34:59.180 a trillion years?

01:35:00.080 It's like, well, none, but why, what good is posing that question?

01:35:05.820 Exactly.

01:35:06.460 I couldn't agree with you more.

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,

01:35:32.660 because it's, it's so unique.

01:35:35.500 And therefore, you're right, there may be no cosmic purpose to your existence, but you

01:35:39.940 create your own purpose.

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.

01:35:46.900 We make our own meaning.

01:35:48.220 And to the extent we make our own meaning, our lives are more or less valuable to us and

01:35:53.100 to others around us.

01:35:54.180 And so I would say...

01:35:55.140 You see, I would, I would quibble with that.

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.

01:36:15.980 So that's deeply meaningful.

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.

01:36:24.280 Yeah, yeah, okay.

01:36:26.140 Well, it'll be an interesting question to see if we're debating semantics here or not.

01:36:30.340 Yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

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

01:36:46.780 meaning to the universe.

01:36:48.880 There's existence.

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

01:36:58.440 part of its operation.

01:36:59.580 And I think it, I mean, you can make a strong case that the scientific method is designed

01:37:04.640 to exclude subjective meaning.

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?

01:37:14.740 Well, it doesn't exist scientifically.

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

01:37:30.380 sophisticated conception of reality itself.

01:37:33.340 And it isn't obvious to me that it is, because it does have this tendency to include, to exclude

01:37:38.420 the subjective by its, by its method.

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.

01:37:48.360 Well, it is, it is one of its strengths.

01:37:49.840 There's no doubt about that, because the subject, because by excluding the subjective, you can

01:37:54.720 discover what's transpersonally universal.

01:37:58.040 But, but that also may mean that there are things you exclude that are real, that, that

01:38:03.160 are necessary.

01:38:04.360 You know, you will, to, to, you know, I used to read, well, there's a, I like Oliver Sacks,

01:38:09.360 so I used to read a lot.

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,

01:38:32.620 let's make no mistake about that.

01:38:34.100 And objectively real is powerful.

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,

01:39:03.200 neurosurgery must be the way to do it.

01:39:04.740 I didn't realize it wasn't.

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

01:39:29.160 is not really based on reason.

01:39:31.160 I try as a scientist to do it.

01:39:32.740 Well, it's certainly not based on our capacity to, to, uh, what would you say, to conceptualize

01:39:37.180 objective reality.

01:39:38.080 That isn't how people think.

01:39:39.540 Christ, we've only thought like that for 500 years.

01:39:42.420 Yeah.

01:39:42.880 No, it's really powerful, but, but it's not the way we naturally, and that's also something

01:39:47.540 that's greatly mysterious to me.

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.

01:39:57.320 And, um, and therefore they're subjective.

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

01:40:10.640 mistakes and be human.

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

01:40:26.200 That's terrible.

01:40:27.020 That's a terrible thing.

01:40:28.360 I know.

01:40:29.000 If that's the case, it's so terrible.

01:40:30.340 You'll be surprised.

01:40:31.180 There was a debate on, the question was, we are all religious.

01:40:34.660 And I asked to speak on the pro side.

01:40:37.720 My colleagues, my atheist colleagues who, people, you know, uh, were on the anti side and they 0.63

01:40:42.280 were shocked that I wanted to speak on the pro side.

01:40:43.760 But, and my argument was quite simple.

01:40:45.740 If we weren't all religious, we wouldn't need science.

01:40:48.540 If we didn't all want to believe.

01:40:50.500 Right.

01:40:50.700 That's, that's exactly right, man.

01:40:52.620 That's exactly right.

01:40:53.520 Okay.

01:40:53.620 So we agree.

01:40:54.240 I mean, they didn't get the point.

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

01:41:08.800 and then science emerged out of alchemy.

01:41:10.660 It's like, it's nested.

01:41:12.640 Science is nested inside an alchemical fantasy.

01:41:15.220 That's nested inside a religious fantasy.

01:41:18.120 Well, I wouldn't say nested.

01:41:19.060 I would say it grew out of it.

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.

01:41:36.340 The objects that draw a scientist's attention.

01:41:41.580 Aren't determined by scientific processes.

01:41:45.640 You're, you're the fantasy.

01:41:47.320 You see what I mean?

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

01:42:12.620 spiritual discipline.

01:42:14.520 Okay.

01:42:15.160 We tried that for a long time.

01:42:17.440 It wasn't enough.

01:42:18.400 People were still suffering from leprosy.

01:42:21.260 Okay.

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.

01:42:40.420 And that's not a scientific goal.

01:42:43.660 That's, that's a motivational goal.

01:42:45.600 Yeah, I agree with you.

01:42:46.240 But where I guess that we disagree and we could have this discussion is that I think

01:42:50.400 you're right.

01:42:50.760 And that's what I said before.

01:42:51.780 Scientists are people.

01:42:52.840 So they're motivated by all.

01:42:53.980 They're motivated by greed, by fame, by jealousy, as well as by facts.

01:42:58.260 By awe.

01:42:59.120 By awe.

01:42:59.580 By awe.

01:42:59.920 By awe and wonder.

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

01:43:03.060 I'm a scientist.

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

01:43:15.640 all true from a psychological perspective.

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.

01:43:35.580 Wait, it doesn't overcome, the science.

01:43:37.560 It doesn't overcome the motivation.

01:43:39.160 It doesn't overcome the motivation.

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

01:44:16.060 to go over here.

01:44:16.900 And that's the beauty of science.

01:44:18.360 It's that nature determines what's beautiful.

01:44:20.820 Ultimately, you know, I, you know, I, there was a while when string theorists talked about

01:44:24.740 the elegant universe and all that.

01:44:25.800 But elegant and beauty don't matter.

01:44:27.920 Nature determines it, not scientists.

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

01:44:44.380 the way it really is.

01:44:45.180 And then we, we develop an understanding of it.

01:44:47.340 But so that's the beauty.

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

01:45:04.500 tell me what you think.

01:45:05.380 Okay.

01:45:05.780 Okay.

01:45:06.060 So I'll try to formulate this properly.

01:45:11.540 Although I may not be able to do it.

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.

01:45:27.120 Okay.

01:45:27.280 That is a, that is a fantasy.

01:45:29.840 Now it may be accurate. 0.94

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.

01:46:02.340 Whereas we're just transforming like mad.

01:46:05.220 And so we do have this fantasy, which is we can escape our static destiny by the acquisition

01:46:12.340 of knowledge, by going out into the unknown.

01:46:14.360 That's Star Trek, right?

01:46:15.640 Yeah.

01:46:15.820 You wrote books on the physics of Star Trek to go boldly where no one has gone beyond

01:46:19.780 before.

01:46:20.840 Yeah.

01:46:21.060 And that, that will be of net benefit to us.

01:46:23.300 And that's the fantasy, which, with, when, which this is nested.

01:46:26.680 I don't think that does change.

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.

01:46:59.680 And the reason I agree.

01:47:01.520 And the reason that it persists is that we have found that, yeah, when we developed

01:47:05.420 antibiotics, we can live longer.

01:47:07.340 I mean, so there's a hope and you're right.

01:47:09.700 And, and it comes back to what I said before.

01:47:11.440 Reason is a slave of passion.

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.

01:47:21.800 You can't be.

01:47:22.560 Well, that's it.

01:47:23.520 This is so okay.

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.

01:47:32.620 We're motivationally driven.

01:47:34.460 Like we, and we have a pattern.

01:47:36.200 We are not rational.

01:47:37.940 That's wrong.

01:47:38.680 Now we can learn to be rational with great difficulty.

01:47:41.680 Yeah.

01:47:41.980 But fundamentally, and maybe that's a tool, but there is underneath this, you said it

01:47:47.080 was an instinct.

01:47:48.120 An instinct.

01:47:48.820 So we could take that apart a little bit.

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 1.00

01:48:03.340 avatar like universe and kill off stupid ideas before they kill you. 0.99

01:48:07.880 So we, we've evolved to produce hypotheses, test them through, through dialectic often and 1.00

01:48:16.240 dispense with those that don't work.

01:48:18.180 And so we've, we've staked ourselves on that attempt and we've evolved to be able to do

01:48:24.280 that.

01:48:24.580 And science, I believe is a, is the extension of that, the practical extension of that.

01:48:28.700 The most successful extension, I would argue.

01:48:30.780 Yes.

01:48:31.120 It's well, so successful so far, right?

01:48:33.620 So far.

01:48:34.140 We have the timeframe problem.

01:48:35.860 Yeah, exactly.

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.

01:48:44.900 Now it's very reductionistic, right?

01:48:47.320 And you can see the power of that because we understand hydrogen atoms well enough to

01:48:50.900 make them, to turn them into bombs.

01:48:53.180 Yeah.

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

01:49:05.260 hydrogen atom from its context.

01:49:07.080 It's broad, broad, broad context.

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.

01:49:17.960 But look what it produced.

01:49:19.360 It produced the hydrogen bomb.

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.

01:49:47.340 Mickey Mouse.

01:49:48.020 Yeah.

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

01:49:59.600 book.

01:49:59.980 But anyway, um, uh, the, we have this weird, like, I can't agree with you more.

01:50:06.620 We have this weird dichotomy.

01:50:07.640 We've discovered science.

01:50:09.620 The scientific method was a discovery.

01:50:11.980 It took a while to discover it.

01:50:13.220 When the Greeks didn't have it, they did a lot. 0.99

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

01:50:22.740 works.

01:50:23.660 But we humans, you know, um, didn't evolve, uh, didn't evolve to discover the scientific

01:50:31.240 method.

01:50:31.620 I mean, we had the capability and therefore we have all sorts of evolutionary baggage that

01:50:37.980 makes us human.

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.

01:51:03.000 I don't know if you know him.

01:51:03.780 And we talked a great deal about fear in the amygdala and, and, and how those things play

01:51:08.060 out.

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.

01:51:32.500 And you're right, that's a fantasy too.

01:51:33.720 That's a, that's a, that's a claim.

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.

01:51:44.140 Yeah.

01:51:44.780 Yeah.

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

01:51:50.100 empiricist.

01:51:50.880 If there's not an empirical way of this, of defining why it's better than it's an irrelevant

01:51:54.940 concept.

01:51:55.440 And that's why I have a, I'm this just, I'm a very pedestrian kind of guy.

01:51:58.820 If you can't measure it, don't talk about it.

01:52:01.980 To some extent.

01:52:03.320 Um, and, and, and, and, uh, and so.

01:52:08.140 Well, you can't measure it.

01:52:09.120 You can't define it.

01:52:10.140 And then it's hard to tell what the hell you're talking about.

01:52:12.300 Yeah.

01:52:12.500 Then it just ends up being semantics. 0.93

01:52:14.080 Then it ends up being pure intellectual masturbation, you know, which is a lot of. 0.93

01:52:18.240 Yeah. 0.80

01:52:18.340 And you can shift the concept around at your convenience, which is not helpful.

01:52:22.140 Which is, yeah.

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.

01:52:29.960 All right.

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.

01:52:41.260 So you just went on this panel at Oxford.

01:52:44.920 You said it was Oxford.

01:52:45.800 It was Oxford union debate.

01:52:47.520 Yeah.

01:52:47.860 Yeah.

01:52:48.000 Okay.

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.

01:53:02.100 Oh, sure.

01:53:02.640 So, you know, I was thinking for a long time about the advantages of a, of a democratic

01:53:08.340 monarchy like Great Britain.

01:53:10.220 Okay.

01:53:10.840 So imagine, imagine instead of executive, legislative, and judicial, there's four branches

01:53:16.640 of government.

01:53:17.300 Okay.

01:53:17.780 Legislative, judicial, executive, and symbolic.

01:53:21.620 Okay.

01:53:22.200 And so you need, it's helpful to have the queen because then the president isn't the queen. 0.97

01:53:27.040 Yeah.

01:53:27.420 Or the president isn't the king.

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.

01:53:32.120 So that's, I agree.

01:53:32.900 Okay.

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.

01:53:42.480 Yeah.

01:53:43.380 Okay.

01:53:43.900 We agree on that.

01:53:44.700 That's possible anyways.

01:53:45.740 Absolutely.

01:53:46.120 I think it's one of the problems of American politics.

01:53:48.240 Yeah.

01:53:48.540 Okay.

01:53:48.920 And now I would say that's also related to the problem of the separation of church and

01:53:52.500 state.

01:53:53.140 And one of the things the West seems to have got right is the idea that we should render 0.93

01:53:58.040 unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's.

01:54:03.140 Well.

01:54:03.660 It's an analogous idea.

01:54:04.740 That's okay.

01:54:05.160 You don't, don't, I'll just continue where I'm going.

01:54:07.240 I need that to be described more, but okay.

01:54:08.800 Yeah.

01:54:09.140 Yep.

01:54:09.660 Yep.

01:54:10.180 Yeah.

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

01:54:19.040 too.

01:54:19.500 Okay.

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 1.00

01:54:37.340 politics with it.

01:54:38.760 Okay.

01:54:39.360 And so now I've been watching what's been happening to Richard Dawkins, for example.

01:54:42.980 Yeah.

01:54:43.240 Yeah.

01:54:43.400 Yeah.

01:54:43.740 Right.

01:54:44.100 And now Richard's idea.

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,

01:54:50.620 he's brilliant and I've read his books.

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

01:55:01.960 something missing there.

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.

01:55:19.680 It goes somewhere else.

01:55:21.280 Oh yeah.

01:55:21.400 And I think we're, if you're saying it's going into secular religiosity now, I, well,

01:55:26.180 what do you think?

01:55:27.140 I agree.

01:55:27.580 I mean, what does it look like to you?

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 1.00

01:55:44.680 religion, there's no possibility of absolution, which is.

01:55:47.760 Yeah.

01:55:48.000 Yeah.

01:55:48.340 But that's not funny.

01:55:49.700 Right.

01:55:50.000 That's seriously not funny.

01:55:51.680 I know.

01:55:52.000 I know.

01:55:52.240 I agree with you.

01:55:53.220 I know it's seriously not funny.

01:55:54.380 Believe me.

01:55:54.760 I know it very well.

01:55:55.400 I know you do.

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.

01:56:03.400 Those two things, those are miraculous.

01:56:06.320 Yeah.

01:56:06.880 Well, I agree.

01:56:07.940 Miraculous constructs of thought, constructs of thought.

01:56:10.180 I agree.

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

01:56:30.700 to know how you're defining things.

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

01:56:45.660 discussions on a lot.

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.

01:57:02.200 Okay, that's the first argument.

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.

01:57:45.560 Okay.

01:57:45.960 Do you know Roland Griffith's work?

01:57:48.480 Not as well as you, obviously.

01:57:49.960 Okay.

01:57:50.160 Well, he's been investigating psychedelics and with psilocybin.

01:57:54.220 Yeah.

01:57:54.420 And he's a very solid scientist.

01:57:55.860 Yeah.

01:57:56.160 I've heard people talk about psilocybin.

01:57:57.440 Yeah.

01:57:57.780 Okay.

01:57:58.200 Yeah.

01:57:58.560 Yeah.

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

01:58:31.200 questioning.

01:58:32.160 In fact, that's what education should be based on.

01:58:34.080 It should be based on answers.

01:58:35.040 It should be based on questions.

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

01:59:03.320 here, it really means how are we here?

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,

01:59:13.180 your heart allows your body to just.

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

01:59:32.940 to be viewed.

01:59:33.700 Okay.

01:59:34.120 And so, to the degree that I can look at religious matters from a biological perspective,

01:59:38.240 I do that, because it's simpler.

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

02:00:06.900 crucial.

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

02:00:33.020 imitate.

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.

02:00:43.700 Now, we investigate that.

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

02:00:56.020 different domains.

02:00:57.280 And that is a reductionistic argument, right?

02:00:59.500 It says nothing to do about divinity itself.

02:01:02.020 Sure.

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

02:01:33.440 theology to knowledge.

02:01:35.420 And you know what they all say?

02:01:37.660 What do you mean by knowledge?

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

02:01:46.220 and Jung.

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. 0.54

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,

02:02:09.580 so I think that's probably.

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.

02:03:01.720 Yeah.

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

02:03:22.040 hit an impediment, and then you question it.

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 0.84

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 0.98

02:05:34.040 expression, but the underlying basis of Judaism is just as ridiculous, in fact, just as ridiculous 0.99

02:05:40.240 as evil, as vicious, as, as, as Christianity and, and, and Islam and, and most other religions, 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.95

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

02:07:52.200 so good. Okay, all right, all right. Okay.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 12, 2021

182. From the Beginning to Now ｜ Lawrence Krauss

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript