The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 348. Black Holes, Time Travel, and the Origin of the Universe ｜ Dr. Brian Keating

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 I'm looking very much forward today to speaking with Dr. Brian Keating.

00:01:11.700 I met him recently in Miami, looked through the telescope at his beautiful San Diego house on the coast.

00:01:18.520 He gave me a moon rock, which was very nice of him. We had a very good conversation.

00:01:21.720 I'm looking forward today to talking to him about the unfolding of the cosmological landscape on the broadest possible scale from the Big Bang forward.

00:01:31.540 As I mentioned, he's a cosmologist and also Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego.

00:01:39.380 He is also the author of more than 200 scientific publications, the equivalent of between 60 and 70 PhDs, by the way.

00:01:46.700 Two U.S. patents and the best-selling books, Into the Impossible, Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, and Losing the Nobel Prize.

00:01:57.360 The latter was selected as one of Amazon Editor's best nonfiction books of all time.

00:02:03.680 He received his Bachelor of Science from Case Western in 1993 and a PhD from Brown in 2000.

00:02:11.600 He was later a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and Caltech.

00:02:15.640 In 2007, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President George W. Bush

00:02:23.720 for inventing the BICEP telescope located at the South Pole, Antarctica.

00:02:30.180 He is also a commercial pilot and was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 2022.

00:02:37.460 Dr. Keating, let's start out by telling everybody what your primary focus of concern is as a researcher,

00:02:43.420 and then let's delve into what you can bring to people as a consequence of that research,

00:02:49.720 what they need to know about the cosmic structure, let's say.

00:02:54.380 Yeah.

00:02:54.980 So, I always ask people, you know, what's the most important day on the calendar to them?

00:02:59.400 And usually I get some version of, you know, Christmas or my birthday or my, you know,

00:03:03.680 hopefully for them, my spouse's birthday.

00:03:05.640 And it's an origin story.

00:03:07.960 And I think humans are fascinated with origin stories.

00:03:11.060 How did we come to be here?

00:03:12.480 Because we don't know, right?

00:03:13.700 We come in, as they say, in media rays in the middle of the story.

00:03:17.760 And so, how do you get to understand what happened before you?

00:03:21.340 The prehistory and the biggest prehistory of all is how the cosmos came to be.

00:03:25.540 And my research centers on the oldest fossils of the earliest epoch in the universe.

00:03:32.060 So, I'm an experimental cosmologist.

00:03:34.220 You've discussed many times with more theoretically inclined individuals.

00:03:38.900 I actually build the telescopes.

00:03:40.740 My colleagues and I, my students and I, we build telescopes that peer back as far as possible using light.

00:03:48.200 Now, the light's not light we can see with the human eye.

00:03:51.020 It's in the form of microwaves because the universe has been expanding for some 13.8 billion years since a Big Bang.

00:03:59.460 And we'll get to the question of whether or not there was more than one Big Bang, I hope, later on.

00:04:03.740 And the universe, as it expands, has cooled off from a fiery, hot hellscape of an inferno to a more, you know, moderate climate

00:04:13.200 that will support the existence of planets and people and all sorts of other interesting forms of matter.

00:04:20.540 But the question of how the matter came to be in the first place is really the purview of what I do as an experimentalist.

00:04:26.740 So, my job as an experimentalist is not to prove theorists right.

00:04:30.780 It's to prove everything else wrong.

00:04:32.660 And then what we're left with will be a closer approximation to the truth,

00:04:36.740 which is that we live in this incredibly intricate, fascinating universe filled with the most mysterious forms of matter

00:04:44.020 and even consciousness and beings like you and I.

00:04:47.020 So, that's the focus of the research.

00:04:49.480 And the way that we do that is by building the most precise and accurate telescopes ever made

00:04:54.540 and deploying them to the most interesting parts in the universe, including the South Pole Antarctica

00:04:59.700 and the high mountain desert of the Andes Mountains in Chile, as well as into outer space.

00:05:05.120 So, it's kind of every, you know, boy's dream to grow up to be a rocket scientist,

00:05:09.580 to build stuff, to shoot rockets into space, to go to these far extremes.

00:05:13.640 And the beauty of it is I get paid to do it.

00:05:16.240 So, that's my research focus.

00:05:18.200 So, why don't we start with a comment you made right at the beginning of that explanation.

00:05:24.300 You said that you build telescopes that peer back into time.

00:05:28.880 And you might want to explain to everybody, there'll be lots of people who are listening who understand that,

00:05:33.440 but there'll be people listening who don't.

00:05:35.320 Why is it that when you build a technologically sophisticated telescope

00:05:41.240 that can peer out into the vast depths of space, that you're also looking back in time?

00:05:46.980 So, all telescopes are time machines of a sort, and that's by virtue of the fact that light,

00:05:54.320 as fast as it travels, and it is the fastest propagating entity that we know about in all of science,

00:06:02.260 it travels about this far, about one foot every nanosecond.

00:06:06.500 So, if you convert, you know, nanoseconds to miles, and you convert, you know, feet to miles,

00:06:13.160 and nanoseconds to seconds, it travels about 186,000 miles per second, which is pretty darn fast.

00:06:19.580 But, it's not infinite.

00:06:21.460 So, therefore, whenever you're looking at something, you're not seeing it as it is right now.

00:06:26.320 You're seeing it as it was sometime in the past.

00:06:29.000 And the farther away something is, the longer the light traveled to reach your eyes,

00:06:33.940 or to reach our telescopes.

00:06:35.720 And telescopes are just eyes of a different sort.

00:06:37.620 There might be sensitive to microwaves, in the case of the telescope that I build,

00:06:42.280 radio waves, gamma rays, but just like your eyeballs, your eyeballs are two refracting telescopes.

00:06:49.100 They have lenses, they have detectors.

00:06:51.200 And so, when we look at the sun, and I'm not advocating as a professional astronomer,

00:06:55.160 never look at the sun with your remaining good eye,

00:06:58.420 but when you look at the sun, you're seeing it as it was.

00:07:01.140 And that period in which it was, was eight minutes ago, because it's 93 million miles away.

00:07:06.220 And if you convert feet per nanosecond, or miles per second, or miles per hour,

00:07:10.480 you get, it takes about eight minutes for light to travel from the sun.

00:07:13.680 That means that, Jordan, the sun could disappear, and we wouldn't see it,

00:07:17.980 and we wouldn't know about it, really, for at least eight minutes, and maybe even longer.

00:07:21.840 So, all telescopes are time machines, even the telescopes embedded in our skulls.

00:07:26.800 So, how far back can we look now with, for example, with the Webb Telescope,

00:07:33.760 and that's the newest large-scale deep-peering telescope that was launched into space,

00:07:39.560 and how far back have we pushed the horizon of view now?

00:07:45.380 So, yes, the James Webb Telescope was launched on Christmas Day in 2021,

00:07:50.040 and it's been sending back phenomenal images.

00:07:52.940 What makes the Webb Telescope so powerful is not that it can see farther back in time,

00:07:58.720 although it can in a certain sense, but it doesn't have extra magnification,

00:08:03.360 and that's not required to see things that are farther away.

00:08:05.820 In other words, if you use a tiny little telescope,

00:08:08.980 like the sort that Galileo used back in 1609 to spot the craters on the Moon's surface,

00:08:14.920 you could use, the Hubble Telescope can also look at the Moon,

00:08:18.880 and it won't see things that are, it'll see more detail on the Moon's surface,

00:08:22.500 but it won't see farther than the Moon because the Moon is in the way.

00:08:26.420 Now, if you look where there's no Moon, where there's no planet,

00:08:28.960 where there's no galaxies, where there's no absorbing matter whatsoever,

00:08:32.680 then you're seeing back to the creation of whatever light your telescope is sensitive to.

00:08:37.820 Now, visible light has only been around for a few billion years,

00:08:41.540 because before that time, because of the universe's expansion,

00:08:46.120 that light has red-shifted.

00:08:47.800 It has gone from visible light to infrared light, which is invisible to our eyes,

00:08:52.440 but highly visible, and that is the quarry that the Webb Telescope is seeking.

00:08:57.580 Now, if you go farther than the infrared, then you come to microwaves, which is what I study.

00:09:02.440 So the longer the wavelength of light you're looking at, the farther you can go back in time,

00:09:06.340 not because you're impeded by something, but because the source,

00:09:10.120 the very source that you're looking at, has been diminished in intensity

00:09:15.660 and has been reddened by the expansion of the universe,

00:09:19.020 which is a phenomenal discovery that we've only known about for less than 100 years.

00:09:23.420 But because of that universal expansion, we can only see using particular wavelengths of light.

00:09:29.420 And so that's why the earliest light in the universe,

00:09:31.900 there's no light that we could ever see that is more primitive

00:09:35.460 than the cosmic microwave background that I and my colleagues are studying.

00:09:40.180 So the Webb Telescope can't see far back in time as we can, but that's really irrelevant.

00:09:45.340 It's designed to do something very specific.

00:09:47.220 Look at the first galaxies that formed, the first stars that formed,

00:09:50.260 exoplanets and other stellar solar systems in our own galaxy.

00:09:54.900 And because of that, it's a phenomenal machine and is unrivaled in its capability.

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00:11:35.980 So what element of the, let's have you explain what the electromagnetic spectrum is, because people are not going to necessarily know what the relationship is, say, between visible light and microwave radiation.

00:11:53.840 They might not know that those are varying forms of radiation that is very similar in its essence.

00:12:00.420 And also to explain why the red shift occurs and how that was discovered, I suppose.

00:12:07.140 Yes, yes.

00:12:08.560 So a spectrum is a characteristic of light.

00:12:11.940 Light has three major properties that we discuss as scientists.

00:12:17.180 One is its intensity, how bright the light is, and the other is the color of the light.

00:12:21.700 And the third is something called polarization, which happens to be my area of subspecialty.

00:12:26.920 Not political polarization, but it's an actual useful form of polarization that has to do with the orientation of the electromagnetic field.

00:12:34.320 But all forms of light.

00:12:35.680 Now, people hear radiation and they get scared.

00:12:37.860 Did a bomb go off?

00:12:38.940 Is there some nuclear reaction?

00:12:40.040 No, no, no.

00:12:40.340 It has nothing to do with that.

00:12:41.560 It's just a generic term that scientists call light of different wavelengths.

00:12:45.780 So if you imagine a rainbow, which has an infinite number of colors.

00:12:49.280 People say there's seven colors, the famous Roy G. Biv we learned about in elementary school, maybe.

00:12:54.880 But there's actually an infinite number of colors because the number that describes the color of light is called its wavelength.

00:13:01.800 And the wavelength of light is a continuous number.

00:13:04.300 It can be any number.

00:13:05.340 It can have any number of decimal places.

00:13:07.180 So it's a continuous number.

00:13:08.400 Therefore, there's an infinite number of real numbers.

00:13:12.140 Therefore, the spectrum is not discrete in seven different increments.

00:13:15.780 So now, imagine you go beyond the red color.

00:13:19.480 You keep going to the left of that red color.

00:13:21.480 And actually, this was an experiment done by a very famous scientist in Herschel.

00:13:26.280 And even Isaac Newton did similar types of experiments where they took the sunlight.

00:13:30.460 They refracted it through a prism.

00:13:32.720 So we've all seen these prisms that disperse light.

00:13:35.260 And they had light of different colors coming out at different angles.

00:13:38.240 And that's the property of a prism that causes it to make a rainbow from ordinary white light.

00:13:43.140 And what Newton and Herschel did is they put a thermometer.

00:13:47.200 They went into the red light, and they put a bulb of an ordinary thermometer.

00:13:50.580 And they kept moving it until it got beyond the red.

00:13:53.660 And then they found that beyond the red color, there was still something coming in causing the mercury to rise in this thermometer.

00:14:00.500 So there was clear there was other light of a longer wavelength.

00:14:03.900 They knew about the wavelength of light.

00:14:05.460 And that longer wavelength is what we associate with heat.

00:14:08.860 Now, the opposite side, if you go past the violet side of ROYGBIV, you come to something called ultraviolet.

00:14:16.660 Ultraviolet is also invisible.

00:14:18.420 And we know about that from the sun.

00:14:20.100 The sunlight produces damaging UVA and UVB radiation.

00:14:24.420 That's not any different except for the fact it buys characteristic wavelengths.

00:14:29.000 So its wavelength is shorter than violet light.

00:14:31.360 Infrared is longer than red light.

00:14:34.520 And if you keep going in both directions, there's photons and wavelengths of light in all different directions ad infinitum to the high frequency or short wavelength.

00:14:43.740 And it goes to infinity in the other direction.

00:14:45.940 You can have an infinitely long, and that would be called a radio wave.

00:14:48.980 So that's the electromagnetic spectrum.

00:14:51.200 Now, if you've ever listened to a siren approaching, you've heard the familiar Doppler shift.

00:14:59.200 That's interesting.

00:14:59.720 Christian Doppler and Wolfgang Mozart grew up in the same town in Salzburg, Austria.

00:15:04.760 I like to think they're kind of enjoying the irony of that fact that they both have this fascination with sound and its phenomena.

00:15:13.400 And the expansion or dilution of the wavelength of light is exactly the result of a Doppler shift,

00:15:20.260 which is exactly analogous to the increase in pitch and the decrease in pitch that one hears.

00:15:25.360 When an ambulance first approaches you with its siren on, that pitch is increased.

00:15:31.100 And that's called a blue shift, meaning it goes to shorter sound wavelengths or it goes to higher pitches.

00:15:37.400 As it goes away, the opposite phenomenon happens.

00:15:40.000 And that's where you hear this characteristic rise as it moves away from you.

00:15:45.000 And that's an analog of redshift.

00:15:47.200 Well, the same thing happens in light.

00:15:49.060 So if you're being approached by a police car and you try to get away from it,

00:15:55.280 its blue light will seem slightly more red because it's effectively moving away from you.

00:16:00.080 Now, you have to go a large fraction of that tremendous speed that I spoke about earlier

00:16:05.620 to get even a tiny, minute shift in the wavelength, either higher or lower.

00:16:10.540 So the redshift that we observe for the universe was discovered in the early 1900s.

00:16:16.840 And it was discovered that we could see these little nebulae.

00:16:20.600 They were first called spiral nebulae.

00:16:22.220 We didn't know if they were part of the Milky Way galaxy.

00:16:24.980 Some said they were outside the Milky Way galaxy, but that didn't make sense.

00:16:27.860 Because put yourself in the frame of mind of a scientist in the 1900s.

00:16:32.400 Even the great Albert Einstein thought this was all there is, to quote a song,

00:16:37.260 that the universe was the Milky Way galaxy.

00:16:40.100 And that it was preposterous to think about something beyond our galaxy

00:16:44.240 because that would mean beyond our universe.

00:16:45.720 Nowadays, ironically, we talk about things beyond our universe,

00:16:48.600 and we'll probably get into some of that when we discuss the multiverse in a little bit.

00:16:52.520 But the universe was found to be much larger than the Milky Way galaxy.

00:16:57.540 In fact, there were galaxies outside the Milky Way galaxy that we observed.

00:17:01.060 The most famous one being the Andromeda Nebula,

00:17:04.020 which is now called the Great Spiral Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy.

00:17:08.000 It's actually the farthest thing, Jordan, that you can see with the human eye.

00:17:10.840 If you look up on a clear night, you can see a smudge,

00:17:14.400 and I'll show you the next time you're in San Diego.

00:17:16.520 But I will show you a clear smudge through my telescope.

00:17:19.400 And you can see it with your naked eye as well.

00:17:21.800 That smudge is particles of light, photons, coming from a galaxy.

00:17:26.980 And those photons set out on their journey to your eye

00:17:30.000 when there were hominids walking around on the Serengeti plains of Africa. 0.97

00:17:35.060 This is the light that reaches us today is 3 million years old.

00:17:38.700 It's been traveling for 3 million years since Lucy was extant.

00:17:43.740 So that light from that galaxy is not being redshifted or blueshifted tremendously.

00:17:49.460 But if you look at every other galaxy, and we can see about 100 billion galaxies,

00:17:53.640 and each one has at least 100 billion stars,

00:17:56.740 and each one of those stars probably has tens or thousands of minor bodies,

00:18:02.000 asteroids, planets around them.

00:18:03.540 The numbers are truly astronomical.

00:18:06.100 But if you go back and you look at it, and we see 100 billion galaxies, Jordan,

00:18:10.000 of those 100 billion galaxies, all but 20 show their light,

00:18:14.700 their characteristic spectrum is shifted to the red, some by tremendous amounts.

00:18:19.580 And that implies, just as it would if you were in the city,

00:18:24.560 and you heard all these ambulances, and every single ambulance,

00:18:28.260 you heard it as if it was moving away from you.

00:18:30.440 You heard every siren's wail being redshifted to lower and lower pitches.

00:18:36.740 What would you conclude?

00:18:38.380 You would either conclude you're at a very special location where there was just an accident,

00:18:43.060 and the bodies have been cleaned up and taken away to hospital,

00:18:46.000 or that every part of the city is experiencing all these,

00:18:49.760 all the ambulance drivers are on strike, and everybody's leaving.

00:18:52.840 And so, the interpretation that Edwin Hubble began to make in 1929,

00:18:57.860 this is not 100 years old yet.

00:18:59.580 It's incredible.

00:19:01.000 The observation that every galaxy exhibits a redshift,

00:19:04.360 that is, every galaxy is moving away from the Milky Way galaxy.

00:19:07.860 The Milky Way galaxy is no more special or more important than any other galaxy.

00:19:13.060 Therefore, all galaxies, to high approximation, are moving away from one another.

00:19:18.400 And that's an astounding observation, a physical fact that we observe,

00:19:22.400 that when extrapolated to the future means the universe is going to become more and more dilute.

00:19:28.020 And in the past, it was much more tightly condensed, compressed,

00:19:31.520 and presumably began in its infancy with what we call the Big Bang.

00:19:36.060 Mm-hmm.

00:19:37.500 So, do you want to explain why the farther galaxies are away,

00:19:42.860 the faster they're moving away?

00:19:44.340 And is it also the case that it's the redshift that explains the fact

00:19:50.420 that the night sky is primarily black instead of lit up?

00:19:54.840 Am I correct in the latter assumption?

00:19:57.240 And then let's go to the former question.

00:19:59.640 Yeah, the latter question is related to something called Olber's Paradox,

00:20:02.820 which is that in an infinite universe, populated with an infinite number of objects,

00:20:08.320 stars in this case, no matter where you were in that universe,

00:20:12.820 you would look out and your eye, your line of sight,

00:20:15.860 would terminate on a star's surface somewhere.

00:20:18.940 They might be really far away, but eventually your eye would come to rest on a star.

00:20:24.880 So, that would mean that it's a paradox that our night sky,

00:20:29.320 we have during the day, we see just one star,

00:20:31.360 but even at night, we don't see any stars that are any,

00:20:34.280 or the night sky's intensity is nowhere near as close as the surface of the sun,

00:20:38.300 let alone the infinite intensity of an infinite number of suns.

00:20:42.420 And it's as if you were in a forest.

00:20:44.200 Imagine a beautiful boreal forest, and it's effectively infinite.

00:20:49.380 The trees are a finite width, and they're spaced at some distance away from you,

00:20:53.560 but there's an infinite number of these trees.

00:20:55.920 And as you scan around your local horizon, all you would see is bark.

00:21:00.000 All you would see are the trunks of these trees.

00:21:02.480 That's Olber's paradox for trees.

00:21:05.240 And what you're bringing up is this notion that was interestingly really encountered and proposed,

00:21:11.280 and even a solution perhaps, by Edgar Allan Poe, the great poet in the 1800s.

00:21:17.020 He conjectured this idea that it's kind of strange that, well, we're told we live in an infinite universe,

00:21:22.860 that even the Milky Way galaxy could be infinite in size.

00:21:25.440 We didn't know back then in the 19th century.

00:21:28.180 And so it began to be a paradox.

00:21:30.200 Now, the resolution of that paradox, as you're pointing out, is several fold.

00:21:34.680 One is that the condition for the night sky to not be dark is that the universe is infinitely old,

00:21:43.460 that the universe is infinitely big, and that the universe is static.

00:21:47.500 These stars are not moving in that simple-minded paradox as the trees are not moving in the Olber's paradox analogy for trees.

00:21:55.920 Those trees are stationary.

00:21:57.460 The forest is infinite, and the light has had enough time to travel to your eyes because the universe is infinitely old.

00:22:03.920 So if any one of those three propositions is falsified, then you can demolish the paradox as a paradox.

00:22:12.480 And so the resolution, interestingly enough, comes down to all three of those are true or false.

00:22:19.020 In other words, it would have been enough, it would have been sufficient to falsify one of those three propositions.

00:22:25.260 The universe is infinitely old, infinitely big, and static.

00:22:28.280 But we actually know now that the universe isn't any one of those three, at least the universe that we can observe.

00:22:33.040 So, now you asked about how we can think about the expansion of the universe, or how we can determine that, or how it was determined.

00:22:42.900 Is that right?

00:22:43.740 Can you remind me, Jordan?

00:22:44.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:22:46.080 Well, and why the more distant galaxies are moving away faster.

00:22:49.660 That's right.

00:22:50.400 So the analogy that astronomers use, no analogy is perfect, right?

00:22:53.760 We're dealing with things, not just in the three dimensions of space, but in the fourth dimension of what we call space-time.

00:23:00.140 So we have to visualize things that are really unvisualizable by the human mind, by our own limitations.

00:23:07.280 And so we make analogies.

00:23:08.520 So one of the most common analogies is to think about, I'll give you two.

00:23:13.160 One is to imagine a balloon with little dots drawn on the balloon's surface.

00:23:18.160 The balloon's surface is two-dimensional.

00:23:20.180 As you blow up the balloon, the galaxies move away.

00:23:23.260 The dots on the balloon's surface move from one another.

00:23:25.880 And they move with exactly that property, that a galaxy that is one centimeter or a dot that's one centimeter away from another galaxy or dot will move twice as much in the same amount of inflation or expansion as a galaxy that is half a centimeter separated or two dots that are only five millimeters apart from one another.

00:23:45.800 But that's confined to a two-dimensional surface, so it's a little bit hard to maybe project that into three dimensions in our mind.

00:23:52.460 So another one that people use is, imagine baking a raisin bread.

00:23:56.520 So a bread, and you put in a bunch of raisins inside of it.

00:23:59.820 That, too, has the exact same property.

00:24:01.880 If you sit on any raisin inside the bread and you watch, what are the other raisins doing?

00:24:08.340 That all will be observed to move away from you.

00:24:10.920 There won't be any gravitational attraction between you and another raisin, so you'll actually observe what's, like, a perfect expansion of the universe from your perspective.

00:24:19.740 Remember, I said there are about 20 or more galaxies that are gravitationally attracted to the Milky Way, and they are blue-shifted because they're falling towards us and will eventually combine into an enormous mega-galaxy called Milkdromeda someday.

00:24:31.600 But that doesn't happen for raisins or for dots on a balloon.

00:24:34.220 So the law that describes that type of expansion in either a raisin bread populated with raisins in three dimensions or a balloon dotted with magic marker marks in two dimensions, those two phenomena are exactly displaying what's called Hubble's law, which is the velocity of every galaxy we see beyond a certain distance.

00:24:56.200 That's a minimal distance that we don't have gravitational interactions between us and them.

00:25:00.740 That galaxy will be moving away directly proportional to what's known as Hubble's constant.

00:25:06.740 So the velocity in meters per second, miles per hour, you know, furlongs per decade, whatever you want, will be directly linear.

00:25:14.320 It's the simplest law imaginable besides just a constant.

00:25:17.440 It'll be moving linearly proportionate to its distance away from you.

00:25:20.720 And that's a fascinating observation, and that's the only type of observation that can produce the type of structures that we see in the universe.

00:25:27.960 In other words, it could have been traveling as the velocity scaling as the square of the distance, the cube of the distance, the square root of the distance, whatever.

00:25:35.900 We would live in a much, much different universe, and it wouldn't have any of the characteristics that we observe.

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00:26:48.300 So, I think when I read Stephen Hawking's brief history of time, which is, it's got to be 20 years ago, or approximately.

00:27:00.460 Oh, it's 40, almost 40 years old, yeah.

00:27:02.980 Is it 40?

00:27:03.480 God, well, that's what happens when you get old.

00:27:05.260 The decades start to collapse.

00:27:06.500 So, at that point, my memory, if my memory serves me properly, the standard cosmological model was that it emerged from a Big Bang and that the universe was expanding, but that at some point it would contract back on itself, and this was Hawking's idea anyways, and then collapse back down into another singularity, whatever existed before the Big Bang.

00:27:30.660 But it's my understanding that over the last few decades, the evidence has accrued in an incontrovertible manner that the rate of expansion is actually increasing rather than decreasing, and I believe that's the great mystery that's propelled scientists to posit the existence of such phenomena as dark energy.

00:27:52.640 Have I got that right?

00:27:53.840 And what's the current state of thought about the fact that, first of all, explain why that's surprising.

00:28:01.660 That the rate of increase, or the rate of expansion is increasing.

00:28:05.320 Explain why that's surprising, and then would you explain how that view has changed over time and where we're at now?

00:28:11.660 Absolutely, yeah.

00:28:12.460 So, I got to hear Stephen Hawking speak at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in London in 1995, and it was back when he couldn't speak for a very long time.

00:28:22.240 So, he wasn't able to actually speak in real time, but he could move his fingers, and he could move his eyes, and he could type on this very special keyboard, which the ex-husband of his current nurse at the time had invented.

00:28:33.500 That's a whole other story.

00:28:34.660 I can recommend a book by my friend Charles Seif called Hawking Hawking, and it was sort of the business of Stephen Hawking.

00:28:40.440 And he could answer one question, and it would take him about 10 minutes to answer a question.

00:28:44.700 Someone asked him in the audience, Professor Hawking, you're rumored to be the most brilliant man alive, and yet you've written this book that almost no one, besides a younger Jordan Peterson perhaps, had read cover to cover.

00:28:55.140 Why did you write this book?

00:28:57.200 And he answered in his computerized, synthetic voice, because my daughter needed to pay for college.

00:29:03.780 And it was just interesting that this great man, this great intellect, you know, trapped in this body that had, you know, been robbed of all of its physical kind of maneuvering and so forth was so facile with his mind.

00:29:17.140 It was really an incredible thing to see.

00:29:18.740 When Hawking wrote that book, it is true, the expectation was that the universe would eventually collapse on itself, would eventually undergo what's called a big crunch, which is essentially the opposite of the Big Bang.

00:29:32.440 We would observe, if we were living billions of years, hence the story went, that we would see not galaxies being redshifted, but galaxies being blueshifted, because we're all going to combine and eventually into a collapse of an enormous, if you like, gravitational time bomb that would probably play out over, you know, billions, if not trillions of years.

00:29:53.280 So I kept advising people to keep paying their taxes.

00:29:56.380 But at the time, we didn't know about the substance called dark energy.

00:30:00.460 And what's so surprising about that, and what kept Einstein really flummoxed for the first part of his career, was that we only knew of a few different forms of matter and energy in the universe.

00:30:12.700 We knew of matter, stuff, the stuff that we were made up of, and we knew of light.

00:30:17.080 And in a universe that only has matter and light, it's impossible to not have a gravitational collapse.

00:30:23.760 Just as the same is true if I take an object, a ball, or an apple, and I throw it up with some velocity, it will still come back down, unless it reaches what's called escape velocity.

00:30:34.360 And the perplexing thing about Einsteinian general relativistic gravitation that still mystifies me and experts is that when you add matter to the universe, it actually makes it expand faster, which is counterintuitive.

00:30:46.900 You would think if there was more gravity in the Earth's surface, the ball or the apple would actually fall down even quicker, which it would.

00:30:54.060 But in the case of when we described the expansion of the universe, we're talking about its velocity, not its acceleration.

00:31:01.840 So there's a crucial distinction.

00:31:03.580 The universe can have objects moving faster away from each other, and that doesn't involve necessarily their acceleration.

00:31:10.220 So what Einstein did to counteract that fact, he was a pretty smart guy, right?

00:31:15.020 He looked around, he said, well, the universe doesn't seem to be collapsing, so there must be some hidden form of energy that we don't observe.

00:31:22.440 And that unobserved matter, he called the cosmological term or cosmological energy source.

00:31:28.200 We later call it the cosmological constant, and now we call it dark energy, as you proposed.

00:31:33.080 What that does is by adding in matter, you get anti-gravity, or you add in energy, pure energy, you get a form of anti-gravity, almost as if, you know, it's the comic book hero's dream that you could suspend gravity, that you could freeze the motion of objects that tend to want to combine with one another.

00:31:51.460 So he then had a mechanism, contrived as it was, to explain why the universe appeared static, as it did in 1919.

00:32:01.820 But then, as I mentioned earlier, when Hubble observed the universe is, in fact, not static, Herr Einstein, the universe is expanding, then Einstein had the brilliance, the humility, and the confidence to say, I was wrong.

00:32:15.960 And supposedly, he called the insertion of the cosmological term, his biggest blunder.

00:32:22.180 Right, right.

00:32:22.900 So he was trying to account for the fact, let's, just to get the chronology clear, at that point, the universe appeared static, and Einstein was trying to figure out why it wasn't collapsing onto itself.

00:32:34.720 And so he proposed a constant, which you equated to something like an anti-gravity energy.

00:32:39.740 But then the problem turned out to be even worse than it seemed to be, because it was not only not collapsing, and not, or sorry, not static, and not collapsing, it was expanding.

00:32:50.540 Yeah.

00:32:50.720 And so, and that's the mystery that people are trying to address, well, still today, with the hypothesis of something approximating dark energy.

00:32:57.900 That's right.

00:32:58.820 So the dark energy phenomenon causes not only a reversal of the collapse of the universe's infall of all these galaxies or raisins that would be coming together, it not only freezes them in their tracks, it actually reverses that process.

00:33:14.060 So instead of just expanding linearly, smoothly, as Hubble would envision us doing, actually the universe starts to accelerate.

00:33:21.360 So it's as if you're pushing down on the cosmic accelerator pedal.

00:33:25.460 These galaxies are not only moving apart, but tomorrow they'll be moving apart even faster.

00:33:30.440 At a given distance, they'll be moving apart faster than they are.

00:33:33.680 So I always joke, you know, it was a blunder of Einstein to call that blunder his blunder, because it wasn't a blunder at all.

00:33:41.540 And I always say, I like to throw in, you know, it's too bad that he made that blunder, otherwise he could have had a good career.

00:33:46.740 But in this case, when we look at what Einstein was conjecturing, it came back unavoidably in the late 1990s through the observation of what are called type 1a supernovae, which are just used.

00:34:01.180 It's not important to know what they are.

00:34:02.340 They're exploding stars and they're fascinating objects in their own right.

00:34:04.980 But they're really used as the sirens on the ambulances at great distances.

00:34:10.980 So in 12 Rules for Life, you talked about the value of precision of speech.

00:34:15.920 Well, the most important thing for cosmologists is precision cosmology.

00:34:20.400 When I started graduate school in the 1990s, in the mid-90s, we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion years old or 20 billion years old.

00:34:28.780 Now we know it's 13.824 billion years old, and we have a precision of less than 1%.

00:34:36.060 And we also have an accuracy.

00:34:38.800 In other words, we have calibrated that number and removed systemic contamination from that number.

00:34:44.000 It's really phenomenal.

00:34:44.860 I mean, at that time, we knew of objects that were older than the universe.

00:34:48.460 Supposedly, there were objects called globular clusters, and they were older than the universe.

00:34:52.420 That's like finding out that you're older than your mother.

00:34:55.400 I mean, it's a very bizarre situation.

00:34:57.180 And quite frankly, it was embarrassing to cosmologists.

00:34:59.780 Now we know it with extreme precision.

00:35:01.420 But with that precision comes great power.

00:35:03.940 And that power allows us to assess what is the nature of this dark energy, potentially.

00:35:09.900 And not only that, what is it doing to our future understanding of where the universe will continue to develop in the far, far distant future.

00:35:17.900 And so if the universe truly has this dark energy, chimeric form of energy, unknown, completely, you know, unlike anything we've ever had an experience with, that type of energy will eventually drive the universe potentially in a variety of different ways.

00:35:32.500 None of them good, but luckily, they don't come about for tens to perhaps hundreds of billions of years.

00:35:38.600 When the universe might physically rip apart, there could be aspects of space-time that at all locations develop what we call singularities, the breakdown in all the laws of physics.

00:35:49.460 And certainly long before then, we will have stopped having the ability to do astronomy or cosmology.

00:35:56.680 We will no longer be able to see any other galaxies after a certain point.

00:36:01.520 After the universe has expanded so much, those galaxies will all be redshifted so far out of observational constraints.

00:36:07.600 That we won't even know we live in a galaxy.

00:36:10.560 We'll just think, this is the entire universe.

00:36:12.600 So ironically, we'll be back to the way the state of affairs was in pre-1929 planet Earth's understanding of cosmology.

00:36:21.360 And with the precision that I mentioned before, that we know the age of the universe, we know the expansion rate of the universe, we can do astounding things.

00:36:28.380 We can go back in time and ask, just as we do with, I remember when my children turned two years old.

00:36:36.860 You take them to the pediatrician's office, and they measure their height.

00:36:40.880 And basically, they've got this rule of thumb based on the statistics of 100 billion people that have lived on planet Earth to date that the child will be about twice as high, twice as tall as he or she is at age two.

00:36:52.080 I think I'm getting that right.

00:36:53.540 I am a doctor, but I'm not that kind of a doctor, right?

00:36:56.300 So you'll have to check those numbers.

00:36:57.940 But they basically extrapolate.

00:36:59.400 So imagine if you went and you go to the pediatrician, and then you come back in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and the kid is like 30 times bigger than that height.

00:37:07.720 Or one-tenth as tall.

00:37:09.500 Well, you'd say, this is crazy.

00:37:10.880 There's something strange going on.

00:37:12.480 Your tables are all messed up.

00:37:13.780 And your actual statistical sample is not a good representation of the parent population, no pun intended.

00:37:20.960 So the question becomes, how accurately can you estimate how fast the universe will be expanding today versus 13 billion years ago?

00:37:29.260 And there's what's called a tension.

00:37:31.080 Because the two numbers disagree, and they disagree by a violently unacceptable amount.

00:37:37.040 The measurements that we do with the cosmic microwave background radiation suggest a universe that is a billion years younger, if you like, than the universe that we see using the type 1a supernovae.

00:37:53.040 And that tension is a lot.

00:37:55.460 A billion years is a big difference.

00:37:57.040 And so each one is precise.

00:37:58.680 That's the current problem?

00:38:01.140 A current problem?

00:38:02.020 That's a current problem.

00:38:03.140 We don't know the Hubble constant's value.

00:38:05.240 It disagrees at what's called five standard deviations.

00:38:08.680 So there's one part and several million that it could be a statistical fluke, and they're both actually the same.

00:38:14.900 Or it could be that the physics of the early universe that I study is very different than the physics of the late-time universe that my colleagues who study supernovae study.

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00:39:41.320 So, okay, so let's walk back 13.824 billion years.

00:39:50.260 Now, in principle, correct me if I've got any of this wrong,

00:39:54.060 all of the matter and energy that constitute the current universe,

00:39:57.940 visible and invisible, is collapsed to, well, to a point that isn't even a pinpoint.

00:40:03.680 It's infinitely small and infinitely dense.

00:40:08.040 And there's a cataclysmic explosion.

00:40:11.140 That's the Big Bang.

00:40:12.060 That's still part of the standard cosmological model, still an accepted, let's say, fact.

00:40:17.860 And then why don't you walk us through what happens as the universe unfolds from that point onward,

00:40:23.060 including speculations or known facts about the difference between the early periods that you just described,

00:40:30.980 maybe even in terms of fundamental cosmological laws and later periods.

00:40:36.940 Now, and we might also throw in this caveat, too, is that as far as I've been able to determine,

00:40:43.500 it's still an axiomatic presupposition among scientists that the laws of physics

00:40:49.840 that obtained at the point of the singularity are not the same laws of physics,

00:40:55.640 or at least can't be shown to be, that govern the universe as it's currently unfolding.

00:41:01.220 So let's go back, and we'll walk through all of that.

00:41:03.880 Actually, yeah, I'm glad you said it in those terms.

00:41:06.340 It's actually better to start not with the beginning, which is ambiguous,

00:41:10.540 which is hotly debated, which is contestable,

00:41:12.960 and those are all good things about the scientific process,

00:41:15.940 but actually to start with today.

00:41:17.340 So let's go back from today, when we think we understand the laws of physics that are presented to us,

00:41:24.040 and go back in time to a point before which we don't understand the laws of nature.

00:41:30.880 Because if you start from a point of ambiguity and uncertainty,

00:41:35.880 and then you attempt to extrapolate forward,

00:41:37.980 you're less likely to get the right answer than if you kind of go back historically and ask,

00:41:41.940 when do we lose sight of the plot line?

00:41:43.820 When do we lack our understanding of the laws of nature?

00:41:47.640 So starting from today, we see four forces of nature.

00:41:51.100 There are two nuclear forces called the strong and weak force that govern the behavior of atoms and radioactive decay.

00:41:57.060 And then there's the law of electricity and magnetism that govern everything from electromagnetic communication,

00:42:01.780 like we're doing right now,

00:42:03.260 to refrigerator magnets, to magnetic levitation,

00:42:06.720 and future, you know, helpful transportation mechanisms.

00:42:10.060 And then there's the law of gravity, which is perhaps most familiar to us when we try to get out of bed every morning.

00:42:15.380 We're fighting against the entire mass of the Earth with our meager masses,

00:42:19.380 hopefully, you know, maintaining the battle every day to get out of bed and make your bed in the morning.

00:42:25.100 So this phenomena, these four phenomena are familiar to us.

00:42:29.420 And we can actually go back a great distance in time and even staying only in space where we are right now.

00:42:35.700 Let's take the Earth back in time.

00:42:37.420 We go back four billion years,

00:42:38.620 the Earth condensed out of the shrapnel of a supernova that had exploded perhaps a billion years before that in our local arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

00:42:47.360 Let's go back a few more billion years.

00:42:48.920 The dark energy that we spoke about earlier began to dominate and the universe started to accelerate faster and faster.

00:42:54.800 Well, that still is in the laws of classical physics and quantum physics that we understand.

00:42:59.640 Let's keep going back.

00:43:00.660 Now we're back, say, 10 billion years ago.

00:43:02.800 The first stars that were ever made are all long gone.

00:43:06.320 They've all blown up into these type population three events that the Webb telescope is hopefully going to shed more infrared light on.

00:43:15.560 And then you go back even further, 100 million years before that.

00:43:18.700 So now you're going back from 13.8 billion years.

00:43:21.720 Let's say today we're talking on a Friday.

00:43:24.460 We go back.

00:43:25.040 There's some Friday 13.8 billion years ago, okay?

00:43:28.980 If you just kept going back seven times 24 and you just keep counting the weeks and the years and the months, you'll reach some day.

00:43:35.600 And there'll be some day that three minutes, you know, earlier, the laws of physics that we really understand, know and love, gravity, electromagnetism,

00:43:44.480 the strong and weak nuclear forces, that they all froze into the configuration that we can understand today.

00:43:52.200 In other words, once you go beyond that, and it is a type of event horizon in a sense, in that it may be forever shielded from our vision.

00:44:00.440 Once you go beyond that gap, you can no longer speculate with the knowledge and certainty and precision that we have today.

00:44:08.120 So it kind of marks a boundary, an ignorance boundary, an ignorance horizon beyond which we can only speculate.

00:44:15.260 But speculation is fun, and it's great to do.

00:44:18.040 And I appreciate it as much as my theoretical colleagues do.

00:44:21.740 Remember, I'm an experimentalist.

00:44:23.280 I look at the shrapnel and the fossils and what's left from the universe that we can observe today, even if it's very old, like the light of the cosmic microwave background.

00:44:32.640 It's very old.

00:44:33.300 It's the oldest light in the universe.

00:44:34.720 I still can use that to glean information about that period, you know, three minutes after midnight on some Friday 13.8 billion years ago.

00:44:43.340 Right, so we can't look all the way to the Big Bang itself.

00:44:47.880 We can look some fractions of seconds after the Big Bang when the laws of physics spring into existence and we have the beginnings of the interactions between matter and energy that we see today.

00:44:59.820 But there's a border there prior to that that we can't peer into at the moment.

00:45:05.560 Now, talk to people, tell everybody about what the cosmic background microwave radiation is and why you study that and how that enables us to peer back really to as close to the beginning of time as we can manage.

00:45:18.640 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:19.680 So, the cosmic microwave background is the leftover heat from the fusion of the very first elements on the periodic table of the elements.

00:45:28.600 So, the lightest elements in the universe are hydrogen and helium, and they have isotopes.

00:45:33.500 Each one has a couple of different isotopes, meaning they have more or fewer neutrons in their nuclei.

00:45:39.220 These are not atoms, though.

00:45:40.600 These are just the nuclei of what would eventually become the chemical elements and atoms.

00:45:45.400 So, the nuclei are fused in the first few minutes of the universe, of our current observable universe.

00:45:51.400 I have to be very precise here.

00:45:53.240 We can't say the Big Bang was the beginning of time.

00:45:55.840 We don't know that.

00:45:56.760 Most people assume that the universe, with the universe's origin, with the Big Bang, came the beginning of time.

00:46:03.500 That raises all sorts of hairy paradoxes that are really quite difficult to approach, both from the laws of physics perspective, but even from metaphysical perspectives.

00:46:13.320 You know, how does time come into existence when there was a moment before that existence was even possible?

00:46:20.280 Can you even conceive of such a thing?

00:46:21.880 How do you get the motive change, the motive force, if you will, to go from X to delta, X plus delta, or T plus delta T, if there was no time at the zero point?

00:46:32.800 So, these are metaphysical questions.

00:46:34.300 And I should say, there are many eminent and serious cosmologists who do speculate what would the universe look like if there wasn't a quantum singularity at the origin of time.

00:46:46.820 There were no origin of time, if you will, whatsoever.

00:46:50.160 And you've spoken to some of them, Roger Penrose and others.

00:46:53.840 But the point being that there are alternatives to that.

00:46:57.080 Now, 99% of my colleagues don't really pay much attention to those models, but I think it's important to at least not give the impression that we know for certain the universe had a quantum gravitational singularity that sprang time into existence.

00:47:12.480 As you said before, you know, there's infinitesimal amount of space.

00:47:17.260 And in that space was all the matter in the universe.

00:47:19.580 Jordan, we don't know that.

00:47:20.920 That is a possibility.

00:47:21.960 And in fact, that's the most popular possibility amongst my colleagues.

00:47:26.860 But again, I'm an experimentalist.

00:47:28.520 I don't come up with these theories.

00:47:30.200 I try to prove these theories wrong.

00:47:32.180 So, one of the things that I'm doing with the cosmic microwave background, because it is the oldest light in the universe, and because if you think about the motor homunculus of a human being, we get most of our, you know, kind of attention, our cortex, our brain pays attention to light, the visual cortex, and also our hands and our motor, you know, our motor system.

00:47:50.720 I mean, you know this infinitely better than I do, Jordan, but light is such a powerful tool that we should do everything we can to exploit all the information.

00:48:00.240 And these precious few photons that are still left over, they're still coming to us, they're still saying, hello, here I am.

00:48:06.520 I am a relic fossil, and I've traveled through time like a time machine to get to your telescope here in Chile or Antarctica, and I'm going to tell you about what it was like when I was born.

00:48:18.500 Now, that's enough for me to kind of, you know, just stretch my imagination, build new instrumentation.

00:48:25.260 But, of course, it's fun to speculate on what happened before.

00:48:28.100 So, I just told you these are the oldest particles of light.

00:48:30.800 So, the only thing you can say right now is that we can't use light to find out what happened before these photons were born.

00:48:36.800 These cosmic microwave background photons came to be.

00:48:39.560 So, that doesn't mean that there's nothing we can use because nature is clever, and there are many different forms of matter and energy that we can use to trace the early universe phenomenon.

00:48:50.660 If, indeed, if and only if there was a universe prior to, say, the Big Bang or prior to the formation of these ancient relic photons.

00:49:00.340 So, one other form of radiation, it's not electromagnetic radiation, it's called gravitational radiation.

00:49:08.140 Gravitational radiation arises whenever there is matter in motion and whenever space-time reverberates.

00:49:15.360 So, famously, it was discovered by three friends and colleagues of mine and their team called the LIGO experiment in 2015.

00:49:22.320 In September 2015, they caught the in-spiral of two black holes, each one 30 times the mass of our sun.

00:49:30.800 They were moving at a fraction of the speed of light, a very high velocity.

00:49:34.680 They eventually coalesced into one fused, exactly the analogy I like to use is fused into a giant black hole.

00:49:42.120 But that black hole had a mass of, say, 59 times the mass of our sun.

00:49:46.680 So, where did that extra one mass of the sun go?

00:49:49.480 Well, it went into shaking up the fabric of space-time itself.

00:49:54.380 And that reverberation of space-time is called a gravitational wave or gravitational radiation.

00:50:00.480 Gravitational radiation penetrates everything.

00:50:03.740 When I shake my fist here in San Diego, you feel it there on the East Coast.

00:50:09.360 But it's minute and it's overwhelmed by a multitude of other sources of local gravitational field distortion.

00:50:15.680 But as these waves of gravity travel through space-time, they affect all matter and they go through all matter.

00:50:22.340 And so, we would actually weigh slightly heavier and then alternate.

00:50:25.680 We'd weigh slightly less as a gravitational wave came into the room that we're in right now.

00:50:30.880 That's the effect.

00:50:31.420 Does that propagate at the speed of light?

00:50:34.640 Yeah, it propagates at the speed of light.

00:50:36.820 It also has the virtue that they don't decay.

00:50:39.400 There's nothing for a radioactive, there's no radioactive decay of gravitational radiation.

00:50:44.820 They're just like light, except they go through everything.

00:50:48.260 So, if the universe produced an enormous amount of gravitational waves capable of being detected a billion light years away from these two black holes that I described before.

00:50:59.060 They were located one billion light years away in a galaxy.

00:51:02.060 We don't know exactly which galaxy they were in, but they crashed together in a galaxy far away from the Milky Way galaxy a billion years ago.

00:51:08.980 Those waves of gravity traveled at the speed of light for a billion years.

00:51:13.200 They entered into two different telescopes on Earth, and they displaced those telescopes by less than the diameter of an atom.

00:51:19.960 And these incredible researchers were able to detect this, and they've done it a hundred times since.

00:51:24.980 So, it's a precision science, just like Galileo first using a telescope to look at the moon, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, etc.

00:51:34.860 That opened up a whole new regime of astronomy, not just to look at the moon, but to look at the entire universe using optical telescopes.

00:51:42.000 They revolutionized that.

00:51:43.180 Now, Jordan, if indeed all the matter in the universe was, as we know, at one point the universe was far, far smaller.

00:51:50.140 It was at least a thousand times smaller than it is now in every dimension.

00:51:54.680 That means it was a thousand, thousand, thousand, or a billion times smaller in volume than it is now when the cosmic background radiation was released or produced about 380,000 years after the initial singularity or after the origin of our current observable universe.

00:52:11.960 If two little measly black holes, you know, if just they're crashing together, can cause a lot of gravitational radiation, think about all the matter in the entire universe, all the black holes that would ever be, and all the stars, all of our matter that made us up, all the light, all of it coming into existence at a certain time.

00:52:31.120 You would expect that that would make an enormous amount of gravitational radiation, and you'd be right.

00:52:35.900 And so that gravitational radiation would then propagate through the universe, and eventually it would encode and encrypt its behavior on what's called the polarization of the microwave background.

00:52:48.740 Remember I said light has three properties.

00:52:50.940 We talked about the three properties, the intensity, the brightness of the light.

00:52:55.220 We talked about the color of the light or its spectrum.

00:52:57.920 Well, the third and least known of properties of light, because our eyes aren't sensitive to it, is the polarization state of light.

00:53:06.160 Right.

00:53:06.660 Now it's its angle of travel, essentially.

00:53:09.080 It's the oscillation.

00:53:10.060 If light's a wave, like you and I holding a rope and oscillating a rope up and down, it's the plane that the rope is oscillating in.

00:53:16.140 It could be horizontal.

00:53:17.100 It could be vertical.

00:53:17.800 It could be any angle between.

00:53:19.260 It turns out that gravitational waves have a beautiful propensity to turn the polarization of the microwave background in a very particular orientation.

00:53:29.360 And we can, by mapping the orientation of the microwave background and its polarization, we can divine the existence or lack thereof of waves of gravity called gravitational radiation.

00:53:40.840 And if detected, that doesn't prove a theory that we can get into called inflation, which is the most popular cosmogenesis model that we have.

00:53:51.440 But it gives very, very, very strong circumstantial evidence for it.

00:53:55.320 But again, I'm an experimentalist.

00:53:56.940 So what do I do, Jordan?

00:53:58.060 I try to kill other theories.

00:54:00.820 Well, it turns out our good friend Roger Penrose, he has a theory that there should be no polarization of this kind.

00:54:06.480 In other words, Jordan, if I observe, my team and I observe this particular polarization configuration, it doesn't prove somebody right.

00:54:15.240 It proves Roger wrong.

00:54:16.780 It proves other colleagues wrong as well that have alternative hypotheses.

00:54:20.600 And what are those alternative hypotheses?

00:54:22.880 Well, they're very fascinating because they do not involve inflation, but they also do not involve a singularity at the origin of time.

00:54:31.980 There is no origin of time in most of these alternatives.

00:54:34.820 So by observing this signal, we kill those models off.

00:54:38.800 And what's left is a closer approximation to the truth.

00:54:43.320 And did you observe this polarization?

00:54:46.540 Yes, we did.

00:54:47.420 And then, yes.

00:54:48.420 That's a hangover.

00:54:50.320 If I've got this right, that's a hangover of events that occurred before the light itself that you're measuring,

00:54:57.480 which is the microwave radiation, electromagnetic radiation, that it was extant about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

00:55:05.540 And so it's been oriented in a manner by something even earlier than that.

00:55:09.740 That's right.

00:55:10.320 Now, I read a counter-theory, I think, when I was investigating your work for our podcast,

00:55:16.900 that is it the case that there are people who claim that the polarization that you detected was a consequence of the interaction between light,

00:55:26.120 the light you're observing, and dust that's spread out in the cosmos?

00:55:30.080 And it's not a consequence of these early gravitational waves?

00:55:35.740 Yeah.

00:55:36.300 So this is a very, very important chapter, not only in my life, but it will be talked about in future years as an example of how science actually gets done.

00:55:47.060 And it's the subject of my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize.

00:55:49.700 And it's the story of how a scientist can become obsessed.

00:55:55.000 In this case, the scientist is me.

00:55:56.480 It's a memoir of my career trying to detect these early reverberations of the universe's space-time structure

00:56:04.140 in order to see whether or not inflation or an alternative took place to ignite the hot Big Bang that we do observe

00:56:12.940 and have stacks and reams of evidence to support.

00:56:16.040 So the existence of matter, the existence of the CMB, the existence of galaxies and expansion,

00:56:23.360 those all support the fact the universe was in an extremely hot and dense state early on in its history,

00:56:29.140 but they don't provide the mechanism by which that came about.

00:56:32.380 Now, I always say it's like this, Jordan, when somebody says, you know, we're going to take biology class,

00:56:37.100 on the first day of biology class when you were in college,

00:56:40.180 they don't start off with the origin of life in the universe.

00:56:42.980 They don't even start off with the origin of DNA, right?

00:56:45.220 It's almost as if the origin of the universe is outside or metacosmologically related to the expansion

00:56:52.540 and the properties that we observe as cosmologists.

00:56:55.280 So it's almost expecting too much of us to say, well, we also know how the universe came into existence.

00:57:00.520 But again, it's super-duper fun to speculate about things that you can't observe and maybe will never be observable.

00:57:07.540 So I wanted to do this.

00:57:09.180 I wanted to observe the early universe and its infant state.

00:57:13.480 I wanted to do that for two reasons.

00:57:14.860 I've always been fascinated by the biggest possible questions.

00:57:18.600 I always, I grew up, I'm Jewish, but I grew up as a Catholic, you know, young man.

00:57:24.020 I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church.

00:57:25.800 I never had a bar mitzvah.

00:57:27.940 And so at the time when I should have been having a bar mitzvah, I was in the Catholic Church.

00:57:31.640 I was interested in the origin of the universe, trying to know if God existed,

00:57:36.380 and trying to understand our place in the cosmos.

00:57:39.900 And I didn't care about kind of the stamp collecting aspects of life.

00:57:44.660 I didn't care about parties and all sorts of other things, status, sports.

00:57:48.940 I just wanted to understand math, science, and use my telescope.

00:57:52.520 And those were my real fascinations as a young man.

00:57:56.820 Later in life, I became, I said I was Jewish.

00:58:00.500 Both my parents are Jewish.

00:58:01.680 My father was a great scientist.

00:58:03.460 His name was James Axe.

00:58:04.580 I don't have the same last name as him.

00:58:06.460 He divorced my mother and father got divorced.

00:58:09.040 And I live with my stepfather, who became my stepfather, and he adopted me.

00:58:13.360 And I lost touch with my biological father for many, many years.

00:58:16.460 For 15 years, I didn't see him.

00:58:18.260 And in that period of time, I knew he was a great scientist.

00:58:21.240 He was a great mathematician.

00:58:22.600 He was the youngest tenured professor of mathematics at Cornell in their history.

00:58:26.500 And I think he still holds that distinction.

00:58:29.380 He went on to have a great career, and I didn't see him.

00:58:32.760 And I actually was adopted by my stepfather.

00:58:35.260 And I kind of had this rivalry with him, Jordan.

00:58:37.740 And you can psychologically diagnose it as you like.

00:58:40.480 But just as a boy might want to be a better football player or wrestler than his father,

00:58:45.260 I want to be a better scientist than him.

00:58:47.200 As great a scientist as he was, he never won the Nobel Prize.

00:58:51.120 And I realized I could kind of one-up this old man who had abandoned me and my older brother

00:58:56.320 decades earlier, and I could do what he did not.

00:58:59.460 And best of all, I could do it by doing the most fun thing I could possibly imagine,

00:59:04.060 building telescopes and studying the biggest picture topics.

00:59:07.000 So this became my obsession.

00:59:08.620 I became obsessed with this.

00:59:10.220 And later on, I proposed an experiment with my mentor and friends at Caltech,

00:59:15.100 where I was a postdoc, to go back in time as far as we could go back,

00:59:19.820 building a telescope called BICEP, which I coined the name.

00:59:23.000 It means Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization.

00:59:26.700 But it's a play on words because that polarization signal I told you about, Jordan,

00:59:30.660 the orientation is called a curl.

00:59:33.120 So it's called a curl-type motion.

00:59:35.360 Very funny.

00:59:35.920 There's a profound nerd joke for you, man.

00:59:39.540 It is, yeah.

00:59:39.860 You have to know a lot to catch that one.

00:59:42.340 Before I got to purveying dad jokes, I was purveying nerd jokes.

00:59:47.080 So that experiment did detect, we detect, we claimed we detected, the imprimatur of inflation.

00:59:54.820 In other words, we claimed that we saw the twisting, roiling pattern of polarizations called curl-mode polarization

01:00:02.380 that was thought to be conclusive, if circumstantial, evidence for the inflationary origin of the universe.

01:00:11.120 Now, Jordan—

01:00:11.580 So these are kind of like eddies in a stream, eh?

01:00:14.020 Exactly.

01:00:14.680 You're detecting an eddy on the edge.

01:00:16.020 And so these are remnants of things that happened extraordinarily early on.

01:00:19.660 You're looking back past, theoretically, you're looking back past 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

01:00:25.840 Hey, let me lay out for everybody who's watching and listening just a brief schemata of time

01:00:31.880 because you never know.

01:00:33.160 There's all sorts of people listening, and you never know what people know and what they don't know.

01:00:37.440 So let's just take a walk through numbers.

01:00:39.400 So everybody understands 1,000, and people generally know that a million is 1,000,000.

01:00:44.820 But then things get murky at the top end past then.

01:00:49.000 So 1,000 million is a billion.

01:00:50.900 And so we're looking at 13,000 millions, or about 13 and 13.3 in your estimation.

01:00:57.720 And right now we're speaking about a time that's 300,000 years after the events of the Big Bang.

01:01:03.660 But you're looking back even farther than that by looking at the effects of the gravitational waves

01:01:09.320 on the microwave background.

01:01:11.340 And that's what you built the telescope for in the South Pole.

01:01:13.740 That's right.

01:01:14.960 So imagine you're in a room right now.

01:01:17.100 You're looking around your room.

01:01:18.800 You have a horizon beyond which you can't see.

01:01:21.100 It's called the walls of the room that you're in.

01:01:23.080 But if something happened outside, let's say somebody lit off a firecracker outside of the room that you're in,

01:01:28.120 you couldn't see it with light, but you could hear it with sound.

01:01:31.960 So in other words, you can see things that are farther away.

01:01:34.240 And as we initiated our conversation, something that's farther away,

01:01:37.340 we're seeing light from when it was more primitive, when it was older,

01:01:40.220 when it was more distant means it translates by the finite speed of light to an older, more primitive existence.

01:01:46.980 Right.

01:01:47.460 And if the explosion was loud enough, even if you were deaf, you could detect the movement of the walls.

01:01:53.300 That's right.

01:01:53.820 And so I've heard that people in the FBI, they use the vibration of windows, bouncing a laser off the windows,

01:02:00.740 because people inside the room are talking.

01:02:02.840 It's causing reverberations of the glass.

01:02:04.760 And they can read out and transduce the sonic vibrations of the air molecules

01:02:09.160 using the reverberations of glass and bouncing a laser off it.

01:02:12.420 Exactly like that.

01:02:13.540 Right.

01:02:13.740 We can see back—

01:02:14.400 That's probably what they're doing right now while we're talking satellites in space.

01:02:18.400 I hope so.

01:02:19.060 It would be a good use of their bandwidth, right?

01:02:21.560 So if you look back to that first—as I said, we can go back from Friday today, 13.8 billion years,

01:02:27.820 that someday we can go back and that first three minutes of that day formed the elements,

01:02:34.400 all the hydrogen that's in your body's water,

01:02:37.720 all the hydrogen that's in the oceans of the entire planet and all planets perhaps,

01:02:42.400 all of the hydrogen was formed in that first three-minute period.

01:02:45.840 But we can go into the farther—

01:02:46.940 Okay, let me ask you a question about that, because I want to get this exactly right.

01:02:51.240 And it also relates to something metaphysical that I wanted to ask you about.

01:02:55.240 So when we go back extraordinarily close to the events of the Big Bang,

01:02:59.940 when things are super hot and super dense,

01:03:02.380 we don't have any of the elements that currently make up the universe of matter as we know it.

01:03:07.880 We have a state prior to the elemental state.

01:03:11.160 And so what's the initial state?

01:03:14.840 Can you walk us through this sequence of unfolding?

01:03:17.500 Now, people should remember that the material world that we see around us is made out of 114 elements,

01:03:23.920 some of which are man-made, not easily found in nature.

01:03:27.160 So let's say 100, just as a rule of thumb.

01:03:30.580 And those elements differ in the complexity of their atomic structure.

01:03:37.020 And so the simpler elements have—you have neutrons and protons and electrons that make up an atom.

01:03:43.660 And the simpler the element is, the fewer of the neutrons and protons and electrons are in the atomic structure.

01:03:51.240 So they're more and more complicated clumps of subatomic particles, of atomic particles to make up the elements.

01:03:57.780 Now, they appear in a sequence, right, as the universe unfolds.

01:04:02.600 And so, but before even hydrogen, which is the simplest elemental structure, before hydrogen appears,

01:04:09.300 there are other states of matter, and that sequences all the way back to the Big Bang.

01:04:14.860 So can you unfold how the periodic table emerges, and then what happens before that?

01:04:20.940 And then we'll go back to the microwave and gravitational wave story.

01:04:25.220 Yeah.

01:04:25.620 So, you know, the famous poet-scientist Carl Sagan said, you know,

01:04:29.180 we are all made of stars, we're all star stuff.

01:04:32.180 And it's actually not really true.

01:04:34.020 We're actually cosmic stuff.

01:04:35.800 Actually, most of us is water, right, Jordan?

01:04:37.920 So most of water is hydrogen, and most of that hydrogen, if not all of it, was formed during these first three minutes after the Big Bang.

01:04:45.560 Or, again, I'll say that as a shorthand for the period of time before which we lose information and we become ignorant.

01:04:53.760 But that period of time leaves fossils.

01:04:57.220 And those fossils are the hydrogen, the helium that we see in the universe, and they're isotopes.

01:05:02.540 So there's really only six or seven different things that are made.

01:05:05.020 But without those things, they become the ingredients of the first generation of stars.

01:05:10.560 Those generation of stars become nuclear fusion reactors taking hydrogen nuclei and isotopes and fusing them together to make helium.

01:05:19.360 After all, helios, the name of the sun, the element helium, was discovered not on Earth, on the sun.

01:05:25.140 I always joke with my cosmology students, the scientists had to go at night, you know, for their own safety.

01:05:30.260 But helium was discovered not on Earth, but it was discovered on the sun via its chemical spectrum, its chemical fingerprint.

01:05:36.900 So the first elements, hydrogen and helium, are formed in the Big Bang.

01:05:41.120 Much more helium is formed later on in stars.

01:05:44.080 Then that helium makes heavier and heavier elements, and we start marching up the periodic table to fill out the rest of those hundred or so elements.

01:05:52.280 Okay, so we have the Big Bang and the initial particles, or electromagnetic waves that emerge, are—how would you—how do you characterize them?

01:06:02.200 Is it—how long after the Big Bang do you have the initial hydrogen and its variant isotopes?

01:06:08.240 And what's there before that, before it's even hydrogen?

01:06:11.300 Yeah, so it doesn't become hydrogen until 380,000 years later, when the universe is cool enough that a proton can meet an electron and fuse together, if you like, or condense to make an actual atom.

01:06:23.880 And the first atoms in the universe are formed then.

01:06:26.000 Then, afterwards, you get hydrogen combining to make helium inside of stars.

01:06:29.860 Okay, so before that, it's just protons and electrons.

01:06:32.840 Just protons.

01:06:33.440 They're not hanging out.

01:06:34.980 It's exactly right.

01:06:36.020 They're in what's called a plasma.

01:06:37.620 So a plasma is the fourth state of matter.

01:06:40.260 It's what happens when you heat beyond a gas.

01:06:42.380 You ionize.

01:06:43.120 You break apart the atom into its constituent nucleus and its electronic content.

01:06:47.600 So you've got—the nucleus is positively charged.

01:06:49.700 It's made of protons and neutrons.

01:06:51.640 And the electrons are just separate individualistic particles.

01:06:56.000 And there's another type of particle, which is very important, but we won't get into, called the neutrino.

01:07:00.000 And that's actually the only form of dark matter that we know for sure exists.

01:07:04.320 So you've heard about dark matter.

01:07:05.420 We've never observed any other dark matter in the universe besides a neutrino.

01:07:09.400 But they're not relevant necessarily for either life or what we have, right?

01:07:14.200 Okay, so now you have this plasma.

01:07:16.240 You have this plasma of protons and electrons that aren't associating with one another.

01:07:22.100 Now, that's a relatively uniform field of protons and electrons.

01:07:27.440 It's super hot.

01:07:28.300 Now, it's only relatively uniform.

01:07:30.740 And correct me if I've got this wrong, but I looked into this a while back.

01:07:34.260 So, it starts to clump together.

01:07:38.300 And the reason it clumps together is because of gravitational attraction, right?

01:07:41.640 It clumps together in material—in material, well, clumps.

01:07:45.920 And the reason that that happens is because of—I believe it's because of quantum uncertainty.

01:07:50.540 It isn't 100% uniform.

01:07:52.820 And so some particles, some of these primordial particles, are a little bit closer to others than others are.

01:08:00.260 There's a slight non-uniformity about it.

01:08:03.560 And now you get clumping.

01:08:05.160 And as the clumping occurs, the bigger the clump that emerges, the more likely it is to accrete additional matter.

01:08:12.140 And then that keeps happening until you get the beginning of clumps of matter that are large enough to be stars.

01:08:17.920 And then the stars have enough gravitational force to produce additional nuclear trans—or atomic transformations.

01:08:25.940 And the stars start to generate the rest of the periodic table of the elements.

01:08:30.760 Correct so far?

01:08:32.480 Yep.

01:08:33.620 Yeah, so let me—let me—yeah, go ahead.

01:08:36.120 Well, no, no, no, that's okay.

01:08:37.300 Take it from there.

01:08:37.980 Okay, and so we can talk about how the rest of the elements come into being as well.

01:08:43.220 Yes, exactly.

01:08:44.660 So I'll get to your point about curvature, which is the crux of everything that you just said relies on a very short word, curvature, that we have to delineate.

01:08:52.700 But first I want to take a slight detour, if you'll indulge me with your patented forbearance, Jordan.

01:08:58.380 There is a lot of talk in the zeitgeist about artificial intelligence and the dangers at which artificial intelligence will pose to humanity.

01:09:06.480 Some say it's worse than nuclear war.

01:09:08.380 Elon Musk has said such things.

01:09:10.160 Others worry about more pedestrian but still more important things like loss of jobs and meaning and so forth as very important to human psychology.

01:09:19.120 I'm not so worried about artificial intelligence, and I'll tell you why.

01:09:23.180 The reason relates to this famous gentleman, Albert Einstein.

01:09:27.040 We've mentioned him three or four times already.

01:09:29.300 I don't know if you're familiar with what Einstein called his happiest thought, Jordan.

01:09:32.760 Einstein called the Gedanken experiment, a thought experiment, that he alone did for the first time.

01:09:40.260 And the following was conjectured by the great Einstein.

01:09:43.420 He said that somebody, if he was falling, if he was in an elevator and the cable broke, God forbid, and the elevators start to fall, that person would experience no gravitational force.

01:09:54.200 It's called the Einstein equivalence principle.

01:09:56.780 He called that the happiest thought of his life.

01:09:59.280 Now, what does that have to do with curvature and so on?

01:10:01.160 Well, it turns out, and artificial intelligence.

01:10:04.200 Let me first detour back to artificial intelligence.

01:10:06.340 Jordan, can I ask you, how do you expect a computer or an artificial general intelligence could interpret these two phenomena?

01:10:14.840 Freefall, the visceral, human-centered experience of freefall, A, and B, have a happiest thought.

01:10:23.840 I'm going to ask you, actually.

01:10:24.840 I'm sorry to turn the tables on you.

01:10:26.160 For me, that gives me great comfort because it really is occurring in the human mind, the human brain, another thing that is of infinite complexity and possibly forbidden to our understanding behind an ignorance horizon like the Big Bang.

01:10:40.580 But, Jordan, does that give you any solace?

01:10:43.020 Because, to me, it's of great comfort that it took a mind, something trapped in the wet supercomputer, if you will, on top of our shoulders operating at room temperature.

01:10:51.540 How can a computer experience a visceral sensation, if possible?

01:10:55.700 And how could it ever associate happiness with it?

01:10:58.320 Yeah, well, that's a good question.

01:11:03.560 I don't know how artificial intelligence systems will mimic emotions.

01:11:08.900 I'm afraid that might be more crackable than we think because I've been talking to Carl Friston, for example, who's a great neuroscientist.

01:11:16.360 And one of the things he pointed out, I'd figured out already, because I had done some work that was parallel to Friston's on the entropy management front.

01:11:23.220 And one of the—you can characterize anxiety as the neurophysiological response to the unexpected emergence of entropy.

01:11:33.460 So it's the expansion of a single specified pathway forward.

01:11:38.720 It's the expansion of that to multiple pathways.

01:11:41.140 So, for example, if you're driving down the freeway and your car breaks down, the reason you get anxious is because your car has been expanded from the simple object that will move you from point A to B to a set of complex and currently unsolvable problems.

01:11:56.980 And that's signified by negative emotion.

01:11:59.320 That anxiety is proportionate to the degree to which entropy has emerged.

01:12:03.340 And that's on the negative emotion front.

01:12:05.120 And then on the positive emotion front, if you're moving towards a valued goal, with each successful move forward, you decrease the entropic distance between you and the goal.

01:12:16.220 And that's signified by positive emotion.

01:12:18.760 And it's possible that AI systems will be able to at least model this conceptually.

01:12:24.080 Now, that's different than feeling it qualitatively, right?

01:12:28.300 Because we have a feeling of anxiety.

01:12:29.980 Yeah, exactly.

01:12:30.660 Whatever that feeling means.

01:12:32.040 And that seems irreducible in some sense.

01:12:34.200 But I think it can be modeled mathematically.

01:12:37.340 And that means that AI systems should be able to conceptualize what constitutes the basis for positive and negative emotion, even if they can't feel it.

01:12:45.600 Feel it.

01:12:46.100 But that's a mystery, too, because we don't know what the hell feel means.

01:12:49.220 Right, yeah.

01:12:50.140 So, getting back to—and actually, I'm glad that you brought up entropy, because that reduction in phase space states is exactly what Einstein effectively did in this thought experiment.

01:12:59.840 He's saying—

01:13:00.160 Right, that's why he had positive emotion.

01:13:02.720 That's exactly right.

01:13:03.580 Because—

01:13:04.060 Exactly.

01:13:04.620 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:13:05.460 And in the context of the physical—so I promise I'm an absent-minded professor, but I'm not that absent-minded.

01:13:11.440 Going back to the curvature conjecture that you mentioned before, everything hinges on curvature.

01:13:15.580 Everything hinges.

01:13:16.540 You nailed the crux of the issue.

01:13:18.340 It hinges on curvature.

01:13:19.100 Where does that come from?

01:13:19.780 In Einstein's conceptual general relativity, he had two great—many, many great ideas, obviously, but special relativity has to do with the finite speed of light and things that travel near the speed of light and the properties of such paths through space and time.

01:13:33.800 And then gravity is when you are—general relativity is when you add in mass and gravity and what that does to space-time itself.

01:13:40.440 So it turns out that there's—what the effect of gravity is to do is to curve and warp space-time.

01:13:47.660 Now, we experience that on Earth when we launch a—say you have a cannon and you shoot out a cannonball horizontally, it will eventually impact the Earth's surface.

01:13:58.080 But it'll travel in a curved parabolic arc for a little bit of time.

01:14:01.320 But if you shoot it with enough velocity, it can actually go into orbit around the Earth.

01:14:05.800 That's also a curved path that it's taking.

01:14:07.920 Those are called geodesics.

01:14:09.100 And so, yeah, so it's actually tracking the shape of the space-time that it's traveling through.

01:14:14.240 You can feel that if you're on one of those merry-go-rounds, those kid merry-go-rounds.

01:14:17.980 That's right, yeah.

01:14:18.740 And you try to move your feet towards the middle, you can feel the centrifugal force, you know, moving your legs as you're—yeah, but that's actually just curvature in space-time that's local.

01:14:29.260 That's right.

01:14:29.760 Or if you've ever been here to SeaWorld here in San Diego, or if you've ever been on a car moving slightly faster than maybe you should and you go over a bump, for a moment you're suspended in space-time and then you come back down.

01:14:40.320 It feels like that.

01:14:41.140 Of course, you're actually traveling on what's called a geodesic, which is an entropically minimizing—so it's order-producing.

01:14:47.840 It's producing a translational map through space-time that minimizes your path length.

01:14:54.040 Just like if you travel from, you know, Miami to London, you don't take a straight line.

01:14:58.400 You take a geodesic path that brings you closer to the North Pole than you would ordinarily expect.

01:15:03.880 But as you experience that, that is the manifestation on Earth of the mass of the Earth.

01:15:09.360 But remember, what you're trying to figure out is how did that mass come to be in the clump that we call the Earth, and how did the galaxy that surrounds us come to be in the place?

01:15:16.360 Well, that means that there had to be some place for matter and mass to agglomerate, to fall into, to coalesce, to eventually make the galaxy that has the sun in it and the sun to have the material that orbits around it that we call the Earth.

01:15:30.660 Those fluctuations in the background otherwise perfection of space-time uniformity—I would say if, you know, everything was completely perfect, we wouldn't be here having this conversation.

01:15:42.540 Right, right, right.

01:15:43.420 There'd be no place to go.

01:15:43.720 Because everything would be still distributed.

01:15:45.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:15:46.280 That's right.

01:15:46.640 It would be a very boring universe.

01:15:47.900 So people often in science, Jordan, are driven, and my scientific colleagues, are driven by a notion of beauty.

01:15:53.860 And beauty has symmetry.

01:15:55.340 And symmetry is a manifestation of underlying order and perfection.

01:15:58.700 Well, I say to them, the universe would be incredibly boring if the universe was actually driven by symmetry.

01:16:04.480 It's actually the deviations from symmetry, the variations, the perturbations, that lead to all the interesting phenomena that we know and love, right?

01:16:12.840 You've seen this experiment, I'm sure.

01:16:14.040 So just that tiny—that's so interesting that it's a tiny—reminds me of a Buddhist minimalist art, you know, where there's an art piece where everything is perfect except for one thing that's left in disarray.

01:16:29.960 And there's a whole art form, a whole Japanese art form that's associated with that.

01:16:33.600 And so why do you believe that it was the curvature that was there at the beginning of time that was responsible for the lack of homogeneity rather than quantum uncertainty in relationship to the location of the particles?

01:16:46.120 Or is that the same thing?

01:16:47.660 Or are there alternative theories?

01:16:49.220 They're related.

01:16:49.780 So the overarching framework by which curvature provides the primordial seeds for later matter to agglomerate to then collapse and have nuclear fusion, ignition, and then the movie plays forward as we described it or you described it before.

01:17:04.040 So the initial conditions, how did those curvature perturbations get there in the first place?

01:17:09.320 Well, if the universe was smaller than an atom, even though we don't manifest these large-scale perturbations today in a quantum field, we don't sense quantum mechanics in any discernible sense, on the scale of an atom, if we were atom-sized, then we would see quantum effects all the time.

01:17:24.240 We would see the input and output of virtual particles, which later become things like Hawking radiation, all sorts of other things.

01:17:31.340 But in the early universe, this would manifest itself as departures from perfect homogeneity by one part in 100,000.

01:17:40.560 So let me give you an idea.

01:17:42.460 You ever go bowling, Jordan, and you have a bowling ball?

01:17:45.220 The surface of the bowling ball is more rough than the surface, if you like, of the smoothness relative to its characteristic scale.

01:17:53.860 In other words, the fluctuations of the bowling ball's surface relative to its radius are far rougher than the universe was at this extremely early time, a fraction of a second before what we then produced the elements that we spoke about before.

01:18:10.480 Now, that surface to the bowling ball is pretty smooth, unless it's my bowling ball, which has all these dents in it.

01:18:15.360 But the point being, the universe is incredibly smooth, and so you only have to manifest tiny little perturbations.

01:18:22.520 But that's what inflation does.

01:18:23.720 Inflation says, I didn't get to this before, but when we made this detection in 2014 that's described in my book, Losing the Nobel Prize, we claimed we detected these waves of gravity.

01:18:33.580 That's as close as scientists think we can get to detecting the smoking gun.

01:18:38.380 It's actually the smoke from the gun, if you will, of the initial inflationary expansion of the universe.

01:18:43.880 Now, with inflation, concomitantly, unavoidably, inextricably linked is the notion of the multiverse.

01:18:53.580 You cannot have inflation, which means you cannot have these quantum perturbations that you were describing, which means that the framework then collapses once you go forward, unless you have a multiverse.

01:19:04.580 Okay, so let's walk people through what inflation is first and then talk about the relationship between that and the multiverse.

01:19:11.200 So, explain inflation and explain why it was necessitated as a theoretical and then an experimentally validated construct or experimentally investigated.

01:19:23.200 So, we live in a quantum universe.

01:19:25.000 We don't detect it because we're kind of these macroscopic creatures, right?

01:19:28.500 We're sort of, you know, a couple meters characteristic scale.

01:19:31.580 We live for, you know, tens of decades, hopefully.

01:19:33.540 But we don't live, you know, we don't observe things at the nanosecond or picosecond scale.

01:19:39.140 We don't observe things at the femtometer size scale.

01:19:43.260 So, it's kind of hidden to us by an averaging process that our brain, you've spoken about this many times, we have a foveal kind of attention that we pay to objects and beyond which we can't really say anything other than vague notions about.

01:19:56.380 So, we can only focus on the foveal analogy to us is that we are focused on things that are our size.

01:20:02.820 So, it's natural to think about that.

01:20:04.280 We don't see quantum tigers coming out of the vacuum and then disappearing, right?

01:20:08.180 So, our mind has to work and make analogies.

01:20:11.100 So, we analogize the universe today as being filled with quantum fields and then the particles are just instantiations of those quantum fields.

01:20:18.500 So, there's a proton field over here that's making this dust particle or this air molecule.

01:20:22.520 There's a photon field, there's the particles of light, etc., etc.

01:20:25.720 Imagine the universe, the cosmos as you know it, is filled with an infinite tapestry of potentiality.

01:20:32.560 It can be a photon over here or there may not be a photon over here.

01:20:35.640 It depends on the value of that quantum field.

01:20:37.100 Okay, so that's so interesting, that idea of an infinite expanse of potentiality.

01:20:43.080 Because potentiality is a very strange, what would you call it, scientific materialist concept.

01:20:49.560 Because only what's real can be measured materially.

01:20:53.460 But we need this hypothesis of something approximating an infinite potential.

01:20:57.880 And, you know, I don't know if you know this about, I would say, my work.

01:21:01.660 But it's not just my work.

01:21:02.920 It's the entire corpus of symbolic thought.

01:21:05.600 But, insofar as that's been interpreted, let's say, by psychoanalytic thinkers, there is a hypothesis, a cosmological hypothesis, that permeates religious speculation.

01:21:16.020 That the cosmos that's inhabitable, so the structured material world, is a manifestation of a multiplicitous potential.

01:21:27.680 That's chaos.

01:21:28.700 That's the infinite chaos, right?

01:21:30.960 And so, in Genesis, for example, there's a process that looks to me to be akin to communicative consciousness that interacts with something approximating an infinite potential.

01:21:41.320 That's teom or tohu vabohu.

01:21:44.000 Tohu vabohu, yeah.

01:21:45.320 Exactly that, exactly that.

01:21:46.840 And it's that the order that is good is extracted out from this multidimensional, it's not multidimensional, multipotential field of potential, as a consequence of the action of some structuring force, right?

01:22:01.440 And that's the cosmologically generative principle.

01:22:05.380 And so, it's very interesting to me that in the realm of physics itself, which people consider the queen of sciences, that there is the notion of this expansive potential.

01:22:17.340 And you associated that with quantum fields and also with the multiverse.

01:22:22.560 And so, yeah, let's walk through all of that.

01:22:24.920 But it's even deeper than that, as you're saying, the potentiality is something intrinsic to not only the existence of our universe, but there's a mirror universe that you, I know, have been familiarized with Sir Roger Penner.

01:22:39.100 And that's the anti-universe, the fact that we have antimatter.

01:22:42.080 And it is possible to look at the work of Dirac.

01:22:45.980 We talk about the Dirac-C, where there's an infinite set of potential states that are filled and occupied, or occupied, and depending on their potentiality versus their actuality, when do they get instantiated?

01:22:59.860 When do they get commanded into existence, to use a very overburdened phrase, right?

01:23:04.580 So, this, and there's what's called solid state physics or condensed matter theory.

01:23:08.440 We have, imagine you have, you know, a bunch of people, a crowd, on a regular grid, and they're all moving.

01:23:16.020 And then one guy gets teleported by some aliens that we'll have to talk about some other time.

01:23:20.160 So, one guy gets teleported out of this infinite grid of people marching as soldiers, right?

01:23:24.480 And then the soldiers kind of get nervous, so they start moving to fill in that hole.

01:23:28.680 So, one moves to fill in the hole where the soldier has been extracted or, you know, rendered out of existence.

01:23:34.400 And then that produces a hole in another place where that other soldier was, right?

01:23:38.440 So, there's a sea of the, now you start to see this hole moving.

01:23:41.520 But is the hole real, Jordan?

01:23:42.940 I mean, the guys are real, right?

01:23:44.980 But now, one guy left, and so they're filling in.

01:23:47.640 So, now there's this other thing called a hole, and it's moving.

01:23:49.980 And there's an exact analogy between that and what's called condensed matter physics that are called phonons.

01:23:55.360 Not photons, but phonons, and how they propagate.

01:23:57.680 And they have properties.

01:23:58.940 They travel at some speed.

01:23:59.900 So, now you're talking about the absence of something, the potentiality of that which was, and it is propagating in a sea of possibilities as well.

01:24:08.980 So, I'm not going to say—

01:24:10.100 So, this sea of potentiality.

01:24:13.500 My students and I tried to work through the relationship between anxiety and entropy.

01:24:20.240 And we were contemplating the horizon of possibility, because I think that what people, what consciousness does is confront a horizon of possibility.

01:24:31.480 It's not something driven in an algorithmic, deterministic manner by the states of material objects at the current time.

01:24:38.440 It contends with the sea of potentiality, but it also appears, and maybe this is a consequence of the principles of existence itself, that that sea of probability is structured in a normal distribution of probability.

01:24:53.280 So, for example, the most probable next event in our conversation is that one or the other of us or both will utter a word.

01:25:02.200 But there's some non-zero probability that there'll be a cataclysmic earthquake and I'll be swallowed up by the ground, right?

01:25:08.000 Now, it's a relatively low probability event, thank God, but it's not zero, and it's not entirely predictable.

01:25:14.940 Not in San Diego.

01:25:15.900 It's just low probability.

01:25:16.480 It's more higher probability than it means.

01:25:18.540 Exactly, exactly.

01:25:20.020 Well, and the cataclysmic events in our life occur when something that we deem of relatively low probability in this set of infinite potential actually makes itself manifest.

01:25:30.420 And the more unlikely that event, according to our conceptual schema, the more anxiety is associated with it.

01:25:36.540 But is there a sense among physicists that this infinite sea of possibility—you described it in relationship to Dirac's thought, and I didn't know about that—is there some notion that some of those states are more likely to emerge given the current state than others?

01:25:54.580 And is that a way of conceptualizing some alternative to determinism?

01:25:59.220 Yeah, we actually had, you know, a concept that, you know, we could turn to probably another topic.

01:26:03.920 But Richard Feynman, one of the titanic physicists of the last hundred years, came up with this kind of sum over histories or a path integral description by which particles get from A to B by sampling all paths in which they could possibly take, you know, going from me and you directly, but going the opposite way, too.

01:26:21.940 And those get weighted with different or lesser probabilities, to use the language that you were just saying.

01:26:26.640 But I want to touch back one more to what you said.

01:26:30.040 You've got Feynman, who Feynman developed.

01:26:31.120 That's right, that's right.

01:26:32.340 And so, when you spoke about this anxiety, I want to—I do, you know, because I can't resist, Jordan, as a podcaster myself, to, you know, how often do I have the chance to interview somebody like you?

01:26:44.360 Even though this is your conversation, I want to continue with your questions.

01:26:47.500 But there's something that you said, and I hope, again, you'll indulge me with your forbearance.

01:26:52.780 You mentioned anxiety and entropy.

01:26:55.160 I want to ask you right now, you know, how many different ways could I make your life twice as good?

01:27:02.000 Like, or ten times as good?

01:27:03.680 How many ways could I do that?

01:27:05.220 I mean, it's very limited.

01:27:05.500 There's a finite number of ways.

01:27:07.160 Yeah, exactly.

01:27:07.880 And there's a—well, that's a very good observation.

01:27:09.580 That's part of, I think, why we're also weighted towards weighting negative emotion more significantly,

01:27:15.800 is that the number of ways things can go wrong is near infinite, whereas the number of ways things can be improved is—that's the straight and narrow path, right?

01:27:25.180 That's also, by the way, the boundary between order and chaos in the Taoist conceptualization of the world.

01:27:31.080 It's a very narrow pathway to make things better.

01:27:34.060 It's not impossible, but it's very difficult.

01:27:36.240 It's not to make things—but I think, Jordan, and I want to run this by you, my theory is that you should lean into that which would devastate you.

01:27:43.980 In other words, you and I are both parents.

01:27:46.300 You've met my children.

01:27:47.940 You know that, you know, the greatest fears—I don't even have to speak it, you know, God forbid.

01:27:53.000 But anyone who's had brought a life into existence has organized entropy, has reduced entropy, has invested so much into this beautiful creature miracle that we call a child.

01:28:04.060 And that's just one example of how your life could be made not twice as worse or ten times worse.

01:28:10.020 It could be made infinitely worse.

01:28:11.760 But I like to invert that and use that as a guiding principle and get your impressions about that.

01:28:16.860 Because it seems to me that we should be doing those things and making those network entropic connections that we should have as many of them that they would, if removed, would devastate us.

01:28:28.860 In other words, you can find out what you should be doing by—

01:28:31.680 Well, look, look, okay, so one of the—I would say that that's one of the most fundamental contributions of New Testament thinking to Old Testament thinking.

01:28:42.280 It emerges in part as a consequence, you could say, a narrative consequence of the conundrums that are brought forward in the book of Job.

01:28:50.740 So the book of Job is a narrative description of the infinite numbers of potential ways you can profoundly suffer.

01:28:58.440 And so Job is not only ill in the most terrible ways and innocently ill, but he's ill in a way that loses—and he simultaneously loses his wife and his family.

01:29:08.860 And then his friends make fun of him for being ill and accuse him of being sinful.

01:29:13.480 That's the reason for his illness.

01:29:15.040 And so he's at the bottom of the deepest possible pit.

01:29:18.140 And he has—he contends with God as a consequence in some ways attempting to negotiate with the divine to understand why it is that he's being condemned to suffering.

01:29:30.220 Now, it turns out in that story that God made a bet with Satan of all things that if Satan tortured Job that—or Job that—

01:29:38.080 He'd lose his faith.

01:29:39.020 Job would lose his faith, right?

01:29:41.140 So it's a very strange story.

01:29:42.220 But Carl Jung wrote a great book called Answer to Job that takes that apart in great detail.

01:29:47.400 But what happens in the Christian story is a strange inversion of the story of Job because the hypothesis in the Christian story is essentially that the best way through the absolute catastrophe of life is to voluntarily take on the deepest possible set of catastrophes as if they're an encouraging challenge.

01:30:10.320 It's something like that.

01:30:11.340 That's—you could think about that metaphysically as the invitation to the cross.

01:30:15.080 And so the notion is analogous to the notion that you're describing, which is the best way to inoculate yourself against catastrophe is to confront it voluntarily.

01:30:25.840 It's the same idea, by the way, as the notion that the larger dragons hoard more gold.

01:30:32.040 And the dragon gold story is a very, very old story.

01:30:34.620 The notion there is that the best—what you could find that would manifest itself as the best in your life is likely to be found, as Jung said, in sterquilinus inventur, which meant that which you most need will be found where you least want to look.

01:30:49.400 Right.

01:30:49.780 The cave that you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

01:30:52.880 I think Campbell's—

01:30:53.720 Exactly.

01:30:54.080 Well, you know, in your life, one of the things you pointed out, and we'll talk about this maybe in the Daily Wire interview, you know, you had to deal with the loss of your father, which was a very dark thing to lose, very dark thing to contemplate.

01:31:07.840 And, you know, you said that one of the things you did as a consequence of contemplating that relatively forthrightly was develop a certain kind of radical ambition, both in terms of enthusiasm, because you were interested in it, but also in terms of the magnitude of the problem that you were setting out to challenge.

01:31:25.040 And so you simultaneously solved a psychological and a metaphysical problem by delving into the structure of the real at the place that looked darkest and most mysterious to you.

01:31:35.180 And I think that is—it's something everyone should know.

01:31:38.400 I've been lecturing to my audiences as I go around the world more recently, talking about how destiny makes itself manifest to people.

01:31:45.300 And it does that by inviting you with opportunities that seize your imagination.

01:31:50.740 But it also does it by calling out to you certain problems that beset you that happen to be your problems, whatever that means.

01:32:00.040 You know, because it's not like—it's not like you're obsessed by an infinite number of problems.

01:32:04.340 You're obsessed by that set of problems that happen for whatever reason to be your problems.

01:32:09.780 And you might say, well, I wish I didn't have any problems, but then you don't have any mystery.

01:32:14.720 The reverse of that would be to say, well, I'm going to take the worst problem that besets me and delve into that most assiduously.

01:32:22.200 And I think the evidence is quite clear on the clinical front that that's how you find the great adventure of your life.

01:32:28.700 I think that's a universal truth, by the way.

01:32:30.940 Yeah, I think this—and I see this with scientists.

01:32:33.500 You know, the issue that, you know, that most people don't really recognize is that science is done by scientists.

01:32:39.860 You know, we're not walking automatons that have no feeling and have nothing invested in it.

01:32:44.060 And that's why I think it was sort of like almost like a coming out, you know, feeling must be—I'm not familiar with it—but liberation.

01:32:51.720 When you recognize your own particular dragon, if you're willing to solve it.

01:32:55.700 Look, I mean, you mentioned the mystery and what perplexes you.

01:32:58.720 So if your car breaks down and the analogy you used before, it causes you anxiety.

01:33:02.040 But you know exactly what you have to do.

01:33:03.540 You have to, you know, get a jack and you have to put a tire on and you have to get on your way.

01:33:07.300 And hopefully you'll be there on time.

01:33:09.140 But you know what the path is, and it's not that mysterious.

01:33:12.560 I've been thinking about scientists.

01:33:14.200 You know, we're confronted with an infinite, you know, spectrum of mysteries on a daily basis.

01:33:20.260 And the rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, I don't know if you ever met him.

01:33:23.540 He's the one of the guests, the few guests that I never got to have on my podcast.

01:33:27.380 But Jonathan Sachs is the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, of the Commonwealth.

01:33:31.560 And he has this kind of brilliant take.

01:33:33.460 He wrote a book called The Grand Partnership about the reconciliation and the comity between religion and science.

01:33:39.900 And one of the things he would speculate on was, you know, why is it that scientists are the least religious?

01:33:46.440 You know, I actually happen to think that scientists are incredibly religious.

01:33:49.540 Yes, I think so.

01:33:50.580 We should talk more about that because I'd like to know why you think that.

01:33:54.720 Yeah.

01:33:55.180 We'll get to that before we part here.

01:33:57.320 Yeah, let's do that.

01:33:58.100 So, you know, thinking about scientists, we are confronted with mysteries on this daily basis.

01:34:04.480 But getting back to the ultimate mystery, you know, of why are we here?

01:34:08.660 You know, scientists aren't used to answering why questions.

01:34:13.040 And it's almost like it's beyond our domain.

01:34:15.020 But we don't like that, Jordan, right?

01:34:16.780 Scientists, I think you can correct me again if I'm wrong in any way.

01:34:21.040 But I think there's a narcissistic trait behind scientists.

01:34:23.980 That's a good thing.

01:34:24.900 You know, we have this concept in Judaism of a Yetzir Hara, an evil inclination, and a Yetzir 1.00

01:34:30.080 HaTov, a good inclination. 0.63

01:34:31.740 But it's like the yin-yang.

01:34:33.320 There's a little bit of each and each one.

01:34:35.280 In other words, your evil inclination, your desire for glory and the Nobel Prize.

01:34:40.120 And so they can actually cause you to transmute that into gold and do things that are good for you.

01:34:45.720 And likely, the positive qualities.

01:34:48.840 You want everybody, you know, to think the right way or whatever that means.

01:34:52.740 You want everyone to get a vaccine or, you know, you can think you're doing good and

01:34:55.840 that can actually not be good, right?

01:34:57.240 So the point that I'm trying to make is if you don't channel the propensity of a scientist

01:35:04.140 to think solipsistically and narcissistically, if you don't do it, and I don't know how to

01:35:10.020 do it with my students, right?

01:35:11.440 I'm supposed to teach them the what questions, but I don't get to teach them the why questions.

01:35:15.720 Well, okay.

01:35:16.080 So there's a couple of things here.

01:35:17.400 We'll go back to the scientists are more religious than they presume they are.

01:35:22.660 They partly because they believe in the presumption of redemptive truth.

01:35:26.980 They believe there is a logos in the world, an order, that can be discovered through rational

01:35:31.860 apprehension and experimentation, empirical experimentation.

01:35:35.240 But they also believe that the truth will set you free because otherwise you wouldn't do science.

01:35:40.120 And that was the way in that I used when I was trying to train my graduate students to

01:35:44.580 be ethical researchers.

01:35:47.100 So now, as you said, someone who does science is a person, a scientist, and so a person above

01:35:54.180 all and then a scientist.

01:35:55.540 And the consequence of that is that that person has to be concerned with such mundane realities

01:36:00.300 as formulating a career.

01:36:02.000 And that isn't only self-promotion because there's no bloody point in discovering something

01:36:07.220 unless you communicate it to people, unless you have a network that you've developed, you

01:36:11.140 can't communicate it.

01:36:12.120 And so it's part and parcel of the scientific endeavor.

01:36:15.100 But then you might ask yourself, well, what should be paramount, right, the promotion of

01:36:19.100 your career and the communication of your findings, in which case you get false research findings

01:36:23.100 all the time, or the truth?

01:36:25.060 And part of the answer to that is, you know, if you're not assiduous in your pursuit of

01:36:29.680 the truth, then you could easily...

01:36:32.380 So if I have a student who does a master's or a PhD piece of research and they p-hack, 0.99

01:36:37.500 so they claim that they found valid results when they didn't because they muck about at

01:36:42.640 the micro level with the statistics, then...

01:36:45.480 Well, then as they swallow that lie, they're going to convince themselves that what they

01:36:51.300 discovered was actually true.

01:36:53.120 And then they're going to convince other people.

01:36:54.960 And then there's going to be a whole set of them that are going down an entirely pathological

01:36:58.900 and false road.

01:36:59.820 And so part of the reason that even if you are interested in promoting your career, which

01:37:03.960 you should be to some degree, the reason you should abide by the truth is because you have

01:37:08.440 to ask yourself whether or not you want to spend your entire life investigating something

01:37:13.460 that doesn't exist merely to inflate your status among your peers.

01:37:17.960 And with anyone sensible, like, because you could have your cake and eat it too, you know,

01:37:22.520 you could look at where you're wrong as a scientist and find the interesting stumbling blocks

01:37:26.980 and the interesting mysteries.

01:37:28.180 You could dive into that.

01:37:30.140 Then you could discover something real.

01:37:32.080 And you could have status among your peers and be acclaimed as someone who had a genuine

01:37:36.620 contribution and build a communication network.

01:37:39.060 And that's a way better plan than being, what would you say, than falling prey to falsehood

01:37:44.440 and warping the entire field.

01:37:46.520 That's all an ethical, that's all an issue of fundamental ethics.

01:37:49.800 Which we never teach to our students.

01:37:51.780 No, no, no.

01:37:52.360 We never teach that to our students.

01:37:54.040 I mean, at least, sorry, in the physical sciences.

01:37:55.900 I mean, my law school colleagues, my medical school colleagues, even my business school

01:37:59.560 colleagues.

01:38:00.180 I don't know about you, Jordan, but I was never taught to teach, right?

01:38:03.460 So this is my job.

01:38:04.920 And I think for you too, I think, you know, on your tombstone may it be at age 120, Jordan,

01:38:11.360 but I think it'll say, you know, father, husband, teacher, some order like that.

01:38:16.040 Because I think the essence of who you are, like, I'm a pilot too.

01:38:19.400 I fly little tiny planes in Southern California, little Cessnas around, okay?

01:38:23.760 When I became a pilot, it changed who I was.

01:38:26.560 I started to think about the world.

01:38:28.220 Look, I'm not only, you know, a physicist or a father, whatever, I'm a pilot.

01:38:31.900 And it's a part of a core identification.

01:38:34.380 I also felt that way as a professor.

01:38:35.920 And I know that you felt that way as a professor.

01:38:37.480 Even if you're not teaching, you know, on a daily basis and we can get into your, the

01:38:41.940 travails, the awful way that you've been brutally, you know, kind of set about by monsters in

01:38:47.120 your own right some other time.

01:38:49.040 But I just want to point out that we never get taught how to teach.

01:38:53.100 We never get taught, at least in the physical sciences maybe.

01:38:55.920 And we almost get these ethical conundrum that you just mentioned.

01:39:00.660 You know, we get the barest minimum of kind of ethical training in a one-page sheet that

01:39:06.660 you sign and maybe you watch a two-minute video that some consulting firm was paid $80,000

01:39:12.080 to make.

01:39:12.960 But this, the point is that you do have the tendency, and this is in part what my first

01:39:17.320 book, Losing the Nobel Prize, is about.

01:39:19.180 It's about wanting to discover something that's not only viscerally connected to you and your

01:39:23.560 career and making a living for yourself and your family, which, as you said, is by no

01:39:28.120 means a trivial thing.

01:39:30.320 I mean, we're human beings.

01:39:31.380 We have to support.

01:39:32.760 And there's a lot to be said about good, honest work.

01:39:35.540 And the work that colleagues and I are engaged in.

01:39:38.660 But we were confronted with the discovery of a lifetime.

01:39:41.480 And that would not only mean, as I said before, that we had discovered, you know, gravitational

01:39:46.000 waves, which had never been observed in this fashion in 2014 when we made this announcement

01:39:51.100 at Harvard, you know, that we had discovered the aftershocks of the inflationary epoch, but

01:39:57.600 that we had discovered evidence for the multiverse.

01:40:00.140 And yet, what did it get undone by?

01:40:03.760 The most humble, meager, meek substance in the whole world, which in the universe, which

01:40:08.440 is called dust.

01:40:09.600 And I thought it was so ironic, but it's a teachable thing.

01:40:12.540 We succumb to what Feynman, the great Feynman that we mentioned before, he said, the first

01:40:18.080 principle is that you should not fool yourself.

01:40:21.600 And the second principle is that you are the easiest person to fool.

01:40:26.020 And that speaks of what's called confirmation bias, the p-hacking and stuff. 1.00

01:40:30.380 That's downstream, as you said, the p-hacking, the replication crisis in your field.

01:40:34.020 And by the way, it's starting to become a crisis in my field.

01:40:36.800 Oh, yeah.

01:40:37.120 And things like room temperature.

01:40:38.280 Of course, most discoveries aren't real.

01:40:41.060 If science progressed at 5% a year in real fact, and so 95% of it was tripe, we were still

01:40:49.500 progressing at 5% knowledge increment a year.

01:40:53.140 That's a high rate.

01:40:53.420 That's right.

01:40:53.780 Okay, so what happened on the dust front?

01:40:57.680 And then I want to tell you a little story from Exodus, and then we should wrap up this

01:41:01.200 section.

01:41:01.640 So what happened on the dust front?

01:41:03.720 So on the dust front, we were so consumed with this notion.

01:41:08.080 And I want to speak mostly for me, although I know that it did afflict colleagues involved

01:41:11.700 with this.

01:41:12.520 For me, as I said before, it represented the greatest idol, the talisman of all, not just

01:41:18.400 of society, not just of science, Jordan.

01:41:20.480 You have to imagine when people run to be president of the United States, they always

01:41:25.240 get, whoever's running on the Democratic side gets a letter from 70 Nobel Prize winners

01:41:29.900 about why the Democrats should be president.

01:41:33.700 When there was the COVID vaccine, or sorry, the gain-of-function research was being sponsored

01:41:39.020 by the EcoHealth Alliance by Peter Daszczyk and Fauci, 70 Nobel Prize winners wrote to President

01:41:44.440 Trump to say, this is wrong, you shouldn't cancel the gain-of-function research, and people

01:41:49.200 can invest.

01:41:49.640 In other words, Nobel Prize carries weight, punches way above its weight class.

01:41:55.420 It doesn't just affect egghead boffins in the laboratory.

01:41:58.880 It does, and it does affect my funding probability and how many people we can hire in a given

01:42:03.380 field and what the direction of the field may be.

01:42:05.720 But it percolates to the front page of the New York Times as well.

01:42:08.580 So it's the most, you know, kind of highest example of an idol.

01:42:12.800 And I always look back, you know, when we talk about Exodus, maybe we'll talk about the

01:42:17.940 sin of the golden calf, which is a very natural thing.

01:42:20.800 But when you actually see Jordan, that scientists will give their eye teeth, and they will literally

01:42:26.940 bow down to the king of Sweden and accept a gildengraven image.

01:42:33.300 I mean, the mapping of the symbolism could not be more perfect if you wrote it in a

01:42:39.960 Hollywood script, but it comes directly out of Exodus.

01:42:43.400 And in our case, in my case, this idol that I had worshipped and set so much of my being,

01:42:49.840 my psychology towards, that it could be undone.

01:42:54.420 And it worried me, but it didn't cause me to pull the plug and to not go forward or to

01:43:01.820 say, over my dead body, are we going to publish this?

01:43:04.160 And what ended up happening is we saw the pattern of polarization called curling polarization,

01:43:10.360 this whirlpools, these eddies that you spoke about earlier.

01:43:12.880 And that bespeaks of the inflationary origin of the universe, because if the universe were filled

01:43:18.560 with a quantum field at its earliest moments, and perhaps in perpetuity via what's called the

01:43:26.180 inflaton, this would then be the field in which reverberations could take place.

01:43:32.240 Those reverberations are the curvature perturbations that you asked about a while ago.

01:43:36.660 Those provided the nucleation sites for matter to collapse, condense, agglomerate into, which

01:43:42.140 then ignited the stars, which then made the supernova, which then made us.

01:43:46.140 So the story is an incredible story.

01:43:48.120 It hinges on inflation being correct.

01:43:50.380 Inflation hinges upon a quantum field called the inflaton, and the inflaton hinges upon a

01:43:57.220 super arching structure called the multiverse for it to be filling.

01:44:00.880 In other words, inflation didn't just happen once, Jordan.

01:44:03.180 It didn't happen twice.

01:44:04.340 It happened an infinite number of times, and it's happening right now, and it's unavoidable

01:44:09.980 because it cannot be sort of superseded.

01:44:12.900 It cannot be shut off.

01:44:14.900 And yet, and yet, because we live in a galaxy, a galaxy is a very, very dirty place.

01:44:21.180 It's a place filled with asteroids and subatomic particles and charged particles, and it's filled

01:44:27.260 with the most humble substance that's left over.

01:44:30.320 And thank God, thank bloody God, as you might say, that dust exists because we are, as Carl

01:44:36.580 Sagan called the earth, a moat of dust riding on a sunbeam. 0.52

01:44:40.920 In other words, the earth is a giant block of dust.

01:44:43.580 The iron in the hemoglobin molecule that powers your body right now came from that supernova

01:44:50.800 that produced the dust that obscured and mimicked with perfect fidelity the signal that I was

01:44:57.840 hell-bent, and my colleagues were hell-bent on detecting.

01:45:01.760 It mimicked the curl mode polarization signal to a T.

01:45:06.120 And we saw what we wanted to see.

01:45:08.060 And best of all, it meant that we had seen the multiverse.

01:45:11.640 People on the front pages of every headline, every newspaper, from San Diego to New York

01:45:18.200 to CNN, we have detected the first physical evidence for the multiverse.

01:45:24.920 Okay, so walk me through that, because I still, I don't quite understand it.

01:45:28.160 So you talked about the fact that the initial quantum perturbations that existed prior to

01:45:35.840 our ability to detect the background radiation were a consequence of gravitational waves.

01:45:44.340 And we talked a little bit about the fact that those perturbations could be mimicked by cosmic

01:45:49.920 dust, the perturbation-induced polarization could be mimicked by cosmic dust.

01:45:55.040 So was the polarization you detected a consequence of the quantum fluctuation, or was it a secondary

01:46:01.480 consequence of polarization by this widely dispersed dust?

01:46:07.640 So when you came to visit San Diego, I gave you some chunks of rock.

01:46:11.400 They look like ordinary chunks of rock, but they're actually meteorites.

01:46:14.160 And actually, I give them away on my website for free.

01:46:16.720 You know, I have these giveaways where people can get.

01:46:19.040 It's a meteorite.

01:46:20.140 It's actually what you see as a meteor shower.

01:46:21.980 When some of the material in a meteor shower reaches the Earth's surface, it's called a meteorite.

01:46:26.540 And that meteorite that I gave you, and I give away on occasion to people who go to my website,

01:46:30.460 is a chunk of iron.

01:46:33.160 And it's iron, it's cobalt, it's nickel.

01:46:35.440 I also will send people the chemical assay of it as well, because it's just so cool to see

01:46:41.240 that this chunk of rock is 4.3 billion years old.

01:46:45.080 It predates the Earth's formation, and it shares a lot in common with the Earth.

01:46:49.940 One thing it shares in common with the Earth is that it has magnetic susceptibility.

01:46:53.800 If you take that little meteorite that I gave you, and you put it next to a refrigerator magnet, 0.96

01:46:57.940 it'll suck onto that like a parasite sucking on a brain, okay?

01:47:03.580 That suction is due to the magnetic properties of iron, which is a ferromagnet, and that will 0.86

01:47:10.080 attach to a magnetic field, just like the Earth does.

01:47:12.640 Those magnetic fields are not confined to the Earth, Jordan.

01:47:16.060 The galaxy has a magnetic field.

01:47:18.180 The universe as a whole may have a magnetic field.

01:47:22.000 But what happened was there's these particles of meteorites in our local region of the Milky

01:47:27.040 Way galaxy, through which we are always looking like a dirty window, like looking through a

01:47:31.600 dirty window that is unavoidable.

01:47:33.600 We live in a galaxy.

01:47:34.980 So we'd have to go outside the galaxy, which is technologically and almost theoretically

01:47:39.140 impossible, and go outside to get away from this dust.

01:47:42.140 So we're stuck inside this dusty cloud, this dusty region.

01:47:45.100 Again, thank God for it, because without it, there wouldn't be blood in our veins, and there

01:47:48.900 wouldn't be a planet for us to sit on.

01:47:50.620 So it's a chimera.

01:47:52.420 It gives and it takes away.

01:47:54.280 In this case, it took away the Nobel Prize, because the magnetic field of our galaxy can

01:47:58.400 cause the same twisting, curling eddies of the emission from these meteorites or these

01:48:03.640 dust particles as well.

01:48:05.260 And that provided the chimeric illusion that we had seen exactly, Fidelitas, to the origin

01:48:12.720 if the universe began with inflation.

01:48:15.260 The exact same pattern.

01:48:16.680 It's almost devilish.

01:48:18.020 It's almost satanic, because it exactly mimicked it.

01:48:21.020 And of course, we knew about it.

01:48:22.140 We weren't babes in the woods.

01:48:23.720 We didn't make a blunder.

01:48:24.940 We didn't put our thumb in the front of the lens cap.

01:48:27.520 But we did our job.

01:48:28.880 But we de-weighted that probability.

01:48:31.980 We assessed it.

01:48:32.640 We said, it's not as likely as the explanation that we found.

01:48:36.100 Of course, the opposite is true, right?

01:48:38.300 To say that the universe began out of a spawn nucleation site within the multiverse, providing

01:48:43.060 curvature sites for agglomerations of matter.

01:48:45.300 That's a much, much wilder story to believe in retrospect than, oh, we detected dust from

01:48:50.820 our galaxy.

01:48:51.760 But I don't want to condemn myself too much, too harshly, or my colleagues, because we

01:48:57.220 immediately tried not only to falsify that hypothesis, but we worked with another team,

01:49:02.140 which was our competitor, which is a billion-dollar satellite called the Planck satellite.

01:49:06.940 And they had been hot on the trail of the exact same signal as us.

01:49:09.480 Science is very competitive.

01:49:10.540 You mentioned all these different traits of scientists all the time.

01:49:13.660 I always say scientists are like children, right?

01:49:15.640 We're curious.

01:49:16.780 We're playful.

01:49:18.000 We're whimsical.

01:49:19.180 But just like children, we don't like to play with others.

01:49:21.780 We're jealous.

01:49:23.260 We're petty.

01:49:23.860 We have all the good qualities of children, but it's a double-edged sword.

01:49:28.020 We have some of the negative.

01:49:28.860 Some of those are the desire for credit and for affirmation and for attention.

01:49:32.420 I'm speaking for me specifically here.

01:49:34.300 But this is a very common affliction, especially when the stakes are as high as they are to

01:49:39.060 say that we live in a multiverse, which is the direct conclusion of this discovery, if

01:49:44.220 it had held up, which it did not.

01:49:45.920 So the results were accurate.

01:49:47.240 So what's the status of the quantum fluctuation field agglomeration theory now?

01:49:55.060 You didn't provide evidence that it was the case.

01:49:58.140 Right.

01:49:58.460 But is that still the extant theory in relationship to the initial agglomeration of matter?

01:50:03.080 It is.

01:50:03.460 It is.

01:50:04.140 We didn't validate that theory.

01:50:05.880 No, no, no.

01:50:06.320 It just invalidated your claim to have provided evidence for it.

01:50:08.760 Exactly.

01:50:09.260 And we made the most precise detection ever of this type of signal.

01:50:13.340 It's just the interpretation was wrong.

01:50:14.820 We didn't make a blunder.

01:50:15.900 We didn't say there's faster-than-light neutrinos or whatever.

01:50:18.240 We made an exquisitely precise measurement of dust in our galaxy, which is useful, by the

01:50:23.720 way, because what we see, we'll never see a unit—well, as I said, until we get out

01:50:28.180 of the galaxy, which won't even happen, you know, with trillions of dollars of funding.

01:50:32.460 It's physically impossible, right?

01:50:34.540 So until we—we're always going to be measuring a combined signal, a potential cosmic signal

01:50:39.480 plus an actual dust signal.

01:50:41.140 So now with other experiments, including the experiment that I lead with my colleagues

01:50:45.700 at the University of Pennsylvania, at Princeton, at Berkeley, and Chicago, called the Simons

01:50:50.820 Observatory, funded by Jim Simons at the Simons Foundation and Marilyn Simons.

01:50:54.820 And that project is a $110 million project in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, which

01:51:01.340 has, as one of its tools, as one of its pieces of apparatus, Jordan, has a dust detection

01:51:07.840 experiment.

01:51:09.080 So the only way to get rid of a systematic experiment, a systematic contaminant, is to

01:51:13.900 dedicate a whole new experiment to it.

01:51:16.580 Imagine you've got your thumb on the scale and you're pouring your coffee beans in.

01:51:20.400 You're going to get too few coffee beans.

01:51:21.640 Oh, I do another experiment in this trivia, just, ah, I saw my thumbs on the scale.

01:51:25.060 For us, we have to do a separate experiment.

01:51:27.000 We have to dedicate some of our extremely exquisitely produced detectors.

01:51:31.660 My colleague Suzanne Staggs at Princeton makes these—no one's ever made anything like what

01:51:35.700 she's been able to do with her group.

01:51:37.360 And they detect the faintest possible microwave signals from the Big Bang, but they can also

01:51:42.960 detect dust.

01:51:44.340 So she's dedicating some of these—

01:51:45.440 So you can control for it now.

01:51:47.440 Exactly.

01:51:47.980 So she has channels, Jordan, that only measure dust, which if you had told me 25 years ago

01:51:52.200 you're going to be measuring dust, I'd say, I thought I was interested in the biggest

01:51:55.160 questions.

01:51:55.760 If I want to study dust, I can follow my teenager around, right?

01:51:59.540 I don't need to build a $100 million project.

01:52:02.600 No.

01:52:03.100 We measure the combined total signal.

01:52:04.980 We'll subtract the dust signal.

01:52:06.300 What will be left is the cosmic signal.

01:52:08.260 And we hope to have first light or first microwave of that instrument in the coming next year.

01:52:14.060 Oh, well, congratulations on that.

01:52:15.780 So let me close this up with this Exodus story, because I think it's relevant to, well, the

01:52:20.760 metaphysical speculations we've been indulging in.

01:52:23.600 But also, I think it's biographically relevant.

01:52:26.760 So when Moses—before Moses emerges as a leader of his people, he encounters the burning bush.

01:52:34.100 And that's a very interesting story, because what happens is Moses is basically out for a stroll,

01:52:39.840 and something attracts his attention.

01:52:42.560 Now, it's not a burning oak tree.

01:52:44.400 It's not a volcano.

01:52:45.820 It's something that flickers and glimmers on the edge of his perception, you might say.

01:52:50.780 It attracts him.

01:52:52.280 So it attracts his curiosity.

01:52:53.700 And he decides that he's going to investigate that which attracts his curiosity.

01:52:59.260 Now, the burning bush is a paradoxical manifestation, because it's being,

01:53:03.380 and that would be the bush or the tree, the small tree, that's alive, that's being.

01:53:08.020 But it's also becoming, because fire is an agent of transformation.

01:53:11.560 And so the burning bush is a symbol of the paradox of existence, which is that things are

01:53:16.600 and are becoming at the same time.

01:53:19.300 And so Moses is attracted by this, and he decides to investigate it, to inquire into its nature.

01:53:25.500 And the consequence of his inquiry into its nature is that the voice of being itself speaks to him.

01:53:31.800 And that's basically how God announces himself.

01:53:34.760 He says, I am that I am, or I am that I will be, or I was that I am now.

01:53:39.980 It's a statement of the essence of being.

01:53:42.240 And the idea behind that story is that if you assiduously pursue that which attracts your attention,

01:53:48.920 the voice of being itself will speak the ultimate truth to you.

01:53:53.280 And that's a hell of a thing to understand.

01:53:55.000 And so when you're trying to teach your students ethics, you can say, look, you can subjugate the search for truth to your venal ambition.

01:54:03.940 But the cost of that will be that if the voice of God beckons to you from the unknown, you'll miss it.

01:54:09.080 And if you think about that for, like, 30 seconds and you have any wisdom at all,

01:54:14.020 there isn't a chance in hell that if you were the least bit wise that you would put the exigencies of your ambition,

01:54:19.720 even if they're Nobel Prize-oriented, above the possibility that the structure of reality itself could reveal itself to you

01:54:27.900 as a consequence of you having the delightful opportunity to pursue what effectively attracts your interest.

01:54:34.720 There isn't a better deal than that.

01:54:36.860 And scientists who are real scientists are imbued by that desire, and they believe it, too,

01:54:41.700 because they do believe that if they investigate something, no matter how trivial, dust, let's say,

01:54:48.720 no matter how contemptible, that the consequence of that will be that they will be able to peer into the furthest expanses of,

01:54:55.040 what would you say, the sacred fundamental realities of existence itself.

01:55:00.320 And all of that seems to be true.

01:55:01.780 So, that's a good ethical lesson for students to know.

01:55:05.700 That is, yeah, to be open to what your eyes can see, right?

01:55:09.240 The Torah speaks about being able to hear the Shema, the catechism of the Jewish faith, is hear, not see. 0.92

01:55:15.420 Don't follow after what your heart leads you astray.

01:55:18.480 It actually says to prostitute yourself after what your heart wants.

01:55:23.320 No, hear, hear is a passive, but you can be sensitized to it.

01:55:26.360 No, I absolutely appreciate that, Jordan.

01:55:28.040 I appreciate that.

01:55:28.760 Yeah, well, that's also a matter of, rather than thinking and imposing your desire onto the phenomena,

01:55:34.960 which is what you said you were tempted by, and you described why,

01:55:38.320 is that you have to let the phenomena speak for itself.

01:55:41.140 And phenomena, by the way, means shine forth.

01:55:43.860 That's the original derivation of the term.

01:55:46.060 So, a phenomena is something that shines forth, right?

01:55:48.600 And it does, in fact, attract your attention.

01:55:50.420 And if you pay enough attention, then, well, you'll be rewarded for what you pay,

01:55:55.160 and you'll be rewarded by a glimpse into the structure of things.

01:55:58.160 And that can help you reconcile yourself to the catastrophe of existence itself, right,

01:56:03.400 by peering into that underlying structure and to feel, as a consequence,

01:56:07.560 in some manner in harmonious relationship to the cosmos itself.

01:56:11.560 And there isn't a better prize than that.

01:56:13.620 No, there isn't.

01:56:14.820 That's right.

01:56:15.420 All right, well, for everyone watching and listening, that was a brief walk through the

01:56:21.560 entire structure of cosmological reality at a relatively low resolution, but in a very

01:56:26.500 interesting manner.

01:56:27.500 And so, thank you for taking us on a 90-minute-long 13.8 billion-year trip.

01:56:35.160 It's much appreciated.

01:56:36.900 I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today and to answer all my questions.

01:56:40.680 And to everyone who's watching and listening, your time and attention is always appreciated

01:56:44.840 and not taken for granted.

01:56:46.320 And to the Daily Wire Plus people for making this conversation possible, for facilitating

01:56:50.360 it, that's also much appreciated.

01:56:52.260 They bring that all to you, all of you who are listening on YouTube.

01:56:55.840 That's all courtesy of the Daily Wire, and that's a big deal on their part, a real public

01:56:59.840 service as far as I'm concerned.

01:57:01.340 And to the film crew here in, where the hell am I?

01:57:06.680 Oh, yes, I'm in Miami.

01:57:08.140 I'm in Miami, in Florida, and doing this podcast.

01:57:12.500 I'm going to continue to speak to Dr. Keating for another 30 minutes on the Daily Wire Plus

01:57:16.900 platform about some of the autobiographical issues that we described.

01:57:20.280 And if you guys are interested in pursuing this conversation further in a more psychological

01:57:24.980 direction, then jump on over to Daily Wire Plus.

01:57:28.340 And if you don't have a subscription, consider supporting them.

01:57:31.460 And in any case, thank you very much, Dr. Keating.

01:57:34.540 It was wonderful talking to you and to everybody who is listening and watching.

01:57:38.640 Ciao.

01:57:39.160 We'll see you again.

01:57:41.940 Hello, everyone.

01:57:43.060 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 13, 2023

348. Black Holes, Time Travel, and the Origin of the Universe ｜ Dr. Brian Keating

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