Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take this first step towards the brighter future you deserve. I m looking very much forward today to speaking with Dr. Brian Keating. I met him recently in Miami, looked through the telescope at his beautiful San Diego house on the coast, and had a very good conversation. I'm looking forward to talking to him about the unfolding of the cosmological landscape on the broadest possible scale from the Big Bang forward. Dr. Keating is an experimental cosmologist and is also a commercial pilot and was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 2022. He received his Bachelor of Science from Case Western in 1993 and a PhD from Brown in 2000. He was later a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and Caltech in 2007. In 2007, he received the Presidential Early Career Award from President George W. Bush for inventing the BICEP telescope located at the South Pole, Antarctica. And we ll get to the question of whether or not there was more than one Big Bang, I hope, later on later on. The answer to that question? What s the biggest prehistory of all is how the cosmos came to be in the first place? And what we re left with the story of the origin story of all that happened before you come to be here? What we re in the story? That s a story about the prehistory and the story we come in the middle of the story and what we ve got to know about the origins of the pre history of the universe? Let this be the story you deserve to be a closer to the story, right? I hope you ll join us in this episode of Daily Wire Plus now. . I m talking to Dr. Kaye Keating on this episode on this epilogue to the first episode of The Dark Side Of It?
00:00:00.940Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420I'm looking very much forward today to speaking with Dr. Brian Keating.
00:01:11.700I met him recently in Miami, looked through the telescope at his beautiful San Diego house on the coast.
00:01:18.520He gave me a moon rock, which was very nice of him. We had a very good conversation.
00:01:21.720I'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.
00:01:31.540As I mentioned, he's a cosmologist and also Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego.
00:01:39.380He is also the author of more than 200 scientific publications, the equivalent of between 60 and 70 PhDs, by the way.
00:01:46.700Two U.S. patents and the best-selling books, Into the Impossible, Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, and Losing the Nobel Prize.
00:01:57.360The latter was selected as one of Amazon Editor's best nonfiction books of all time.
00:02:03.680He received his Bachelor of Science from Case Western in 1993 and a PhD from Brown in 2000.
00:02:11.600He was later a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and Caltech.
00:02:15.640In 2007, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President George W. Bush
00:02:23.720for inventing the BICEP telescope located at the South Pole, Antarctica.
00:02:30.180He is also a commercial pilot and was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 2022.
00:02:37.460Dr. Keating, let's start out by telling everybody what your primary focus of concern is as a researcher,
00:02:43.420and then let's delve into what you can bring to people as a consequence of that research,
00:02:49.720what they need to know about the cosmic structure, let's say.
00:11:35.980So 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.
00:11:53.840They might not know that those are varying forms of radiation that is very similar in its essence.
00:12:00.420And also to explain why the red shift occurs and how that was discovered, I suppose.
00:12:08.560So a spectrum is a characteristic of light.
00:12:11.940Light has three major properties that we discuss as scientists.
00:12:17.180One is its intensity, how bright the light is, and the other is the color of the light.
00:12:21.700And the third is something called polarization, which happens to be my area of subspecialty.
00:12:26.920Not political polarization, but it's an actual useful form of polarization that has to do with the orientation of the electromagnetic field.
00:14:34.520And 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.
00:14:43.740And it goes to infinity in the other direction.
00:14:45.940You can have an infinitely long, and that would be called a radio wave.
00:14:48.980So that's the electromagnetic spectrum.
00:14:51.200Now, if you've ever listened to a siren approaching, you've heard the familiar Doppler shift.
00:23:08.520So one of the most common analogies is to think about, I'll give you two.
00:23:13.160One is to imagine a balloon with little dots drawn on the balloon's surface.
00:23:18.160The balloon's surface is two-dimensional.
00:23:20.180As you blow up the balloon, the galaxies move away.
00:23:23.260The dots on the balloon's surface move from one another.
00:23:25.880And 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.
00:23:45.800But 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.
00:23:52.460So another one that people use is, imagine baking a raisin bread.
00:23:56.520So a bread, and you put in a bunch of raisins inside of it.
00:23:59.820That, too, has the exact same property.
00:24:01.880If you sit on any raisin inside the bread and you watch, what are the other raisins doing?
00:24:08.340That all will be observed to move away from you.
00:24:10.920There 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.
00:24:19.740Remember, 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.
00:24:31.600But that doesn't happen for raisins or for dots on a balloon.
00:24:34.220So 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.
00:24:56.200That's a minimal distance that we don't have gravitational interactions between us and them.
00:25:00.740That galaxy will be moving away directly proportional to what's known as Hubble's constant.
00:25:06.740So the velocity in meters per second, miles per hour, you know, furlongs per decade, whatever you want, will be directly linear.
00:25:14.320It's the simplest law imaginable besides just a constant.
00:25:17.440It'll be moving linearly proportionate to its distance away from you.
00:25:20.720And 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.
00:25:27.960In 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.
00:25:35.900We would live in a much, much different universe, and it wouldn't have any of the characteristics that we observe.
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00:27:06.500So, 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.
00:27:30.660But 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.
00:28:12.460So, 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.
00:28:22.240So, 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.
00:28:34.660I can recommend a book by my friend Charles Seif called Hawking Hawking, and it was sort of the business of Stephen Hawking.
00:28:40.440And he could answer one question, and it would take him about 10 minutes to answer a question.
00:28:44.700Someone 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.
00:28:57.200And he answered in his computerized, synthetic voice, because my daughter needed to pay for college.
00:29:03.780And 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.
00:29:17.140It was really an incredible thing to see.
00:29:18.740When 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.
00:29:32.440We 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.
00:29:53.280So I kept advising people to keep paying their taxes.
00:29:56.380But at the time, we didn't know about the substance called dark energy.
00:30:00.460And 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.
00:30:12.700We knew of matter, stuff, the stuff that we were made up of, and we knew of light.
00:30:17.080And in a universe that only has matter and light, it's impossible to not have a gravitational collapse.
00:30:23.760Just 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.
00:30:34.360And 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.
00:30:46.900You 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.
00:30:54.060But in the case of when we described the expansion of the universe, we're talking about its velocity, not its acceleration.
00:31:03.580The universe can have objects moving faster away from each other, and that doesn't involve necessarily their acceleration.
00:31:10.220So what Einstein did to counteract that fact, he was a pretty smart guy, right?
00:31:15.020He 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.
00:31:22.440And that unobserved matter, he called the cosmological term or cosmological energy source.
00:31:28.200We later call it the cosmological constant, and now we call it dark energy, as you proposed.
00:31:33.080What 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.
00:31:51.460So he then had a mechanism, contrived as it was, to explain why the universe appeared static, as it did in 1919.
00:32:01.820But 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.
00:32:15.960And supposedly, he called the insertion of the cosmological term, his biggest blunder.
00:32:22.900So 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.
00:32:34.720And so he proposed a constant, which you equated to something like an anti-gravity energy.
00:32:39.740But 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.
00:32:50.720And so, and that's the mystery that people are trying to address, well, still today, with the hypothesis of something approximating dark energy.
00:32:58.820So 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.
00:33:14.060So instead of just expanding linearly, smoothly, as Hubble would envision us doing, actually the universe starts to accelerate.
00:33:21.360So it's as if you're pushing down on the cosmic accelerator pedal.
00:33:25.460These galaxies are not only moving apart, but tomorrow they'll be moving apart even faster.
00:33:30.440At a given distance, they'll be moving apart faster than they are.
00:33:33.680So 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.
00:33:41.540And 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.
00:33:46.740But 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.
00:34:01.180It's not important to know what they are.
00:34:02.340They're exploding stars and they're fascinating objects in their own right.
00:34:04.980But they're really used as the sirens on the ambulances at great distances.
00:34:10.980So in 12 Rules for Life, you talked about the value of precision of speech.
00:34:15.920Well, the most important thing for cosmologists is precision cosmology.
00:34:20.400When 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.
00:34:28.780Now we know it's 13.824 billion years old, and we have a precision of less than 1%.
00:34:44.860I mean, at that time, we knew of objects that were older than the universe.
00:34:48.460Supposedly, there were objects called globular clusters, and they were older than the universe.
00:34:52.420That's like finding out that you're older than your mother.
00:34:55.400I mean, it's a very bizarre situation.
00:34:57.180And quite frankly, it was embarrassing to cosmologists.
00:34:59.780Now we know it with extreme precision.
00:35:01.420But with that precision comes great power.
00:35:03.940And that power allows us to assess what is the nature of this dark energy, potentially.
00:35:09.900And 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.
00:35:17.900And 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.
00:35:32.500None of them good, but luckily, they don't come about for tens to perhaps hundreds of billions of years.
00:35:38.600When 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.
00:35:49.460And certainly long before then, we will have stopped having the ability to do astronomy or cosmology.
00:35:56.680We will no longer be able to see any other galaxies after a certain point.
00:36:01.520After the universe has expanded so much, those galaxies will all be redshifted so far out of observational constraints.
00:36:07.600That we won't even know we live in a galaxy.
00:36:10.560We'll just think, this is the entire universe.
00:36:12.600So ironically, we'll be back to the way the state of affairs was in pre-1929 planet Earth's understanding of cosmology.
00:36:21.360And 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.
00:36:28.380We can go back in time and ask, just as we do with, I remember when my children turned two years old.
00:36:36.860You take them to the pediatrician's office, and they measure their height.
00:36:40.880And 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.
00:36:59.400So 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.
00:37:31.080Because the two numbers disagree, and they disagree by a violently unacceptable amount.
00:37:37.040The 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.
00:38:03.140We don't know the Hubble constant's value.
00:38:05.240It disagrees at what's called five standard deviations.
00:38:08.680So there's one part and several million that it could be a statistical fluke, and they're both actually the same.
00:38:14.900Or 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.
00:38:25.220In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace.
00:38:30.720But here's the thing, prayer, the most common tool we have, isn't just about saying whatever comes to mind.
00:38:36.580It's a skill that needs to be developed.
00:42:38.620the 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.
00:42:47.360Let's go back a few more billion years.
00:42:48.920The dark energy that we spoke about earlier began to dominate and the universe started to accelerate faster and faster.
00:42:54.800Well, that still is in the laws of classical physics and quantum physics that we understand.
00:43:25.040There's some Friday 13.8 billion years ago, okay?
00:43:28.980If 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.
00:43:35.600And there'll be some day that three minutes, you know, earlier, the laws of physics that we really understand, know and love, gravity, electromagnetism,
00:43:44.480the strong and weak nuclear forces, that they all froze into the configuration that we can understand today.
00:43:52.200In 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.
00:44:00.440Once you go beyond that gap, you can no longer speculate with the knowledge and certainty and precision that we have today.
00:44:08.120So it kind of marks a boundary, an ignorance boundary, an ignorance horizon beyond which we can only speculate.
00:44:15.260But speculation is fun, and it's great to do.
00:44:18.040And I appreciate it as much as my theoretical colleagues do.
00:44:23.280I 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.
00:44:33.300It's the oldest light in the universe.
00:44:34.720I still can use that to glean information about that period, you know, three minutes after midnight on some Friday 13.8 billion years ago.
00:44:43.340Right, so we can't look all the way to the Big Bang itself.
00:44:47.880We 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.
00:44:59.820But there's a border there prior to that that we can't peer into at the moment.
00:45:05.560Now, 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.
00:45:56.760Most people assume that the universe, with the universe's origin, with the Big Bang, came the beginning of time.
00:46:03.500That 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.
00:46:13.320You know, how does time come into existence when there was a moment before that existence was even possible?
00:46:20.280Can you even conceive of such a thing?
00:46:21.880How 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?
00:46:34.300And 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.
00:46:46.820There were no origin of time, if you will, whatsoever.
00:46:50.160And you've spoken to some of them, Roger Penrose and others.
00:46:53.840But the point being that there are alternatives to that.
00:46:57.080Now, 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.
00:47:12.480As you said before, you know, there's infinitesimal amount of space.
00:47:17.260And in that space was all the matter in the universe.
00:47:32.180So, 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.
00:47:50.720I 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.
00:48:00.240And these precious few photons that are still left over, they're still coming to us, they're still saying, hello, here I am.
00:48:06.520I 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.
00:48:18.500Now, that's enough for me to kind of, you know, just stretch my imagination, build new instrumentation.
00:48:25.260But, of course, it's fun to speculate on what happened before.
00:48:28.100So, I just told you these are the oldest particles of light.
00:48:30.800So, 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.
00:48:36.800These cosmic microwave background photons came to be.
00:48:39.560So, 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.
00:48:50.660If, 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.
00:49:00.340So, one other form of radiation, it's not electromagnetic radiation, it's called gravitational radiation.
00:49:08.140Gravitational radiation arises whenever there is matter in motion and whenever space-time reverberates.
00:49:15.360So, famously, it was discovered by three friends and colleagues of mine and their team called the LIGO experiment in 2015.
00:49:22.320In September 2015, they caught the in-spiral of two black holes, each one 30 times the mass of our sun.
00:49:30.800They were moving at a fraction of the speed of light, a very high velocity.
00:49:34.680They eventually coalesced into one fused, exactly the analogy I like to use is fused into a giant black hole.
00:49:42.120But that black hole had a mass of, say, 59 times the mass of our sun.
00:49:46.680So, where did that extra one mass of the sun go?
00:49:49.480Well, it went into shaking up the fabric of space-time itself.
00:49:54.380And that reverberation of space-time is called a gravitational wave or gravitational radiation.
00:50:31.420Does that propagate at the speed of light?
00:50:34.640Yeah, it propagates at the speed of light.
00:50:36.820It also has the virtue that they don't decay.
00:50:39.400There's nothing for a radioactive, there's no radioactive decay of gravitational radiation.
00:50:44.820They're just like light, except they go through everything.
00:50:48.260So, 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.
00:50:59.060They were located one billion light years away in a galaxy.
00:51:02.060We 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.
00:51:08.980Those waves of gravity traveled at the speed of light for a billion years.
00:51:13.200They entered into two different telescopes on Earth, and they displaced those telescopes by less than the diameter of an atom.
00:51:19.960And these incredible researchers were able to detect this, and they've done it a hundred times since.
00:51:24.980So, 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.
00:51:34.860That 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.
00:51:43.180Now, Jordan, if indeed all the matter in the universe was, as we know, at one point the universe was far, far smaller.
00:51:50.140It was at least a thousand times smaller than it is now in every dimension.
00:51:54.680That 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.
00:52:11.960If 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.
00:52:31.120You would expect that that would make an enormous amount of gravitational radiation, and you'd be right.
00:52:35.900And 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.
00:52:48.740Remember I said light has three properties.
00:52:50.940We talked about the three properties, the intensity, the brightness of the light.
00:52:55.220We talked about the color of the light or its spectrum.
00:52:57.920Well, the third and least known of properties of light, because our eyes aren't sensitive to it, is the polarization state of light.
00:53:19.260It turns out that gravitational waves have a beautiful propensity to turn the polarization of the microwave background in a very particular orientation.
00:53:29.360And 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.
00:53:40.840And 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.
00:53:51.440But it gives very, very, very strong circumstantial evidence for it.
00:55:10.320Now, I read a counter-theory, I think, when I was investigating your work for our podcast,
00:55:16.900that is it the case that there are people who claim that the polarization that you detected was a consequence of the interaction between light,
00:55:26.120the light you're observing, and dust that's spread out in the cosmos?
00:55:30.080And it's not a consequence of these early gravitational waves?
00:55:36.300So 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.
00:55:47.060And it's the subject of my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize.
00:55:49.700And it's the story of how a scientist can become obsessed.
01:04:35.800Actually, most of us is water, right, Jordan?
01:04:37.920So 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.
01:04:45.560Or, again, I'll say that as a shorthand for the period of time before which we lose information and we become ignorant.
01:04:53.760But that period of time leaves fossils.
01:04:57.220And those fossils are the hydrogen, the helium that we see in the universe, and they're isotopes.
01:05:02.540So there's really only six or seven different things that are made.
01:05:05.020But without those things, they become the ingredients of the first generation of stars.
01:05:10.560Those generation of stars become nuclear fusion reactors taking hydrogen nuclei and isotopes and fusing them together to make helium.
01:05:19.360After all, helios, the name of the sun, the element helium, was discovered not on Earth, on the sun.
01:05:25.140I always joke with my cosmology students, the scientists had to go at night, you know, for their own safety.
01:05:30.260But helium was discovered not on Earth, but it was discovered on the sun via its chemical spectrum, its chemical fingerprint.
01:05:36.900So the first elements, hydrogen and helium, are formed in the Big Bang.
01:05:41.120Much more helium is formed later on in stars.
01:05:44.080Then 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.
01:05:52.280Okay, so we have the Big Bang and the initial particles, or electromagnetic waves that emerge, are—how would you—how do you characterize them?
01:06:02.200Is it—how long after the Big Bang do you have the initial hydrogen and its variant isotopes?
01:06:08.240And what's there before that, before it's even hydrogen?
01:06:11.300Yeah, 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.
01:06:23.880And the first atoms in the universe are formed then.
01:06:26.000Then, afterwards, you get hydrogen combining to make helium inside of stars.
01:06:29.860Okay, so before that, it's just protons and electrons.
01:08:44.660So 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.
01:08:52.700But first I want to take a slight detour, if you'll indulge me with your patented forbearance, Jordan.
01:08:58.380There is a lot of talk in the zeitgeist about artificial intelligence and the dangers at which artificial intelligence will pose to humanity.
01:09:10.160Others worry about more pedestrian but still more important things like loss of jobs and meaning and so forth as very important to human psychology.
01:09:19.120I'm not so worried about artificial intelligence, and I'll tell you why.
01:09:23.180The reason relates to this famous gentleman, Albert Einstein.
01:09:27.040We've mentioned him three or four times already.
01:09:29.300I don't know if you're familiar with what Einstein called his happiest thought, Jordan.
01:09:32.760Einstein called the Gedanken experiment, a thought experiment, that he alone did for the first time.
01:09:40.260And the following was conjectured by the great Einstein.
01:09:43.420He 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.
01:09:54.200It's called the Einstein equivalence principle.
01:09:56.780He called that the happiest thought of his life.
01:09:59.280Now, what does that have to do with curvature and so on?
01:10:01.160Well, it turns out, and artificial intelligence.
01:10:04.200Let me first detour back to artificial intelligence.
01:10:06.340Jordan, can I ask you, how do you expect a computer or an artificial general intelligence could interpret these two phenomena?
01:10:14.840Freefall, the visceral, human-centered experience of freefall, A, and B, have a happiest thought.
01:10:26.160For 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.
01:10:40.580But, Jordan, does that give you any solace?
01:10:43.020Because, 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.
01:10:51.540How can a computer experience a visceral sensation, if possible?
01:10:55.700And how could it ever associate happiness with it?
01:11:03.560I don't know how artificial intelligence systems will mimic emotions.
01:11:08.900I'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.
01:11:16.360And 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.
01:11:23.220And one of the—you can characterize anxiety as the neurophysiological response to the unexpected emergence of entropy.
01:11:33.460So it's the expansion of a single specified pathway forward.
01:11:38.720It's the expansion of that to multiple pathways.
01:11:41.140So, 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.
01:11:56.980And that's signified by negative emotion.
01:11:59.320That anxiety is proportionate to the degree to which entropy has emerged.
01:12:03.340And that's on the negative emotion front.
01:12:05.120And 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.
01:12:16.220And that's signified by positive emotion.
01:12:18.760And it's possible that AI systems will be able to at least model this conceptually.
01:12:24.080Now, that's different than feeling it qualitatively, right?
01:12:32.040And that seems irreducible in some sense.
01:12:34.200But I think it can be modeled mathematically.
01:12:37.340And 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.
01:12:50.140So, 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.
01:13:19.780In 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.
01:13:33.800And then gravity is when you are—general relativity is when you add in mass and gravity and what that does to space-time itself.
01:13:40.440So it turns out that there's—what the effect of gravity is to do is to curve and warp space-time.
01:13:47.660Now, 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.
01:13:58.080But it'll travel in a curved parabolic arc for a little bit of time.
01:14:01.320But if you shoot it with enough velocity, it can actually go into orbit around the Earth.
01:14:05.800That's also a curved path that it's taking.
01:14:18.740And 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.
01:14:29.760Or 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.
01:14:41.140Of course, you're actually traveling on what's called a geodesic, which is an entropically minimizing—so it's order-producing.
01:14:47.840It's producing a translational map through space-time that minimizes your path length.
01:14:54.040Just like if you travel from, you know, Miami to London, you don't take a straight line.
01:14:58.400You take a geodesic path that brings you closer to the North Pole than you would ordinarily expect.
01:15:03.880But as you experience that, that is the manifestation on Earth of the mass of the Earth.
01:15:09.360But 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?
01:15:16.360Well, 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.
01:15:30.660Those 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.
01:15:55.340And symmetry is a manifestation of underlying order and perfection.
01:15:58.700Well, I say to them, the universe would be incredibly boring if the universe was actually driven by symmetry.
01:16:04.480It's actually the deviations from symmetry, the variations, the perturbations, that lead to all the interesting phenomena that we know and love, right?
01:16:12.840You've seen this experiment, I'm sure.
01:16:14.040So 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.
01:16:29.960And there's a whole art form, a whole Japanese art form that's associated with that.
01:16:33.600And 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?
01:16:49.780So 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.
01:17:04.040So the initial conditions, how did those curvature perturbations get there in the first place?
01:17:09.320Well, 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.
01:17:24.240We would see the input and output of virtual particles, which later become things like Hawking radiation, all sorts of other things.
01:17:31.340But in the early universe, this would manifest itself as departures from perfect homogeneity by one part in 100,000.
01:17:42.460You ever go bowling, Jordan, and you have a bowling ball?
01:17:45.220The surface of the bowling ball is more rough than the surface, if you like, of the smoothness relative to its characteristic scale.
01:17:53.860In 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.
01:18:10.480Now, that surface to the bowling ball is pretty smooth, unless it's my bowling ball, which has all these dents in it.
01:18:15.360But the point being, the universe is incredibly smooth, and so you only have to manifest tiny little perturbations.
01:18:23.720Inflation 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.
01:18:33.580That's as close as scientists think we can get to detecting the smoking gun.
01:18:38.380It's actually the smoke from the gun, if you will, of the initial inflationary expansion of the universe.
01:18:43.880Now, with inflation, concomitantly, unavoidably, inextricably linked is the notion of the multiverse.
01:18:53.580You 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.
01:19:04.580Okay, so let's walk people through what inflation is first and then talk about the relationship between that and the multiverse.
01:19:11.200So, explain inflation and explain why it was necessitated as a theoretical and then an experimentally validated construct or experimentally investigated.
01:19:25.000We don't detect it because we're kind of these macroscopic creatures, right?
01:19:28.500We're sort of, you know, a couple meters characteristic scale.
01:19:31.580We live for, you know, tens of decades, hopefully.
01:19:33.540But we don't live, you know, we don't observe things at the nanosecond or picosecond scale.
01:19:39.140We don't observe things at the femtometer size scale.
01:19:43.260So, 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.
01:19:56.380So, we can only focus on the foveal analogy to us is that we are focused on things that are our size.
01:20:04.280We don't see quantum tigers coming out of the vacuum and then disappearing, right?
01:20:08.180So, our mind has to work and make analogies.
01:20:11.100So, we analogize the universe today as being filled with quantum fields and then the particles are just instantiations of those quantum fields.
01:20:18.500So, there's a proton field over here that's making this dust particle or this air molecule.
01:20:22.520There's a photon field, there's the particles of light, etc., etc.
01:20:25.720Imagine the universe, the cosmos as you know it, is filled with an infinite tapestry of potentiality.
01:20:32.560It can be a photon over here or there may not be a photon over here.
01:20:35.640It depends on the value of that quantum field.
01:20:37.100Okay, so that's so interesting, that idea of an infinite expanse of potentiality.
01:20:43.080Because potentiality is a very strange, what would you call it, scientific materialist concept.
01:20:49.560Because only what's real can be measured materially.
01:20:53.460But we need this hypothesis of something approximating an infinite potential.
01:20:57.880And, you know, I don't know if you know this about, I would say, my work.
01:21:02.920It's the entire corpus of symbolic thought.
01:21:05.600But, insofar as that's been interpreted, let's say, by psychoanalytic thinkers, there is a hypothesis, a cosmological hypothesis, that permeates religious speculation.
01:21:16.020That the cosmos that's inhabitable, so the structured material world, is a manifestation of a multiplicitous potential.
01:21:30.960And 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.
01:21:46.840And 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?
01:22:01.440And that's the cosmologically generative principle.
01:22:05.380And 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.
01:22:17.340And you associated that with quantum fields and also with the multiverse.
01:22:22.560And so, yeah, let's walk through all of that.
01:22:24.920But 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.
01:22:39.100And that's the anti-universe, the fact that we have antimatter.
01:22:42.080And it is possible to look at the work of Dirac.
01:22:45.980We 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?
01:22:59.860When do they get commanded into existence, to use a very overburdened phrase, right?
01:23:04.580So, this, and there's what's called solid state physics or condensed matter theory.
01:23:08.440We have, imagine you have, you know, a bunch of people, a crowd, on a regular grid, and they're all moving.
01:23:16.020And then one guy gets teleported by some aliens that we'll have to talk about some other time.
01:23:20.160So, one guy gets teleported out of this infinite grid of people marching as soldiers, right?
01:23:24.480And then the soldiers kind of get nervous, so they start moving to fill in that hole.
01:23:28.680So, one moves to fill in the hole where the soldier has been extracted or, you know, rendered out of existence.
01:23:34.400And then that produces a hole in another place where that other soldier was, right?
01:23:38.440So, there's a sea of the, now you start to see this hole moving.
01:23:59.900So, 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.
01:24:13.500My students and I tried to work through the relationship between anxiety and entropy.
01:24:20.240And we were contemplating the horizon of possibility, because I think that what people, what consciousness does is confront a horizon of possibility.
01:24:31.480It's not something driven in an algorithmic, deterministic manner by the states of material objects at the current time.
01:24:38.440It 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.
01:24:53.280So, for example, the most probable next event in our conversation is that one or the other of us or both will utter a word.
01:25:02.200But there's some non-zero probability that there'll be a cataclysmic earthquake and I'll be swallowed up by the ground, right?
01:25:08.000Now, it's a relatively low probability event, thank God, but it's not zero, and it's not entirely predictable.
01:25:20.020Well, 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.
01:25:30.420And the more unlikely that event, according to our conceptual schema, the more anxiety is associated with it.
01:25:36.540But 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?
01:25:54.580And is that a way of conceptualizing some alternative to determinism?
01:25:59.220Yeah, we actually had, you know, a concept that, you know, we could turn to probably another topic.
01:26:03.920But 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.
01:26:21.940And those get weighted with different or lesser probabilities, to use the language that you were just saying.
01:26:26.640But I want to touch back one more to what you said.
01:26:30.040You've got Feynman, who Feynman developed.
01:26:32.340And 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?
01:26:44.360Even though this is your conversation, I want to continue with your questions.
01:26:47.500But there's something that you said, and I hope, again, you'll indulge me with your forbearance.
01:27:07.880And there's a—well, that's a very good observation.
01:27:09.580That's part of, I think, why we're also weighted towards weighting negative emotion more significantly,
01:27:15.800is 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?
01:27:25.180That's also, by the way, the boundary between order and chaos in the Taoist conceptualization of the world.
01:27:31.080It's a very narrow pathway to make things better.
01:27:34.060It's not impossible, but it's very difficult.
01:27:36.240It'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.
01:27:43.980In other words, you and I are both parents.
01:27:47.940You know that, you know, the greatest fears—I don't even have to speak it, you know, God forbid.
01:27:53.000But 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.
01:28:04.060And that's just one example of how your life could be made not twice as worse or ten times worse.
01:28:11.760But I like to invert that and use that as a guiding principle and get your impressions about that.
01:28:16.860Because 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.
01:28:28.860In other words, you can find out what you should be doing by—
01:28:31.680Well, 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.
01:28:42.280It emerges in part as a consequence, you could say, a narrative consequence of the conundrums that are brought forward in the book of Job.
01:28:50.740So the book of Job is a narrative description of the infinite numbers of potential ways you can profoundly suffer.
01:28:58.440And 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.
01:29:08.860And then his friends make fun of him for being ill and accuse him of being sinful.
01:29:15.040And so he's at the bottom of the deepest possible pit.
01:29:18.140And 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.
01:29:30.220Now, 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—
01:29:42.220But Carl Jung wrote a great book called Answer to Job that takes that apart in great detail.
01:29:47.400But 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.
01:30:11.340That's—you could think about that metaphysically as the invitation to the cross.
01:30:15.080And 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.
01:30:25.840It's the same idea, by the way, as the notion that the larger dragons hoard more gold.
01:30:32.040And the dragon gold story is a very, very old story.
01:30:34.620The 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.
01:30:54.080Well, 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.
01:31:07.840And, 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.
01:31:25.040And 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.
01:31:35.180And I think that is—it's something everyone should know.
01:31:38.400I've been lecturing to my audiences as I go around the world more recently, talking about how destiny makes itself manifest to people.
01:31:45.300And it does that by inviting you with opportunities that seize your imagination.
01:31:50.740But it also does it by calling out to you certain problems that beset you that happen to be your problems, whatever that means.
01:32:00.040You know, because it's not like—it's not like you're obsessed by an infinite number of problems.
01:32:04.340You're obsessed by that set of problems that happen for whatever reason to be your problems.
01:32:09.780And you might say, well, I wish I didn't have any problems, but then you don't have any mystery.
01:32:14.720The 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.
01:32:22.200And I think the evidence is quite clear on the clinical front that that's how you find the great adventure of your life.
01:32:28.700I think that's a universal truth, by the way.
01:32:30.940Yeah, I think this—and I see this with scientists.
01:32:33.500You know, the issue that, you know, that most people don't really recognize is that science is done by scientists.
01:32:39.860You know, we're not walking automatons that have no feeling and have nothing invested in it.
01:32:44.060And 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.
01:32:51.720When you recognize your own particular dragon, if you're willing to solve it.
01:32:55.700Look, I mean, you mentioned the mystery and what perplexes you.
01:32:58.720So if your car breaks down and the analogy you used before, it causes you anxiety.
01:33:02.040But you know exactly what you have to do.
01:33:03.540You have to, you know, get a jack and you have to put a tire on and you have to get on your way.
01:33:07.300And hopefully you'll be there on time.
01:33:09.140But you know what the path is, and it's not that mysterious.