back to indexBrian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize | Lex Fridman Podcast #257
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The following is a conversation with Brian Keating, experimental physicist at
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USASD and author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.
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Plus, he's a host of the amazing podcast of the same name called Into the
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Impossible. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it,
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please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now here's my conversation with Brian Keating.
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As an experimental physicist,
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what do you think is the most amazing or maybe the coolest measurement device
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you've ever worked with or humans have ever built? Maybe for now,
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let's exclude the background imaging of cosmic extra galactic
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polarization instruments. Yeah. Absolutely biased towards that particular
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instrument. Talk about that in a little bit. Yeah.
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But certainly the telescope to me as is a lever that has literally moved the
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earth throughout history. So the OG telescope.
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The OG telescope. Yeah. The one invented not by Galileo, as most people think,
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but by this guy Hans Lippertje in the Netherlands.
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And it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s, 14, 1500, 1600s,
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it was the beginning of movable type. And so people for the first time in
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history had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight.
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So looking at a printed word now, we just take it for granted.
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12 point font, whatever. And that's what the eye charts are based on.
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They're just fixed height. But back then there was no way to adjust your eyesight
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if you didn't have perfect vision.
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And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until
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the Gutenberg Bible and movable type. And at that time, people realized,
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hey, wait, I can't read this. My priest or my friend over here,
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he can read it. She can read it. I can't read it. What's going on?
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And that's when these people in Venice and in the Netherlands saw that
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they could take this kind of glass material and hold it up and maybe put
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another piece of glass material and it would make it clearer.
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And what was so interesting is that nobody thought to take that exact same
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device, you know, two lenses and go like, let me go like this and look
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at that bright thing in the sky over there until Galileo.
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So Galileo didn't invent it, but he did something kind of amazing.
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He improved on it by a factor of 10. So he 10xed it,
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which is almost as good as going from zero to one is going from one to 10.
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And when he did that, he really transformed both how we look at
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the universe and think about it, but also who we are as a species,
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because we're using tools not to get food faster or to, you know,
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preserve, you know, our legacy for future generations,
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but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.
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Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans weren't able to see the stars,
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maybe there was some, some kind of a make above the atmosphere,
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which for the early humans made it impossible to see the stars that we
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would never develop human civilization, or at least raising the question of how
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important is it to look up to the sky and wonder what's out there as opposed to
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maybe this is an over romanticized notion, but like looking at the ground,
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it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival and not being eaten
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by a bear slash lion. If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder,
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what is my place in the universe?
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Do you think, do you think that's modern humans romanticized?
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I think it's a little romantic, because they also took the same,
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they took the same two lenses and they looked inward, right?
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They looked at bacteria.
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They looked at, you know, hairs and in other words, they made the microscope
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and we're still doing that.
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And so, you know, to have a telescope is, it serves a dual purpose.
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It's, it's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in,
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but it's also looking back in time.
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In other words, you didn't see a microscope.
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You don't think, oh, I'm, I'm seeing this thing as it was, you know,
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one nanosecond ago, light travels one foot per nanosecond.
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I'm seeing it, no, you don't think about it like that.
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But when you see something that's happening, you know, on Jupiter,
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the moon and drama in a galaxy, you're seeing things, you know,
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back when Lucy was walking around the Serengeti Plains.
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And for that, I think that took then the knowledge of, you know,
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relativity and time travel and so forth.
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It took that before we could really say, oh, we really
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unlock some cheat codes in the human brain.
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So I think that might be a little too much, but, but nevertheless,
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I mean, what's better than having a time machine?
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You know, it's like, we can look back in time.
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We see things as they were, not as they are.
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And that allows us to do many things, including speculate about that.
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But one of the coolest things, I don't know if you're familiar with,
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so I'm a radio astronomer.
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I don't actually look through telescopes very often, except, you know,
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on rare occasions when I, when I take one out to show the kids.
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But, but a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral.
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I mean, it's much less cool because you look at it and you're like,
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all right, it looks cool.
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It's kind of weird shaped thing.
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It looks like it belongs in sci fi.
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It's going to blast, you know, the Death Star or whatever.
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But when you, when you realize that when you point a radio telescope
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at a distant object, if that object fills up what's called the beam,
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which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope,
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it's called this beam.
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If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor,
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just a simple absorbing piece of material at the focus of the radio telescope,
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that resistor will come to the exact same temperature
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as the object that's looking at, which is pretty amazing.
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It means you're actually remotely measuring,
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you're taking the temperature of Jupiter or whatever in, in effect.
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And so it's, it's, it's allowing you to basically teleport.
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And there's no other science that you can really do that, right?
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If you're an archeologist, you can, let me get into my, you know,
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my, my time machine and go back and see what was Lucy really like,
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you know, it's not possible.
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So the same thing happens.
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This is where I've learned about this from March of the Penguins
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when the penguins huddle together, they, you know,
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the, the body temperature arrives to the same place.
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So you're, you're doing this remotely.
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The March of the Penguins, but remote.
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And we do it from Antarctica too.
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So there are some penguins around when we do it.
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You mentioned time machine.
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I think in your book, Losing the Nobel Prize,
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you talk about time machines.
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So let me ask you the question of, take us back in time.
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What happened at the beginning of our universe?
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That's a, usually people preface this by saying,
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I have a simple question.
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So, you know, what happened before the universe began?
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Brian Keating teaching me about comedy.
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I have a simple question for you.
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I have a simple question.
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What happened at the beginning of our universe?
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So when we think about what, what happened, it's more correct.
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It's more logical.
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It's more practical to go back in time starting from today.
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So if you go back 13.874 billion years from today,
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that's some day, right?
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I mean, you could translate into some day, right?
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So on that day, something happened earlier than,
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than, you know, than the moment exactly now,
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let's say we're talking around one o clock.
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So at some point during that day,
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the universe started to become a fusion reactor.
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It started to fuse light elements and isotopes
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into heavier elements and isotopes
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of those heavier elements.
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After that period of time, you know,
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going forward back closer to today,
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less, you know, 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier,
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or later rather coming towards us today,
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we know more and more about what the universe was like.
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And in fact, all the hydrogen, you know,
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to very good approximation in the water molecules in this bottle,
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almost all of them were produced during that first 20 minute period.
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So I would say, you know, the actual fusion and production
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of the lightest elements on the periodic table
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occurred in a time period shorter
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than the TV show, The Big Bang Theory.
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You know, most of those light elements,
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besides hydrogen, aren't really used in your,
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you know, in your encounter, right?
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We don't encounter helium that often,
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unless you go to a lot of birthday parties
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You don't need lithium, hopefully, you know,
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but other than that,
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those are the kind of things that were produced
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during that moment.
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The question became, how did the heavier things
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like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later.
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And I brought some samples for us to discuss
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and how those came from a very different type of process
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called a different type of fusion reactor
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and a different type of process explosion as well
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and called the supernova.
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However, if you go back to the,
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beyond those first three minutes,
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we really have to say almost nothing
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because we are not capable,
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in other words, going backwards
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from the first three minutes,
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as famous Stephen Weinberg titled his book,
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we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over.
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In other words, we can't speculate on what happened
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three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen
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was formed in our universe.
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We just don't know enough about that epoch.
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There are many people, most people,
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most practicing card carrying cosmologists
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believe the universe began in what's called the singularity
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and we can certainly talk about that.
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However, singularity is so far removed
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from anything we can ever hope to prove,
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hope to confront or hope to observe with evidence
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and really only occurs in two instantiations,
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the big bang and the core of a black hole,
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neither of which is observable.
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And so for that reason,
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there are now flourishing alternatives that say,
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you can actually for the first time ask the question,
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that day, Tuesday, in the first moments of our universe,
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there was a Tuesday a week before that,
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24 hours times seven days before that.
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That has a perfectly well understood meaning
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in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more
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eminent of cosmologists working today.
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When I was in grad school over 25 years ago,
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no one really considered anything besides that big bang,
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that there was a singularity and people would have to say,
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as I said, we just don't know.
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But they would say some future incarnation
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of some experimental tell us the answer.
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But now there are people that are saying,
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there is an alternative to the big bang.
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And it's not really fringe science as it once was,
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50, 80 years ago, when these models,
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by the way, the first cosmology in history
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was not a singular universe.
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The first cosmology in history goes back to
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Akhenaten Ra and the temples of Egypt in the third millennium BC.
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And in that, they talked about cyclical universes.
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So I always joke, that guy Akhenaten's court,
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he'd have a pretty high H index right about now,
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because people have been using that cyclical model
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from Penrose to Paul Steinhart and Aegis
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and right up until this very moment.
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Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives
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to the big bang theory?
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So there are many alternatives starting with,
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so the singularity, quantum cosmologically demanding
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singular origin of the universe,
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that stands in contrast to these other models
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in which time does not have a beginning.
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Many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle,
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possibly infinite number of cycles,
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called by Sir Roger Penrose.
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And they all have things in common, these alternatives,
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as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis,
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which is inflation.
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Inflation can be thought of as this spark
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that ignites the hot big bang that I said we understood.
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So it's an earlier condition,
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but it's still not an initial condition.
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In physics, imagine I show you a grandfather clock
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or pendulum swinging back and forth.
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You look away for a second, you come into the room,
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pendulum swinging back and forth.
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Alex, tell me, where did it start?
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How many cycles is it going to make before the end?
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Or you can't answer that question
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without knowing the initial conditions in a very simple system
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like a one dimensional simple harmonic oscillator,
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Think about understanding the whole universe
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without understanding the initial conditions.
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It's a tremendous lacuna gap that we have as scientists
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that we may not be able to, in the inflationary cosmology,
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determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe
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prior to what's called the inflationary epoch.
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So you're saying for the pendulum in that epoch, we can't,
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because you can infer things about the pendulum
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before you shut up to the room in our current epoch, correct?
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Yeah, so if you look at it right now,
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but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating?
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So that depends on how much energy it got initially,
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and you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance,
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yet infrared camera, you can see it's getting hotter, maybe,
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and you could do some calculations.
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But to know the two things in physics
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to solve a partial differential equation
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are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions.
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Boundary conditions were here on Earth,
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it has a gravitational field, it's not going to excurs,
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or make excursions wildly beyond the length of the pendulum.
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It has simple properties.
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But in this, in other words, you can't tell me
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when did the solar system start orbiting
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in the way that it does now.
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In other words, when did the moon acquire the exact angular momentum
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Now, that's a pretty pedestrian example.
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But what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch purports
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and is successful at providing a lot of explanations
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for how the universe evolved after inflation took place and ended,
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but it says nothing about how it itself took place.
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And that's really what you're asking me.
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I mean, you don't really...
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Look, what you care about, like, Big Bang Nuclear Synthesis
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and the elements got made and these fusion reactors
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and the whole universe was a fusion reactor,
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but, like, don't you really care about what happened
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at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time?
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And the problem is we can't really answer that
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in the context of the Big Bang.
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We can answer that in the context of these alternatives.
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So you asked me about some of the alternatives.
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So one is A on theory, the conformal cyclic cosmology
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of Sir Roger Penrose.
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Another one that's...
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It was really popular in the 60s and 70s
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until the discovery of the primary component
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of my research field, the cosmic microwave background radiation,
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or CMB, the three kelvin, all pervasive signal
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that astronomers detected in 1965.
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That kind of spelled the death knell, in some sense,
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to what was called the quasi steady state universe.
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And then there was another model
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that kind of came out of that.
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You hear the word quasi, so it's not steady state.
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Steady state means always existed.
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That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble
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showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe.
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And most scientists believed in that for millennia, basically.
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The universe was eternal, static, unchanging.
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They couldn't believe that after Hubble,
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so they had to append onto it, concatenate this new feature
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that it wasn't steady, it was quasi steady.
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So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen
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every century in a given volume of space.
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And that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant,
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but because it was producing more and more every century,
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the centuries pile up and the volume piles up,
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the universe could expand.
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And so that's how they developed.
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And it doesn't match observational evidence,
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but that is an alternative.
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By the way, did Einstein think the steady state universe
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is infinite or finite?
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I would assume that he thought it was infinite
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because there was really, you know,
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if something had a no beginning in time,
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then it'll be very unlikely we're in like the center of it
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or it's bounded or it has, in that case, a finite edge to it.
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I wonder what he thought about infinity,
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because that's such an uncomfortable.
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No, it's a silly joke.
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I'm sure you're familiar with a silly joke, right?
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It's a silly joke was that there are only two things
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that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
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and I'm not sure about the universe.
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Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke
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is a good example of the joke.
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Okay, so, sorry, you were saying about quasi...
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All the alternatives.
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All the alternatives in the quasi steady state.
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And the most kind of promising, although I hate to say that,
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you know, people say like,
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well, that's your favorite alternative, right?
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This is not investment advice.
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Inflation is not transitory.
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It is quasi permanent.
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So, a very prominent...
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Sorry to interrupt.
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We were talking about cosmic inflation.
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So, calm down, cryptocurrency folks.
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Although the first Nobel Prize,
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and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics
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was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind.
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So, most people don't know that.
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Inflation is already won a Nobel Prize.
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It's a good topic to work on if you want a Nobel Prize.
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It doesn't matter the field.
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Exactly, it's time translation and bearing.
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So, when we look at the alternative that's called
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the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies,
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these have serious virtues according to some.
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One of the virtues to me, just as a human,
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I'm just speaking, you know, as a human,
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one of the founders of the new version of the cyclic cosmology
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called the bouncing cosmology is Paul Steinhardt.
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He's the Einstein Professor of Natural Sciences
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at Princeton University.
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You may have heard of it.
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And he was one of the originators of what was called
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In other words, he was one of the founding fathers of inflation,
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who now not only has no belief or support for inflation,
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he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious,
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dangerous, malevolent, not to science,
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not just to cosmology, but to society.
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So, here's a man who created a theory that's captivated
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the world, the universe of cosmologists, such as it is,
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not a huge universe, but they're more podcasters
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than cosmologists, some do both.
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But this man created this theory with collaborators.
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And now he's like, I joke, I'm like, Paul,
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you're denying paternity.
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You're like a deadbeat dad.
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Now you're saying inflation is bogus.
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But he doesn't just attack.
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See, this is what's very important about approaching things
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as an experimentalist.
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You've got a lot of theorists on.
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And that's wonderful.
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And I think that's a huge service.
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An experimentalist has to say no.
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He or she has to be confident to say, like, I don't care
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if I prove you right or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever.
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We have to be like exterminators.
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And nobody likes to exterminate until they need one, right?
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Or the garbage collectors, right?
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But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded
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by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry
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and the simplicity of some idea.
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Like inflation is a beautiful idea.
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But it also has consequences.
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And what Paul claims, I don't agree with him fully on this point,
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is that those consequences are dangerous
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because they lead to things like the multiverse,
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which is outside the purview of science.
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And in that sense, I can see support for what he does.
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But none of that detracts from my respect for a man.
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Imagine, like, Elon comes up with this really great idea space.
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And then he's like, actually, it's not going to work.
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But like, here's this better idea.
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And he's like, SpaceX is not going to work.
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But he's now creating an alternative to it.
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It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done.
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It doesn't mean he's right.
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It doesn't mean I'm going to, like, have more and more attention
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paid to it because he's my friend or because I respect the idea
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or I respect the man and his colleague, Ana Aegis,
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who works really hard with him.
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But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it.
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And what it does most foremost is that it removes
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the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology.
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So it takes away 50% of the motivation
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for a theory of quantum gravity.
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You talked a lot about quantum gravity.
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You talked people, eminent people on the show.
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Always latent in those conversations is sort of the
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teleological expectation that there is a theory of everything.
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There is a theory of quantum gravity.
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But there's no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.
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So that kind of implicit expectation has to do ultimately
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with the inflationary theory, so in cosmic inflation.
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So is that at the core?
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Maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts on society
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from believing in cosmic inflation.
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So one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation,
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according to its other two patriarchs,
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considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Gooth at MIT
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and Andre Linde at Stanford, although he was in the USSR
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when he came up with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhardt,
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was that the universe has to eventually get into a quantum state.
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It has to exist in this Hilbert space,
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and the Hilbert space has certain features.
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And those features are quantum mechanical,
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endowed with quantum mechanical properties.
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And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off.
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So inflation can get started, but then it's like one of SpaceX rockets.
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It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster.
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It continues the thrusting.
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You need another mechanism to douse the flames
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of the inflationary expansion,
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which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere,
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it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times,
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including now, spawning an ever increasing set of universes.
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Some will die stillborn.
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Some will continue and flourish,
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and this is known as the multiverse paradigm.
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It's a robust, seemingly robust consequence,
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not only of inflationary cosmology,
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but more and more, we're seeing it in string theory as well.
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Sometimes two branches coming to the same conclusion
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is taken as evidence for its reality.
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So one of the negative consequences is it creates phenomena
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that are outside the reach of experimental science.
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Or is it that the multiverse somehow has a philosophical negative effect on humanity?
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Like it makes life seem more meaningless?
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Is that where he's getting at a little bit?
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Or is it not reaching that far?
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No, I think those are both kind of perceptive.
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The answer is a little both,
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because in one sense, it's meant kind of to explain this fine tuning problem
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that we find ourselves in a universe that's particularly façade.
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It has features consistent with our existence.
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And how could we be otherwise, the sort of weak anthropic principle?
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On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything,
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literally everything, can be said to predict nothing.
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Like if I say, Lex, you've been working out.
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You look like you're about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms.
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Like, all right, yeah, you're right, but that's completely horribly imprecise.
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So what good is that?
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That's meaningless.
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I don't contribute any what's called surprise or reduction of your ignorance about the system.
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You know exactly how much you weigh.
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So me telling you that tells you nothing.
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In this case, it's basically saying that we're living in a universe
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because the overwhelming odds of our existence dictate that we would exist.
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There has to be at least one place that we exist.
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But the problem is it's a manifestation of infinity.
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So humans, and I'm sure you know this from your work with AI and L and everything else,
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that humans, as far as we know, really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity.
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But we do so very imperfectly, right?
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So if I say to you, like, what's bigger the number of water molecules in this thing
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or the number of real numbers?
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Or if I say, what's bigger the number of real numbers or rational numbers?
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They're all different classifications of the amount of infinities that there could be.
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Infinity to the infinity power.
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You know, when you have kids someday, they'll tell you, I love you, infinity.
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You have to come back. I love you, infinity plus one, right?
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But the human brain can't really contemplate infinity.
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Let me illustrate that.
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They say in the singularity, the universe had an infinite temperature, right?
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So let me ask you a question.
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Is there anything that you can contemplate in the observed, you know, Einstein's little quip aside
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that's infinite, like a physical property, density, pressure, temperature.
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Energy. That's infinite.
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And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it.
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But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one?
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You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids.
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How does it go from, like, to half of infinity?
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Because that's still infinity.
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How did it cool down?
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How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied?
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So now it's only infinity over two in terms of past.
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Less infinite, more infinite.
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Yeah, I mean, it's, that's one of the biggest troubling things to me about infinity is you can't truly hold it inside our minds.
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It's a mathematical construct that doesn't, it feels like intuition fails.
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But nevertheless, we use it nonchalantly and then use, like physicists, their incredible intuition machines.
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And then they'll play with this infinity as if they can play with it on the level of intuition as opposed to on the level of math.
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You know, yeah, maybe something cyclical you can imagine infinity just going around the same kind of like a mobius strip situation.
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But then the question then arises, how do you make it more or less infinite?
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Yeah, all of that intuition fails completely.
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And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right?
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It's either some placeholder for infinity or it's one divided by a very, the smallest, you know, possible, you know, rat real number that you can represent in the memory.
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Well, that's basically my undergraduate studying computer science is how to represent a floating point in a computer.
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I think I took 17 courses on this topic. It was very useful.
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I came to the right place, but, but, you know, in terms of what a physicist will mean, you're right.
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I mean, physicists will blindly, nonchalantly subtract infinity, you know, renormalization and do things to get finite answers.
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And it's, it's, it's miraculous.
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But, you know, at a certain point, you have to ask, well, what are the consequences for the real world?
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And one of them, you ask, you know, what, what's the problem? Does it make us more meaningless?
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They purport many of the people that support it, like Andre Lindy.
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In fact, Andre Lindy says, you have a bias. You, Lex, me, Brian, you have a bias that you believe in a universe.
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But shouldn't you believe in a, in a multiverse?
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What, what evidence do you have that there's not a multiverse?
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So he turns it around.
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Whereas Paul Steinhart will say, no, if anything can happen, then there's no predictive power within the theory.
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Because you can always say, well, this value of the inflationary field did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy for us to detect it with Bicep or Simon's Observatory or whatever.
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But that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen.
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And that's logically 100% correct.
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But it's like, it's like kind of chewing, you know, Wonder, Wonder Bread.
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You know, I'm sorry, I apologize if they're one of your sponsors, but, you know.
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Wonder Bread slash Lex.com.
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Type in code, Kleb, right?
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It's my favorite Russian word is like, would you like a piece of bread?
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By the way, even that, that word, which means bread and Russian, as you say it, like you're jokingly saying it now.
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It made me hungry because it made me remember how much I loved bread and I was in the Soviet Union.
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When you were like, hungry, that was the sort, that was the things you dreamed about.
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You know, what's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists contributed to so much of what we understand today.
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And they were completely in hiding.
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There was no Google.
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They couldn't look up on Scholar.
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They had to wait for journals to get approved by the Communist Party to get approved.
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And then, and then, and only then, if they weren't a member of some class, I'm sure you know, like Jewish scientists, you had a passport.
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I said, Jew on your passport.
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And then, you know, Zeldovich, the famous Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnarev.
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And he had to only because he was like at a noble level and, you know, was one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb program.
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Could he even get his Jewish student?
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He was Jewish too.
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But, but only by virtue of his standing, of his intellectual accomplishments, would they give him the dispensation to let his student, you know, travel to Georgia or something.
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And it makes what we complain about, I complain about academia and it's like, oh, well, what can I talk about?
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We have no idea of how good it is and that they were able to create things like inflation, completely isolated from the West.
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I mean, some of these people wouldn't, didn't meet like people like Stephen Hawking until, you know, he was almost dead.
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And they just learned this thing through smuggled in, you know, it's, it's, it's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology.
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There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard, probably because they were working the, they could, they could pass off as well.
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We're doing stuff for the atomic bomb program as well, which they were.
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At the same time, there is interesting incentives in the Soviet system that maybe you can take this tangent for a brief moment.
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That because there's a dictatorship authoritarian regime throughout the history of the 20th century for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized.
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And because the state prioritized it through the propaganda machine, through the news and so on, it actually was really cool to be a scientist.
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Like you were highly valued in society.
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Maybe that's a better way to say it.
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And I would say you're saying like we have it easy now in that sense.
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It was kind of beneficial to be a scientist in that society because you were seen as a hero as there's, there's, there's famous hero of the Soviet Republic.
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And that, you know, there's positives to that.
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I mean, I'm not saying I would take the negative to the positives, but it is interesting to see a world in which science was highly prized.
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In, in the capitalist system, or maybe not capitalist, let's just say the American system, the celebrities are the, the athletes, the actors and actresses, maybe business leaders, musicians.
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And, you know, the people we elect are sort of lawyers and lawyers.
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So it's interesting to think of a world where science was highly prized, but they had to do that science within the constraints of always having big brother watching.
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Germany had, you know, highly prized.
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I mean, one of the most famous tragic to me cases is Fritz Haber, who invented the, you know, Haber Bosch process that allowed us to, I don't know, have you eaten yet?
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You look, you look slim.
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I mean, I know you fast, intermittent fast every day.
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And you do that, you know, I said club and you got, it's a little drool, but he says I'm lifting and I look slim.
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I'm going to clip this out and put it on Tinder.
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I think that's a website.
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You gotta swipe left or right for that.
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But when you think about like, you know, what he did and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy and we eat from every day.
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He was a German nationalist, first and foremost, even though he was a Jew.
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And he personally went to witness the application of ammonia chlorine gas applied during trench warfare in 1916 and battles in Brussels and whatever.
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And he was, they had a whole contract of Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, you know, that would go and witness these atrocities.
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But that was also, they were, they were almost putting science above, I don't want to say human dignity, but, but of like the fact that he would later be suppressed.
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And actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz because of the chemical that he invented also called Zycon B.
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And so it's just, it's just unbelievable.
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So I feel like that does have resonance today in this worship of, of science, you know, and listen to science and follow the science, which is more like scientism.
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And there is still a danger, you know, I always say, just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you don't have a religion, you know, just because you, you know, in my case, in my books, I talk a lot about the Nobel Prize.
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It's kind of like a kosher idol is something that you can worship, you know, it doesn't do any harm.
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And we want those people that are so significant in their intellectual accomplishments because there is a core of America and the Western world in general that does worship and really look at science predominantly because it gives us technology.
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But there's something really cool about that.
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And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point between, between looking to science for wisdom, which I don't think it has, there are two different words, but, but also recognizing how much good and transformative power maybe our only hope comes from science.
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You opened so many doors, because you also bring up our Ernest Becker in that book. So there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science and to the Nobel Prize that's fascinating to explore.
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And we still haven't finished the discussion of the beginning of the, of the universe, which we will return to.
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But now, since you opened the book, wow, pun unintended of losing the Nobel Prize.
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Can you tell me the story of bicep, the background imaging of cosmic extra galactic polarization experiment, bicep one and bicep two.
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And then maybe you can talk about bicep three.
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But the, the thing that you cover in your book, the human story of it, what happened?
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Yeah, that book is in contradiction to the second book. That's like a memoir. It's really a description of what it's like to feel, what it feels like to be a scientist and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty, imposter syndrome, which, which I cover in the later
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book in more detail, but to really feel like you're doing something.
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And it's all you think about. It is all consuming. And it's something I couldn't have done now because I have too many other, you know, wonderful, delightful demands of my time.
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But to go back to that moment when I was first captivated by the night sky, who has a 12 year old, 13 year old, and really mixed together throughout my scientific story has always been wanting to approach the greatest mystery of all, which I think is the existence or non existence of God.
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So I call myself a practicing agnostic. In other words, I do things that are that religious people do, and I don't do things that atheist people do.
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And I once had this conversation, you know, with my first podcast guest, actually, I shouldn't say, oh, I was just, just having a conversation with Freeman Dyson, but he was actually my first guest.
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Name drop. Yes. I'm sure there's going to be plenty of comments.
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So in case people don't know, Brian Keating is the host of Into the Impossible podcast where he's talked to some of the greatest scientists in history of science, physicists, especially in the history of science.
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So when I talked to Freeman, I said, you know, Freeman, you're, you call yourself an agnostic too. Can you tell me something like what, what do you do on Saturday, on Sundays?
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Do you go to church? It's like, no, I don't go to church. And I'm like, well, imagine there was like an intelligent alien, and he was looking down or she was, I don't know, it thing was looking down.
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And it's off Freeman. And on Sundays, like a group of people go to church, but Freeman doesn't go to church. And then there's another group of people that don't go to church.
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And those are called atheists. But Freeman calls himself an agnostic, but he does the things that the Richard Dawkins, he doesn't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to.
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Right. So I said, how would you distinguish yourself if not practice? So I'm a behaviorist. I believe you can change your mentality, you can, you can influence your mind, view your bodily physical actions.
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So when I was a 12 year old, I got my first telescope, I was actually an altar boy in the Catholic church, which is kind of strange for a Jewish kid who grew up in New York, maybe we'll get into that, maybe not.
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But I was just fascinated by these, these.
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Can we get into it for a second?
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Okay, yeah, let's go.
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All right, let's go there. Let's go to baby Brian or young Brian, the new sitcom on CBS.
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Young Brian born to two Jewish parents. My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, he was a mathematician, eminent mathematician.
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And my mother was an eminent mom and brilliant English major, etc.
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And they raised that they were secular and they think, you know, we'd go to Iowa's job, we'd go to, we'd go to synagogue, you know, two times a year on Christmas and Easter.
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No, no, we would go, you know, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, right? That's the typical two day a year Jews.
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And, you know, we'd have, we'd have matzahs once a year on Pam Passover.
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And that was about it. And for years, I was like that until my parents got divorced.
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My mother remarried and she married an Irish Catholic man by the name of Ray Keating, my father's name is James X.
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So when she remarried Ray Keating, I was immediately adopted.
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I'm actually adopted into the Keating family and he had nine brothers and sisters and just warm and gregarious.
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They, you know, did Christmas and Easter.
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It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had and I do things with great gusto.
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Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way.
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So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity, in this case Catholicism.
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So I was baptized, confirmed, and I said, I want to go all the way.
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I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church.
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And you're going to be the best altar boy there ever was.
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I had like serious skills. You passed that collection basket.
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I could push people and get them to two extra contributions.
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But in this case, I was 13.
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I don't know if you remember, you know, when you were 13.
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But if you extrapolate the next level up, you know, it's like you go graduate student, postdoc, professor.
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The next level up from, you know, confirmation altar boy is priest.
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And I don't know if you're aware of this, but priests are not entitled to have relations with women.
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And as a 13 year old boy, kind of like future forecasting what life's going to be like for myself if I continue on my path.
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I found it, maybe I...
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The math is not up.
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There was a serious gap in that future and that future.
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And instead, when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah, you know, as most Jewish boys would be a 12, 13 year old boy,
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I actually got a telescope and became infatuated with all the things you could see with it.
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It wasn't bigger than that one over there that you're hedgehogs looking through.
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Is that a hedgehog?
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It's a hedgehog, hedgehog in the fog.
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I should mention, and we'll go one by one, these things.
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You've given me some incredible gifts.
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Maybe this is a good place to ask about the telescope that put some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look and using...
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Now you're officially an experimental astrophysicist by the way.
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Why experimentalist versus an engineer?
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Because you assembled this telescope, you gave it a mount and you connected it to a very powerful...
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Yeah, but there's no experiment going on.
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It's just engineering for show.
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It's very shallow.
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Experiment is taking it to the next level and actually achieving something.
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Here, I just built a thing for show.
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Well, that's always a joke.
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People say, oh, you're an experimental cosmologist.
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I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes.
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Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things, soldering things.
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It's not actually doing the stroking of my non existent beard, contemplating the cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological model.
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Yeah, and just like most of robotics is just using Velcro for things.
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It's not like having dancing dogs and whatever, right?
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Yes, this telescope.
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What's the story of this little telescope?
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This telescope's a very precious thing in some ways.
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It's a symbol of what brought me all the blessings I have in my life.
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It came from a telescope.
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And I always advise parents or even people for themselves.
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You right here, wherever we are, at Biggest City on Earth, Manhattan, where I was growing up as a 12 year old outside of Manhattan.
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You can see the exact same craters on the moon, the same rings of sounder and the same moons of Jupiter, the same phases of...
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You can see the Andromeda galaxy lacks two and a half million light years away from Earth.
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You can do that with that little thing over there.
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You know, one that's a little more expensive, get one that has a mount and you can attach now your smartphone.
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What the hell is that?
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I wouldn't have known what that was in 1984.
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And with that, you can do something that no other science to my knowledge can really replicate, maybe biology in some sense.
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But you can experience the physical sensation that Galileo experienced when he turned a telescope like that to Jupiter and saw these four dots around it.
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Or that Saturn had ears, as he called it, or that the moon was not crystalline polished smooth and made of this heavenly substance, the quintessence substance, right?
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So where else can you be viscerally connected with the first person to ever make that discovery?
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Try doing that with the Higgs boson.
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You know, get yourself an LHC and smash together, you know, high luminosity, you know, call a paracliff and say, you know, I want to replicate.
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He didn't feel anything.
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None of them felt anything.
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It took years to go, Mila, you can't do it.
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But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.
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That's fascinating.
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It's almost like maybe there's another one like that is fire.
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Like when you build a bonfire, like, can you actually get it?
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See, if you use a lighter, I think if you actually, by rubbing sticks together or however you do it without any of the modern tools, that's probably what that's like.
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And then you get to experience the magic of it.
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Of what, like, early humans.
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Yeah, you feel what Ag felt when he did it that first time.
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By the way, is this a gift?
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This is a gift, of course.
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You need a little bit of a swag upgrade, so I got you some gifts.
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Yeah, this is a, I'm pulling a Putin, like, asked if this is a gift, making it very uncomfortable for you.
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This is actually my childhood telescope here.
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But now I'm keeping it.
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So looking through this telescope was when your love for science was first born.
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Change my life, because not only was I doing that, I was replicating what Galileo did, but I was, and I'm 100% not comparing myself to Galileo Galileo.
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Okay, if there's any confusion out there.
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But I did replicate exactly what he did, and I was like, holy crap, this is weird.
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Let me write it down.
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So it had another effect, which all good scientists, budding scientists should do, and all parents should do.
link |
Get your kid a book, a little notebook, tape a pencil to it.
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Write down what you see, what you hypothesize, what you think it's going to be.
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Not like in the high school, you know, like hypothesis, thesis, but just like, wow, how did I feel?
link |
Better yet, astronomy is a visual science.
link |
Sketch what you see, the Lagoon Nebula, the Pleiades Seven Sisters.
link |
You can see them anywhere on Earth.
link |
And when you do that, again, you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain, as I understand it, and you're connecting them through your fingertips.
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You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips, in your connection between what you see, what you observe, and what you write down.
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Then you do research, right?
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The goal of science is not to just replicate what other people did, is do something new.
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And that's what we call it, research, and not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia.
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And in so doing, you start to train a kid at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks.
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It's unbelievable.
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And now we can do even better, because you can share it on Instagram or whatever.
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And you can, by doing so, have an entree into the world of what does it really mean to be a scientist and do so viscerally?
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You know, I often say, I was taught this by my English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins, in ninth grade, that the word educate, it doesn't mean to pour into.
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Let me pour in some facts into lex and, you know, it's not like machine learning.
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You're just showing like billions of cats or, you know, you're not like forcing it in.
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You're bringing it out.
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It means to pour out of in Latin, edukare.
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And what more could a teacher want than to have something that the kid is just like gushing?
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You're not going to see like...
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To inspire the kid.
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Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins.
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Me, she doesn't care for it, but you.
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We take those we love for granted.
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This is in Manhattan.
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This is in Westchester County, New York.
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So, but then that's where the dream is born.
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But then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist.
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So, going to university, graduate school, postdoc, and all the way to where you are today.
link |
What are some notable moments in that journey?
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So, I call that the academic hunger games.
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You know, because it's like you're competing against like these people, you know, who are
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just getting smarter all the time as you're getting smarter all the time.
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They want to get into a fewer and fewer number of slots.
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Like there's fewer slots to get into college than in high school.
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There's fewer slots in graduate school.
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There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc.
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And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number.
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You know, we just did a faculty search at UC San Diego, 400 applicants for one position.
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It's almost getting impossible.
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Like I almost can't conceive of doing what these new brilliant young people applying to
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become an assistant professor at a state university that they're doing.
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Like it takes so much courage to do that.
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So, I went from, you know, this kid in New York thinking I would never be a professional
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A, because I didn't know any.
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I'd never seen any.
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I didn't even know that they existed.
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And I thought, who the hell is going to pay me to look at the stars?
link |
Like, won't they pay me to be like an ice cream taster?
link |
Like, it's just not something I could conceive of getting paid to do, even if I had the
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brilliance to do it, which I didn't feel I did.
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And then I went to graduate school.
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And during graduate school, I had this kind of on again, off again, relationship with
link |
And I knew that he was a mathematician.
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He had left and gotten remarried himself and moved across the country.
link |
I didn't see him for 15 years.
link |
And in that time, I learned a lot about him.
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And I learned that he had gotten very interested, not in pure mathematics, which he had been
link |
a number theorist and contributed seminal work on the Fantine equations, which play a role
link |
in Turing's work, you may have seen.
link |
But anyway, he had become interested, turned completely away from that into the foundations
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of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics.
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And by that time, I was at Brown University.
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And I was, you know, thinking, oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter physicist or experimentalist.
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I never thought I'd be a theorist.
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And I'm not a theorist.
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So it was pretty prescient.
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But it always appealed to me, like, why not do what made me happy as a 12 year old?
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Like, we often forget about, like, those, you know, primitive things about us are probably
link |
the most sustainable, durable, and resilient attributes of our character.
link |
So with my own kids, like, what are they interested in now when they're young?
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And it doesn't mean that's what they're going to do.
link |
I mean, some of them want to play Fortnite, you know, like professional Fortnite play,
link |
But, you know, the odds of that is less than the odds of being a professor.
link |
Can I ask you, is your father still with us?
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Just in a small tangent.
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Do you think about him?
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Does his mathematical journey reverberate through who you are?
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Oh, yeah, absolutely.
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I mean, it did in very many ways.
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And he's been gone for a long time now.
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Thinking back to that time with him, he must have instilled some capacity for me to only
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want to spend my time, which is a limited quantity.
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I don't think it's the most limited quantity.
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Maybe we'll talk about that later.
link |
But to go into only the most challenging, interesting things with the limited time that
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we have while we're alive.
link |
And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics.
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For me, it was the foundations of the universe.
link |
And how did it come to be?
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And I felt like, well, people have been trying since Einstein to outdo Einstein.
link |
It really haven't made great progress in the foundations of quantum mechanics.
link |
But this is an exciting time, the Kobe satellite had just released its data that the universe
link |
had this anisotropy pattern.
link |
Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God and so forth.
link |
And so it seemed like this is a good golden age for what I'm going to do and what I'm
link |
most interested in.
link |
But always throughout that, I wanted to understand, I didn't want to be a wrench monkey.
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No offense to people that just do experiment.
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And no offense to monkeys.
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No offense to monkeys.
link |
But thinking back to what animates me, it's not doing the engineering as much as it is
link |
But there's a lot of steps.
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I want to be the guy understanding what made the universe produce the signal that we saw.
link |
So I always joke with my theorist friends, call me a closeted theorist.
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I want to be, they call a guy who hangs out with musicians, a drummer.
link |
So I want to be like that for physics, right?
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For theoretical physics.
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I want to be like the guy doesn't do new theory, but understands the theory that the new theorists
link |
I love that formulation of a theorist is understanding the source of the signal you're getting.
link |
Signal is primary.
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The thing you measure is primary and theory is just the search of explaining how that
link |
signal originated.
link |
But it's all about the signal.
link |
I see the same search for the human mind and neuroscience in that same kind of way.
link |
It's ultimately about the signal, but you kind of hope to understand how that signal
link |
That's fascinating.
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That's such a beautiful way to explain experimental physics, because it ultimately at the end
link |
of the day is all about the signal.
link |
So maybe those two things, the neuroscience and the cosmos, not getting too romantic,
link |
but yeah, maybe they're linked in some fundamental way.
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Some fundamental consciousness, cosmic consciousness.
link |
We're going to get to that.
link |
No, we definitely have to get to that.
link |
But getting back to that, so my origins, so I always say like, and I want to try this
link |
You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions, but I'm going to ask you some questions.
link |
What's the most important day on the calendar?
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Don't tell me the date, but to you, what is your most, what's the most important day to
link |
Do I have to answer or do I have to think about that?
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The answer, like you don't have to tell me the exact date of the calendar.
link |
It could be like your mistress's birthday or whatever.
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I have so many I lose track.
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Even though I'm single.
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How does that even make sense?
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So a day, like a month in a day, yeah, I mean, for me it would be December 31st.
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So I was going to say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day.
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Some people say birthday, anniversary, kid's birth.
link |
They're usually signifying beginnings and ends, right?
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January means the portal between the God was the portal between the beginning and the end.
link |
So you're looking back maybe because you're Russian, you know, like the death side, the
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light side looking forward to January, the beginning, right?
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So everybody's most important day is usually some beginning or something significant.
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For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all is like, when did the universe
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Like I said before, and I didn't think there, again, I didn't, I just, there was some mental
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obstruction that I didn't realize that I could get passed because I didn't think like anybody
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Like I knew astronomers knew these answers, like the universe at that time between 10
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and 20 billion years old.
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Now we know it's 13.872 billion years old.
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It's incredible, the five digit, you know, first significant 505.
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13.872 billion years, 872 million.
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So is there a lot of plus or minus on that?
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Is it, what are the air bars on that?
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So for me, I'm 50.
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So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me and telling me within 12 hours how old
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So half a percent, percent level accuracy.
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There's a confidence behind that.
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I mean, there's a significance.
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No, it's extremely well measured.
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I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have in contrast to, again, 25 years
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ago, we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion or 20 billion years old, but there
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were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be as they are about 12 billion years old.
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Or in the universe that were 12 billion.
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So that would be like you being older than your father.
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It was embarrassing.
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Can we actually take a tangent on a tangent, on a tangent, on a tangent?
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How old is the universe?
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Can you dig in onto this number?
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How do we know currently with those, I guess you said four or five significant digits?
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So we can come about it from two different ways.
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One, basically they rely on the most important number in cosmology, which is called the
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The Hubble constant is this weird number that has the following units.
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It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec.
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So it's a speed per distance, which means you multiply it by distance and you get a
link |
And what is the speed you're measuring?
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Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy at many megaparsecs away.
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So a galaxy at one megaparsec away.
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This isn't actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects.
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But if you go out, say, one megaparsec away, I would say that that galaxy is moving 72
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kilometers per second away from you.
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And every galaxy, except for the local, very most local group surrounding us, maybe a half
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a dozen galaxies, out of 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies.
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So 12 out of that number are moving towards us, the rest are moving away from us.
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So that number, if you invert it, if you say, well, when did those things last touch each
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other, all those galaxies?
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Now they're really far apart.
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We know how fast they're moving away.
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It's a very simple algebra problem to solve, when were they touching?
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That's where you get that number from.
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So there's the local 12 and then the rest.
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And then you ignore the 12 and then look at the others and solve the algebra problem.
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How does the stuff in the beginning, the mystery of that beginning epoch change this
link |
Very little because actually we understand how there's some other ingredients that go
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into it, namely how much dark energy there is in the universe, how much dark matter there
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is in the universe, how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera, there are, and how much
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ordinary matter like we're made up of, neutrons, protons, croutons.
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It appears that the universe is bigger than it is older.
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How does that make sense?
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So you're talking about the fact that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe
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that's located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the
link |
Naively, you would say that.
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If the universe were static, if the universe came into existence, and you can conceive
link |
of this, the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe.
link |
So the universe just started off and those galaxies were, they could be moving towards
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us away from us, who knows, that you could say I can see a galaxy that's at a distance
link |
of only 13.8 billion years times the speed of light, that would be true.
link |
But the fact that the light is expanding along with the expansion of the universe.
link |
So imagine there was some very distant past, we were near a galaxy, it's going to produce
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some light, and that galaxy is going to be moving away from us, the light's going to
link |
be getting more and more red shifted as it's called, that's going to be moving farther
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and farther away from us as time goes on, there'll be some acceleration as we get into
link |
the era of dark energy.
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The light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance, if you will, from which represents
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all the events that we could have received information from.
link |
We can't currently communicate with that galaxy.
link |
It sent us some light, and now it's moving away, and it's sent us some light.
link |
And because the space is also dragging the photons with it, if you like, the photons
link |
are being participating in the expansion of the universe, that's why they're red shifting,
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that we can see things out to where the universe first began expanding, not just when it began
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And because the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years, with no sign of slowing
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down yet, which is a huge surprise, but it's just a surprise, that we can see things approximately
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three times the age of the universe away from us.
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So we can see this called the age of the universe 15 billion years, just to make the math simple.
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We see things at 45 billion light years distance in that direction, and we see things at 45
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billion light years in that direction, just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away.
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So that means we see things that themselves are 90 billion light years away from each
link |
That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe.
link |
Is there another universe beyond that?
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So I'm conjecture, there's not only one, there's an infinite number of them.
link |
How are you emotionally okay with the fact that our universe is expanding?
link |
It's gonna be like Annie Hall, like with Alvie Singer?
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I'll grow up in the Soviet Union.
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We watched propaganda.
link |
I realized that you did, yes.
link |
So there's a fake of Annie Hall.
link |
Is that some kind of, what is this?
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It's a comedy or propaganda movie with Woody Allen, certainly canceled, but nevertheless,
link |
back when he was not canceled yet, he made a movie called Annie Hall, in which as a self
link |
depiction, he's like a Larry David before Larry David was Larry David, neurotic, typical
link |
neurotic young Jew.
link |
He's in Brooklyn, and he all of a sudden tells his mother he's not doing his homework anymore.
link |
He refuses to do his homework.
link |
The mother says, why? because the universe is expanding, and it keeps on expanding.
link |
Everything will rip apart, and no, we'll never have anything in contact, and everything
link |
I assume these are some of the topics we're gonna get to, and she goes, what are you talking
link |
We're in Brooklyn.
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Brooklyn is not expanding.
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Brooklyn is not expanding.
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The solar system is not expanding.
link |
Oftentimes, they get asked, what is the universe expanding into?
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That's one of my favorite questions.
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What is it expanding into?
link |
And I say, it's actually an easy question if you think about it.
link |
You've seen your friend, Elon, he goes out into space, he's got a rocket, right?
link |
What's outside of the rocket?
link |
If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle, take the cap off it, go outside the rocket,
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you know, sip in some tang, screw on the cover of it, what's in there?
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That's just semantics, I guess.
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No, it's definitely not empty.
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So you step outside the rocket?
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Yeah, you're in the vacuum of space, the quote, unquote, vacuum of space.
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And there's no more liquid in it?
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There's no more liquid in it.
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No, it's just a container, one cubic centimeter, let's just make it simple.
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One cubic centimeter of box, and you take it out into space outside of the Falcon, whatever.
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What's inside that box?
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There's actually, I'm going to say, this is going to set your friends up.
link |
There's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements that we call the cosmic microwave
link |
background inside that box at any second.
link |
Okay, all right, hold on a second, what, 420, that's, I've heard of that number before.
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All right, let's...
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It used to be 69, but then they changed.
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Wow, physics works in mysterious ways.
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In the millimeter box, it's 69.
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What are we talking about here?
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What's in the box?
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I'm going to get it, that's right.
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Let's think outside the box.
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No, we're thinking inside the box.
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So if you have, every cubic centimeter of our observable universe is suffused with heat
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left over from the big bang, dark matter particles.
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There's a little ordinary matter in the universe, and every cubic centimeter, there's some probability
link |
to find a proton, a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera.
link |
There's actually an awful lot of neutrinos inside of that cubic centimeter.
link |
Just imagine how many cubic centimeters there are in the universe.
link |
That's why there's enormous numbers of particles in our universe.
link |
It's a very rich universe.
link |
But now let's zoom in on that box.
link |
So now inside that box, there might be one, let's say there might be one ordinary matter,
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like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton.
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There might be a couple hundred neutrinos, and there'll be a couple hundred photons,
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What's between those guys?
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What's between the protons and the neutrinos and the photons?
link |
Just zoom into the cubic micron now.
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Imagine 420 things inside a box this big.
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It's actually pretty empty.
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There's just zipping around in there, right?
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So between them, there's a lot of empty space.
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And this is outside the physics based models of fields and all those kinds of things, just
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actually asking the question, what is this emptiness?
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What's the particle content in the universe, in every cubic centimeter of the universe?
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Outside of the 420.
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So you have the 420.
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They have some mass.
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Oh, they have energy.
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They don't have mass.
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Photons don't have mass.
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That's why they don't bring suitcases.
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That's true, right?
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Photons never bring suitcases with you, with them because they're traveling light.
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I don't even get a laugh at you.
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You'll appreciate something.
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No, this is pretty good.
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It's just, I'm laughing on the inside.
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What's in the box?
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What's between the photons?
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That's what space is.
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That's what the universe is expanding into.
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That's the notebook on which the photons are written.
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Still, thank you, still, I understand this, but it's still uncomfortable that if the universe
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is expanding, that this thing is expanding.
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The canvas is expanding.
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It's very strange because if we're just sitting there still, I guess if we're in Brooklyn,
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nothing's expanding.
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So our cognition, our intuition about the world is based on this local fact that we
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don't get to experience this kind of expansion.
link |
And that intuition leads us astray.
link |
But you know that gravity is the weakest of the so called four fundamental forces.
link |
And yet it has the longest range pervasiveness.
link |
Gravity is, we're being pulled towards the Andromeda galaxy at some enormous rate of
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speed because of its massive counter gravitational force to the force we exert on it.
link |
So gravity is enormously long range, but incredibly weak.
link |
And because of that, we can think about these effects of expansion as the relationship between
link |
the, as you said, the grid lines on the notebook, right?
link |
Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship between those points, how far they are from
link |
each other, and those can change.
link |
Those point distances can change over time because of the force of gravity.
link |
So it's weak and what we experience is gravity is the changing of those trajectories from
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being rectilinear to curvilinear.
link |
That's what we experience is gravity.
link |
You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish about bowling ball and a trampoline.
link |
That's almost right because it's actually, you have to visualize that now in four dimensions,
link |
like wrapping a trampoline at every point around the object, including on the sides.
link |
And it becomes very hard to visualize.
link |
So a lot of people use that.
link |
It's also a fraught analogy because you're using gravity, like the notion of gravity
link |
pulling something down to explain the notion of gravity.
link |
So it's a little overburdening the analogy.
link |
So you mentioned Barry Barish wrote the forward to your book.
link |
How do gravitational waves fit into all of this?
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How do they, on the emotional level, how do they make you feel that they're just moving
link |
So gravitational waves were the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery the first
link |
It was discovered twice indirectly by two men named Halson Taylor.
link |
And that was given my first year of graduate school.
link |
The day I entered graduate school almost, they announced these two guys won it.
link |
And the guy who won it did the work that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was
link |
Is this in the 40s?
link |
You know, to a cosmologist age, it means nothing.
link |
And to a tennis player.
link |
Gravitational waves do fit in because what we're trying to do now is use the properties
link |
of gravitational waves, the analogous properties that they have to photons, that they travel
link |
at the speed of light, that they go through everything, they can go through everything,
link |
and that they're directly detectable, we're using them to try to confirm if or if not
link |
inflation occurred.
link |
So did inflation, the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part of
link |
the universe and the expansion, the initial expansion of the universe, did that take place?
link |
There's only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that through the imprint
link |
of these primordial gravitational waves, not these old newcomers that Barry studies,
link |
the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us a billion years ago, but we're
link |
seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch.
link |
However, those we cannot build a LIGO and put it at the Big Bang.
link |
So if you want to measure, let's say you have the old time firecracker, let's say there's
link |
a firecracker, and you want to see if it went off in the building next door to you.
link |
You can't see it, so you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it.
link |
And what we're trying to do is hear the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang,
link |
not by using a camera or even an interferometer like Barry used and his colleagues, but instead
link |
using the CMB, the light, the primordial ancient fossils of the universe, the oldest light
link |
We're going to use that as a film, quote unquote, onto which gravitational waves get exposed.
link |
And hope you can know, so what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy for the exposure?
link |
So the signal, as I said, so there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter, and there's
link |
a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe.
link |
However, what we're looking for is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is.
link |
We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is.
link |
We're looking for what its polarization is.
link |
And we'll go there.
link |
Let me just ask, are you serious about the per cubic millimeter or 420 is the number?
link |
But a cubic centimeter, 420 is the number.
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That's the number.
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And if he doesn't, he will truly enjoy this.
link |
Yeah, that's true.
link |
So, I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak, of triumph, of that you described
link |
and losing the Nobel Prize.
link |
So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.
link |
Can you describe what Bicep 1 and Bicep 2 are, Bicep 3, perhaps the instruments that
link |
can detect this kind of polarization, what are the challenges, the origin story, the
link |
So, well, the origin story goes back again to like a father son rivalry.
link |
My father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera, but he never won a Nobel Prize.
link |
And you know, some parents in America, they compete with their kids, you know, oh, I was
link |
a football player in high school, I'll show you and whatever, wrestling, whatever.
link |
And some of us could be healthy too.
link |
But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy, like we would compete and, you know, he was
link |
much more of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist.
link |
So we had both different ideas in what was worth prioritizing our time.
link |
But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize.
link |
And I knew I could kind of outdo him.
link |
So I feel pretty venal and kind of, you know, a minuscule kind of character why I say that.
link |
The only reason you could outdo him is because the field's muddle is given every four years.
link |
And only if you're under 40, which he was.
link |
So he's working under much more limited conditions.
link |
So even if I had, which, you know, spoiler alert, the book's called Losing the Nobel Prize,
link |
so I didn't do it.
link |
But I wanted to do something big and I wanted to do something that would really just unequivocally
link |
be realized as a discovery for the ages.
link |
As in fact, it was when we made the premature announcement that we had been successful.
link |
So you were from the beginning reaching for the big questions.
link |
That's all I can say.
link |
So as an experimenter, you were swinging for the fences.
link |
That's all I wanted to do.
link |
I felt like if it's not, you know, if it's worth spending, you know, perhaps the rest
link |
of my life on as a scientist, it better be damn well, better be interesting to me to
link |
carry me through to give me the, you know, the, you know, I always say, passion is great
link |
when people say, oh, follow your passion, but it's not enough.
link |
Passion's like the spark that ignites the rocket, but that's not enough to get the
link |
rocket into space.
link |
So then you swung for the fences with bicep one.
link |
So bicep one was born out of a kind of interesting circumstances.
link |
So I had gone to a Stanford university for postdocs.
link |
So in academic hunger games, Stanford University, yeah, it's a small little school.
link |
It's not like that technical college in Massachusetts that you're affiliated with.
link |
But as I went there, I was working for a new assistant professor.
link |
She had gotten there only a year before I got there, and she had her own priorities
link |
that things that she wanted to do.
link |
But I kept thinking in my spare time that I wanted to do something completely different.
link |
She was studying galaxies at high redshift, and I wanted to study the origin of the universe
link |
using this type of technology.
link |
And I realized the courtesy of a good friend of mine who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark
link |
Hemminkowski, that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope.
link |
We didn't need a 30 meter diameter telescope.
link |
We needed a tiny refracting telescope.
link |
You know, bigger than my head, you know, less than a foot across.
link |
And that telescope would have the same power as a Hubble telescope, you know, size telescope
link |
could have, because the signals that we're looking for are enormous in wavelength on
link |
They're enormously long, large area signals on the sky.
link |
And if we could measure that, it would be proof effectively as close as you get to proof
link |
there could be things that mimic it, but that we discovered the inflationary epoch.
link |
Inflation being the signal originally conceived by Alan Goothe to explain why the universe
link |
had the large scale features that it does, namely that it has so called flat geometry.
link |
So there's no, there's no way to make a triangle in space in our universe that has three interior
link |
angles that do not sum to 180 degrees.
link |
You can do that with spacecraft, you can do that with stars, you can do that with laser
link |
beams, you can do that with three different galaxies.
link |
All those galaxies, no matter how far you go, have this geometry, it's remarkable.
link |
But it's also unstable, it's very unlikely, it's very seemingly finely tuned.
link |
And that was one of the motivations that Goothe had to kind of conceive of this new idea called
link |
inflation in 1979 when he was a postdoc also at Stanford, Slack.
link |
And he was trying to get a permanent job, I was trying to like make my name for myself.
link |
And so I realized I could do this, but I was also being paid by this, this professor at
link |
Stanford to do a job for her.
link |
And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you.
link |
And then one day she couldn't take it anymore because I was like sketching notebooks and
link |
planning his experiments and I just, I wasn't, no, I actually had big ideas in your mind.
link |
You're planning big experiments.
link |
And that was difficult to work with on a small scale for like a postdoc type of situation.
link |
We have to publish basic papers, deliver on some basic deadlines for a project, all those
link |
And support your advisor is paying, she's paying me.
link |
And so one day I came in and actually involved another friend of mine, an astronomer named
link |
Jill Tarder, one of the pioneers in the SETI science business of detecting extraterrestrials,
link |
which I assume you'd never like to talk about aliens, so I'm sure we won't get into aliens.
link |
But Jill was visiting Stanford and I was like, I really want to meet her, can you introduce
link |
And she said, no, in fact, you're fired, my boss.
link |
So I was like, this is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to me.
link |
I didn't know where it would lead or what happened to it, but getting fired from this
link |
ultra prestigious university turned out to be the path, I mean, literally that brings
link |
me here today, in that because of that, I ended up working for another person in Caltech,
link |
which is in Pasadena.
link |
And she, my original boss at our church, she got me the job with her former advisor,
link |
a man by the name of Andrew Lang.
link |
And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know, like, he's like Steve Jobs or Elon,
link |
you know, charismatic, handsome, persuasive, ideal man.
link |
Not the guy always in the lab doing everything, but understood where things are going decades
link |
And he had been involved in an experiment that actually measured the universe was flat,
link |
very close to flat, along with a preceding experiment done at Princeton by Lyman Page
link |
and other collaborators.
link |
So the shape of the universe is flat.
link |
The geometry of the universe is flat.
link |
How did he do that experiment?
link |
So he used the cosmic microwave background.
link |
And so what I said is you have to look for triangles in the universe, so you can measure
link |
triangles on Earth, you can actually, it's hard to show that the Earth is curved, but
link |
you can show the Earth is curved using triangles, mountaintops, et cetera, if you have an accurate
link |
enough protractor.
link |
God, you're like auto canceling.
link |
I asked hard questions.
link |
My ratings are going to go up, man.
link |
This is going to be great.
link |
Take out the figures.
link |
If you want actual science, go listen to Brian.
link |
If you want all of these conspiracy theories, or a.k.a. the truth about flat Earth, listen
link |
So what he used was the following triangle.
link |
There are proto galaxy sized objects in the CMB.
link |
The cosmic microwave background has these patches.
link |
And so you can make a triangle out of the diameter of one of these blobs of primordial
link |
plasma, the soup that constitutes the early universe, which is hydrogen.
link |
It's very simple material.
link |
I understand hydrogen, electrons and radiation.
link |
Plasma physicist's son, understand it.
link |
The diameter is one base of the triangle.
link |
And then the distance to the Earth is the other two legs.
link |
So he measured along with his colleagues at Caltech and then University of Rome and that's
link |
other group at Princeton, measured the angle, interior angle effectively, very, very accurately,
link |
and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.
link |
Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB?
link |
Can you know where they could trace them back location wise?
link |
You can know where they are, but more than that, there's so many of these patches.
link |
They're about one square degree on the sky.
link |
The sky, you may know, a sphere has about 44,000 square degrees in a sphere.
link |
So there's literally 44,000 of these sized patches over which he could do these kind
link |
of measurements to build up very good statistics.
link |
That's not exactly how they do it or how they did it in this experiment called boomerang,
link |
but they did measure very accurately what was called the first Doppler peak or acoustic
link |
peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.
link |
So the sphere has 44, approximately 44,000 square degrees to cover a sphere.
link |
That's a very kind of important data collection thing when you're sitting on a sphere and
link |
you're looking out into the observable universe.
link |
So there's a lot of patches to work with.
link |
And in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic decomposition of spheres and machine learning
link |
in the early 2000s still used today was created out of this field by data analysts using this
link |
thing called hierarchical, equal area triangles called heel picks is what it's called.
link |
And just stitch all this stuff together and stitch it together very accurately.
link |
Get high statistical significance in order to reduce the statistical errors.
link |
Very clean signal and measurement device to reduce the systematic errors.
link |
Those are the two predominant sources of error in any measurement.
link |
Those that can be improved by more and more measurement, you know, you take more and more
link |
measurements of this table, you'll get slightly better each time, but you only win as the
link |
number of, the one over the square root of the number of measurements.
link |
But the square root of 44,000 is pretty big.
link |
So they were able to get a very accurate measurement.
link |
Again, it's not exactly how they did it.
link |
They also have to do a Fourier analysis, decompose that to a power spectrum, filtration,
link |
There's a lot of work that goes into it, image analysis.
link |
And then comparing that with cosmological parameters, very simple model, just six different
link |
numbers that go into a model that made a prediction.
link |
And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out.
link |
And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature and that was called boomerang.
link |
So he had just come off of this.
link |
Now let me remind you, who is the first person, you know, to measure the curvature of the
link |
It's a guy named Aristophanes in that, you know, whatever lived around Aristotle's time.
link |
His name is in the history books.
link |
So this guy, Andrew Lang, I was like, he's like the next Aristotle, Aristophanes, like
link |
I just wanted to work for this guy, you know, he was clearly had this brand.
link |
He was about 40 at the time, California scientist of the year.
link |
I was sure he was going to win an Nobel Prize for that.
link |
And I knew that he, you know, so I went down to Caltech to give my job talk.
link |
And he said, you know, I love it, you got a job.
link |
And before I could even, you know, before he finished the sentence, I said, I'll take
link |
it, you know, like it was too good to be true.
link |
And I started working there at Caltech and slowly but surely, because Caltech's a rich
link |
private university, at that time run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore.
link |
He just wrote us a check, Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started on this idea.
link |
And so we started coming with the idea for what I later named bicep by the background
link |
imaging cosmic extragalactic polarization, which is kind of ironic because we ended up
link |
measuring galactic polarization, we'll get to that in a minute.
link |
But along the way, the idea was very simple, we're going to make the simplest telescope
link |
you can possibly make, which is a refracting telescope.
link |
Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes in your head.
link |
Only way, you know, forward is making things more complex, right?
link |
And when you make things complex in science, you introduce the possibility for systematic
link |
And so we want to build the cleanest instrument, turns out a cleanest instrument you can build
link |
in astronomy is a refracting telescope.
link |
We also had to unlike that telescope or Galileo's, we had to use very sensitive detectors that
link |
were cooled less than one twentieth of the temperature of the cosmic background itself,
link |
which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe.
link |
So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.
link |
To do that, we need to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the air molecules
link |
and water molecules and take it to a very, very special place called the South Pole Antarctica,
link |
from which I retrieved for you a patch.
link |
There it is over there.
link |
So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.
link |
As somebody who was born in the Soviet Union, we obviously like to call it red, United States
link |
Antarctic Program, the National Science Foundation.
link |
And the base is called the Amundsen Scott South Polar Station.
link |
So it's a little known fact of geopolitics that whatever country occupies a region has
link |
ownership over it.
link |
Now there is a treaty in Antarctica.
link |
You can't use it for military purposes, for mining, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago, Putin sent a submarine to the North
link |
There's no land at the North Pole, right?
link |
So what did he do?
link |
He stuck it on the ocean underneath.
link |
But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica, which was first reached about
link |
110 years ago, first time in human history.
link |
Antarctica means the opposite of the bear.
link |
That means like no bears there, basically opposite of where polar bears are.
link |
Like it means polar bear, that's where, in Greek.
link |
Oh, did not know that.
link |
So Antarctic means the opposite place of that.
link |
So humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole, which is kind of in the
link |
middle of that continent.
link |
We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry.
link |
It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego, Texan, there's no place like the South Pole
link |
Those are the two premier places on Earth.
link |
Of course, you'd like to go into space.
link |
There's no water in space.
link |
It's not about cold, it's about dry.
link |
So that's why, for example, you can take this awadka and you could put it in this cup,
link |
And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere and heat it up.
link |
After two minutes, the water's, three minutes, the water's boiling.
link |
You can't touch it.
link |
Take it for me, don't touch it.
link |
But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to, right?
link |
Because the mug is totally bone dry.
link |
But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules because water molecules resonate
link |
exactly at these microwave frequencies.
link |
So we don't want these precious photons, 420 of them, traveling per cubic centimeter,
link |
from the Big Bang itself to get absorbed in some water molecule in the Earth's atmosphere.
link |
So you take it to a place with the fewest number of water molecules per square centimeter
link |
And that happens to be either Chile or my other project, the Simons Observatory is located,
link |
or you take it to the South Pole.
link |
We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months of my life down there.
link |
And it's like being on Hoth, you know, it's like, it's a completely otherworldly environment,
link |
ice, planar, flat as a pancake, you like, and the buildings are built up on stilts.
link |
They're built up on, because the snow will otherwise cover them over.
link |
The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away.
link |
If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth, they yank them before you go down there.
link |
If you have any issues with your appendix, they'll cut it out of you before you go down
link |
The Vostok base, not too far away, about 600 miles away.
link |
The doctors there, there's a famous picture of one of them operating on himself, taking
link |
out his own appendix in the middle of winter by himself.
link |
It's a harsh condition, science in the harshest of conditions.
link |
On Earth at least.
link |
And we go to those great lengths because it's a pristine environment to observe these precious
link |
And we built this telescope and it weighs, you know, tens of thousands of pounds.
link |
And it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot.
link |
I mean, it's scanning the sky almost unattended.
link |
It needed, we have a guy who spends a year of his life down there, a girl who spends
link |
a year of their life down there.
link |
They're called winter overs.
link |
They arrive in sometimes as early as November and they don't leave until the following December.
link |
And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000.
link |
You just have to work for one night of your life.
link |
But it's a long night.
link |
And what bicep is, and I couldn't bring my polarized sunglasses here, so I brought these
link |
actual polarizers here.
link |
So if you take this and put it in front of your telescope there, you have now made a
link |
You have made a polarization sensitive telescope.
link |
Now you may not be able to immediately know how you would use such a thing, but one way
link |
to think about it, now take this guy and look at a light, look at a light source, put one
link |
up to your eye and now put the other one in front of it anywhere and now rotate them.
link |
What happens to the light source?
link |
It becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.
link |
So it's called a quadripolar pattern, right?
link |
So it's repeating.
link |
It goes bright, dim, bright, dim.
link |
It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical rotation.
link |
And that's because of the property of the photon.
link |
The photon is a spin one field, but the polarization of light is the axis at which its electric
link |
field is oscillating.
link |
Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down.
link |
And so therefore vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical polarization.
link |
And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times for every one physical rotation.
link |
It's just like a spin, a spin two object.
link |
So now if you put that in front of the telescope, you can do one of two things.
link |
Now you're polarizing all the light that's going in because you have one of the polarizers
link |
and then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one.
link |
You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization.
link |
Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here.
link |
There's a crystal.
link |
It's called calcite.
link |
This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman.
link |
This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes there and tell me what does it look
link |
There's, like I could see everything twice.
link |
It's a double image.
link |
That is a special crystal that has two different indices of refraction.
link |
So light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink, comes out and it splits into
link |
two different directions and it could split even more if I made the crystal, give you
link |
my more expensive crystal, but that's all I have.
link |
What is the crystal with this kind of property called?
link |
It's called calcite.
link |
It's called birefringent crystal.
link |
By means to, refrigerant means refracting.
link |
So this is a special type of material that separates light based on its polarization.
link |
Pretty clean by signal.
link |
It's cleanly too, I'm seeing too very cleanly.
link |
That's yours to keep with every time you host me.
link |
Now take the polarizer underneath your left hand, put it on top of the crystal and kind
link |
of move it back and forth.
link |
This is incredible.
link |
You can switch as you rotate, you switch from one signal to the other.
link |
So it's one of the refractions to the other.
link |
So that is now you are analyzing the polarization.
link |
You're confirming the light comes out of the crystal, two different types of polarization.
link |
And effectively what we do is we have those two things, if you like, but working in the
link |
microwave, so our detector, that's where the cosmic photons are brightest in the microwave
link |
regime in the electromagnetic spectrum.
link |
And we're coupling that to refracting telescope, but your eyes are refracting telescopes.
link |
So you are a polarimeter right now.
link |
The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization, but otherwise it mainly detects
link |
its intensity of light and the color.
link |
That's what we call color and intensity, brightness.
link |
So you're devising an instrument that's very precise in measuring that polarization.
link |
And doing so in the microwave region with detectors not made of biological human eyes,
link |
retina cells, but of superconductors and things called bulometers.
link |
And this has to be done at temperatures close to absolute zero.
link |
Under vacuum conditions, one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.
link |
So why is it that this kind of device could win a Nobel Prize?
link |
So when the CMB was discovered, it was discovered serendipitously.
link |
There were two radio astronomers working at the time at Bell Laboratories.
link |
Now why would Bell Laboratories be employing radio astronomers?
link |
Bell Laboratories was kind of like Apple or, you know, it was like a think tank or, you
link |
know, it was Google.
link |
Let's say it was like Google.
link |
Google has like Google X, it has this thing and that thing, right?
link |
So they were working there, but imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers.
link |
Like they were actively recruiting.
link |
Why would they do that?
link |
Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s, was the first commercial satellite
link |
launch for communication.
link |
And so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone, you know, part of AT&T in
link |
the early telephone company, later invent the first cell phone the year I was born.
link |
And they would take that 1946 and they would take that telescope technology that radio
link |
astronomers had developed and they would use that to see if they could improve the signal
link |
to noise of the satellites that they were seeing.
link |
And they found they couldn't.
link |
They found that they could not improve the signal to noise ratio of the first telecommunication
link |
It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second, Malcolm, and they were bouncing
link |
signals from, you know, from the West Coast up to the satellite, bouncing it down, landing
link |
it in New Jersey of all places in Northern New Jersey, Holmville, New Jersey.
link |
And these radio astronomers couldn't get rid of the signal.
link |
So they said, well, New Jersey is not far from New York.
link |
Let's see if the signal is coming from New York.
link |
No, not coming from New York.
link |
Let's see if it changes with the year.
link |
Maybe it's coming from the galaxy, which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930 something.
link |
So in the not being able to reduce the signal or increase the signal to noise ratio, the
link |
They knew the signal was right.
link |
They couldn't get rid of the noise.
link |
And there was excess noise over the model that had not only been predicted by them, but had
link |
been measured by a previous guy, a guy by the name of Edward Ohm.
link |
He measured the same signal, found that there was this hiss of static, of radio static that
link |
he could not get rid of that had a value of about three Kelvin.
link |
So you can translate.
link |
Remember, I said, if you take a radio telescope and you have pointed at an object that's hot,
link |
the radio telescope's detector will get to the same temperature as the object.
link |
It's a principle of radiothermodynamics.
link |
So it's a really interesting thing.
link |
So thermometer, you can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth.
link |
And so we in a radio astronomy characterize our signal not by its intensity, but by its
link |
So he found this guy, Edward Ohm, oh, there's this three Kelvin signal, I can't get rid
link |
It must be I did my error analysis wrong.
link |
And I would give him an F if he was one of my first year students.
link |
But he's just attributed to lack of understanding.
link |
These other guys, Penzius and Wilson, who are also radio astronomers, they said, no, let's
link |
build another experiment, put that inside of our telescope and do what's called calibration,
link |
put inject a known source of signal.
link |
Every second that has a temperature of about four Kelvin, because the signal that they
link |
were trying to get rid of is about three Kelvin, and you want to have it as close as possible
link |
to the pernicious signal as possible.
link |
They did that once a second, so they got billions of measurements, millions of measurements
link |
over the course of several months, years, and even by the end, maybe millions of measurements
link |
And they found they couldn't get rid of it either, but they measured it.
link |
It was exactly 2.7265 degrees Kelvin.
link |
So how does having a four Kelvin source, how does the calibration work, just that accuracy?
link |
It could be larger.
link |
I imagine you're trying to calibrate the microphone.
link |
You could do it with a really loud sound, but the gain would start to compress.
link |
So there are amplifiers downstream from the detector in every experiment that I've ever
link |
worked on, and they only have a linear region over a very small region, and you want to
link |
keep it as linear as possible.
link |
That means you want, if you're trying to get rid of, you're trying to compare like a voice
link |
and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine, it's not going to be as easy on the
link |
amplifiers as getting a slightly, a gong or something.
link |
So the idea of the noise is present in both?
link |
There's noise present in both, and you measure, what they did is they made a separate measurement
link |
just of the calibration system, which they measured exactly very well.
link |
Four Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium.
link |
That's a temperature that's not going to change, and it's certainly not going to change
link |
of a time scale of one second.
link |
And so they could compare unknown signal, known signal, unknown signal, known signal,
link |
like a scale, like a balance.
link |
So another way to think about it is like this.
link |
You've seen these Libra kind of balances, where you put two weights in a pan, right?
link |
What happens if you put like a one ounce weight on one side and a 20 kilogram weight in the
link |
You don't get any measurement, right?
link |
You do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight.
link |
That's why they use four Kelvin.
link |
But just to linger on the fact that there's a romantic element to the fact that you're
link |
arriving at the same temperature.
link |
That's kind of fascinating.
link |
And you're measuring stuff in terms of, you're measuring signal in terms of temperature at
link |
So you get a, I mean, there's something about temperature that's intimate.
link |
Especially since, you know, all life is basically, you know, conversion of energy and trying
link |
to control entropy, which is then related to thermodynamics, exactly in that way.
link |
And this was very crucial kind of thing to do in science because they weren't looking
link |
They found it accidentally, these two scientists, Penzias and Wilson.
link |
And I like to think that those kind of discoveries are the purest in science.
link |
Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said, like the most important reaction
link |
as a scientist is not Eureka, which means in Greek, as you know, I have found it.
link |
No, he said, no, he said, like, that's weird.
link |
Like that's a much better reaction or that's freaking cool.
link |
Like that's a scientist.
link |
Not like, oh, I found one because.
link |
If you find what you're going to find, that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias,
link |
And so, you know, as close to deadly as possible.
link |
So how does that take us to something that's potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize?
link |
So Penzias and Wilson weren't looking for a signal.
link |
They ended up discovering the heat left over from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, etc.
link |
And that was a serendipitous discovery.
link |
They won the Nobel Prize in 1978.
link |
It was the first one ever awarded in cosmology.
link |
My reasoning is what if you could explain not only how the elements got formed, but how
link |
the whole universe got formed and kill off every other model of science.
link |
So if that weren't enough, every scientist, you know, worth his or her salt had told me
link |
and Andrew Lang and our colleagues, this is a slam dunked Nobel Prize if you could do
link |
Because it was really explaining, again, the stakes of this science is different than like
link |
superfluidity, plasma physics.
link |
When you talk about the origin of the universe, it ties into everything.
link |
It ties into philosophy, theology.
link |
You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct, that the Bible can't be correct.
link |
In other words, the Bible is correct now, isn't falsified if you like, if you believe
link |
I'm not, I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously.
link |
But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning.
link |
What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular, it would be more like the cosmology
link |
of Akhenaten and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament, if you will, narrative.
link |
So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher.
link |
And again, it's not an offense because we need plasma physics, we need, we need every
link |
type of physics except maybe biophysics, like we literally use every branch of physics
link |
and thermodynamic superconductivity, quantum attack, all that goes into our understanding
link |
of the instrument.
link |
And even further, if you want to understand the theory that predicts the signal that we
link |
purport to measure.
link |
So I rationalize that if Pensius and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for this, if Holson Taylor
link |
won the Nobel Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves, this is decades before
link |
LIGO, by me detecting gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe began,
link |
detecting the origin of the initial conditions for the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, which won
link |
the Nobel Prize in 1983, these are like five Nobel Prizes, potentially.
link |
And for that reason, it seemed as close as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk,
link |
to outdo what my father did, to do really this impossible.
link |
And at that time, Lex, again, it sounds weird because people are like, oh, you wouldn't,
link |
you don't really, you still want the Nobel Prize, you're still like greedy, and look,
link |
you wrote another book about, and I always joke, I'm like, well, if you want to see if
link |
I'm a hypocrite, just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature.
link |
And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite.
link |
But wait, well, we'll get to your current feelings on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrites
link |
But so there's this ambition, let's say this device, this kind of signal could unlock many
link |
of the mysteries about the early universe.
link |
And so there was excitement there.
link |
So let's take it then further.
link |
I mean, there's a human story here of a bit of heartbreak, not only was this possibly
link |
worth the Nobel Prize, if the Nobel Prize was given, you were excluded from the list
link |
of three that would get the Nobel Prize.
link |
So why were you excluded?
link |
Maybe that's a place to tell the story of Bicep 2.
link |
So Bicep 2, like iPhones, or I know you're an Android fanboy, but every year, they get
link |
a little bit better.
link |
They get more megapixels, they get more optics, triple X zoom, whatever.
link |
We upgraded our detectors as well.
link |
The initial detectors were based on what are called semiconductors.
link |
They have certain properties that make them very difficult to replicate at scale.
link |
And we wanted to make them into superconductors, which had a virtue that you could then mass
link |
Why superconductors?
link |
Well, again, we're measuring heat.
link |
So one thing about a superconductor is that it transitions from some finite resistance
link |
to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature range.
link |
That means you can use that very short span dependency as an accurate and sensitive and
link |
precise thermometer.
link |
And so my brilliant colleagues around the world, in this case, Jamie Bach and nowadays
link |
Suzanne Staggs at Princeton, they are just exquisitely making these sensors tens of thousands
link |
The initial Bicep 1 instrument, of course, we just call it Bicep, that only had 98 detectors.
link |
Simon's Observatory is going to have 100 times more, just in one of our four telescopes.
link |
We're going to have 60,000 detectors operating full time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero
link |
in the Atacama Desert.
link |
But in the case of getting back to what Bicep did, we upgraded it made Bicep 2.
link |
In January 2010, we had just installed in the exact same location at the South Pole in
link |
the same building, which is ominously called the Dark Sector Laboratory, DSL, still operating
link |
through this very day.
link |
We installed a new receiver on the same platform as before, very similar identical optics, cryogenics,
link |
vacuum, everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors.
link |
So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade.
link |
And it had certain other features that made it even more powerful than just a naive factor
link |
And then we started observing with that, and we knew we'd have years to go, and maybe we'd
link |
never see anything.
link |
Again, we're looking for these tiny little reverberations in the fabric of space time
link |
produced close to the origin of the universes we could ever get to.
link |
So I was playing a role in that.
link |
Obviously, it had upgraded my version of the original idea that I had had for Bicep, along
link |
And in January of 2010, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley, and I got a call from Andrew
link |
Lang, or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor, Paul Richards, at UC Berkeley.
link |
And he said Andrew is dead, he had taken his life by suicide.
link |
And this is a man, and I had already lost my father at this point in 2010, but he was
link |
like a father figure to me, Andrew.
link |
He would give me advice on marriage, on how I should be with my kids, and what was the
link |
most important way to move through the academic ladder.
link |
Again, he was preternaturally suited to win the Nobel Prize, everyone always thought he
link |
If he were alive, he still could win it.
link |
In fact, his wife, or his ex wife, won it, Francis Arnold in 2018.
link |
And it was just a power couple, and it destroyed me for a long time because he was just this
link |
I mean, I couldn't conceive of my career, my life, even like these aspects of raising
link |
kids and being married without him.
link |
And to do it in that way, it felt like, again, he's got kids, and I feel terrible for them,
link |
But it did feel like a betrayal.
link |
I mean, I'm just being honest with you.
link |
It felt like, why didn't the F did you not reach out?
link |
I thought we were close, and I couldn't.
link |
I told him everything, and I felt like he had told me everything.
link |
And now he was gone, and then inevitably we had to keep running the instrument.
link |
I mean, there's millions of dollars invested, careers at stake, young people working tremendously
link |
hard, and then here we were, and who's going to take over the lead?
link |
He was the lead of the project at Caltech.
link |
And then it turned out that the other collaborators with whom I had been working for years and
link |
shared a lot of ups and downs with as well, they had decided to form a collaboration in
link |
which I was no longer the principal investigator.
link |
I was no longer one of the co principal investigators as I was on Bicep One.
link |
So I continue on Bicep One as the co leader of it, but not on Bicep Two.
link |
And obviously that was pretty painful.
link |
This is all happening at the same time as you lose this father figure.
link |
Now there's this one betrayal in a way, and there's another or something that feels like
link |
And he had kind of been the only one looking out for my interest in the new experiment.
link |
I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego, and there were other postdocs in the mix,
link |
all of whom would come there to work with him to get the, you know, the approbation
link |
that would then lead to their careers taking off as it did for mine.
link |
And you know, so there was a competition.
link |
I mean, science is not free from egos and competition and desires rightfully or wrongfully
link |
for credit and attribution.
link |
Was he the source of strength and confidence for you as a scientist, as a man?
link |
I mean, we're kind of alone in this world as when you take on difficult things, we often
link |
kind of grasp, but a few folks that give us strength.
link |
Was he your basically your only source of strength in this whole journey, like primarily
link |
in terms of like this close knit?
link |
As a scientist, there were really two.
link |
There was one, this Russian cosmologist, Alexander Polnarev, who thankfully is very much alive.
link |
It was a Queen Mary university, now he's retired.
link |
He was kind of a theoretical, you know, cosmological father to me.
link |
And then Andrew was this counterpoint that was teaching me, you need to have a brand
link |
Every scientist has a brand and some of them don't protect it.
link |
Some of them don't burnish it.
link |
But some of the skills about being a scientist, we don't teach our students involve, how do
link |
you cultivate a scientific persona?
link |
And he was the exemplar for that.
link |
In addition to being the avuncular, you know, father figure type character that really,
link |
you know, was the person I would talk to.
link |
I had issues with when I had issues with my own students and he would tell me how those
link |
And he would tell me, you know, his misgivings about people that he worked with or things
link |
in his personal life.
link |
And it was, it was, it was devastating.
link |
But again, like, who the hell am I?
link |
You know, he, his kids lost father, you know, it's, so I feel guilty talking about it in
link |
that sense, but it's just a reality, you know.
link |
Well, there is something that's not often talked about is people who collaborate on
link |
scientific efforts.
link |
I mean, that's, I don't, again, don't want to compare, but you know, it's, it's sometimes
link |
when the collaboration is a truly great, it sounds similar as when veterans talk about
link |
their time serving together, there's, there's a bond that's formed.
link |
So like comparing family and this kind of thing is, you know, it is not productive, but
link |
the depth of the bond is nevertheless real because you're taking on something, you're
link |
taking on the impossible.
link |
You're trying to achieve something sort of like there's this darkness, this fog of mystery
link |
that we're all surrounded by, which is what the human condition is.
link |
And you are like grasping at hope through the tools of science and you're doing that
link |
together with like a confidence you probably should not have, but you're boldly pushing
link |
And then for him to, to take his own life, it can, can I ask you about this kind of moment
link |
that combined, I don't want to say betrayal, but perhaps the feeling of betrayal that bicep
link |
to kind of goes on without you, even though you're part of it, you're not part of the
link |
Can you describe those low points?
link |
Was there a depression?
link |
What was there a crumbling of confidence?
link |
I mean, it was, it was so wrapped up with my identity as a person, you know, like there's
link |
only a few different ways to have identity and, you know, unless you're unhealthy psychologically,
link |
one of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist and that sometimes is their primary
link |
Now I've got other, you know, husband and father, but, but, you know, at that time that
link |
So to have that kind of taken away, it, you know what, it reminded me of being, you know,
link |
kind of adopted in a sense like my, like the one who created me or that I had played, you
link |
know, played a role in Mila, that he abandoned me in the sense, it felt like these people
link |
are abandoning me.
link |
And the only thing I'd correct about the analogy that you use is like in Mila in the war, they're
link |
all working, you know, for common good.
link |
It's not like, I want to be, get the most kills or, I compare it more to like a band,
link |
like think about the Beatles, you know, and what they did.
link |
And then they like, you know, they ripped apart because of Ego's credit, they had solo careers,
link |
they had, you know, relations with their intimates and so forth.
link |
And there it's not only for the common good, there is more of a zero sum aspect.
link |
Like I would say science is not, science is an infinite game.
link |
You can't win science.
link |
You never get to the, oh, we won science and even the Nobel Prize, they don't feel like,
link |
They feel like a lot of times they're imposters even to that day.
link |
However, science is made up of a lot of, lot of, lot of finite games where there is only
link |
one winner for tenure.
link |
There is only three winner, are only three winners for the Nobel Prize.
link |
And because of that, I think it's heterodox and it's very confusing, especially there's
link |
I never got a guide how to be a professor, how to teach, how to lead a research group,
link |
how to deal with the death of an advisor, how to deal with an unruly graduate student
link |
You know, so we're all like reinventing it, which is kind of ironic and insane if you
link |
Because the academic system that I am a part of and you are a part of is a thousand years
link |
old, dates back to Bologna, Northern Italy, 1088 or so, first universities were established.
link |
And you know, very little has changed, some guy or gal scratching a rock on another piece
link |
of rock and, you know, lecturing in front of, there's only one better aspect nowadays
link |
is that back then, the students could go on strike if they didn't like the professor,
link |
and then he or she wouldn't get paid, probably mostly it was he's back then.
link |
Nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced by tenure, so okay.
link |
But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug getting pulled out from underneath
link |
You know, he was like my consigliore, he was a guy I, you know, sought counsel and counseled
link |
me and he's dead and I felt like there is no one who's going to honor the agreements
link |
And he was a very soulful person.
link |
He was so much better at being a scientist than I could ever be.
link |
And just a loss for the cosmos, it just really hurt.
link |
And you know, I thought, oh, like, you know, it's so sad because he could have won the
link |
I don't think like that anymore.
link |
Just I think about his kids felt at first, now there goes my chance at winning a Nobel
link |
Prize and hence the title of the book was like, I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize.
link |
It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize that have to be done away with.
link |
It's a double entendre, like we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize to help science
link |
We can talk about that at a different time, but in the context of like now thinking back
link |
on it, that was such a minuscule part of it because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize
link |
or I did win the Nobel, you know, any of us did, would that have changed anything?
link |
Would that have brought anything back?
link |
It's so, you know, we say it's like vanity, it's futility.
link |
And I just, you know, for me, the Nobel Prize is like, it's, I don't want to say it's like
link |
insignificant because obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence.
link |
And you know, I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show, I'm going to name drum, okay?
link |
He prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show.
link |
So you see him going on Colbert Report, you think, oh, they just have a banter.
link |
He's just naturally gifted.
link |
No, he said, no, no, no.
link |
You say that you're undermining what he does.
link |
What he does, he goes back, he watches the last month of Colbert Reports or whatever
link |
it's called, late show, and he says, how long does Stephen pause between questions?
link |
How long in the news cycle does he go back?
link |
What topics has he talked about with people similar to me?
link |
So I took Neil and I did that for you.
link |
And I look back, how many times has Lex mentioned the words Nobel and prize?
link |
And I put it into Google Engram and out came exactly the same number of times as show notes,
link |
show episodes as of this moment.
link |
So you've said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.
link |
I mean, it is so strange as a symbol that kind of unites this whole scientific journey,
link |
And it's both sad and beautiful that a little prize, like a little award, a medal, a little
link |
plaque, they'll be most likely forgotten by history completely.
link |
It's somehow a catalyst for greatness.
link |
It resulted in you doing your life's work, the dream of it.
link |
Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize?
link |
I can't necessarily counterfactually state that that would have happened.
link |
So no, it definitely has a place.
link |
And for me, it is valuable to think about it.
link |
But the level of obsession that academics have about it is really, I think it is almost
link |
unbalanced becoming unhealthy.
link |
And again, I have no, I make no truck with the winners of the Nobel Prize.
link |
Obviously, now I've had 11 on the show, and to think about the one rule.
link |
So by the way, right after the day new month of the story, which I'll get to in a bit,
link |
how our dreams went down to dust and ashes, I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of
link |
Sciences to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.
link |
So the one that I theoretically could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually, they
link |
asked me to nominate.
link |
Now, imagine if I ask you.
link |
You say, Brian, you know, instead of me inviting myself on the show, if you say, Brian, would
link |
you like to come on the Lex Friedman podcast?
link |
I say, you know what, Lex, you know, that kind of Rogan, I think you might, can you
link |
introduce him to me?
link |
Like, do you imagine how that would feel?
link |
Like you'd be like, you know, so I was asked to nominate the winners and the one rule that
link |
they say of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated, there's only one rule that they
link |
In other words, he said one person can win it for something they discovered in the preceding
link |
year that had the greatest benefit to mankind, made the world better, right?
link |
None of that was mentioned in the letter.
link |
I said, many people can win it for what worked on long ago.
link |
They didn't mention anything in the letter to me signed by the secretary general, nothing
link |
about benefiting mankind.
link |
They said, just one thing, can't nominate yourself.
link |
So none of these guys nominated themselves.
link |
Actually, little known fact, they sent that exact letter just to you.
link |
That rule was created just for you.
link |
It's called the Keating Coralit, yes, exactly.
link |
I mean, it's, in this particular case, of course, there's like some weird technicality
link |
But in this particular case, it's kind of a powerful reminder that the Nobel Prize leaves
link |
a lot of people behind in that there's stories behind all of that.
link |
I mean, here's a good example.
link |
Again, this is my friend, Barry Barr.
link |
He's become like a mentor and a friend.
link |
He wrote the forward to this, my book, Into the Impossible.
link |
He won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died.
link |
And actually, it's funny with him because I've heard you talk, you know, very rhapsodically
link |
and loving and romantically about, with Harry Cliff and wonderful podcasts with him, by
link |
the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is and how in that, you know, we were about
link |
to build the superconducting supercollider right here in Texas and it didn't get built
link |
and got canceled by Congress and so on.
link |
And I'd say to Barry, that was the best thing that ever happened to you.
link |
And he's like, what the hell are you talking about?
link |
I'm like, if that didn't get canceled, first of all, even though it did get canceled, the
link |
Europeans went on to build it themselves, save the American taxpayers billions of dollars.
link |
And we wouldn't have learned anything really substantially new as proven by the fact that
link |
as you and Harry talked about, nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note has come out
link |
and actually he's had a recent paper, but it's been an upper limit along with his collaborators
link |
and LHCP experiment that I'm going to be talking with him about.
link |
But the bottom line is it was really built to detect the Higgs.
link |
So the SSE for twice as much money would have sucked up Barry's career and he would have
link |
been working on that, maybe not.
link |
And then he would never have worked on LIGO.
link |
And then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize, right?
link |
So you look at counterfactual history.
link |
That's not actually a big stretch, right?
link |
If the SSE had still gone on, he would have worked on it because he was one of the primary
link |
leaders of that experiment.
link |
Second thing, imagine the following thing had happened.
link |
They won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015, they detected unequivocal evidence for
link |
the in spiral collision of two massive black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the
link |
sun, leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar masses behind.
link |
So one solar mass worth of matter got converted to pure gravitational energy, no light was
link |
This particular date, September 14, 2015, that explosion because of the miracle of time
link |
travel that telescopes afford us, that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy
link |
They actually don't know which galaxy it took place in still and they never will.
link |
If that collision between these two things, which have probably been orbiting each other
link |
for maybe a million years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier, Barry wouldn't
link |
have won the Nobel Prize because...
link |
It's hilarious to think that there's one human that won the Nobel Prize because two giant
link |
things collided a billion, 200 million years ago.
link |
And if it had happened 18 days, 20, 30, because that was the deadline for the Nobel Prize
link |
to be announced, they announced the findings in February, but you have to nominate the
link |
winners in January.
link |
So I could have nominated them up until January 30th, but they didn't announce anything and
link |
they were just rumors.
link |
But the reason that he wouldn't have won it, because there was another guy who was still
link |
alive, considered to be the founder and father of three of the three fathers, Ray Weiss who
link |
did win it, Kip Dorn who did win it, and the third gentleman at Caltech named Ron Driever,
link |
who passed away again.
link |
He was alive in 2016, he died in the middle of 2017, and then he was awarded the Nobel
link |
And here we are, several billion of hairless apes that strangely were clothing, celebrated
link |
three other clothed, hairless apes with a metal, with one particular element.
link |
And then they made speeches in a particular language that evolved in a...
link |
Yeah, to get those metals in front of another guy who wears even fancier clothes, who is
link |
the king of Sweden.
link |
And then they got some free food afterwards.
link |
Get some reindeer meat, that's right.
link |
Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example, what happened to you in terms of
link |
I want to kind of speak at a high level about a particular thing I observed.
link |
So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast.
link |
Just listening to the podcast, I'm a huge fan of podcasts in general.
link |
And it also coincided with my entry into grad school and this whole journey of academia.
link |
So grad school, getting my PhD, going to MIT, and then Google, and then just looking at
link |
this whole world of research.
link |
What I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world is that he celebrates others.
link |
Like he promotes them.
link |
He gets like genuinely, and I now know this from just being a friend privately, he genuinely
link |
gets excited by the success of others.
link |
And the contrast of that to how folks in academia often behave was always really disappointing
link |
to me because the natural, just on a basic human level, there is an excitement.
link |
But the nature of that excitement is more like, I'm happy for my friend, but I'm really
link |
jealous and I want to even, I'll do them.
link |
I want to celebrate them, but I want to do even better.
link |
So even that's even for friends.
link |
So there's not a genuine, pure excitement for others.
link |
And then a couple of that with just you now as a host of a popular podcast know this feeling,
link |
which is like, there's not even a willingness to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others.
link |
People in academia are often best equipped technically in terms of language to celebrate
link |
They understand the beauty, like the full richness of why the cool idea is as cool as
link |
And they're in the best position to celebrate it.
link |
And yet there's a feeling that if I celebrate others, they might end up on the cover of
link |
nature or whatever and not me.
link |
They turn into zero sum game.
link |
The reason why I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me and many others is that it doesn't have
link |
And forget money and all those kinds of things that I think there's a narrative told that
link |
uh, academics are this way because there's a limited amount of money and so they're fighting
link |
I don't think that's the reason it's happening this way.
link |
I think, uh, I think you, you can have a limited amount of money.
link |
The battle for money happens in the space of proposal.
link |
There's networking.
link |
There's private stuff, public celebration of others and all and just actually just how
link |
you feel in the privacy of your own heart is not have to do anything with money.
link |
It has to do with you having a big ego and not humbling yourself to the beauty of the
link |
journey that we're all on.
link |
And there's folks like Joe Rogan who in the comedian circles is also rare, but he inspired
link |
all these other comedians to realize, you know what, it's great to celebrate each other.
link |
We're promoting each other and therefore the pie grows because, because everybody else
link |
gets excited about this whole thing and the pie grows right now.
link |
The scientists by fighting, like by not celebrating each other are not growing the pie.
link |
And now because of that sort of science becomes less and less popular.
link |
The flying wheel and exactly, no, and I want to point out two things.
link |
One is that I remember you went on Joe's show maybe a couple of years ago and, um, and then
link |
he gave you a watch and gave you like a Rolex, right?
link |
And I tweeted to you and I think it's Omega Omega, sorry.
link |
Uh, the watch that went to the, to the moon, which we will get to in a bit.
link |
Um, I don't think he could give you what I gave you though, by the way.
link |
Um, and we'll get to what that final gift package is for you.
link |
And by the way, I also wanted to mention because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset
link |
and you should definitely go on Joe Rogan.
link |
And we had this conversation with him because I was like when I was, uh, uh, so moving to
link |
Austin and had a conversation like, don't you think it's weird like if we have the
link |
same guests at the same time or whatever, he's like, fuck that.
link |
I want you to be more successful than me.
link |
I want, he, he truly wants everybody, like especially people close to him to be more
link |
Like there's not even a thought like, but you know why he does.
link |
And this is what I tweeted to you in one of the few things I think you have retweeted
link |
I said, someday you're going to give that to somebody and today I wanted that to be
link |
Uh, Joe's Omega, no, but, but the point is he sees in you that same, um, you know, grandiosity,
link |
that same genuine spirit, graciousness.
link |
And I think that's true.
link |
I mean, you do do something very rare.
link |
I don't want to turn this into too much of a love fest, but I do want to say even back
link |
to Andrew, you know, who I've almost been, hey, he geographic about, you know, just treating
link |
He said to me the same thing and a moment of peak said like, God damn it, like I have
link |
to train these guys and women that work for me so that they can be better than me so that
link |
they can go out and compete with me for the same limited amount of funding from the FANG
link |
You know, that wasn't his, that wasn't who he was.
link |
Um, that was just an expression like I'm doing something which is fundamentally, but
link |
Um, when you have kids, hopefully, you know, please God, you will someday because I think
link |
and I hope we can get to talk about that later, but part of investment and part of doing something
link |
Like you can get married, you can marry someone cause she's rich or he's rich or you can marry
link |
someone cause they're good looking or he's good looking.
link |
You can marry for all these different reasons that are ultimately selfish.
link |
There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish.
link |
Nobody says like, oh, you know what?
link |
I really want this thing that's three feet tall that doesn't speak English that craps
link |
on my floor that wakes me up all hours of the night that interferes my love life.
link |
You know, nobody says that cause it doesn't benefit you for months and months.
link |
A friend of mine who actually does the videos for me and does a lot of my solo videos, he's
link |
having his first kid.
link |
He's like, what do I do?
link |
Cause it always gets stupid if I will catch up on sleep now.
link |
Like yeah, I'm going to store sleep in my sleep bank.
link |
Like I don't think Huberman and you talked about that, right?
link |
You can't do that.
link |
What you can do, give the kid a bath, feed the baby, let the mother relax.
link |
Like in other words, do the things and, and this really relates back to what Aristotle
link |
Aristotle once said, why do parents love kids more than kids love parents?
link |
As much as you love your dad and your mom, they still love you more and because you love
link |
that, what you sacrifice for.
link |
Um, I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs.
link |
Some, some with severe, uh, my, one of my uncles, uh, my, the Keating side had, uh, severe
link |
what they called mental retardation now, it's probably has a different name.
link |
That out of the nine other brothers and sisters, he was their favorite cause they had to sacrifice
link |
And I think of that, you know, in the small case, like Joe is kind of mentoring you or
link |
You're going to mentor someone.
link |
You love that, what you sacrifice for.
link |
What you sacrifice is reduction of entropy.
link |
It's storing and investing and you want to protect that and you know, that, that to me
link |
really speaks to this.
link |
So I, you know, I don't hold it against, but it is true.
link |
Like scientists are, you know, when they're described again, they're often said to be like
link |
You've heard this description.
link |
They're inquisitive.
link |
They're passionate.
link |
And I'm like, yeah, and they don't play well with others.
link |
They won't share their ball in the go home.
link |
We, you can't, there's no such thing as a single edge sword.
link |
I wish there were, you know, because you, we, we need some more of that cause you gotta
link |
But in this case, he, you know, I think when, when you have this kind of investment in,
link |
in science, it's going to be natural.
link |
But that doesn't mean we have to like, you know, feed the flames of competition.
link |
You know, I'm like really, if you go to the homepage of the NSF or the department of energy
link |
or the recently released national academy of sciences, future of science for the astronomical
link |
sciences for the next 25 years or more, they talk about how many Nobel prizes these different
link |
science things could win.
link |
Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB, B mode polarization, the nice thing.
link |
You know, that's figure two in this thing.
link |
And I'm like, what message is that sent to kids like to young people?
link |
Like that's what you should be doing so that you win this small, as you said, this prize
link |
given out by one hairless ape to another wearing a fancier costume using reindeer.
link |
Especially in the case of Nobel prize, it's only currently given to three people.
link |
Which was never one of his stipulate.
link |
He actually said one.
link |
You can only give it to one person.
link |
So they change it.
link |
Why did they change it?
link |
Why did they change it?
link |
And by the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11 about the Nobel prize.
link |
And it's, it's a fact.
link |
But you know, one of the things that's been so interesting, like I'm speaking, actually
link |
this coming up in December is that the Nobel prize is given out on the day of Alfred Nobel's
link |
There's a lot of and, and they bring in flowers, not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum,
link |
which is in San Romano, Romano in Italy.
link |
It's a lot of like death fascination, you know, denial of death features heavily in the Nobel
link |
prize because it's like what outlives a person? Well, science can outlive a person. My father has
link |
a theorem named after him. It's still, you know, engraved in many places around the world.
link |
You or I, we can go to different places around the world. People know who we are based on our
link |
publications. We engrave things. We want to store things. We want to compress things. And I think
link |
that's, there's something beautiful about that, but there is a notion of denial of death. Like,
link |
there is a notion of what will outlast me, especially if you're among the many 90 something
link |
percent of members of the National Academy. Don't believe in an active faith and a creator
link |
and a God. And science can substitute for that, but it's not ultimately as fulfilling. I just,
link |
I don't believe it can fulfill a person the way even practicing but not believing in a religion
link |
can fulfill a person. So, which is interesting because you do bring up Ernest Becker and the
link |
denial of death in losing the Nobel Prize book. And there is a sense in which that's probably in
link |
part at the core of this, especially later dream of the Nobel Prize or a prize or recognition.
link |
I've interacted with a few, you know, or a large number of scientists that are getting up in age.
link |
And there is the feeling of a real pride of happiness in them from winning awards and getting
link |
certain recognitions. And I probably at the core of that is a kind of a mortality or
link |
a kind of desire for mortality. And that was always off putting to me as opposed to,
link |
I mean, I know it sounds weird to say it's off putting, but it just, rather than celebrating
link |
the pure joy of now solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us, just the actual
link |
exploration of the mysterious. For its own sake. For its own sake.
link |
Yeah. Well, that's why I said, you know, it's like a scientist should, okay, you have to be
link |
careful and not have any, you know, physical, it has to be platonic. But you can think of
link |
scientists and mentor. I have a chart in the book and in my plaque made by one of my graduate
link |
students, former graduate students, she's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Barron. And
link |
she made this plaque and it has 17 generations. So, here I am, 17, you know, levels down. There's a
link |
guy, Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz, different Leibniz, 1596 he was born. And I'm in this
link |
chain. And I don't know if you know this, but in the Russian language, the word scientist
link |
means someone who was taught. I'll say it very slowly. One who was taught, right?
link |
Hachoni. Hachoni. So, it probably means the guy who was taught, right?
link |
No. No, no, no, it's, it's, it's literally someone who was taught.
link |
Someone who was taught, right? Yeah.
link |
So, what does that mean? To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning. One is
link |
that you have to be a good student to be a scientist because you have to learn from somebody
link |
else. Two, you have to be a teacher. You have to pay it forward. If you don't, I claim you're really
link |
not a scientist in the truest sense. And I feel like with the work that I do and outreach and
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stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale. I'm influencing more than the, you know, 24 kids
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I might have in my graduate class or undergraduate class. And they're, you know, potentially could
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reach thousands of people around the world and make them into scientists themselves.
link |
Because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial. There is no competition. There's no zero
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some fixed, fixed mindset versus growth mindset. Because it is an infinite game. Imagine a culture
link |
that had none of the trappings of the negativity of the Soviet Union or pre World War One,
link |
Germany or Imperial Japan, you know, science celebrated. And we're just making like a nation
link |
of scientists and like, we're not doing it to become multi billionaires or necessarily, you know,
link |
for any military purpose whatsoever. But if we had that, you know, sometimes I'm flying, you know,
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home at night, like when you fly into LA, you literally, it's very rare. You can see like the
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number 10 million, like it's very hard to like visualize things. You see a brick wall you ask,
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how many bricks are there? It might be a thousand, two thousand, 10 million lights,
link |
there's 10 million souls. And you can see in their discreet, they're not like the Milky Way
link |
all blending together. Each loss in their own busy lives, excited, fall in love, afraid of losing
link |
their job, all that. By the way, people should know that you're a pilot. So you literally mean fly.
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Yeah, sometimes I get to do it. You get to look at the eye of God perspective on these 10 million,
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on these millions of... And I don't think they're like constellations, but upside down,
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like the city is like a constant. Hopefully, I'll stay to keep the plane the right way up.
link |
But when you think about like, imagine they're all working together. And imagine like, you always
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talk about love. But like, you don't know, you don't know that they're not where they have love.
link |
Like, so you're looking down on them. And it's just amazing. Because you think like,
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what amazing creation is man and humans? And what can we do? It's phenomenal. It's so exciting.
link |
And then I get to do it. It's a job, I say, don't tell Gavin Newsom, but I do it for free.
link |
I love what I do. But to think about like, oh, if my student succeeds, no, it's unfortunate
link |
that you have experience that I've certainly experienced it. And I think there are ways
link |
around it. I think it is a vexing problem because people want to... It's very tempting to keep your
link |
own kind of garden fertilized. One thing that's interesting is like, people are like, why are
link |
you doing this thing? And podcasts and you're supposed to be as serious scientists leading
link |
this huge project and collaborators. And I'm like, well, most of what I do, as I said before,
link |
it's for you, it's Velcro. For me, it's like, what is the deal with the safety standards on the
link |
truck that we're driving up to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator that will allow
link |
the concrete truck to... It has nothing to do with the Big Bang inflation, the multiverse.
link |
God's existence has nothing to do with that. So those are people I say I have to talk to,
link |
the people that come on the show, those are people I want to talk to. And that's super fun.
link |
I mean, it's a real honor that I get to do it. I'm using... I have some unfair advantages, right?
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I'm at a top university. We have people that's affiliated with the Arthur C. Clark Foundation,
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brilliant scientists coming through. But I felt like it would be kind of a shame if I didn't allow
link |
them to teach at scale because they're better teachers than I am. Let me ask you an interesting,
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maybe difficult question. Have you ever considered talking on your podcast with the people who would
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get the Nobel Prize for Bicep 2 if it turned out to be detecting what it is? Yeah. I mean,
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I'm still friends with them and they have still gone on too. So we should say like,
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why we didn't win the Nobel Prize and then what happened with the group that is now leading it
link |
completely, that I'm completely divorced from in a secular sense. We're friends. We see each other.
link |
We send each other emails and stuff like that. I would love to get their sense of what the natural
link |
heartbreak built into the whole process of the Nobel Prize, what their sense is. I would love
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to hear an honest, real conversation. I understand you're friends. There's some hard truth that
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even friends will talk about it too. They weren't happy I wrote the book. I mean, I remember one of
link |
them was like, well, what's this I hear about a book? I mean, a lot of people told me not to
link |
write the book. They said it's going to give too much attention to the Nobel Prize. It's going to
link |
look like sour grapes. Again, I say you can prove I have sour grapes or not. Just give me the next
link |
prize. So you would, if you get a Nobel Prize for Literature, you would turn it down? I don't know.
link |
It's funny because Sabina Hasenfelder, who is a fellow kind of YouTube sensation and
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an issue in for the Nobel Peace Prize.
link |
You're right. She's so gracious and so good. She has that German, just gentleness.
link |
She's a little too nice for my taste, I would say.
link |
I wish she could really say what she thinks and be snarky on occasion. So she wrote a review of
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my book when it came out three or four years ago and she said, well, Brian Keating, she said,
link |
well, it's good. It's interesting. He talks about cosmology, but they can do whatever the hell
link |
they want and he presumably has these problems with it, but it's none of his business, basically.
link |
And at the end, she said, but if you want one good thing, he's a really good writer and who
link |
knows? He could win the Nobel Prize in Literature someday. I said, and then she allowed me to
link |
publish a rebuttal on her blog, which was kind of funny. But anyway, no. So getting back to the
link |
guys that we were kind of collaboratemies or frenemies and, look, we don't wish each other
link |
active ill. I've visited them. They're welcome to visit me. They have visited me. The thing I have
link |
to say is that I just wonder about introspection. Like for me, literally, I don't care about the
link |
Nobel Prize other than what it can do to benefit science. But I no longer, I did, but by the way,
link |
I did seriously care about how I benefit Brian Keating early on in my career. I'm just totally
link |
honest. I'm not proud of it. It's kind of embarrassing. But now I would hope that people
link |
would say like, okay, the guy is like, he's obsessed with it. My next book is not about this.
link |
It's about something completely different. And I do feel like people lack introspection
link |
a lot of times in science. We don't think about why we're doing what we're doing.
link |
And I think it comes down to curiosity. One thing about Joe, and again, I've only listened to like,
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I have to confess, you're like my father. Now I'm confessing my sins to you,
link |
Father Lex, Father Friedman. I haven't listened to like that many of your episodes start to finish,
link |
okay? I'm with our friend, a mutual friend, Eric, I've listened to a bunch of recent ones.
link |
Einstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, that's what it is.
link |
I get confused with the brother. The brother's car amounts up,
link |
the brother's wines, and a few others. I haven't ever listened to a full Joe Rogan episode.
link |
But from what I've seen with him, he has a preternatural curiosity. He doesn't have passion.
link |
There are a lot of podcasts about passion, like I've been on their show. He has curiosity, like
link |
he's not going to stop talking about something until he hops it, until he understands it,
link |
until he gets it viscerally. And I respect that because as I say in this more recent book,
link |
passions like kind of like the dopamine hit that gets you started, like, oh, I'm going to be great.
link |
I'm going to maybe I could win a Nobel Prize. Like that's not going to sustain you. The sustenance
link |
comes from the passion converting to curiosity. And what I want to do is convert as many things
link |
as possible to things that I can then, because actually I've had on people that discuss addiction.
link |
And there is an addictive quality to doing podcasts or whatever, but there's an addictive
link |
quality being a scientist. And you get to do things that are very specialized and specialized
link |
locations with special people paid for by other people have no frickin idea what you do. I mean,
link |
imagine you worked in some like some job and you know, Feynman said he said all these contradictory
link |
things like when he was he was once said like, he said, if you can't explain it to your grandmother,
link |
you don't understand it yourself. Then the day you won the Nobel Prize, a reporter asked him,
link |
what did you win it for? He said, if I could explain it to you, bud, it wouldn't be worth a
link |
Nobel Prize. So let's let's leave aside his inherent contradictions. But but in reality,
link |
there is a kind of like dopamine rush that you get from it. But but you know, what is ultimately
link |
going to be the sustenance of it? So yeah, I do feel like we have to find a way to to nucleate
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that. I don't know. Actually, I don't know if it's if it's like, can you can you turn someone
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into a I used to ask this question all the time? Like, can you make someone creative? Like, can
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you teach someone to be creative? I don't know. Can you teach someone to be curious? I don't know.
link |
I do know that kids are naturally curious. As they get older, they get less curious,
link |
just like I heard from the other forward authors, James Altucher, he said once he did a study,
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kids smile 300 times a day or smile or laugh adults five or six, five or six. No, I'm trying to get
link |
you to laugh, but anyway, no, it's true. So somewhere he lose 30, you know, to 50%. I'm not
link |
entertained. But that's because I'm an adult. No. And then I do remember there's some some
link |
distribution on those studies with a happier adult smile a little more, but still the kids
link |
blow them out of the water. Just crushing. So can you is it or should in other words,
link |
should we invest our energy in getting the half life decay constant stretched out more for curiosity
link |
for kids? Or should we try to reset the dopamine hit? And then, you know, I don't know. It's an
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open course. Well, I think it goes to David Foster Wallace, the key to life is to be unboreable.
link |
I think I think you could train this kind of thing, which is in every single situation. So like,
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which I think is at the core, at least this correlated with curiosity is in every situation,
link |
try to find the exciting, the fascinating, like in every situation, you sitting at the,
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I don't know, waiting for something at a DMV or something like that, find something that excites
link |
you like a thought, like watch people or start to think about, well, I wonder how many people
link |
have to go to the DMV every day. And they try to go into the the pothead mode of thinking like,
link |
wow, isn't this weird that there's a bunch of people that are having to get a stamp of approval
link |
from the government to drive their cars. And then there's millions of cars driving every day.
link |
How can I do this better? Maybe some blockchain and they could like VIN transfer. Yeah, exactly.
link |
Yeah. No, that is a good. And then every situation, I think if you rigorously like,
link |
just practice that at a young age, I think you can learn to do that because like sometimes people
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like ask me for advice and like to do this thing or that thing is, I think you at the core really
link |
have to have this muscle of finding the awesomeness in everything because if you're able to find the
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awesomeness in everything, like whatever journey you take, whatever, whatever weird
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man that you take through life is going to be productive is going to end up in a great place.
link |
So like that muscle is at the core of it. And I guess curiosity is central to that.
link |
But you didn't win the Nobel Prize. The team of bicep that led the bicep to didn't win the
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Nobel Prize because of some space dust. That's right. Kick schmutz. Which one is the moon?
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Which one is? That one's the dust. Space dust, yeah.
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What are we looking at? So why is space dust the villain of this whole story?
link |
Well, it's funny, you know, I wrote these books and I don't know about you, but when you get all
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these books, I'm sure you get books and people send you books. They always come in these dust
link |
jackets, right? I was like, what the hell is a dust jacket? Like how much dust is raining down at
link |
any moment? I mean, this is immaculate. This room is Russian tidiness, but in a normal household,
link |
how much dust is raining down? It's not really until I wrote a book. And I realized, you know,
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I'm writing a story about the origin of the universe, then the prologue, you know, to the
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cosmos, and dust is going to cover this story. It's actually more a story about
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astrophysics and cosmology than dust. And this is the link between the cosmological and the
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astrophysical. So what does that mean? So astrophysics is broadly speaking, the study of physical
link |
phenomena manifest in the heavens, astronomical phenomena. Cosmology is concerned with the origin,
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evolution, composition of the universe as a whole, but it's not really concerned with stars,
link |
galaxies, and planets per se, other than how they might help us measure the Hubble constant,
link |
the density of the universe, the neutrino content, etc. So we tend to have a tendency to kind of
link |
look a little bit, you know, they're like, not all astronomers and astrophysicists are equal,
link |
they're all equal, but some are more equal than others. So we have kind of a prejudice,
link |
a little swagger, right? And cosmologists are studying, you know, we're using Einstein,
link |
we're not using like, you know, Boltzmann, we're thinking of the biggest possible pictures.
link |
In so doing, you can actually become blinded to otherwise obvious effects that people,
link |
you know, would have not overlooked. In our case, when we sought out the signal,
link |
we were using the photons that make up this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe,
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luckily only at three degrees Kelvin approximately, we're using those as a type of film onto which
link |
gravitational waves will reverberate it, make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way,
link |
and then we can use our polarized sunglasses, but in a microwave format to detect the characteristic
link |
twofold symmetry pattern of under rotation. That's the technical way that we undergo,
link |
I mean, there's a lot more to it. But there are more than one thing that can mimic exactly that
link |
signal. First of all, when you look at the signal, the signal, if inflation took place, big if,
link |
but if it took place, the signal would be about one or two parts per billion of the CMB temperature
link |
itself. So a few nano Kelvin, the CMB is a few Kelvin, the signal from these B modes would be a
link |
few nano Kelvin. It's astonishing to think, Penzies and Wilson in 1965 measured something
link |
that's a billion times brighter. And that was what 60 years ago, let's call it 60 years ago,
link |
since they discovered it. Moore's Law, you're more expert on this, call it every two years.
link |
So you're talking about like two to the 30th power, doubling or something like that at that.
link |
Let's call it two to the 20th, something like that. So that's like only two to the 10th as a
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thousand, correct my math, I'm wrong. Two to the 20th is a million, two to the 30th is a billion.
link |
So we're outpacing Moore's Law in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments to detect these
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feeble signals from the cosmos. And they don't have to deal with, on the semiconductor factory
link |
in Santa Clara, California, they don't have to deal with meteorites and things like coming into
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the laboratory. It's a clean room, it's pristine, they can control everything about it. We can't
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control the cosmos. And the cosmos is literally littered with particles of schmutz, of failed
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planets, asteroids, meteoroids, things that didn't coalesce to make either the Earth, the moon,
link |
the planet Jupiter or its moons or get sucked into them and make craters on them, etc., etc.
link |
The rest of it is falling and it comes in a power spectrum. There's very few, thank God,
link |
chicks of love size, impact or progenitors that will take out all life on Earth.
link |
But there's extremely large number of tiny dust particles and microscopic grains and then there's
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a fair number of intermediate sized particles. It turns out this little guy here is the end
link |
product of a collapsing star that explodes in what's called the supernova, type 2 supernova.
link |
So stars spend most of their life using helium nuclei protons and neutrons into helium
link |
nuclei. And then from there it can make other things like beryllium and briefly make beryllium
link |
and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the way up until it tries to make iron and nickel.
link |
Iron and nickel are endothermic. It takes more energy than gets liberated to make
link |
an atom of iron. When that happens, there's no longer enough heat supplying pressure to resist
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the gravitational collapse of the material that was produced earlier. So the star form
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is going to go inside out. That's how scientists discovered helium was discovered on the sun.
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I don't know, did you know? That's why it's called helium. Yeah, they went there at night and
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They went there at night. No, helium means heliosis, the god of the sun. It was discovered in its
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spectrum from observations of the telescope like 150 years ago. It wasn't discovered like when
link |
oxygen and iron was discovered. So it's only a relatively recent comer to the pure activity.
link |
The helium came after oxygen.
link |
Oh, no, first hydrogen forms into helium. So that's the first thing that formed.
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No, in terms of discoveries.
link |
Oh, yeah, after oxygen. Yeah, I think priestly and others, the Dalton discovered it in the 1700s.
link |
No, helium was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing
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the weird atomic absorption and Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum.
link |
When it tries to make iron, there's no longer any leftover heat. In other words,
link |
there's heat left over from fusing, as you know, the sun of a plasma physicist. He fused to hydrogen
link |
nuclei, you get excess energy plus you get helium. So that's why fusion energy could be the energy
link |
source of the future and always will be. Hopefully, it'll come much sooner than that.
link |
And so doing trying to make iron, it takes more energy, doesn't give off enough energy,
link |
star collapses, explodes. And what does it spray out into the cosmic interstellar medium?
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It sprays out the last thing it made, which is that stuff. Luckily for us, because some of that
link |
coalesced and made the core of the earth onto which the lighter like silica and carbon and the
link |
dirt and the crust of the earth were formed. And some of that made its way to the crust,
link |
the iron, made its way to the crust. Some of that, your mother ate and synthesized hemoglobin
link |
molecules. And hemoglobin has iron particles in it. It's a quite amazing substance. Without it,
link |
we wouldn't have our red blood. We wouldn't exist as we are.
link |
Is this a very long complicated mom joke?
link |
I've done enough dad jokes. My quote is up. So I'm taking this object,
link |
seriously, not all of it gets bound up in a planet. In fact, forming planets is very inefficient.
link |
And so there's a lot of schmutz left over, some of which gets in the way
link |
of our telescopes looking back to the beginning of time. And some of those molecules like iron
link |
is used in compass needles. They're magnetized. And magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them
link |
and make the exact polarization pattern that we're looking for. As if the compass needles get all
link |
aligned, that's like the polarization of the dust grain. It's like that polarizing filter.
link |
That means light polarized like this will get absorbed. And light polarized like this will
link |
go through. So it's absorbing, it's making 100% polarized light out of an initially unpolarized
link |
light source. And that's what happened. And what we ended up claiming on March 17th,
link |
and I'm sure if you were there, you might remember this, at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics,
link |
there was an announcement. There were like three or four Nobel Prize winners in the audience.
link |
And the bicep two team, which I was no longer leading, I was still a member of it. In fact,
link |
in the announcement, the first person they mentioned, besides, you know, thank you all for
link |
being here as me and my team at UC San Diego, although I wasn't invited to go to the press
link |
conference because that Harvard complicated. Yes, exactly. It's a little school up there in
link |
the Cambridge area. And so they ended up making this announcement that we had discovered the
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aftershocks of inflation. We detected the gravitational waves, shaking up the CMB. And on
link |
that day, past Lex Friedman podcast, back when it was called artificial intelligence,
link |
Max Tagmark said, Goodbye, Universe, Hello, Multiverse, and Hello, Nobel Prize. See, he saw
link |
that as confirmatory evidence, not only of inflation, not only of gravitational waves,
link |
but of the multiverse, Goodbye, Universe, Hello, Multiverse. Multiverse is a natural consequence
link |
consequence of inflation. Yes, according to its prominent, you know, supporters. Yeah.
link |
Yeah. And of course, leave the poetry to Max, which he does masterfully. Okay. So that the
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excitement was there. I mean, maybe the initial heartbreak for you is there too. That's that's
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some of the darker moments you're going through. But broadly for the space of science, there's
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excitement there. Huge excitement. And I often note that this is a problem in what I call, you
link |
know, the science media complex, because oftentimes you'll see things like past guest air seeker,
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Venus life, you know, exists. And that will be really, I mean, it's fascinating, right? And
link |
with the work that she's doing, or her colleagues are doing, Clara, who's on your show as well.
link |
And that will be on front page, New York Times, Boston Globe, San Diego Union Tribune, and it'll
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be above the fold, make headlines around the world. And then six months, 12 months later, as
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is the case for us, retraction, page C17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads, you know,
link |
and underneath the personal. So we have a problem in science that the, you know, if it if it if it
link |
explodes, it leads, you know, and we get this huge fanfare. And this is not unique to my experiment.
link |
This happened with the earlier discovery of so called Martian life of discovered in Antarctica,
link |
which was announced after peer review. We weren't peer reviewed at the point when we made
link |
the announcement, we had a press conference and there are other reasons that the team leaders
link |
felt it was important to do that so that we don't get scooped by a referee who's unethical.
link |
We thought we had done everything right, but that's confirmation by
link |
There's like levels to this. And there were people, you know, me,
link |
warning about how it would be interpreted and wanting to also make sure that we put all the
link |
data out, including the maps, which we still haven't released. And so there were a lot of
link |
reasons to be skeptical, but the audience, the, the public never knows this. I think it's,
link |
so I've made a rule that if I am ever in charge of, you know, doling out large amounts of science
link |
funding, that when you should keep kind of an option, in other words, you should have money
link |
for publicity, fine, have money for your press conference, but hold in reserve in a bond to
link |
be used, hopefully never. But if it's to be used, an equal fund for the retraction, if it should
link |
occur. So you would like to see, because that's a big part of transparency is the, is the,
link |
to me, in the space of science, at least, that's as beautiful because it reveals
link |
the, it's like, it's, uh, it does a great story. There's a, there's an excitement. There's, um,
link |
humanity. There, so there's a climax to the triumph, but there's also a climax to the,
link |
like the disappointment at the end, because that also eventually leads to triumph again.
link |
That sets up, that's the drama that sets up the triumph. Like with Andrew Wiles,
link |
for me, Fermat's last, uh, Fermat's theorem, I guess it's not last name, whatever, the,
link |
is like the ups and downs of that, the roller coaster, the whole thing should be documented.
link |
That is science. That is science. And when we don't do that, then we cultivate this aura
link |
that excludes other scientists, often from minorities or women, that you have to be Einstein,
link |
like Einstein came out of the womb and he was just like this guy with like curly, no, he wasn't.
link |
He was, he wasn't bad at math. That was all, that's all nonsense. But he said that he,
link |
you know what he said? He attributed his success to Alex. He said, I never asked my dad
link |
what happened when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid. And thank God I didn't, because had I,
link |
he would have told me the best answer of the day, which by the way, you know, he would create 20
link |
years later as a 26 year old in the patent office, obviously in Switzerland. And in so doing, by delaying
link |
when he asked these questions, he said, I approached it with the intellect of a mature scientist,
link |
not a little kid. And I wouldn't have accepted the same explanation. So sometimes assuming that
link |
scientists are infallible, inevitable, omniscient, you know, being, I think that really does a
link |
disturbance. And Jim Gates said, you know, he's like, Einstein wasn't always Einstein.
link |
And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we're humans,
link |
until we have artificial Einstein, which I don't think will ever exist.
link |
You've launched the assayer project where you hope to assess theories of everything with
link |
experiments. You have a YouTube video where you're announcing that. That's, it looks super cool.
link |
Can you describe this project? And you also mentioned kind of, you give a shout out to
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little known fellow by the name of Galileo Galilei as an inspiration to this project.
link |
Yeah. So Galileo is kind of my avatar, my hero, kind of all around scientists that I would love to
link |
approach the, you know, logarithm of Galileo. He was not only a phenomenal scientist,
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he was an incredible artist, a writer, a poet, a philosopher. And back then they didn't have
link |
distinctions between, you know, scientists and, you know, it was like a physician, was like a
link |
physicist. And he would indulge, you know, kind of these really intellectual flights of fancy,
link |
thinking about phenomena, such as the Earth's tides or the, you know, the composition of the
link |
Milky Way. And what's interesting about Galileo is that he was almost as wrong often as he was
link |
right. And Galileo was not alone like this. I always say like Einstein had at least seven
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Nobel Prizes that he could have won for discoveries that later became true. But he also had seven,
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you know, huge, you know, impossible to believe blunders in some sense.
link |
It's too bad because he could have had a good career, as I would say. And Galileo was like that
link |
too. In other words, he would fall victim to, I think, this confirmation bias that all scientists
link |
have to guard their lives against, their careers, their brands, their reputations against,
link |
which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn't conform to what you're trying to prove
link |
for one reason or another, or the radical acceptance of things that do comport with it
link |
in order to bolster your confidence. And both are equally intoxicating. It's, you know,
link |
confirmation bias is a hell of a drug because it really reinforces this notion,
link |
which is partially sunk cost. You've put so much time, effort, money, reputation into it.
link |
You don't want to be wrong and go back on it. And with Galileo, he would be incredibly perceptive
link |
about things such as, you know, the Earth being not located at the center of the solar system,
link |
and the Sun being the center, so called Copernican hypothesis. And he would use as evidence very,
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very interesting ideas that all of which were wrong, basically. And in fact, we weren't able
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to prove that the Earth orbited around the Sun. And I ask you, like, can you prove the Earth is
link |
not flat? No, well, you're a flat Earth or anyway. But, but, but it's, I asked my...
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Proud, flat Earth society member, t shirts coming out soon, lexstreaming.com, merch,
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last merch. But it's actually not trivial to do that. But most of my students,
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graduate students can prove that the Earth is rounder. Explain how the Earth...
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It is actually not trivial to do, though. It's not. Yeah.
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And much harder is to prove that the Earth goes around the Sun. In fact, that's extremely hard
link |
to prove. And almost none of my students, even after they get their PhD and the final exam,
link |
I kind of like to just, you know, give them a little bit of humility. Because I think they'd
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be a good scientist. You need to be humble. You need to have a little humility. And you need to
link |
have swagger. You need to feel like a little cocky. Like, I can do this. I can do this thing
link |
that Einstein, by definition, couldn't do. I'm going to attempt it. I'm going to attempt to do
link |
what was impossible just a generation ago. How do you prove that the Earth goes around the Sun?
link |
Is it by the motion of other planets? So there are many ways to do it. I mean,
link |
obviously, you could take a spaceship, park it at the North celestial pole of our solar system and
link |
just watch what happens. But obviously, that wasn't how it was discovered in the late 1700s.
link |
So it's called aberration. So if you look at stars as the Earth orbits around the Sun,
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the position of the stars will shift slightly because of the tilt of the Earth and because
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the Earth is in motion around the Earth and around the Sun. And because the Earth has a non
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trivial amount of velocity compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the Sun,
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the stars will trace out little tiny ellipses and those will correspond to the fact that
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we're moving around. If they're at infinite distance, which we assume that they are, they're not
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really. But for all intents and purposes and the scale of the solar system, they're infinitely
link |
far away. So that's called stellar aberration. And that was the first way it was discovered.
link |
And actually, we still use that. We have to correct for that effect when we measure
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the cosmic microwave background. Because imagine you're inside of an oven. It has some
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temperature three Kelvin and a thousand Kelvin whenever. If you're moving towards you, the
link |
photons that are coming to me in that direction will be blue shifted hotter. And the ones behind
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me will be redshifted. I'll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount of matter
link |
or energy where you are and then extension of the Doppler effect. So we actually
link |
make use of that and construct what's called like a local standard of rest.
link |
Anyway, so you can do it. But Galileo said, no, no, no, I'm not going to wait for that. I have other
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proofs for it. One of which is that the Earth has tides and the tides come in and out twice a day,
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high tide and low tide. And it's he made the analogy of because the Earth is moving around
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the sun, say this is the sun here, and it's moving around the sun, but it's also rotating on its
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axis. See how the water is sloshing up and down inside the vodka bottle. As that happens, he
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said that's what the tides are caused by. Totally wrong. Most people listen to this podcast. Just
link |
so you know, if you're listening to this, he actually has a bottle of vodka in his hand.
link |
Half drunk. And we're both drunk and whatever else is possible. So as it sloshed around,
link |
he claimed that was what now has nothing to do with that. The moon over there, the moon pulls
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differentially on the Earth and the Earth's ocean. That causes the oceans to bulge slightly
link |
towards and away from where the moon is. And the moon is actually the source of the Earth's tides.
link |
It has nothing to do with Copernicus, the orbit of the center. So he was totally wrong about that.
link |
He also thought that the Milky Way was comprised only of stars when we know it's made of gas,
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dust, nebulae, and things like that. So he had a fair share of blunders. Now, one thing I always
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kind of make note of, and I'm actually producing along with Jim Gates, Fabiola Gianatti, Frank
link |
Wilczek, and Carlo Revelli and my friend, Lucio Picharillo, the first ever audiobook of one of
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Galileo's Dialogue, the one where he claimed to find evidence for the orbit of the Earth around
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the Sun. But it was an error. So you're reading parts of this text. Yeah. It's a brilliant book.
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So this book was written in 1632. It was written and it was the one that caused him to go into
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house arrest and almost threatened to be tortured. And that book laid out his arguments for what was
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called the Copernican or the nonparapetetic Aristotelian, et cetera, notion of the planetary
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dynamic. And eventually he was forced to recant that he believed in it and allegedly he said he
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still believes the Earth moves. Anyway, so it's written in the form of a trilog. It's actually
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called the Dialogue with three people. There's one named Salviati, who is espousing Galileo's
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notions about how the heavens were orchestrated. And Salviati means like the salvation, the savior.
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Then there's a middleman, Segredo. So Carlo Revelli is playing Salviati, a brilliant one.
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I am playing Segredo, who's like an intelligent interlocutor. I'm kind of just,
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I can appreciate Aristotle. I can appreciate Copernicus. Then there's this guy, Simpliccio,
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the simpleton. And he espouses the words of the pope. So you can imagine like, you know,
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you're working in the Putin's government or you're working in whatever. And all of a sudden,
link |
you're kind of putting the words of like the fool, literally calling the fool, but you're using the
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words of the all supreme powerful being on Earth at that time as the Vatican Church,
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especially for an Italian like Galileo. So he wasn't as brilliant, you know, politically
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as he was astrophysically and otherwise.
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Who's doing Simpliccio?
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Simpliccio is a friend of mine in University of Manchester named Lucio Picciarillo. He's
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an Irish guy, but he has a full blooded Italian. They all speak English and Italian. I only speak
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and the forwards are written by, so one forward and this place has three forwards,
link |
which is like a 12 word. Okay, the four words are written for me. Yeah, that was a good one.
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The forward three forward. One of them is written by Albert Einstein, in which he says Galileo
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was not only one of the greatest scientists in history. This is Einstein telling Galileo,
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but he was one of the greatest writers and minds of all of human history. That forward is read
link |
by Frank Wilczak, who you've had. Jim Gates, who you've also had. He reads the translation,
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the translator, Stelman Drake is a renowned scientific translator. And then Fabiola Gianotti,
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she reads the introduction and dedication from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany and some of the
link |
different introductions that Galileo himself had. It's such a thrill to be able to do it.
link |
I only randomly found out because I wanted to study it and it's like 500 pages long. And I was
link |
like, let me get the audio book because I'm an audio medium kind of guy. Didn't exist. So I said,
link |
let's do it ourselves. And so we did it. And hopefully it'll be out on Galileo's birthday,
link |
which is February 15th, 2022. There'll be a ripe 457, but that's not the only one of his books.
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Galileo wrote many books, one of which is called the Military Compass. And this is an
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interesting book for my blockchain and your blockchain aficionados. In this book, he talks
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about a compass, which is not a magnetic compass, but an actual slide roll. It's basically a slide
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roll. And it's a manual. It's like, imagine if your phone came with a manual nowadays,
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they don't, right? But this was a manual for how to use this slide roll, which is enormously
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important. And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples. It's a brilliant book. One of the examples
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is how do you convert money? So he does a money conversion, currency conversion between Ducati
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and Florentine Ducati and Scootie and whatever, you know, Lyra, whatever, he does all these currency
link |
conversions. One copy of this book, or maybe maybe two exist, first printings from 1600 still exist.
link |
If Galileo had just kept those in his family, they're worth $100 million. Nowadays, you can't
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get a Scootie. A Scootie's worth nothing. Like a Ducati's worth not, I mean, maybe some collector
link |
wants a piece of paper, right? So it's a lesson. Like there are value in physical, you know,
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non fungible tokens, this original non fungible token. So, but then a third book is called The
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Assayer. So what is an assayer? So assayers were kind of like these alchemists, you know,
link |
physicists, chemists that would, would, would be around a court. And every so often for the
link |
treasurer, they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens and convert that to script
link |
or, you know, paper money. And to do that, they needed someone to verify with a standard of gold
link |
that they knew to be gold and do some kind of semi non destructive evaluation of the purported
link |
object, the metal that was supposed to be gold. So they would take these pieces of gold,
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theoretically gold, and they would rub it on something called a touchstone. Touchstone was
link |
a special piece of rock, granite, whatever. It has no intrinsic value. It's just a piece of rock.
link |
But with that rock, you could assay and determine the content of this thing that could be worth,
link |
you know, millions of lira or whatever, right? So it was an incredibly important job.
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And so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock and use it to do something valuable.
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What I want to do in the assayer project is take this plethora of physical theories of everything.
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I said recently, you know, we should give a nub all prize to someone who doesn't come up with
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a theory of everything because there's just, there's just like, it's just rotten with them.
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And I think it's great. You know, I often say that theory is kind of like software,
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and I'm not denigrating software at all. But like, you can create a lot of software,
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you can make a quine, and it'll make its own quine. And like, you can make infinite amounts of
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software. Look it up, kids. That's one of my favorite videos. And you could see, you can
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replicate, you can't replicate, you can't make a telescope that makes a telescope that makes it
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so. In other words, hardware is kind of like the non fungible token, that's ultimate minted,
link |
you know, limited edition, the book, the compass book. And so it's very expensive. That means
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you have to be very careful before you invest decades, billions, and humans into pursuing
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one of these theories of everything. You have to have good intuition for it. And lately, what
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I've seen is not predictions, but retradictions. So you see that the Large Hadron Collider will
link |
come out with a measurement. And then so and so, we'll say, oh, this is, you know, this is compatible
link |
with string theory, or g minus two of the muon. It has these bizarre properties. Fifth force,
link |
string theory predicts this. String theory solves this. Neutrinos, sterile neutrinos,
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Large Hadron Collider Bottom or B experiment, blah, blah, blah. They'll say that it's compatible
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after the fact. And it's not so bad, right? Because look, what did Einstein do with GR,
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general relativity? The first thing he did was not predict something new. He looked at the anomalous
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behavior of the planet Mercury. And he saw it was behaving strangely. And people had said, oh,
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that's because there's another planet hiding behind the sun that we can't see that perturbs the orbit
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of the planet Mercury. It's always called Vulcan. That was one approach. That's kind of like the
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dark matter approach where it's like, there's a clump of matter that we can't see that's influencing
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the planet that we can't see. And we use that to divine and intuit the existence of the other
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planet. That's actually how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was discovered because of the anomalous
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behavior of the planet Uranus. So Neptune was dark. We couldn't see it. It was tugging on Uranus in a
link |
certain way. And that led to Laverier discovering the planet, predicting where this planet should
link |
be found. So it had a good heritage and physics, right, to predict this planet that you couldn't
link |
see that work. But Einstein said, no, it's caused by the warping and bending of spacetime
link |
due to the presence of matter will later become known as the Einstein equations.
link |
So he explained why Mercury did that. And it was known since the time of Newton
link |
that Mercury was behaving in this really freaky way. So he didn't predict it. He retrojected it.
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That's fine. But at some point, you should come up with something new that's uniquely
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predictive of your theory, as I just said. The theory of dark matter in the context of Neptune
link |
is actually a valid theory. It just happens not to make sense in the context of Vulcan. And so
link |
if he had kept doing that, maybe perhaps he wouldn't have come up with these other predictions
link |
that he would later reject. Like, he rejected the existence of gravitational waves. You and Barry
link |
talked about that. He didn't actually believe it. It was the one peer reviewed paper that he had.
link |
He used to send back in those days, he sent a letter to Nature, physical review, publish this,
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you know, let me know how much it cost. And they got it rejected because he said,
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you can't detect gravitational waves. And actually, or they're not real. And the guy showed that
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they're real because he corrected a math error in Einstein and Rosen's paper. So it's fascinating.
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What should the assayer do? He or she should look at these theories, look what things they explain
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that already exist, and look at what new predictions they can claim to explain if we can build
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experiments to test them. You have to kind of challenge yourself to think about what kind of
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predictions can they make such that we can construct experiments. So that's like ultimately
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back going to the signal to the experimenter theorist, essentially. That's right.
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So like very experiment centric exploration of the fundamental theory of everything.
link |
That's right. And the best scientists, the best physicists were both experimentalists and theorists.
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Or at least that they, if they were experimentalists, they understood the theory well enough
link |
to make predictions or to explore the predictions and the consequences of those predictions.
link |
Or if they were theorists, they were like Galileo, like Einstein has patents for things that he
link |
invented. And then, you know, some of his work led to the laser and the maser. So he had practically,
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it wasn't just pure airy fairy, you know, quantum reality and expanding universe.
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So in this case, what I want to do is look at, you know, there's 10 different theories of everything
link |
or cosmological models, they make predictions, they have advantages and disadvantages. And I'm
link |
just asking the question, why aren't we applying Bayesian reasoning with confidence intervals?
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Why don't we have updates every time an experiment comes out? We can update our
link |
credulity in that experiment or that theory, rather, based on the results of the experiment.
link |
And we shouldn't do it after the fact. Or as, you know, Michio Kaku has said, well,
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you have to tell me what the initial conditions are. And that's not my job. You're supposed to
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tell me if string theory is correct. What should it predict if it's true? There's one big problem,
link |
which I should say, that to be a good ass air, I think you have to be worldly in the sense of
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worldly and curious, like we were talking about before with you and Joe. And you can't only talk
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your own book. You can't only understand your own pet theory of everything. You can't only say, well,
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I only understand string theory, and I don't have time for these other theories, or as if it's
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beneath me to even go into Garrett Leasy, or Eric Weinstein, or Stephen Wolfram, or aspects of M
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theory, et cetera, et cetera. And there are some that say, you know, like, why do we give string
link |
theory so much of an advanced past when we... There are actually predictions it's made that are
link |
completely anathema to what we observe in physics. Like, the dark energy should be negative, and we
link |
see it as positive. Like, that's a huge strife. You know, if you told somebody, here's my tenure
link |
application, and what they'll be like, oh, I've made this pretty... If it wasn't done by, you know,
link |
Maldesena and, you know, Witten and folks like that, I don't know if it would have had the traction,
link |
the endurance, the resiliency that's had. And that worries me, because all these men and some
link |
women are making these fantastic, brilliant, beautiful ideas, and they're not even looking
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at what their neighbor's doing. There's a thing that I really enjoyed seeing, and I don't see often
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enough of these theories, which is others who are also experts kind of studying them sufficiently
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well to steel man the theory, to show the beautiful aspects of the theory. You know,
link |
I see that with Stephen Wolfram. He has a very different sort of formulation of physics with
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his physics project. Now, physics is a foreign land to me, but his formulation, especially
link |
in the context of cellular talent or hypergraphs, just as objects, as mathematical objects themselves
link |
are familiar. And so I'm able to see the real beauty there, and it saddens me that others
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in the physics community can't also see the beauty. Like, give it a chance. Give it a chance
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to see the beauty. Give it your respect. So there is one person who does take time and is
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what I consider to be a great scientist in terms of what he thinks. He obviously has invested
link |
interest in his own theory, and it's Eric. Eric's got a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the history
link |
of physics, and he has a great warmth and graciousness when it comes to giving others. And I've
link |
witnessed this, and I've had, look, first of all, I think debate is pointless. Like, I don't know
link |
about you, but if you've ever voted, like, oh, I saw this debate, and, you know, because Trump did
link |
so badly, now I'm going to vote for Biden. No, never have. You almost never change anybody's mind
link |
unless you debate with love, unless you have almost like, we're going to win together,
link |
like the red team approach in the military, they're trying to win a war. So they may disagree on
link |
the tactics day to day, but the strategy, we have to win this war. I love you, and I want to protect
link |
you. I don't see that in very many of these physicists from Kaku. I almost see it. It's
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embarrassing in some ways, because they'll almost mock with the exception of Eric. You know, Garrett's
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interesting, you know, his theory is, you know, people have a lot of issues, very technical,
link |
but Eric has taken the time to try to understand it. Eric has taken the time to understand
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Peter White's theory, and I don't see the same graciousness extended from them, I'm sorry.
link |
Yes, you're right. I mean, with Eric, he hasn't, he wants to, but he hasn't extended the same
link |
for Stephen Wolfram, because I think... No, he did. No, actually, no, he did. I had a debate with
link |
them live on my show. No, I did. I listened to it, but like, I just think it's outside of the two
link |
kit that Eric is comfortable with. So it's not, it's not that he's not, but you're, the main thing
link |
that's often absent and Eric does have is like the willingness and like not just like dismissing
link |
or mocking though that he's, he's reaching out, but okay. I mean, what if it's not, you know,
link |
I made a joke when they were on, I was like, how many theories of everything can there be,
link |
you know, Highlander, you know, there can be only one, you know, I don't know, maybe.
link |
But he of course also like the other folks who propose a theory has an ego. He rides a dragon
link |
with the dragon representing the ego. Well, let me ask you about your friend, Eric Weinstein.
link |
So he proposed initial sketches of geometric community, which is his theory of everything.
link |
Maybe you can elucidate some aspect of it that you find interesting, but
link |
what do you think about the response he got from the scientific community?
link |
Well, you know, some of the response came from people, academicians, professors. Some came from
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a lay audience and some came from trained scientists or no longer, you know, maybe practicing
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in universities. I thought it was, there was a lot of vitriol, which surprised me because
link |
I look at what he's trying to do. And it was always, the vitriol would always come with some
link |
element of ad hominem. And maybe that's his personality, maybe that engenders this or whatever.
link |
Maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency. You know, I always get these emails,
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Professor Keating, I have a new theory, Weinstein was wrong. I'm going to prove it. I'm not going
link |
to math, but if you help me, I will share my Nobel Prize with you. Oh, thanks. Have you read
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my books? In other words, it's always taking down the dragon. It's always taking down the
link |
kung fu master, right? That you get the hit points from D&D. You get their hit points,
link |
you take their cards, you get their wrist tokens from Kamchatka. And thinking about
link |
with Eric, it's like, because what he's doing is so aspirational, it is grandiose in a good sense.
link |
What he's trying to do is construct a geometric theory of everything that has aspects of supersymmetry
link |
and stuff embedded in it. He's trying to meld that. It has very unusual features and that it
link |
features not only multiple spatial dimensions, multiple time dimensions. It uses new mathematical
link |
objects that he's invented. And look, I had had him on my show. I've talked with him. We've had
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consultations with other physicists, you know, where he'll come down and I have a visitor's
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office and he comes down to San Diego sometimes and spends time there. And we talk with eminent
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mathematicians and physicists. Eric's been out of the academic world for a long time.
link |
And there is, as I said before, an aspect of persuasion that must take place
link |
in order to get anything through. And I think there was a slight amount of good nature, not
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ignorance, naivete, but just the sense that if this is right, everyone will recognize it.
link |
If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door as the expression goes.
link |
That's completely untrue. That doesn't even happen with mousetraps. I mean,
link |
you know how many freaking mousetrap types there are? It's like, no, they don't beat a
link |
path to your door. You have to sell that freaking thing. You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or
link |
Elon. I have never, I've had one paper, I have 200 papers I've published in peer reviewed journals.
link |
I've only had one, half a percent published with no referees comments. In other words,
link |
published like Dream, submitted it, and happened to be in a prestigious journal. I thought I was
link |
pretty psyched about that. But you almost have to crave the response, getting it back from a journal.
link |
And I think he doesn't see, first of all, he doesn't subscribe to the peer review process.
link |
He thinks that is anathema to way sciences, invest interest in public journals, etc., etc.
link |
I think you can have elements of peer review that are substantive and valuable. I think you have to
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learn from your critics. One of my conversations with John Mather, he talks about loving your
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critics in this book, but not being so open to their criticism, that their criticism goes to your
link |
heart, and not being so open to their compliments, that their compliments go to your head. It's a
link |
very tough sila and carib this to walk. Well, there's something, I mean, I want to be careful here
link |
because I'd like to talk to Eric about this directly, but I'll just, from a perspective of a friend,
link |
I want to ask about the drug of fame. So there's also the public
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perception of the battles of physics. And so there's a very narrow community,
link |
but then there's the way that's perceived, the exploration of ideas is perceived by the public.
link |
And so there is a certain drug to the excitement that the public can show
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when they sense that you have something big. And that in itself might become the thing that gives
link |
you pleasure. And I think that with theories of everything or with any kind of super, super
link |
ambitious projects, and this is taking us back to when you were ambitious about trying to understand
link |
the origins of the universe, if you convince yourself that you have an intuition about the
link |
origins of the universe, and you have a platform like you do now, where you start to communicate
link |
your intuition, it's hazy like all the science, you're still unsure, but you have a sense. I mean,
link |
perhaps you don't have that as much as an experimentalist because you always kind of start
link |
going, okay, how can I build a device to see through the fog? But if you're more like a
link |
theoretician who kind of works in the realm of ideas, in the realm of intuitions, it is also
link |
a source of pleasure. You mentioned dopamine, a source of dopamine, that you can communicate to
link |
others that you're really excited by the possibility of solving the deepest mysteries of the universe.
link |
Yeah. So there's some aspect to which you want to be a Gregori Grisha Perlman and go into the
link |
hole and get the work done and shut the hell up about the, I'm speaking about myself about
link |
talking about the dream and planning and exploring how great it will be if my intuition
link |
turns out to be correct. If the sketches I have turn out to actually build the bridge that takes
link |
us to a whole new place as a friend of Eric's or a friend of my friend, what kind of advice do you
link |
give? What is your role? Is it to be a supporter given that he has many critics or is it to be in
link |
private a critic? Like a lot of my friends will say, hey, shut the hell up. Just get it done.
link |
Well, first of all, I want to ask you a question I've asked him and then it comes from Animal Farm.
link |
My favorite book. Yeah. So you remember Benjamin the donkey?
link |
Yes. And he's talking to the pig. I forget the pig's name. You probably know. Anyway,
link |
the pig says to him, you got this long, lustrous, beautiful tail. You're so lucky. I got this short,
link |
curly, little squiggly thing. Does Jack squat? Tell me, how does it feel to have such a lustrous
link |
tail? And Benjamin says, well, the good Lord, he gave me a tail to swat away the flies. But you
link |
know what? I'd rather not have the tail if I didn't have the flies. So I ask you, as I've asked Eric,
link |
is it worth it? You've got these beautiful tail, but there are flies. I'm not saying in a negative
link |
way. I'm just saying you get unwanted distractions, dopamine, kind of the highlight, the spotlight
link |
effect. It's obviously allowing you to do things that you could never do alone. And I think,
link |
you know, first of all, I'd love to know how you answer that because that's something I don't feel
link |
I can relate to myself. Well, this has to do with more like
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platform, platform stuff. Yeah, scale. Oh, I, that has no very little effect on me. I enjoy it.
link |
I enjoy meeting new people, but that has nothing to do with platform. Yeah, no, that has no effect
link |
on me. Do I want somebody that enjoys the act itself. So this conversation, the reason I'm
link |
doing this podcast with you today is because that allows me to trick you into talking to me for a
link |
prolonged period of time. I don't care about platform. I assume nobody listens. It really
link |
doesn't matter. Yeah, I forgot it right. My whole test of it was a good podcast. Because how do you
link |
know? Like podcasts have been around, what, 12 years? How do we know as podcasters we're doing a
link |
good job? Like sometimes you get someone say, that was the best interview I ever had, but that
link |
doesn't happen that often, at least for me. But if you realize that you forgot to put the SD card
link |
in that little guy and the zoom didn't work, would you do it again? And I think if you say yes to
link |
that, that was a good podcast. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. So in that space, yeah,
link |
all of it is worth it. But the dream, I'm more referring to the psychological effects. Forget
link |
the platform, forget all of that. Maybe you shouldn't even brought up the platform because it
link |
really has to do even in your own private mind, which is what I'm struggling with.
link |
Because I enjoy the planning, the dreaming, the early stages,
link |
so much that I often don't take projects to completion. This is a psychological effect
link |
that I'm sure basically everybody, every engineer, everybody that does anything,
link |
goes through. I just, in this case particular, I think it also applies. And I wonder as a friend,
link |
what is the role? So yeah, I mean, that effect has been documented, everything from planning
link |
telescopes to dieting. So there's a tiny bit of dopamine that you get visualizing how you're
link |
going to feel, you don't need to know this, but you don't deal, but losing five pounds.
link |
I say, oh, I'm going to lose five pounds. And I'm going to be able to run a minute faster.
link |
So there's a part of me when I'm planning the diet and the meals and the exercise that I get a
link |
little bit of that thrill. And that actually saps a little bit of my willpower to actually
link |
complete the task that will take me to that goal. So that's a documented effect. And that happens
link |
in project planning and project management. It's a very, very important thing to guard against as
link |
a manager of a big project. With Eric, it's interesting because with him, first of all,
link |
we relate extremely well on a friendship level and very close. He does remind me a lot of my
link |
father. And I've told him that just as a mathematician, as a big thinker, as in his case,
link |
as a father, you know, the father kind of figure that I didn't have a sense. But that he is a
link |
true lover of life. He knows he's got a huge platform. He knows he gets a lot of attention
link |
for what he does. And, you know, I jokingly say, well, it's one thing, like, how do you know,
link |
Lex, that someone's an expert? So experts say there's a good rule Ray Dalio writes about in
link |
principles. He says an expert is someone who's done something three times successfully. Like,
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you can do something correctly once you could do something correctly. It's very hard to pull off
link |
like three projects, three telescopes, three, whatever, right? So look for that. It's arbitrary.
link |
It could be four, it could be two, right? But the point is, look at Eric. So how many things
link |
has he contributed to and made, you know, pretty substantive kind of paradigm shifts for different
link |
people? I would say he's been right many times. Does that mean he's infallible, that he's ineffable?
link |
No, of course not. For me, so what I'm saying is I get a little bit of the joy of kind of learning
link |
something purely as a scientist, something completely outside of what I do, mathematics,
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gauge theory, the kind of very advanced geometry, topology that he's interested in.
link |
But every now and then, I will sneak in that I want, you know, I've told him, I'm going to turn
link |
your son into an experimentalist despite you. You know, like, he is not going to be a theorist.
link |
Zev is not going to be a theorist. He is working with me. He is learning from me. We're trying to
link |
get him into, he wants to bypass all of the, you know, kind of nonsense of undergraduate and go
link |
straight to graduate school. And I've tried to encourage him that maybe he could do it, maybe
link |
he can't, but there's no other way than to try. And so we, I prepared a whole curriculum for Zev
link |
to basically bypass all of undergraduate and to his credit, he's done, earns all the credit.
link |
He's learned it to a level that matches many of my graduates.
link |
Okay, hold on a second. I have to push back and this is me saying it. And I'll, I'm sure I'll
link |
talk to Eric about this, but to say you said, Eric's done, was right on multiple things.
link |
I think Eric has a great deep insight about human nature and how societies work. And he says a lot
link |
of wise words on that world. But I think if we're talking about experts, you kind of have to prove
link |
you, you know, it's like Michael Jordan playing baseball, like he's proved it many times that
link |
he can play basketball, but he's also got to prove that he can play baseball. And I would say the
link |
whole point of, I mean, of radical ideas is you're not, I mean, it's very hard to be sitting on a
link |
track record of, I mean, you're, when you're swinging for the fence as always, you're, there's
link |
not a track record to sit on. And like Max Tagmark is an example of somebody who has a huge track
link |
record of more like acceptable stuff, but he also keeps swinging for the fences in every other world.
link |
So he has that track record with Eric, if you look at just the number of publications, all
link |
this stuff, he did really, he chose not to travel the academic class. So there's no
link |
proof of expertise, except sort of an obvious linguistic demonstration of brilliance. But
link |
that's not how physics works. So there's a polite way to damn somebody as a scientist and say,
link |
he or she, she, they really know the history of physics, right? Like physicists always love
link |
it. Like Sean Carroll always jokes about like, you know, like physicists should never talk about
link |
history of physics. But it's more than that. So Eric has certainly contributed in finance
link |
and finance specifically and gauge theory and economics and inflation dynamics and the non
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cosmological. Hold on a second. That's yet to be proven. He has a lot of powerful interest.
link |
Well, gauge theory is calculated. It's calculus proven. I mean, he has a gauge model for currency
link |
exchanges between different nations that is explanatory. It's not, you know, is it something,
link |
in other words, it's a model and it's used for pedagogical purposes. And it might be,
link |
okay. It's unique to him. I mean, him and Pia. Yes. It might be a powerful model.
link |
It might be one that's actually deserves a huge amount of applause and celebration, but
link |
does not yet receive that. And that's one of the things that Eric talks about is not received the
link |
attention it deserves. But it has not yet received the attention it deserves. And so like the
link |
proven expertise thing, I mean, there's a lot of people that go to their grave without the
link |
recognition they deserve. And it's a tragedy. But the fact is, like, you have to fight for
link |
that recognition. The tragedy happens for a reason. You can't just say this person is obviously
link |
brilliant and therefore they deserve the credit in every single domain. It doesn't, it doesn't
link |
like transfer immediately. There's nobody that's, well, at least I wouldn't argue Eric is one of
link |
the special minds in our generation. But you still have to fight the fight of physics and prove
link |
it within the community. And I think the same applies in economics. You can't, I mean, as somebody
link |
that, you know, I've gone through the academic journey, just like you said, the peer review,
link |
all those things, flawed as they are, that's the part of the process. You have to convince your
link |
peers, the people that are as obsessed for whatever the hell reason about that particular thing that
link |
you're working on. Yes, there's egos. Yes, there's politics. It's a giant mess. But I think it's a
link |
beautiful mess through which you have to go through in order to reveal the power of your idea to
link |
yourself and to the world. Well, let me use an example. So you know of James Clerk Maxwell,
link |
and he invented the laws of electromagnetism, which is the first example of a unification
link |
principle ever displayed by the human mind in history. Purely mathematics, unifying completely
link |
disparate phenomena. In one case, electricity, charges, static electricity, lightning, and the
link |
other magnets, bar magnets, currents, etc. Unified them. You know what he did? I like to do a thought
link |
experiment. Imagine Twitter exists 1864. Maxwell's working away. And he goes, I have this wonderful
link |
idea with fluctuations and inductive virtue and blah, blah, blah. And it revolves around this
link |
thing called an ether. And by the way, there are these little vortices and gears. And the gears
link |
have these planetary things, and they suck up vortices. And the vortices determine the density
link |
of the electromagnetic potential. You feel like this guy's a fricking moron. And what would you do?
link |
Come on. Honestly, you would say everything this guy does is wrong. I mean, he's got this
link |
idiotic idea. And it would be falsified a couple of decades later by Mark Wilson and Morley. And
link |
in so doing, you would have thrown out a very beautiful baby with bathwater or as in Twitter,
link |
imagine the twitstorm, you know, clerk Maxwell at clerk Maxwell, one would get it would be brutal,
link |
right? And to the detriment, and that might even set back history. Imagine Yang Mills doing the
link |
same thing churned Simon's. A lot of these things are very fantastic. But but why Lex? Why does Ed
link |
Witton? Why does one know the same? Let me give a good good example. One guest, brilliant guy,
link |
I love him. He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded his black hole information
link |
paradox loss issue. What did he conceive it conceded based upon mild the same as calculation
link |
in ADS CFT and five dimensional wormholes? But is any of that? First of all, we don't live in
link |
ADS universe. Second of all, we don't know if wormholes are traversable if they exist even.
link |
You know, these are devices that are kept thorn is popularized for movies is like to say that
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this is something on which I will concede a bet. Now, obviously Hawking was doing that for publicity.
link |
Why does Mal Desena? Why does and he's got a pretty high H index, pretty well respected guy at IAS.
link |
Love talking to him, brilliant guy. By the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia's work on gauge
link |
theory and economics. Originally, and one, I believe the breakthrough, I can't remember exactly
link |
what but partially, you know, credit some of the work that he did, which appears there's a footnote
link |
to Pia Milani's thesis and some conversations, Eric, I think in it. Anyway, getting back to that,
link |
why is there not the same skepticism? Is it because Mal Desena, who's an eminent physicist,
link |
obviously, has published, you know, realistic work and done and done? What about Whitton?
link |
You know, Whitton gets a pass. I mean, if you...
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Well, Whitton gets a pass on which aspect? The string theory?
link |
Well, yeah, that M theory is correct. I mean, here's, let me just say Hawking. Hawking gets
link |
the ultimate pass. Hawking would say things like M theory, there's zero evidence for it. I mean,
link |
there's the famous meme that went around this weekend, like, what does string theory predict
link |
it and it's nothing? And by the way, that's actually wrong. I talked to Cumberland. I know
link |
you talked to Cumberland. Cumberland says that string theory does make predictions.
link |
It predicts the mass of the electron, lies between 10 to the minus one plank mass and 10 to the minus
link |
30 plank. Whatever, our electron. It's a big range.
link |
It's a huge range. Imagine Cumberland comes up and again, he's just some nobody, but he actually,
link |
you know, he doesn't have a profile. He's not a Harvard, has zero H and X or whatever Eric's is.
link |
Why do we not like, in other words, why are we more harsh on people that are trying?
link |
You know the answer to that. So I get a million emails, just like you said, yourself, where they
link |
provenize in my world is artificial intelligence, the equivalence of that.
link |
I figured out how to build consciousness, how to engineer intelligence, how to...
link |
You should send your emails to me and I'll send my emails.
link |
And we'll reply to you. I mean, and I don't want to sort of mock this because I think
link |
it's very possible that there is either kernels of interesting ideas or in the whole like,
link |
there is geniuses out there that are unheard, but because of the so much noise,
link |
you do have to weigh, like,
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hire the Ed Wittons of the world when they make statements. And that's why you build up a track
link |
record. As you said with Ray Dalio, you have to show that you can, like, if you're a Pollock and
link |
you show us a painting of a bunch of chaos, you have to, and this is a bad example, probably,
link |
because he probably never showed this proof. I think he could do it.
link |
Yeah. It's much more comforting to see that they can paint a good,
link |
accurate picture of still life of an apple on the table. So there's...
link |
Meteorite at a time.
link |
Because then, I mean, because then there's something about the scientific community that
link |
they have perhaps an oversensitive bullshit sensor to where they're not going to give the full effort
link |
of their attention if you don't have the track record. Now, you could say that's a kind of
link |
club that only you have to, like, you have to have 10, you have to have this, yes, that exists,
link |
but there's some aspect in which you have to play the game a little bit to get the machine of signs
link |
going. Otherwise, if you're always saying, well, I have my ball and I don't want to play your game,
link |
your game sucks, then nobody's going to want to play with you.
link |
That's true in there. Look, inherent in all of this is an underlying grandiosity. Look,
link |
how could you talk about doing what Kaku said on here and elsewhere? We're looking for the
link |
umbilical cord that connects our universe to another universe that will then reveal in a one
link |
inch equation that will surely win a Nobel Prize, the mind of God, the...
link |
That's like a prerequisite, I guess, to tackle these questions.
link |
I think it's detrimental. I think doing that, first of all, I think there's an element of
link |
almost snarkiness because none of these scientists are believing, you know,
link |
nostics. They're not theists, right? So they're using it as kind of a stand in,
link |
and they always talk about Einstein didn't mean it was like a Spinoza, and he wasn't, you know,
link |
a The... God doesn't play dice. God doesn't play dice.
link |
Yeah, Einstein mentions of God, yeah. Yeah, and then Stephen Hawking says,
link |
if when we come, we get an M theory understood, we'll know the mind of God.
link |
That's the title of Kaku's book, the God Particle, the God Equation, you know,
link |
do any of them really believe in God? No, is that a prerequisite? No, I'm not saying that.
link |
But the point being, you're talking about something that has to do with God, right?
link |
I mean, where else do you go from there? I mean, I think God, for now, enjoys a little bit more,
link |
you know, kind of PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right? So, like, it's, you know,
link |
God's got a pretty good, you know, H index himself.
link |
He has a, by the way, a Twitter account, just so you know, it's pretty good.
link |
The tweets of God, yeah. The tweets of God.
link |
So, if you look at that, you have to go in there. Again, you have to go in with some swagger.
link |
You have to have a little bit of arrogance, but you should, I agree, mix with a little bit of
link |
humility. So, he's doing something. He comes from outside of academia. Now, if he rails against,
link |
I'm talking about Eric now, if he's just railing, oh, the system, and I'm not going to publish,
link |
because F that, and that's only created by greedy journals, I don't think he's doing
link |
himself any favors. On the other hand, if he's shopping it, if he's talking it, if he's willing
link |
to expose it to criticism, and to even embrace people who may not have the purest intentions,
link |
perhaps, but in the sense of, like, they're not arguing solely to get to the truth with a capital
link |
T, what they're trying to do is take down, hopefully those people aren't out there,
link |
but on the other hand, looking at what Eric does for other people, looking at the fact that he has
link |
courtesy, he will look at Wolfram, he will look at Lisey, who's one of his closest friends.
link |
I mean, he calls him as Ant, not as Ant. Nemesis.
link |
Nemesis, right, right. I think that's interesting that they're loving friends.
link |
I really enjoyed that portal conversation, which, and Gary Lisey, Eric, Eric has torn about that
link |
conversation because, I guess, because of the nemesis of the beautiful dance of minds playing
link |
these ideas with the years of everything. Some of these things, you know, look, so fundamentally,
link |
now, I may disagree with him, Eric, on a different aspect, which is the only one I'm capable of,
link |
but let me say one thing, which is experimental, but let me say one thing. I understand probably
link |
a third of what Eric's talking about with GU. I understand, you know, GR, I understand mathematics,
link |
I understand some group theory, fiber bone, I can get a little of it, the age theory,
link |
but I also understand what I don't understand, and I understand that there are people like
link |
Witt and Maldesena, Nima, other people that can understand it, and they're not trying to understand.
link |
Sabina, she can understand it. She makes all these, you know, oh, I don't understand it,
link |
I don't want to understand it. I don't have time, and then she makes a video, a music video,
link |
you know, kind of mocking Eric and Steven and Garrett. I'm like, oh, you have a time to do,
link |
and I love Sabina, and I've actually promoted my show on her, and I love her, and she's doing
link |
a wonderful job, but you have a video that you said yourself takes eight weeks to produce from
link |
Start to Fit, and you couldn't have spent, you know, 30 minutes, two hours. I, Brian Keating,
link |
have done it as an experimental cosmologist, and I have enough to say, like, this is interesting,
link |
it's part of the assayer project, and it actually, I shouldn't say that there are no people,
link |
they're very serious. Louis Alvarez Gommet at SUNY, Stony Brook, Simon Center for Geometrical
link |
Physics, so he and I are running this seminar, hopefully this summer, we're going to reenact
link |
the famous Shelter Island conferences in 1900s, where, you know, Feynman got together and they
link |
calculated the lamb shift and all, but what did that feature? The harmony, the resonant minds
link |
behind the best experimentalists in cosmology, particle physics, condensed matter physics
link |
is now teaching us tremendous things about, you know, lower dimensional systems that can be applied.
link |
Theorists and experimentalists, observers, cosmologists, we all were get together,
link |
and we're just going to do it out of a spirit of love, but if it's just like, oh, this guy's like
link |
a loud man, I don't have time for that. I really don't. I don't think it's an interesting way to
link |
spend my time. There's an aspect that I hope to see, and it goes back to our sort of discussion
link |
about Joe Rogan. I do hope to see sort of love and humility in the presentation, like, let go of
link |
this kind of fear of your ideas being stolen and the ego that's inherent to the scientific pursuit,
link |
and not that everybody is established and known entities. Let go of that a little bit so we can
link |
explore and celebrate ideas. I would love to see more of that, just because you're saying,
link |
especially with these big ideas of theories of everything.
link |
And I've talked, I mean, this isn't talking in tales out of school, but I mean,
link |
he has made claims that I fundamentally disagree with, you know, in terms of like,
link |
you know, he's had this Twitter baiting, you know, loving trolling of Elon, you know,
link |
why are you spending all this money to get to Mars? You know, we should be spending money on
link |
interdimensional travel and we can unlock it. And I said to him, like, and he makes the point,
link |
you know, that, oh, the atomic theory, you know, that unleashed the nuclear age and that, you know,
link |
could lead to planetary destruction. But I make the point pushing back with love on him. And I
link |
say, look, nobody looked into the equations, you know, like Fermi didn't like look into all these
link |
equations of the unification, which still doesn't exist. By the way, we spent all this time, Lex,
link |
and I don't know why it is, it's a phenomenon purely in theoretical physics. People are looking for
link |
the toe, and they're overlooking the gut. In other words, they're spending all this time in
link |
the theory of everything, the God equate, and there's this gut that unifies the three stronger
link |
forces. We don't have a single theory for that. And people like lash out, they've tried and failed
link |
at it. For people don't know, there's four forces, gut grant unification theories that
link |
unifies the three forces stuff and don't try to get a shortcut to the theory of everything,
link |
which unifies the four. And then there's this whole thing that may be quantum gravity is not
link |
even a thing. So we're trying to solve, we're trying to solve the puzzle of everything at the
link |
physics level. And then already before solving it, already saying once we solve it, here's going to
link |
be all the beautiful time. Yeah, I suppose you need that kind of ego, that confidence,
link |
that ambition in order to even have a chance at some of these. The only two people in this
link |
book of Nine Noble Laureates who told me they don't have the imposter syndrome or two theorists,
link |
Frank Wilczuk and Sheldon Glashow. And Frank, is it pretty interesting? And I know eventually
link |
we're going to talk about the meaning of life, but you talk about Frank. Frank invented this
link |
theory along with his advisor and another third person in the early 1970s, which from 1974,
link |
three, when he was a Princeton, all the way up until 2004, when he won the Nobel Prize, every
link |
day of his life. Imagine this, Lex, you're going to have this startup, someone tells you're going
link |
to win a lottery. You're going to win a lottery in 40 years. What becomes your singular focus
link |
in your life from now until the next 40 years? Well, I'm not sure. I mean, would it be winning
link |
a lottery or if I'm so confident? I'm saying you're guaranteed to win a lottery. Here's this
link |
wallet, Bitcoin wallet. It's going to guarantee you don't have this much money. It's stablecoin,
link |
whatever. You're going to win it 40, but you have to wait 40 years. To me, it would be surviving
link |
for the next 40 years. You wouldn't leave your house. You would go out in a bubble wrap hat.
link |
You wouldn't go out with that 20 masks on, right? Your whole life would be consumed with... Now,
link |
imagine everyone's telling you you're going to win the Nobel Prize, which is bigger than the
link |
lottery. I mean, many P prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize, and every person who wins a prize
link |
that's worth three times the money, like Maldesena, he would trade the breakthrough prize for a Nobel
link |
Prize and a heartbeat. So these guys had to wait 40 years. Imagine the excruciating pain.
link |
What got him through it? He didn't feel like he didn't deserve it. He felt like, hell, yeah,
link |
I earned it. He has that swagger. And what I'm looking for in this asset is to try to find
link |
ways that we can test stuff now, because I don't know if I'm going to be here in 40 years. I hope
link |
I am. But can we bypass? Can we get shortcuts? What's called the low energy regime? And to me,
link |
that's what's interesting. What can we do now? I don't care. Isaac Newton came up with color
link |
theory, and he did something really interesting. Next time I come, I'll bring you some prisms.
link |
So what did he do? He took a white light. He took a prism from the sun, actually. He put it through
link |
a slit, put it through a prism, and it made a beautiful rainbow, like you've seen. And then he
link |
took another prism, and he put it upside down, like, you know, dark side of the moon, whatever.
link |
And the light went through the first prism, turned into a rainbow, and then the rainbow
link |
went into a prism and came out a white light. That's pretty cool. Then he took a popsicle stick
link |
or whatever, a pipe tobacco, and he put it in the beam, like, blocked out the orange,
link |
and it didn't make white light come out. So he showed, like, colors of synthesis.
link |
It's a common... He didn't use, like, the Large Hadron Collider to do that. You know, he used a
link |
very low energy experiment to prove a unification in this color physics and different kind of color
link |
physics than in quantum chromodynamics. But nevertheless, can we find things like that?
link |
Are we spending way too much time and energy thinking about the future circular collider,
link |
which, even if it gets built, will cost $30 billion just to build? By the way, any time,
link |
from now on, if I leave you with anything, any time an experimental physicist tells you a number,
link |
always double it, maybe triple it. How much is it going to cost? To operate it. So, like, do we
link |
build an aircraft carrier to build an aircraft carrier? Do we build a nuclear reactor, a semiconductor
link |
facility? And the rule of thumb that works pretty well in project management is it costs about 10
link |
percent per year to operate a given object of sufficient complexity. And in this case, so in
link |
10 years, it'll cost double the cost. So never believe a number, whether it's from our mutual
link |
friend Harry or whoever, don't believe the number. Double it and then say, is it worth it? And so
link |
building a solar system size accelerator, even if it were possible, do we have to do that? Or can
link |
we use these two 30 solar mass objects colliding together to test the number of large extra spatial
link |
dimensions? Can we do that? People are working on it. I think it's fascinating. So focus on building
link |
detectors. Experiments. That, like, where the cosmos is part of the experiment, I suppose,
link |
that's doing the hard work. Because when you're saying low energy regime, because for some of these,
link |
especially big questions like theories of everything, you need some high energy events.
link |
And so somehow figure out how the high energy events that are already happening out there,
link |
how to leverage them to understand here on Earth. So one of the alternative theories of
link |
cosmology that is not singular quantum gravitational requiring as the Big Bang and
link |
inflation are, are these balancing models. Some of them feature a similar kind of entity called
link |
the quantum field. And that quantum field in the initial stages of the universe of our current,
link |
after the bounce, which is not a singularity, it compresses to a classical kind of rebound,
link |
and the universe starts expanding. During that process, the expansion is governed by what's
link |
called a scalar field, of which we only know one that exists. That's called the Higgs boson. Higgs
link |
is a scalar fundamental particle, fundamental field. That field then later does double duty,
link |
and it becomes dark energy. So it solves two problems. And I'm not saying it's correct,
link |
we don't know yet. But are there observations of, and so dark energy is manifest today,
link |
it's manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions, etc., etc. We see the effects of
link |
accelerating universe caused by presumably dark energy. Is dark energy a constant, or does it vary?
link |
That has to vary in order for this theory to be true, because that eventually has to decay so
link |
that the universe can not support itself and collapse again, again, classically. So we could
link |
use low energy phenomena. It's hard to think of supernova as being a low energy phenomenon,
link |
but we use that as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field and see, does it change or
link |
is it a constant? That's an example of a low energy limit to prove a high energy phenomenon
link |
like this collapsing universe in the cyclic model. Speaking of things that cost a lot, but are super
link |
exciting. Page two? No, we'll wrap it up. There's more than page two. What do you think this is?
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Louis de Broglie's thesis was three pages long. Anyone want to know about prize for the wave
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particle duality? So size matters in different dimensions in life. I think the lessons I've
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learned about life is the short of the paper or the short of the thesis. Some of the greatest
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papers I've ever written are short. I feel like some of the best ideas in this world,
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not to sound like a contradiction of Feynman, a contradiction on top of a contradiction,
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but it could be written on a napkin, honestly, which just kind of tells you something about ideas.
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What are your thoughts about the James Webb Space Telescope? Is this somebody who likes telescopes
link |
and this is one of the, I think it says, took 20 years to build, $9.7 billion. Is that way too
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much too little? Are you excited about this thing? It's sufficiently different from what I do in my
link |
field that it's incredibly interesting to me because I have no horse in that race and so I'm
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not competing with them for time or money or resources or people or whatever. So I can purely
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be an advocate and an aficionado of science. It is in some sense the successor to Hubble.
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It will do things that Hubble can't do. It will also may or may not have the impact on a visceral
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kind of artistic level that Hubble had. What are some of the most iconic things that Hubble did?
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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the pillars of creation, storms and imaging of these twisted
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deep sky galaxies, those resonated with the public. Just visually, they're beautiful.
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Yeah, when you look at these images, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, you'll maybe put that in,
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you'll show every speck of light except for one, 4,000 blobs of light. There's one star in our
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galaxy, the rest are galaxies. Now, that image is less than one tenth of your fingernail held
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out at arm's length. It contains 4,000 galaxies. So now you can figure out how many galaxies there are
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in the whole sky just by seeing how long does it take you to move your fingernail over the whole
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sky. So we have another couple of hours. No, so it comes out to be that's how we get 500 billion
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or more galaxies. Now, it's not exact to the galaxy, but it's a good order of magnitude estimate,
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maybe even better. Hubble produced that and it was basically serendipitous. They pointed to some
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dark blank piece of sky what they thought was blank and they saw it. Same thing that happened
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with the CMB. They were looking for something they didn't find. Same thing they found when they
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were looking for the deceleration of the universe and found it was accelerating. So what I sometimes
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hear is that we don't know what we're going to discover. I never think that's a good idea to
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spend billions of dollars on something. You should have some guaranteed low hanging fruit
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and then there should be swinging for the fences. And I think in this case, it was really everything
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is swinging for the fences because it's either it's kind of a single point failure. If that
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telescope, which is this origami construction of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly
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and then orient themselves a million miles from Earth beyond the Earth Moon distance by a factor of
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four and still transmit telecommunication back to the Earth, get solar energy, keep it away from
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the sun. You don't want to look through the telescope of the sun with your remaining good eye
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and you do that and you cover. It's going to be phenomenal for science, for sure, if it works.
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There are a lot of people think it's so risky. NASA sunk so much of their budget, it ate up
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and what if it does fail? I mean, there's no guarantee. Yes, it's insured, but so what? You're
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not going to get back those 20 years of people. Well, let's start building it again. They didn't
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build two copies of it. And then if it fails, it kind of has a dampening effect on the prospects
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and the inspiration of the public for what science can do, what science engineer can do
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is all in space. It will make a huge impact scientific. Let's hope for the best. Let's assume
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it does succeed. It's launched in a couple of weeks and when it does, it will transform our
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understanding of we just discovered not only like extra solar planets that have moons on them
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and asteroid belt, we discovered an extra solar planet in another galaxy. This will be able to
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see crazy stuff like that, spectroscopy, imaging. But it will be able to go back farther in time
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such that we will be doing cosmology. Hubble did some cosmology and measured the Hubble constant.
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That was its key project when it was designed and launched. But because it is optical telescope,
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it's sensitive to more close in redshift, so shorter distances. Now, James Webb is much,
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much higher redshift. It can probe the darker, deeper distant universe.
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Okay. Let's talk about not the distant universe, but our neighboring planets.
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First, I got to ask you about the moon. So there's a piece of the moon on this table
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that you've given me that we didn't have to pick up that arrived here.
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That's right. So how did a piece of the moon arrive here on Earth?
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So this chunk of the moon, if it were delivered by the Apollo and NASA missions,
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you and I would be guilty of a felony right now because they legal to own pieces of the moon
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collected by the Apollo astronauts. So don't even joke about that when you go over to Houston.
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This piece of moon, rock, was delivered via the old fashioned way by gravity. So
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this was a chunk of the moon, which is blasted off because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids
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and meteoroids. Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon into space.
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And it will then orbit the common moon Earth system. And it will then eventually enter our
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atmosphere. And if the piece is large enough and the trajectory is proper, it can land intact.
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And this one landed with a few hundred grams worth and they sliced it up. And then it was
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delivered via US Postal Service to my house. So you can buy these pieces and actually you can buy
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a piece of Mars. You can buy a piece of Mars delivered by the same route. Now, what's so
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interesting about that? Well, if a piece of Mars can get here, a piece of Earth can get there,
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some piece of Earth has some life forms on it, it could get there. And if that can happen in our
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solar system, it could happen throughout the galaxy. So I'm actually not of the opinion
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that there is life elsewhere in the universe, at least technological life that we can see.
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I see this look of horror on your face. I view it, I am personally extremely pessimistic,
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would be extremely surprised. I'm just, I'm curious by the transition,
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because you just said that life could have arrived from Mars or like from planet to planet
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by because of the meteorite striking it and so on. Yeah. And then you went to, you don't think
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there might be life out there in the universe. Technological life. Technological life,
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yeah, advanced intelligence civilizations. Okay. Okay, so go on.
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Yeah. So that's the generalization of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called,
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I know this is a PG 13 power, it's called panspermia. Panspermia.
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Beep that out, please. Yeah, please. And that's the exchange of
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genetic life form material from other reaches on Earth, which explains the origin of life on Earth,
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but not the origin of life itself, which I think is a much grander mystery and much more interesting.
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How did life get here? And you've talked with many eminent people about that.
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I'm not going to add that much, but just thinking about the reverse process. Let's say
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life started on the Earth somehow and then made its way out into the universe. Is there enough
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time for the whatever material went from Earth via panspermic direction, spraying the love gun
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out into the universe, did that then have enough time to incubate and go onto a planet that could
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support it? Certainly not within our solar system, which traveling at the meteorite speeds would
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require hundreds of millions of years, then looking at the evolutionary history from bacteria to Bach,
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from rocks to Rachmaninoff. I don't know, I can do this all day.
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Oh, wow, that's pretty good.
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How do you get from those very simple inanimate objects to life? I just simply think there's
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not enough time for Earth to seed life, technological life throughout the galaxy. I
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don't think there's any evidence for that.
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But so you really think that the origin of life on Earth is a really special event.
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Yeah, if it did originate on Earth, my question for those that search for life outside the Earth
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is what if you had a letter from God and the letter said life didn't originate on Earth?
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Like, would you choose a different profession? It would seem hopeless. In other words,
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we only have a sample of one. In fact, we only know of one conscious life form,
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let alone one planet that has life on it. What if you knew for sure it didn't start here?
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That means that there's almost nothing about Earth that is originated. It didn't
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originate the life process. So to study purely the origin of life, not life itself,
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I think that's still fascinating. But how could we learn about the origin of, remember,
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you have to go from inanimate object to a living object, whatever that definition of life is.
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And I'm not an expert in many definitions, Max, Sarah, many different definitions.
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But how do you actually go from inanimate to animate? It's a huge question.
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Yeah, but then you don't have to be the place where life originated to replicate the origin.
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Yeah, that's one way to understand something is to build it. But another way is to just observe
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it. You don't have to truly reengineer for scratch. But then, yes, if it didn't originate on Earth,
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then your intuitions about the basic prerequisites of life are off.
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What's the governing principle? And then you can have just an almost an arbitrary number
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of possible, like, if life didn't start on Earth. So to me, that's exciting because
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it's like, we know even less than we thought. The thing is, it can prosper on Earth though.
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Yeah. So maybe the origin of life is fundamentally different from the maintenance of life.
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Right. And maybe the existence of the Earth life symbiosis is critical. I think Sarah,
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you talked about Sarah Walker, that it's a planetary phenomenon, etc. So doesn't that
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make it less like, in other words, not only do you need special life conditions to create life,
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but then sustenance of life, as you say, that also has to be maintained under very specific
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circumstances by very specific planets and with very specific tectonic activity and moon.
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And by the way, you need a Jupiter nearby. You need an Earth and a moon system so that you
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don't get bombarded too early. And I always think like this, like, technological life.
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I haven't said this before, really, so I'm just speaking. I usually like to write down before I
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say this differently. But one of the things I thought about this... Somebody hosts a podcast.
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You should probably accept the fact that you're going to say stupid things every once in a while.
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Not every once in a while. Every while. I claim that, you know, to get to sending, you know,
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people to the moon, you know, our planet needed whales and dinosaurs, right? Like,
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you don't make a solar panel from another solar panel. Like, you made a solar panel from a factory
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that melted down glass, silica, you know, aluminum extruded that using fossil fuels.
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Where do those fossil fuels come from? Like, so any civilization that's going to be a Dyson,
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you know, Kardashev's, do they have dinosaurs? Like, do they have, like, prebiotic life?
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Did they have a great oxygenation event? Did they have a dimorphism between prokaryotic,
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eukaryotic? All those hurdles... Let's say you give each one... Let's say there's eight hurdles.
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And each one of those has a probability of one in the thousand to go from, you know,
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eukaryotic, prokaryotic, whatever. Let's say that's a one in a thousand chance. I think it's like one
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in 10 to the 40th or whatever if you really do it. But let's say it's first generous nature,
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one in 10 to the 3. Let's say there's eight of those hurdles. That means you have, you know,
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10 to the 24th power, different possibility. And that's just with eight. Like, the moon has to be
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there, Jupiter has to be there, dinosaurs had to be there, all the different things that we have
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to get to technological life. There's only 10 to the... Only. There's 10 to the 22nd, we think,
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earth, not earth, planets in the observable universe, not the galaxy. So that's 100 times
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fewer than the probability to get, you know, 100% clearing these eight very low hurdles of one in
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a thousand. That's fascinating. Because now I really need to listen to your conversation with
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Lee Cronin, who I believe you had, because he believes the opposite. Yes, I'm gonna have a debate
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with him. He believes that the way biology evolved on earth could have evolved almost an
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infinite number of other ways. So like, if you ran earth over and over and over, you would keep
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getting life and it'll be very different. So the fact that our particular life seems unique
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is just like, well, because every freaking life is going to seem unique, but it'll be very different.
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It's not like we shouldn't be asking the question of what's the likelihood of getting a human like
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thing. Because that seems to be super special. It's more like, how easy is it to make anything
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that has the skills of a human. And I don't mean like something with thumbs, but achieving basically
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a technological civilization. And according to Lee, at least, it's like, it's trivial. I know,
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we fought a little bit. I'd love to debate him. I think it'd be a lot of fun because we debate
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with love when I talk with Lee, I love him and he loves me, I think. I hope. But let me ask you
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a question. I asked this of him and Sarah on our clubhouse ones. So what do you think would happen
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the next day? Let's say we discovered life. It's Proxima Centauri B. It looks just like slime mold,
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like you get on your breed cheese or whatever. We discover it. What would happen the next day?
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And they were like, oh, this would be transformative. And I'm not trying to be
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like, you know, total Cassandra about this. But I said, I don't think anything would happen.
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What are you talking about? This would be transformational. I'm like, I stipulate that life
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exists. Go down to like the river, you know, I'm in San Diego, go down to the Pacific Ocean,
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scoop up a glass, you know, you're gonna find life in there. And what are we doing? What are we
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doing to our earth? We're destroying it callously. We're like pumping crap into there. Like we have
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this toxic waste bill a couple of months ago in San Diego, I couldn't go to the beach. Let me take
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it a step further. You know how many people, I'm sorry that you do know, but how many people died
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in the 20th century killed? These are advanced civil. This isn't slime mold. We kill, we mean,
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we harm, we hurt, we hate. I don't think anything would happen the next day. We go back to what
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we had and I said, if that weren't proof enough, life has been discovered at least two or three
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times just in my professional career. Once in 1996, these Alan Landhills meteorites in Antarctica,
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so like microbial respiration processes, still we don't know. It was a press conference held by
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Bill Clinton on the White House lawn that's featured in the movie Contact. We purpose for that movie.
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And then there's this phosphorus life, this toxic life in the pools of Mono Lake,
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many, you know, extremophile, we don't give a crap. We continue to treat. So why are we thinking
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that like our salvation, from whence will our salvation come as the Bible says? Like, it's not
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going to change how we are. It's not going to magnify how I treat you or you treat me. And we're
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pretty knowledgeable people you and I compared to, you know, laypeople. Okay, that's interesting.
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That's a really interesting argument. I wonder if you're right, but my intuition is I can maybe
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present a different argument that you can think about in the realm of things you care about,
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even deeper, which is like, what happens once we figure out the origins of the universe?
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Like how would that change your life? I would say there are certain discoveries
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that even in their very ideal will change the fabric of society. I tend to see if there's
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definitive proof that there's life in the more complex, the more powerful that idea is elsewhere
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that I'm not exactly sure how it will change society because it's such a slap in the face.
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It's like such a humbling force, or maybe not, or maybe it's a motivator to say,
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yeah, I don't know which force would take over. Maybe it'll be governments with military
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start to think like, well, how do we kill it? If there's a lot of life out there,
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how do we create the defenses? How do we extract it? Or mine it for benefits?
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I mean, I just see like there's 100 million literal counter examples of that. I mean,
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right now there's like 700 million kids in poverty. How do we go about our life and just
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not deal with that? I mean, look, I put it aside. I eat hamburgers, and 100 years I'll be canceled
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for being a carnivore or whatever. So obviously to get through life, you have to make certain
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compromise. You're not going to think about certain things. But I just think there is a
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sort of wish fulfillment. Like every time there's, why are we going to Mars and digging and flying
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this cool ass helicopter? We're looking for water. Like stipulate that water was there.
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Like I believe there was water. I think we should investigate and see what the geology was like.
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But don't you think, so you're saying?
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I don't think you're going to get meaning from it. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying it's
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not worth doing. I'm just saying there's a wish fulfillment aspect that people will find meaning
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for life from science. Okay. But there's a complicated line here. What if it's this
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intelligence civilization living, obviously, probably not on Mars, but somewhere like in a
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neighboring galaxy that we, sorry, in a neighboring star system that we discover.
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Don't you think that profound change in meaning?
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I mean, I guess, again, I assume that because of this pansemaramic process or whatever,
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that the probability is much, much greater than zero. I mean, it's not one 100%, but it's much
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likelier than that, that at least some living material from Earth has ejaculated itself into
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the solar system, into the universe, right, into our galaxy.
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Beats that, please. As well.
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That's right. So the fact that that could happen and that you're holding a piece from a planetary
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body, one that couldn't support life as far as we know. But next time, if you play nice and you
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come on my podcast someday, I will give you a tiny chunk of Mars. So Mars theoretically could
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support stuff, right? Moving on up.
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So yeah. So I believe that there could be remnants of Earth in this. So that means
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there could be evolution. I don't think there's any chance that there's like,
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people using iPhones and having podcasts and stuff.
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No, there's so much, some chance, though, right?
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Again, yeah. I think the, well, the simple statement to say,
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it's much, much, much higher probability that life exists than technological life exists,
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right? I don't think we can argue that. It doesn't mean it's forbidden. Again,
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I'm not saying any of this is forbidden, not worth studying, not interesting.
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It's a likelihood thing.
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Yeah. And to answer your, I think you're wise to push back and like,
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what does it matter what I'm doing? And I like to think about that, you know,
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because it's like, what is the value of what you're doing? Like, you have to answer that
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question or else at the end of your life, you'll have these existential, you know,
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kind of crises, right? So when I think about like who I am, part of my identity is
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answering and asking scientific questions. For me, though, there is a religious kind of
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undercurrent that does undergird in some sense, this quest. Again, I'm not like a practicing,
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I'm not like wearing, you know, like I'm not like full on into my birth religion, Judaism.
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But at the same token, I think as, you know, one of the things Einstein did say is that,
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you know, religion without science is blind or is lame, and science without religion is lame,
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is blind and lame. Anyway, the point is that like, you can't get meaning,
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you know, from just knowing facts. Like Wikipedia knows more than all of us will ever know,
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right? It has no wisdom. You know, wisdom, it means, you know, sapien, the word wisdom in
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Latin is sapien. We are wise. And by the way, do you know what we're, what our real name is
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homo sapien sapien. So it's man who knows that he knows. Do you know what he knows? Do you know
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what the knowing is? It's that he's going to die. We're the only creatures that know that we are
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going to die. We don't know when we're going to die. But like, you know, I have a cat,
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a fierce attack cat. It's beautiful. She doesn't know when she's going to die.
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It doesn't mean I'm more valuable than I think I am.
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The survival instinct is fundamentally different from like the knowledge of death. And that's
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where the earner specter comes in with the terror of death. And that that's a creative force
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that seems to be more feature than bug about the human condition is that
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I mean, it's a gift of knowing our own mortality. Yeah, to me, I mean, that's, that's why,
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you know, I agree with you in some sense in terms of the aliens not being a thing that solves all
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mysteries. That's why, you know, my love has always been the human mind. So understanding
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who we are, what the hell are we? And I think your love has been an echo of that, which is,
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where do we come from? Yeah. Or basically, as cheesy as the sounds, you know,
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Michio Kaku is away with words. If you if you can just like enjoy the, you know,
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he speaks in complete, he's like Sam Harris of cosmology. I mean, he speaks in complete paragraphs.
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But like also unapologetically, he says, you know, we will know God, or we will know the
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mind of God, or whatever the quotes, those kinds of things. That's exciting, that physics might
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be able to find equations that unlock our origins at the very core. And like the fabric of it all
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too. And that's just our origins. You know, what's, you know, what's at the beginning.
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Something tells me we're too dumb to truly understand what's at the beginning. But
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I think we should be humble in that way. I mean, again, another thing is, you know,
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you ever hear the saying like we shared 99% of our DNA with chimps or bonobos or whatever.
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I share like pie more than that. You know, sometimes I wish we shared like 100%.
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Like, that'd be so much more interesting. Like, oh, there's 50% of a fruit fly or banana, like
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no, no, no, there's something, but that should make us feel more precious. And I almost feel
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like discovering life on another planet, whatever solar system, would cause a diminution of humanity.
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Like the one thing I do hold fast to from a religion, I don't know where I am with God,
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like, do I believe in God? I think that's an unanswerable question. But I have some thoughts
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about it. But by the same token, I think the one thing I do get from religion is that every human
link |
has infinite worth, because we are in a religious capacity considered to be equal to God. In other
link |
words, we are gods, not to be like, you know, but we can contemplate what God did. We have aspects
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of God. We have free will. God had free will. If he exists, again, I can't prove that God exists.
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Otherwise, you wouldn't have any credit for believing in God.
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This is interesting. I mean, it's like I'm talking to Einstein here, but let me ask anyway.
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Can you clip that for my clip shot?
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For somebody who's looking at the young universe, at the early universe,
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and are talking about God and are agnostic, who do you think is God?
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So I thought you had just like one of the best podcasts with Sam Harris this past summer.
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And one of the things I liked about that conversation is he talked a lot about happiness
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and meditation. And he said something that's really resonated with me, and I've been working
link |
on it around and trying to work on it my own way. But he said like, you can never be happy.
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You can only become happy. And I try to take a little bit further than that, because I think
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it's interesting. Like meditation is like, you're not like, oh, I'm happy and now like,
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oh, my kid came in and now I'm not happy. No, like you can be satisfied. Kurt Vonnegut said,
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like, you ever catch this? Sometimes you're like walking around and you're like,
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life is freaking amazing. Like I'm happy. And Kurt Vonnegut said, you should say to yourself
link |
every time that happens, like a little mantra, like, if this isn't goodness, if this isn't happiness,
link |
nothing is. Just remind yourself how awesome it is every breath, everything that you do,
link |
when you make an impact, even some of the bad stuff that happens. Good, it's good.
link |
So Sam said that. And it made me think, because I was like, well, what does it really mean to be
link |
happy? Because like, I can think of, I can think of about, you know, two or three ways that right
link |
now I could double my happiness. No, like win the lottery or whatever, like I could double my
link |
happiness. There's only a few ways though, right? Like, you know, I had this kind of thought like,
link |
how many boats can you waterski behind? Like you had twice as many followers, now you got
link |
two million followers, five million, whatever. It doesn't do anything. It's called the hedonic
link |
treadmill. Like once you get to a certain level, it takes a lot more, you know, change and followers,
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money, impact, women, whatever you want to make you have one more quanta of happiness, right?
link |
On the other hand, this is a concept from entropy. I could make your life miserable in an infinite
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number of ways. In other words, there's more space space to make your life unhappy than happy.
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And so I thought about that in the context of what Sam said about happiness. So it's sort of like,
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yeah, it's an expression of entropy. And that what you should be doing in life is doing that which
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will cause you devastation if it goes away. Because those are the things that like are where
link |
you're reducing entropy, like a kid, like anyone who's a parent knows instantly what I'm talking
link |
about. Like how to make your life a billion times worse. But there's no way to make your life a
link |
billion times better. And so thinking about that, now turning into the question of God's existence,
link |
I feel like there's no way that you can believe in God to quote, misquote Sam, but there's ways
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that you can become a believer in God. In other words, you could increase the Bayesian confidence
link |
level that there is some, and let's not call it God because that's a freighted term. Let's just call
link |
it some infinite source of goodness or our beautiful power in the universe, right? Simple
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things can do that. You can increase your credulity in the goodness of life. And we have this bias as
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humans towards negativity. Negativity bias, well known fact. So what I want to do is let's call
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God good, right? That's where it comes from. God, good, same words in German. And when we think
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about what is good, let's do those things that would devastate us. And a lot of that could be
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relationships. And there's a powerful concept from network theory, which is that the number of
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connections in a network, you know, I'm just saying it for you, it grows as the square of the
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elements in the matrix, in the number, right? So you think of a matrix with n people, you know,
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person one, two, three, four, and then there's four other people, there's 16 different pairs,
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but half of them overlap. The diagonal is where you know each other, you know yourself. So there's,
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but that still grows as n squared. So those connections increase and decrease, right? You
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ever have two friends that are fighting and like you're kind of upset, even though you're not
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fighting with either one of them. So like a network grows like that. So you want to increase
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your network as much as possible, but only the kind of high quality interstices between them.
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And I think in doing so, you make yourself fragile, not antifragile. And I think that is
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where purpose and maybe approaching some notion of God can come from.
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So that is a source of meaning, maximizing the goodness in life and the way you know it's good
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as if it's taken away, it would devastate you. That's one way. Think about it, your brand,
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your business, your spouse, your kids. I mean, parents can't count though. I've known parents
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that have. Jim Simons, here's a perfect example. He's one of my oldest friends and mentors.
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He is one of the richest people on earth, Gulfstream, Megayan. This is all documented,
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books about him. He lost two sons as adults. And I hear people say, I'm so jealous of Jim Simons.
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Would you take everything? I don't know where he has that strength in his wife,
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Marilyn, and his first wife, Barbara. I'm not, I'm not like that. Some people are,
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there are angels that walk among us. And, you know, there's this famous prayer. It's like,
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God, you know, there's an old saying like one of the hardest tests there are in life is to be
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given a lot of money. And you see it like happens with like lawyer, like people who win the lottery
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or whatever, or NFL football players after their careers over, they get, they're broke, right?
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And I was like, God, please test me with money. You know, that'd be great. But, but in reality,
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you should never say I'm gonna, I want what X person has, unless you're willing to take
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everything. And you'll find you won't want to take everything.
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Yeah, I think a lot about the altering effects of fame, of money, of power on people. I,
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I, it, it blinds people. And I wonder about that for myself, because it seems like in themselves,
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these are definitely not the goals I'm pretty much afraid. I'm not desirous. And I'm definitely
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afraid of each of those things, money, fame, and power. But it seems the dreams I have as
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consequences can often have these things. And I'm really afraid of becoming something
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that would disappoint me when I was younger, that would, that wouldn't recognize, you know,
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because change happens gradually. But are you using yourself as the, as the touchstone to use
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the answer? Like, what is your rubric to, to a prize if you have lived up to that 12 year old,
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whatever year old lacks? Like, how will you know or not know if you've let yourself down? Or like,
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I always think live to impress yourself. Like, I don't care if I have followers. Like, it's nice
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or whatever. But it's hedonic. And it's just never ending. Because you'll always see the next
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level. But I think it's pretty damn cool that like, I've gotten to go to these places, the
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South Pole, and I've done these things, and I've made a family, and I'm able to teleport my values
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into the future through my children. And I've had ideological children that I, so by what metric,
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you know, have you not already A, impressed yourself? And B, could you let yourself down?
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I don't want to say the therapist. I just think some of it is psychology. For me, I'm very much
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just never, I'm highly self critical, is that I'm never happy, never happy with what I've done.
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But I'm always happy in the way that you described, which is that the Vonnegut thing,
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where you just often during the day, I will feel, I don't know, I just remember
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just eating beef jerky and being truly happy. That was just last night. And I have that all the
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time. And that to me is why I mean, that feels to me like a healthy way to live life. And at least
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for me, it's the one I really enjoy. A lot of people tell me that maybe being so self critical,
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so hard on yourself is not a good way to go. But more and more as I get older,
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I realized it's just who I am. You have to a certain point accept this is how I'm always
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going to be the self critical. It's like they were a cold Delphi, right? You know that yourself.
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But I want to leave you with one last thing. It was just to say, just on this topic,
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you know, it could be different, right? We could go down to the ocean and get some krill instead
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of the 711. You know, it could be that we have no other taste buds. And, you know,
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Eric's talked about the four dimensions of the, you know, the vibration of your tongue, right?
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It could be like there's one and it's just like not, you know, Memphis barbecue or whatever you
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like in your slim gym. It could be something, it could be very boring. Similarly, what if like
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that's a clue? Like what if that's giving us evidence? Here's another clue. There are many
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animals, most animals have single monocolor vision. They only see in black and white intensity. They
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only have rods and no cones. We could be like that, but we're not. Why is that not a clue? Like
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God's not going to like hit you over the head and say like, here I am because then everybody
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would believe in him. And there's very simplistic. I've had debates even with like famous atheists
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like Lawrence Krauss, who's like self declared militant atheists. And I was like, well, I don't
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believe in the same God you don't believe in, like some guy in a white beard and a chair. Like
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that's infantile. Like I gave that away a long time ago. But what if there are clues? What if
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Yang Mills theory, you know, Maxwell's equation, like what, those are beautiful. If you've ever
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seen like, you know, expressed in tensor notation, Einstein's equations or, or Maxwell's equations
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or, and then Maxwell's equations riding on Einstein's, it's unbelievably beautiful.
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It doesn't have to be that way. That we can comprehend it. That's a crack. Maybe that's where
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the light gets in. And the light is what reveals what's beautiful. So I don't believe in God.
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I think that's a stupid notion. Like, do I believe in God? Like sometimes I joke. I wonder if God
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believes in me, you know, like more than if I believe in like, he needs Brian Keating. Like,
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you know, what, you know, it's like one of my friends is a rabbi. He's like,
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what would I be doing if I were God? Exactly what God's doing right now. Like,
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you think I know more than God? Give me your proof.
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Leaving clues of beauty for, for these hairless apes.
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And to see what they do with this. And then Marvel at,
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at both the tragedy of what the, what those apes do to each other and the,
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the rare moments of when they have, when they understand, understand deeply about how the
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world works. Brian, you're an incredible human being. I'm a big fan and I'm really honored that
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he was, first of all, shower me with rocks from the moon. From space. From space. Space dust.
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Space dust and crystals, magical crystals, healing crystals that you can, you can use for good.
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And tell me your story and spend your really valuable time with me today. This was amazing.
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That was a great pleasure for me, Lex. Thank you so much.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Keating. To support this podcast,
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please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
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Galileo Galilei. In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble
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reasoning of a single individual. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.