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Brian 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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Okay, excellent.
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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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Ah, okay.
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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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What happened?
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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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Let's take two.
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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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There you go.
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All right, good.
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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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Well done, sir.
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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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or pilot a blimp.
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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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like a pendulum.
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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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Right.
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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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that it has now?
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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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00:14:24.600
the centuries pile up and the volume piles up,
link |
00:14:26.600
the universe could expand.
link |
00:14:28.600
And so that's how they developed.
link |
00:14:29.600
That's slowly.
link |
00:14:30.600
Very slowly.
link |
00:14:31.600
And it doesn't match observational evidence,
link |
00:14:33.600
but that is an alternative.
link |
00:14:35.600
By the way, did Einstein think the steady state universe
link |
00:14:38.600
is infinite or finite?
link |
00:14:39.600
Do you know?
link |
00:14:40.600
I would assume that he thought it was infinite
link |
00:14:43.600
because there was really, you know,
link |
00:14:45.600
if something had a no beginning in time,
link |
00:14:48.600
then it'll be very unlikely we're in like the center of it
link |
00:14:50.600
or it's bounded or it has, in that case, a finite edge to it.
link |
00:14:54.600
I wonder what he thought about infinity,
link |
00:14:56.600
because that's such an uncomfortable.
link |
00:14:57.600
No, it's a silly joke.
link |
00:14:58.600
I'm sure you're familiar with a silly joke, right?
link |
00:15:00.600
It's a silly joke was that there are only two things
link |
00:15:02.600
that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
link |
00:15:06.600
and I'm not sure about the universe.
link |
00:15:08.600
Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke
link |
00:15:10.600
is a good example of the joke.
link |
00:15:12.600
It's very meta.
link |
00:15:13.600
Okay, so, sorry, you were saying about quasi...
link |
00:15:17.600
All the alternatives.
link |
00:15:18.600
All the alternatives in the quasi steady state.
link |
00:15:20.600
And the most kind of promising, although I hate to say that,
link |
00:15:23.600
you know, people say like,
link |
00:15:24.600
well, that's your favorite alternative, right?
link |
00:15:26.600
This is not investment advice.
link |
00:15:28.600
Inflation is not transitory.
link |
00:15:31.600
It is quasi permanent.
link |
00:15:33.600
So, a very prominent...
link |
00:15:35.600
Sorry to interrupt.
link |
00:15:36.600
We were talking about cosmic inflation.
link |
00:15:37.600
So, calm down, cryptocurrency folks.
link |
00:15:39.600
That's right.
link |
00:15:40.600
Although the first Nobel Prize,
link |
00:15:42.600
and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics
link |
00:15:44.600
was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind.
link |
00:15:47.600
So, most people don't know that.
link |
00:15:48.600
Inflation is already won a Nobel Prize.
link |
00:15:49.600
It's a good topic to work on if you want a Nobel Prize.
link |
00:15:52.600
It doesn't matter the field.
link |
00:15:54.600
Exactly, it's time translation and bearing.
link |
00:15:56.600
So, when we look at the alternative that's called
link |
00:15:59.600
the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies,
link |
00:16:02.600
these have serious virtues according to some.
link |
00:16:07.600
One of the virtues to me, just as a human,
link |
00:16:09.600
I'm just speaking, you know, as a human,
link |
00:16:12.600
one of the founders of the new version of the cyclic cosmology
link |
00:16:18.600
called the bouncing cosmology is Paul Steinhardt.
link |
00:16:22.600
He's the Einstein Professor of Natural Sciences
link |
00:16:24.600
at Princeton University.
link |
00:16:25.600
You may have heard of it.
link |
00:16:26.600
And he was one of the originators of what was called
link |
00:16:30.600
new inflation.
link |
00:16:31.600
In other words, he was one of the founding fathers of inflation,
link |
00:16:35.600
who now not only has no belief or support for inflation,
link |
00:16:39.600
he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious,
link |
00:16:44.600
dangerous, malevolent, not to science,
link |
00:16:47.600
not just to cosmology, but to society.
link |
00:16:50.600
So, here's a man who created a theory that's captivated
link |
00:16:54.600
the world, the universe of cosmologists, such as it is,
link |
00:16:56.600
not a huge universe, but they're more podcasters
link |
00:16:59.600
than cosmologists, some do both.
link |
00:17:01.600
But this man created this theory with collaborators.
link |
00:17:06.600
And now he's like, I joke, I'm like, Paul,
link |
00:17:08.600
you're denying paternity.
link |
00:17:10.600
You're like a deadbeat dad.
link |
00:17:11.600
Now you're saying inflation is bogus.
link |
00:17:15.600
But he doesn't just attack.
link |
00:17:17.600
See, this is what's very important about approaching things
link |
00:17:20.600
as an experimentalist.
link |
00:17:21.600
You've got a lot of theorists on.
link |
00:17:22.600
And that's wonderful.
link |
00:17:23.600
And I think that's a huge service.
link |
00:17:24.600
An experimentalist has to say no.
link |
00:17:27.600
He or she has to be confident to say, like, I don't care
link |
00:17:30.600
if I prove you right or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever.
link |
00:17:34.600
We have to be like exterminators.
link |
00:17:36.600
And nobody likes to exterminate until they need one, right?
link |
00:17:39.600
Or the garbage collectors, right?
link |
00:17:41.600
But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded
link |
00:17:45.600
by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry
link |
00:17:48.600
and the simplicity of some idea.
link |
00:17:49.600
Like inflation is a beautiful idea.
link |
00:17:51.600
But it also has consequences.
link |
00:17:53.600
And what Paul claims, I don't agree with him fully on this point,
link |
00:17:56.600
is that those consequences are dangerous
link |
00:17:58.600
because they lead to things like the multiverse,
link |
00:18:00.600
which is outside the purview of science.
link |
00:18:02.600
And in that sense, I can see support for what he does.
link |
00:18:06.600
But none of that detracts from my respect for a man.
link |
00:18:09.600
Imagine, like, Elon comes up with this really great idea space.
link |
00:18:14.600
And then he's like, actually, it's not going to work.
link |
00:18:17.600
But like, here's this better idea.
link |
00:18:19.600
And he's like, SpaceX is not going to work.
link |
00:18:20.600
But he's now creating an alternative to it.
link |
00:18:23.600
It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done.
link |
00:18:26.600
It doesn't mean he's right.
link |
00:18:27.600
It doesn't mean I'm going to, like, have more and more attention
link |
00:18:30.600
paid to it because he's my friend or because I respect the idea
link |
00:18:33.600
or I respect the man and his colleague, Ana Aegis,
link |
00:18:36.600
who works really hard with him.
link |
00:18:38.600
But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it.
link |
00:18:41.600
And what it does most foremost is that it removes
link |
00:18:45.600
the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology.
link |
00:18:49.600
So it takes away 50% of the motivation
link |
00:18:52.600
for a theory of quantum gravity.
link |
00:18:54.600
You talked a lot about quantum gravity.
link |
00:18:56.600
You talked people, eminent people on the show.
link |
00:18:59.600
Always latent in those conversations is sort of the
link |
00:19:02.600
teleological expectation that there is a theory of everything.
link |
00:19:06.600
There is a theory of quantum gravity.
link |
00:19:08.600
But there's no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.
link |
00:19:12.600
So that kind of implicit expectation has to do ultimately
link |
00:19:17.600
with the inflationary theory, so in cosmic inflation.
link |
00:19:20.600
So is that at the core?
link |
00:19:23.600
OK.
link |
00:19:24.600
Maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts on society
link |
00:19:29.600
from believing in cosmic inflation.
link |
00:19:33.600
So one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation,
link |
00:19:37.600
according to its other two patriarchs,
link |
00:19:39.600
considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Gooth at MIT
link |
00:19:41.600
and Andre Linde at Stanford, although he was in the USSR
link |
00:19:45.600
when he came up with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhardt,
link |
00:19:49.600
was that the universe has to eventually get into a quantum state.
link |
00:19:54.600
It has to exist in this Hilbert space,
link |
00:19:56.600
and the Hilbert space has certain features.
link |
00:19:58.600
And those features are quantum mechanical,
link |
00:20:00.600
endowed with quantum mechanical properties.
link |
00:20:02.600
And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off.
link |
00:20:06.600
So inflation can get started, but then it's like one of SpaceX rockets.
link |
00:20:11.600
It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster.
link |
00:20:13.600
It continues the thrusting.
link |
00:20:15.600
You need another mechanism to douse the flames
link |
00:20:18.600
of the inflationary expansion,
link |
00:20:20.600
which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere,
link |
00:20:23.600
it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times,
link |
00:20:26.600
including now, spawning an ever increasing set of universes.
link |
00:20:31.600
Some will die stillborn.
link |
00:20:33.600
Some will continue and flourish,
link |
00:20:35.600
and this is known as the multiverse paradigm.
link |
00:20:38.600
It's a robust, seemingly robust consequence,
link |
00:20:40.600
not only of inflationary cosmology,
link |
00:20:42.600
but more and more, we're seeing it in string theory as well.
link |
00:20:45.600
Sometimes two branches coming to the same conclusion
link |
00:20:49.600
is taken as evidence for its reality.
link |
00:20:51.600
So one of the negative consequences is it creates phenomena
link |
00:20:56.600
that are outside the reach of experimental science.
link |
00:21:00.600
Or is it that the multiverse somehow has a philosophical negative effect on humanity?
link |
00:21:07.600
Like it makes life seem more meaningless?
link |
00:21:13.600
Is that where he's getting at a little bit?
link |
00:21:16.600
Or is it not reaching that far?
link |
00:21:18.600
No, I think those are both kind of perceptive.
link |
00:21:21.600
The answer is a little both,
link |
00:21:23.600
because in one sense, it's meant kind of to explain this fine tuning problem
link |
00:21:28.600
that we find ourselves in a universe that's particularly façade.
link |
00:21:31.600
It has features consistent with our existence.
link |
00:21:34.600
And how could we be otherwise, the sort of weak anthropic principle?
link |
00:21:38.600
On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything,
link |
00:21:42.600
literally everything, can be said to predict nothing.
link |
00:21:45.600
Like if I say, Lex, you've been working out.
link |
00:21:48.600
You look like you're about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms.
link |
00:21:54.600
Like, all right, yeah, you're right, but that's completely horribly imprecise.
link |
00:21:57.600
So what good is that?
link |
00:21:58.600
That's meaningless.
link |
00:21:59.600
I don't contribute any what's called surprise or reduction of your ignorance about the system.
link |
00:22:05.600
You know exactly how much you weigh.
link |
00:22:07.600
So me telling you that tells you nothing.
link |
00:22:09.600
In this case, it's basically saying that we're living in a universe
link |
00:22:12.600
because the overwhelming odds of our existence dictate that we would exist.
link |
00:22:18.600
There has to be at least one place that we exist.
link |
00:22:20.600
But the problem is it's a manifestation of infinity.
link |
00:22:23.600
So humans, and I'm sure you know this from your work with AI and L and everything else,
link |
00:22:29.600
that humans, as far as we know, really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity.
link |
00:22:37.600
But we do so very imperfectly, right?
link |
00:22:40.600
So if I say to you, like, what's bigger the number of water molecules in this thing
link |
00:22:44.600
or the number of real numbers?
link |
00:22:46.600
Or if I say, what's bigger the number of real numbers or rational numbers?
link |
00:22:48.600
They're all different classifications of the amount of infinities that there could be.
link |
00:22:52.600
Infinity to the infinity power.
link |
00:22:54.600
You know, when you have kids someday, they'll tell you, I love you, infinity.
link |
00:22:56.600
You have to come back. I love you, infinity plus one, right?
link |
00:22:59.600
But the human brain can't really contemplate infinity.
link |
00:23:03.600
Let me illustrate that.
link |
00:23:04.600
They say in the singularity, the universe had an infinite temperature, right?
link |
00:23:10.600
So let me ask you a question.
link |
00:23:12.600
Is there anything that you can contemplate in the observed, you know, Einstein's little quip aside
link |
00:23:17.600
that's infinite, like a physical property, density, pressure, temperature.
link |
00:23:21.600
Energy. That's infinite.
link |
00:23:24.600
And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it.
link |
00:23:27.600
But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one?
link |
00:23:30.600
You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids.
link |
00:23:32.600
How does it go from, like, to half of infinity?
link |
00:23:34.600
Because that's still infinity.
link |
00:23:35.600
How did it cool down?
link |
00:23:36.600
How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied?
link |
00:23:39.600
So now it's only infinity over two in terms of past.
link |
00:23:42.600
Less infinite, more infinite.
link |
00:23:44.600
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.
link |
00:23:53.600
It's a mathematical construct that doesn't, it feels like intuition fails.
link |
00:23:57.600
But nevertheless, we use it nonchalantly and then use, like physicists, their incredible intuition machines.
link |
00:24:05.600
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.
link |
00:24:11.600
You know, yeah, maybe something cyclical you can imagine infinity just going around the same kind of like a mobius strip situation.
link |
00:24:20.600
But then the question then arises, how do you make it more or less infinite?
link |
00:24:25.600
Yeah, all of that intuition fails completely.
link |
00:24:28.600
And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right?
link |
00:24:30.600
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.
link |
00:24:39.600
Well, that's basically my undergraduate studying computer science is how to represent a floating point in a computer.
link |
00:24:45.600
I think I took 17 courses on this topic. It was very useful.
link |
00:24:48.600
I came to the right place, but, but, you know, in terms of what a physicist will mean, you're right.
link |
00:24:53.600
I mean, physicists will blindly, nonchalantly subtract infinity, you know, renormalization and do things to get finite answers.
link |
00:25:00.600
And it's, it's, it's miraculous.
link |
00:25:02.600
But, you know, at a certain point, you have to ask, well, what are the consequences for the real world?
link |
00:25:07.600
And one of them, you ask, you know, what, what's the problem? Does it make us more meaningless?
link |
00:25:11.600
They purport many of the people that support it, like Andre Lindy.
link |
00:25:14.600
In fact, Andre Lindy says, you have a bias. You, Lex, me, Brian, you have a bias that you believe in a universe.
link |
00:25:22.600
But shouldn't you believe in a, in a multiverse?
link |
00:25:25.600
What, what evidence do you have that there's not a multiverse?
link |
00:25:28.600
So he turns it around.
link |
00:25:29.600
Whereas Paul Steinhart will say, no, if anything can happen, then there's no predictive power within the theory.
link |
00:25:35.600
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.
link |
00:25:45.600
But that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen.
link |
00:25:47.600
And that's logically 100% correct.
link |
00:25:49.600
But it's like, it's like kind of chewing, you know, Wonder, Wonder Bread.
link |
00:25:53.600
You know, I'm sorry, I apologize if they're one of your sponsors, but, you know.
link |
00:25:57.600
Wonder Bread slash Lex.com.
link |
00:26:00.600
Type in code, Kleb, right?
link |
00:26:02.600
It's my favorite Russian word is like, would you like a piece of bread?
link |
00:26:06.600
By the way, even that, that word, which means bread and Russian, as you say it, like you're jokingly saying it now.
link |
00:26:14.600
It made me hungry because it made me remember how much I loved bread and I was in the Soviet Union.
link |
00:26:19.600
When you were like, hungry, that was the sort, that was the things you dreamed about.
link |
00:26:23.600
I don't know.
link |
00:26:24.600
You know, what's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists contributed to so much of what we understand today.
link |
00:26:32.600
And they were completely in hiding.
link |
00:26:33.600
There was no Google.
link |
00:26:34.600
They couldn't look up on Scholar.
link |
00:26:35.600
They had nothing.
link |
00:26:36.600
They had to wait for journals to get approved by the Communist Party to get approved.
link |
00:26:39.600
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.
link |
00:26:45.600
I said, Jew on your passport.
link |
00:26:47.600
Yeah.
link |
00:26:48.600
And then, you know, Zeldovich, the famous Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnarev.
link |
00:26:55.600
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.
link |
00:27:03.600
Could he even get his Jewish student?
link |
00:27:05.600
He was Jewish too.
link |
00:27:06.600
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.
link |
00:27:15.600
And it makes what we complain about, I complain about academia and it's like, oh, well, what can I talk about?
link |
00:27:20.600
We have no idea of how good it is and that they were able to create things like inflation, completely isolated from the West.
link |
00:27:27.600
I mean, some of these people wouldn't, didn't meet like people like Stephen Hawking until, you know, he was almost dead.
link |
00:27:32.600
And they just learned this thing through smuggled in, you know, it's, it's, it's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology.
link |
00:27:38.600
There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard, probably because they were working the, they could, they could pass off as well.
link |
00:27:44.600
We're doing stuff for the atomic bomb program as well, which they were.
link |
00:27:47.600
At the same time, there is interesting incentives in the Soviet system that maybe you can take this tangent for a brief moment.
link |
00:27:56.600
That because there's a dictatorship authoritarian regime throughout the history of the 20th century for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized.
link |
00:28:06.600
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.
link |
00:28:15.600
Like you were highly valued in society.
link |
00:28:17.600
Maybe that's a better way to say it.
link |
00:28:19.600
And I would say you're saying like we have it easy now in that sense.
link |
00:28:24.600
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.
link |
00:28:33.600
And that, you know, there's positives to that.
link |
00:28:36.600
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.
link |
00:28:45.600
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.
link |
00:29:00.600
And, you know, the people we elect are sort of lawyers and lawyers.
link |
00:29:07.600
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.
link |
00:29:20.600
Yeah.
link |
00:29:21.600
Same in Germany.
link |
00:29:22.600
Germany had, you know, highly prized.
link |
00:29:23.600
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?
link |
00:29:31.600
You look, you look slim.
link |
00:29:32.600
I mean, I know you fast, intermittent fast every day.
link |
00:29:34.600
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.
link |
00:29:40.600
This is amazing.
link |
00:29:41.600
I'm going to clip this out and put it on Tinder.
link |
00:29:43.600
I think that's a website.
link |
00:29:44.600
You gotta swipe left or right for that.
link |
00:29:46.600
I don't know.
link |
00:29:47.600
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.
link |
00:29:55.600
He was a German nationalist, first and foremost, even though he was a Jew.
link |
00:29:59.600
And he personally went to witness the application of ammonia chlorine gas applied during trench warfare in 1916 and battles in Brussels and whatever.
link |
00:30:08.600
And he was, they had a whole contract of Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, you know, that would go and witness these atrocities.
link |
00:30:14.600
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.
link |
00:30:23.600
And actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz because of the chemical that he invented also called Zycon B.
link |
00:30:31.600
And so it's just, it's just unbelievable.
link |
00:30:32.600
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.
link |
00:30:43.600
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.
link |
00:30:54.600
It's kind of like a kosher idol is something that you can worship, you know, it doesn't do any harm.
link |
00:30:59.600
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.
link |
00:31:12.600
But there's something really cool about that.
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00:31:14.600
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.
link |
00:31:29.600
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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00:31:45.600
And we will.
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00:31:47.600
And we still haven't finished the discussion of the beginning of the, of the universe, which we will return to.
link |
00:31:53.600
But now, since you opened the book, wow, pun unintended of losing the Nobel Prize.
link |
00:32:00.600
Can you tell me the story of bicep, the background imaging of cosmic extra galactic polarization experiment, bicep one and bicep two.
link |
00:32:10.600
And then maybe you can talk about bicep three.
link |
00:32:12.600
But the, the thing that you cover in your book, the human story of it, what happened?
link |
00:32:18.600
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
link |
00:32:34.600
book in more detail, but to really feel like you're doing something.
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00:32:39.600
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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00:32:49.600
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.
link |
00:33:05.600
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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00:33:15.600
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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00:33:23.600
Yeah.
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00:33:23.600
And I miss him.
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00:33:24.600
Name drop.
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00:33:25.600
Name drop. Yes. I'm sure there's going to be plenty of comments.
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00:33:28.600
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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00:33:42.600
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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00:33:50.600
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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00:34:01.600
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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00:34:08.600
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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00:34:17.600
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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00:34:27.600
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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00:34:36.600
But I was just fascinated by these, these.
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00:34:40.600
Can we get into it for a second?
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00:34:42.600
Okay, yeah, let's go.
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00:34:44.600
All right, let's go there. Let's go to baby Brian or young Brian, the new sitcom on CBS.
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00:34:52.600
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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00:34:59.600
And my mother was an eminent mom and brilliant English major, etc.
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00:35:05.600
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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00:35:13.600
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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00:35:18.600
And, you know, we'd have, we'd have matzahs once a year on Pam Passover.
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00:35:22.600
And that was about it. And for years, I was like that until my parents got divorced.
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00:35:27.600
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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00:35:33.600
So when she remarried Ray Keating, I was immediately adopted.
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00:35:39.600
I'm actually adopted into the Keating family and he had nine brothers and sisters and just warm and gregarious.
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00:35:45.600
They, you know, did Christmas and Easter.
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00:35:48.600
It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had and I do things with great gusto.
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00:35:53.600
Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way.
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00:35:55.600
So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity, in this case Catholicism.
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00:35:59.600
So I was baptized, confirmed, and I said, I want to go all the way.
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00:36:03.600
I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church.
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00:36:06.600
And you're going to be the best altar boy there ever was.
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00:36:09.600
I had like serious skills. You passed that collection basket.
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00:36:12.600
I could push people and get them to two extra contributions.
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00:36:16.600
But in this case, I was 13.
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00:36:19.600
I don't know if you remember, you know, when you were 13.
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00:36:22.600
But if you extrapolate the next level up, you know, it's like you go graduate student, postdoc, professor.
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00:36:27.600
The next level up from, you know, confirmation altar boy is priest.
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00:36:31.600
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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00:36:36.600
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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00:36:44.600
I found it, maybe I...
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00:36:46.600
The math is not up.
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00:36:47.600
That's right.
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00:36:48.600
There was a serious gap in that future and that future.
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00:36:53.600
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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00:36:59.600
I actually got a telescope and became infatuated with all the things you could see with it.
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00:37:04.600
It wasn't bigger than that one over there that you're hedgehogs looking through.
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00:37:07.600
Is that a hedgehog?
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00:37:09.600
It's a hedgehog, hedgehog in the fog.
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00:37:12.600
I should mention, and we'll go one by one, these things.
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00:37:15.600
You've given me some incredible gifts.
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00:37:17.600
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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00:37:25.600
Now you're officially an experimental astrophysicist by the way.
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00:37:27.600
Why experimentalist versus an engineer?
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00:37:29.600
Because you assembled this telescope, you gave it a mount and you connected it to a very powerful...
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00:37:34.600
Yeah, but there's no experiment going on.
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00:37:36.600
It's just engineering for show.
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00:37:38.600
It's very shallow.
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00:37:39.600
Experiment is taking it to the next level and actually achieving something.
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00:37:42.600
Here, I just built a thing for show.
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00:37:44.600
Well, that's always a joke.
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00:37:45.600
People say, oh, you're an experimental cosmologist.
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00:37:47.600
I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes.
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00:37:49.600
Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things, soldering things.
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00:37:52.600
It's not actually doing the stroking of my non existent beard, contemplating the cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological model.
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00:37:59.600
Yeah, and just like most of robotics is just using Velcro for things.
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00:38:03.600
Right, yeah.
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00:38:04.600
It's not like having dancing dogs and whatever, right?
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00:38:07.600
So telescope.
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00:38:08.600
Yes, this telescope.
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00:38:09.600
What's the story of this little telescope?
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00:38:11.600
This telescope's a very precious thing in some ways.
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00:38:14.600
It's a symbol of what brought me all the blessings I have in my life.
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00:38:20.600
It came from a telescope.
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00:38:22.600
And I always advise parents or even people for themselves.
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00:38:26.600
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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00:38:32.600
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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00:38:40.600
You can see the Andromeda galaxy lacks two and a half million light years away from Earth.
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00:38:45.600
You can do that with that little thing over there.
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00:38:47.600
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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00:38:51.600
What the hell is that?
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00:38:52.600
I wouldn't have known what that was in 1984.
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00:38:54.600
And with that, you can do something that no other science to my knowledge can really replicate, maybe biology in some sense.
link |
00:39:02.600
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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00:39:12.600
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?
link |
00:39:22.600
So where else can you be viscerally connected with the first person to ever make that discovery?
link |
00:39:27.600
Try doing that with the Higgs boson.
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00:39:29.600
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.
link |
00:39:35.600
How did you feel?
link |
00:39:36.600
He didn't feel anything.
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00:39:37.600
None of them felt anything.
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00:39:38.600
It took years to go, Mila, you can't do it.
link |
00:39:41.600
But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.
link |
00:39:44.600
That's fascinating.
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00:39:45.600
It's almost like maybe there's another one like that is fire.
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00:39:49.600
Yes.
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00:39:50.600
Like when you build a bonfire, like, can you actually get it?
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00:39:53.600
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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00:40:01.600
Yeah.
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00:40:02.600
And then you get to experience the magic of it.
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00:40:04.600
Of what, like, early humans.
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00:40:06.600
Yeah, you feel what Ag felt when he did it that first time.
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00:40:10.600
By the way, is this a gift?
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00:40:11.600
This is a gift, of course.
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00:40:12.600
You need a little bit of a swag upgrade, so I got you some gifts.
link |
00:40:16.600
Yeah, this is a, I'm pulling a Putin, like, asked if this is a gift, making it very uncomfortable for you.
link |
00:40:23.600
Not really.
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00:40:24.600
This is actually my childhood telescope here.
link |
00:40:27.600
But now I'm keeping it.
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00:40:29.600
That's right.
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00:40:30.600
So looking through this telescope was when your love for science was first born.
link |
00:40:34.600
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.
link |
00:40:43.600
Okay, if there's any confusion out there.
link |
00:40:44.600
But I did replicate exactly what he did, and I was like, holy crap, this is weird.
link |
00:40:48.600
Let me write it down.
link |
00:40:49.600
So it had another effect, which all good scientists, budding scientists should do, and all parents should do.
link |
00:40:54.600
Get your kid a book, a little notebook, tape a pencil to it.
link |
00:40:57.600
Write down what you see, what you hypothesize, what you think it's going to be.
link |
00:41:01.600
Not like in the high school, you know, like hypothesis, thesis, but just like, wow, how did I feel?
link |
00:41:07.600
Better yet, astronomy is a visual science.
link |
00:41:09.600
Sketch what you see, the Lagoon Nebula, the Pleiades Seven Sisters.
link |
00:41:14.600
You can see them anywhere on Earth.
link |
00:41:16.600
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.
link |
00:41:24.600
You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips, in your connection between what you see, what you observe, and what you write down.
link |
00:41:30.600
Then you do research, right?
link |
00:41:33.600
The goal of science is not to just replicate what other people did, is do something new.
link |
00:41:37.600
And that's what we call it, research, and not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia.
link |
00:41:41.600
And in so doing, you start to train a kid at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks.
link |
00:41:47.600
It's unbelievable.
link |
00:41:48.600
And now we can do even better, because you can share it on Instagram or whatever.
link |
00:41:52.600
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?
link |
00:41:59.600
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.
link |
00:42:09.600
Let me pour in some facts into lex and, you know, it's not like machine learning.
link |
00:42:12.600
You're just showing like billions of cats or, you know, you're not like forcing it in.
link |
00:42:16.600
You're bringing it out.
link |
00:42:17.600
It means to pour out of in Latin, edukare.
link |
00:42:19.600
And what more could a teacher want than to have something that the kid is just like gushing?
link |
00:42:24.600
You're not going to see like...
link |
00:42:25.600
To inspire the kid.
link |
00:42:26.600
Yes.
link |
00:42:27.600
Inspire.
link |
00:42:28.600
That's awesome.
link |
00:42:29.600
Mrs. Tompkins.
link |
00:42:30.600
Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins.
link |
00:42:31.600
She's watching.
link |
00:42:32.600
Yeah.
link |
00:42:33.600
She's a big fan.
link |
00:42:34.600
Me, she doesn't care for it, but you.
link |
00:42:35.600
Yeah, excellent.
link |
00:42:36.600
We take those we love for granted.
link |
00:42:38.600
This is in Manhattan.
link |
00:42:40.600
This is in Westchester County, New York.
link |
00:42:42.600
Got it.
link |
00:42:43.600
So, okay.
link |
00:42:44.600
So, but then that's where the dream is born.
link |
00:42:46.600
Yeah.
link |
00:42:47.600
But then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist.
link |
00:42:51.600
So, going to university, graduate school, postdoc, and all the way to where you are today.
link |
00:42:57.600
What's that?
link |
00:42:59.600
What are some notable moments in that journey?
link |
00:43:02.600
So, I call that the academic hunger games.
link |
00:43:04.600
You know, because it's like you're competing against like these people, you know, who are
link |
00:43:09.600
just getting smarter all the time as you're getting smarter all the time.
link |
00:43:12.600
They want to get into a fewer and fewer number of slots.
link |
00:43:15.600
Like there's fewer slots to get into college than in high school.
link |
00:43:18.600
There's fewer slots in graduate school.
link |
00:43:20.600
There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc.
link |
00:43:22.600
And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number.
link |
00:43:25.600
You know, we just did a faculty search at UC San Diego, 400 applicants for one position.
link |
00:43:30.600
It's almost getting impossible.
link |
00:43:32.600
Like I almost can't conceive of doing what these new brilliant young people applying to
link |
00:43:36.600
become an assistant professor at a state university that they're doing.
link |
00:43:39.600
Like it takes so much courage to do that.
link |
00:43:42.600
So, I went from, you know, this kid in New York thinking I would never be a professional
link |
00:43:46.600
astronomer.
link |
00:43:47.600
A, because I didn't know any.
link |
00:43:49.600
I'd never seen any.
link |
00:43:50.600
I didn't even know that they existed.
link |
00:43:52.600
And I thought, who the hell is going to pay me to look at the stars?
link |
00:43:55.600
Like, won't they pay me to be like an ice cream taster?
link |
00:43:57.600
Like, it's just not something I could conceive of getting paid to do, even if I had the
link |
00:44:00.600
brilliance to do it, which I didn't feel I did.
link |
00:44:03.600
And then I went to graduate school.
link |
00:44:05.600
And during graduate school, I had this kind of on again, off again, relationship with
link |
00:44:11.600
my father.
link |
00:44:12.600
And I knew that he was a mathematician.
link |
00:44:14.600
He had left and gotten remarried himself and moved across the country.
link |
00:44:17.600
I didn't see him for 15 years.
link |
00:44:19.600
And in that time, I learned a lot about him.
link |
00:44:22.600
And I learned that he had gotten very interested, not in pure mathematics, which he had been
link |
00:44:25.600
a number theorist and contributed seminal work on the Fantine equations, which play a role
link |
00:44:31.600
in Turing's work, you may have seen.
link |
00:44:33.600
But anyway, he had become interested, turned completely away from that into the foundations
link |
00:44:37.600
of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics.
link |
00:44:40.600
And by that time, I was at Brown University.
link |
00:44:42.600
And I was, you know, thinking, oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter physicist or experimentalist.
link |
00:44:46.600
I never thought I'd be a theorist.
link |
00:44:47.600
And I'm not a theorist.
link |
00:44:49.600
So it was pretty prescient.
link |
00:44:51.600
But it always appealed to me, like, why not do what made me happy as a 12 year old?
link |
00:44:55.600
Like, we often forget about, like, those, you know, primitive things about us are probably
link |
00:45:00.600
the most sustainable, durable, and resilient attributes of our character.
link |
00:45:03.600
So with my own kids, like, what are they interested in now when they're young?
link |
00:45:06.600
And it doesn't mean that's what they're going to do.
link |
00:45:08.600
I mean, some of them want to play Fortnite, you know, like professional Fortnite play,
link |
00:45:11.600
which there are.
link |
00:45:12.600
But, you know, the odds of that is less than the odds of being a professor.
link |
00:45:15.600
Can I ask you, is your father still with us?
link |
00:45:18.600
No.
link |
00:45:21.600
Just in a small tangent.
link |
00:45:23.600
Yeah.
link |
00:45:24.600
Do you miss him?
link |
00:45:25.600
Do you think about him?
link |
00:45:26.600
Does his mathematical journey reverberate through who you are?
link |
00:45:31.600
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
link |
00:45:32.600
I mean, it did in very many ways.
link |
00:45:35.600
And he's been gone for a long time now.
link |
00:45:37.600
Thinking back to that time with him, he must have instilled some capacity for me to only
link |
00:45:43.600
want to spend my time, which is a limited quantity.
link |
00:45:46.600
I don't think it's the most limited quantity.
link |
00:45:48.600
Maybe we'll talk about that later.
link |
00:45:49.600
But to go into only the most challenging, interesting things with the limited time that
link |
00:45:55.600
we have while we're alive.
link |
00:45:56.600
And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics.
link |
00:45:59.600
For me, it was the foundations of the universe.
link |
00:46:02.600
And how did it come to be?
link |
00:46:03.600
And I felt like, well, people have been trying since Einstein to outdo Einstein.
link |
00:46:06.600
It really haven't made great progress in the foundations of quantum mechanics.
link |
00:46:10.600
But this is an exciting time, the Kobe satellite had just released its data that the universe
link |
00:46:15.600
had this anisotropy pattern.
link |
00:46:17.600
Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God and so forth.
link |
00:46:21.600
And so it seemed like this is a good golden age for what I'm going to do and what I'm
link |
00:46:25.600
most interested in.
link |
00:46:26.600
But always throughout that, I wanted to understand, I didn't want to be a wrench monkey.
link |
00:46:30.600
No offense to people that just do experiment.
link |
00:46:32.600
And no offense to monkeys.
link |
00:46:33.600
No offense to monkeys.
link |
00:46:34.600
That's right.
link |
00:46:35.600
This little guy.
link |
00:46:36.600
Sorry, man.
link |
00:46:37.600
But thinking back to what animates me, it's not doing the engineering as much as it is
link |
00:46:43.600
getting the data.
link |
00:46:44.600
But there's a lot of steps.
link |
00:46:45.600
I want to be the guy understanding what made the universe produce the signal that we saw.
link |
00:46:52.100
So I always joke with my theorist friends, call me a closeted theorist.
link |
00:46:56.600
I want to be, they call a guy who hangs out with musicians, a drummer.
link |
00:47:01.520
So I want to be like that for physics, right?
link |
00:47:04.160
For theoretical physics.
link |
00:47:05.160
I want to be like the guy doesn't do new theory, but understands the theory that the new theorists
link |
00:47:08.840
are doing.
link |
00:47:09.840
I love that formulation of a theorist is understanding the source of the signal you're getting.
link |
00:47:17.960
Signal is primary.
link |
00:47:20.080
The thing you measure is primary and theory is just the search of explaining how that
link |
00:47:29.100
signal originated.
link |
00:47:30.600
But it's all about the signal.
link |
00:47:31.800
I see the same search for the human mind and neuroscience in that same kind of way.
link |
00:47:38.080
It's ultimately about the signal, but you kind of hope to understand how that signal
link |
00:47:43.480
originated.
link |
00:47:44.480
That's fascinating.
link |
00:47:45.480
That's such a beautiful way to explain experimental physics, because it ultimately at the end
link |
00:47:54.360
of the day is all about the signal.
link |
00:47:58.000
Yeah.
link |
00:47:59.000
So maybe those two things, the neuroscience and the cosmos, not getting too romantic,
link |
00:48:03.760
but yeah, maybe they're linked in some fundamental way.
link |
00:48:07.480
Some fundamental consciousness, cosmic consciousness.
link |
00:48:09.920
We're going to get to that.
link |
00:48:11.520
Yeah.
link |
00:48:12.520
Yeah.
link |
00:48:13.520
No, we definitely have to get to that.
link |
00:48:14.520
But getting back to that, so my origins, so I always say like, and I want to try this
link |
00:48:17.840
on you.
link |
00:48:18.840
You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions, but I'm going to ask you some questions.
link |
00:48:21.400
What's the most important day on the calendar?
link |
00:48:23.160
Don't tell me the date, but to you, what is your most, what's the most important day to
link |
00:48:26.220
you every year?
link |
00:48:27.720
Do I have to answer or do I have to think about that?
link |
00:48:29.760
No, no.
link |
00:48:30.760
The answer, like you don't have to tell me the exact date of the calendar.
link |
00:48:32.240
It could be like your mistress's birthday or whatever.
link |
00:48:35.160
I have so many I lose track.
link |
00:48:38.320
Even though I'm single.
link |
00:48:39.320
How does that even make sense?
link |
00:48:40.320
I know.
link |
00:48:41.320
Okay.
link |
00:48:42.320
I'm sorry.
link |
00:48:43.320
So a day, like a month in a day, yeah, I mean, for me it would be December 31st.
link |
00:48:49.240
Yeah.
link |
00:48:50.240
So I was going to say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day.
link |
00:48:52.600
Some people say birthday, anniversary, kid's birth.
link |
00:48:55.000
They're usually signifying beginnings and ends, right?
link |
00:48:58.680
January means the portal between the God was the portal between the beginning and the end.
link |
00:49:02.840
So you're looking back maybe because you're Russian, you know, like the death side, the
link |
00:49:06.520
light side looking forward to January, the beginning, right?
link |
00:49:10.360
So everybody's most important day is usually some beginning or something significant.
link |
00:49:17.360
For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all is like, when did the universe
link |
00:49:20.080
get born?
link |
00:49:21.080
Like I said before, and I didn't think there, again, I didn't, I just, there was some mental
link |
00:49:26.240
obstruction that I didn't realize that I could get passed because I didn't think like anybody
link |
00:49:31.800
does it.
link |
00:49:32.800
Like I knew astronomers knew these answers, like the universe at that time between 10
link |
00:49:36.720
and 20 billion years old.
link |
00:49:38.240
Now we know it's 13.872 billion years old.
link |
00:49:41.840
It's incredible, the five digit, you know, first significant 505.
link |
00:49:44.640
What is it again?
link |
00:49:45.640
13.8?
link |
00:49:46.640
13.872 billion years, 872 million.
link |
00:49:51.000
So is there a lot of plus or minus on that?
link |
00:49:52.920
Is it, what are the air bars on that?
link |
00:49:54.160
So for me, I'm 50.
link |
00:49:55.380
So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me and telling me within 12 hours how old
link |
00:49:59.000
I am.
link |
00:50:00.000
Yeah.
link |
00:50:01.000
So half a percent, percent level accuracy.
link |
00:50:02.640
There's a confidence behind that.
link |
00:50:03.880
Oh yeah.
link |
00:50:04.880
I mean, there's a significance.
link |
00:50:05.880
Yeah.
link |
00:50:06.880
No, it's extremely well measured.
link |
00:50:07.880
I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have in contrast to, again, 25 years
link |
00:50:11.600
ago, we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion or 20 billion years old, but there
link |
00:50:16.240
were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be as they are about 12 billion years old.
link |
00:50:20.960
Or in the universe that were 12 billion.
link |
00:50:22.760
So that would be like you being older than your father.
link |
00:50:26.760
It was embarrassing.
link |
00:50:27.760
Can we actually take a tangent on a tangent, on a tangent, on a tangent?
link |
00:50:31.920
How old is the universe?
link |
00:50:33.480
Can you dig in onto this number?
link |
00:50:36.080
How do we know currently with those, I guess you said four or five significant digits?
link |
00:50:42.840
So we can come about it from two different ways.
link |
00:50:45.320
One, basically they rely on the most important number in cosmology, which is called the
link |
00:50:48.960
Hubble constant.
link |
00:50:49.960
The Hubble constant is this weird number that has the following units.
link |
00:50:54.000
It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec.
link |
00:50:58.400
So it's a speed per distance, which means you multiply it by distance and you get a
link |
00:51:02.240
speed.
link |
00:51:03.240
And what is the speed you're measuring?
link |
00:51:04.240
Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy at many megaparsecs away.
link |
00:51:07.960
So a galaxy at one megaparsec away.
link |
00:51:09.600
This isn't actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects.
link |
00:51:13.160
But if you go out, say, one megaparsec away, I would say that that galaxy is moving 72
link |
00:51:17.640
kilometers per second away from you.
link |
00:51:19.480
And every galaxy, except for the local, very most local group surrounding us, maybe a half
link |
00:51:23.880
a dozen galaxies, out of 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies.
link |
00:51:32.800
So 12 out of that number are moving towards us, the rest are moving away from us.
link |
00:51:37.700
So that number, if you invert it, if you say, well, when did those things last touch each
link |
00:51:43.160
other, all those galaxies?
link |
00:51:44.360
Now they're really far apart.
link |
00:51:45.920
We know how fast they're moving away.
link |
00:51:46.920
It's a very simple algebra problem to solve, when were they touching?
link |
00:51:50.440
That's where you get that number from.
link |
00:51:52.080
So there's the local 12 and then the rest.
link |
00:51:54.280
Ignore the 12?
link |
00:51:55.280
Yeah.
link |
00:51:56.280
And then you ignore the 12 and then look at the others and solve the algebra problem.
link |
00:52:01.120
How does the stuff in the beginning, the mystery of that beginning epoch change this
link |
00:52:06.120
calculation of?
link |
00:52:07.720
Very little because actually we understand how there's some other ingredients that go
link |
00:52:12.360
into it, namely how much dark energy there is in the universe, how much dark matter there
link |
00:52:15.760
is in the universe, how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera, there are, and how much
link |
00:52:20.440
ordinary matter like we're made up of, neutrons, protons, croutons.
link |
00:52:24.200
Okay.
link |
00:52:25.200
So the morons.
link |
00:52:31.400
It appears that the universe is bigger than it is older.
link |
00:52:37.560
How does that make sense?
link |
00:52:38.560
Oh, yeah.
link |
00:52:39.560
So you're talking about the fact that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe
link |
00:52:43.840
that's located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the
link |
00:52:49.080
universe.
link |
00:52:50.080
Yeah.
link |
00:52:51.080
Naively, you would say that.
link |
00:52:52.080
So you're right.
link |
00:52:53.080
If the universe were static, if the universe came into existence, and you can conceive
link |
00:52:56.760
of this, the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe.
link |
00:53:00.480
So the universe just started off and those galaxies were, they could be moving towards
link |
00:53:05.600
us away from us, who knows, that you could say I can see a galaxy that's at a distance
link |
00:53:10.840
of only 13.8 billion years times the speed of light, that would be true.
link |
00:53:16.000
But the fact that the light is expanding along with the expansion of the universe.
link |
00:53:20.520
So imagine there was some very distant past, we were near a galaxy, it's going to produce
link |
00:53:25.120
some light, and that galaxy is going to be moving away from us, the light's going to
link |
00:53:28.720
be getting more and more red shifted as it's called, that's going to be moving farther
link |
00:53:32.200
and farther away from us as time goes on, there'll be some acceleration as we get into
link |
00:53:36.360
the era of dark energy.
link |
00:53:38.840
The light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance, if you will, from which represents
link |
00:53:44.160
all the events that we could have received information from.
link |
00:53:47.760
We can't currently communicate with that galaxy.
link |
00:53:51.560
It sent us some light, and now it's moving away, and it's sent us some light.
link |
00:53:54.520
And because the space is also dragging the photons with it, if you like, the photons
link |
00:53:58.280
are being participating in the expansion of the universe, that's why they're red shifting,
link |
00:54:02.680
that we can see things out to where the universe first began expanding, not just when it began
link |
00:54:07.920
existing.
link |
00:54:09.320
And because the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years, with no sign of slowing
link |
00:54:13.120
down yet, which is a huge surprise, but it's just a surprise, that we can see things approximately
link |
00:54:19.600
three times the age of the universe away from us.
link |
00:54:22.160
So we can see this called the age of the universe 15 billion years, just to make the math simple.
link |
00:54:26.280
We see things at 45 billion light years distance in that direction, and we see things at 45
link |
00:54:32.120
billion light years in that direction, just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away.
link |
00:54:36.880
So that means we see things that themselves are 90 billion light years away from each
link |
00:54:42.160
other.
link |
00:54:43.160
That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe.
link |
00:54:45.400
Is there another universe beyond that?
link |
00:54:47.160
We don't know.
link |
00:54:48.160
So I'm conjecture, there's not only one, there's an infinite number of them.
link |
00:54:51.360
How are you emotionally okay with the fact that our universe is expanding?
link |
00:54:56.040
So like...
link |
00:54:57.040
It's gonna be like Annie Hall, like with Alvie Singer?
link |
00:54:59.400
I'll grow up in the Soviet Union.
link |
00:55:02.640
We watched propaganda.
link |
00:55:03.640
I realized that you did, yes.
link |
00:55:05.520
So there's a fake of Annie Hall.
link |
00:55:07.080
Is that some kind of, what is this?
link |
00:55:09.240
It's a comedy or propaganda movie with Woody Allen, certainly canceled, but nevertheless,
link |
00:55:15.040
back when he was not canceled yet, he made a movie called Annie Hall, in which as a self
link |
00:55:20.360
depiction, he's like a Larry David before Larry David was Larry David, neurotic, typical
link |
00:55:24.720
neurotic young Jew.
link |
00:55:26.240
He's in Brooklyn, and he all of a sudden tells his mother he's not doing his homework anymore.
link |
00:55:29.960
He refuses to do his homework.
link |
00:55:31.240
The mother says, why? because the universe is expanding, and it keeps on expanding.
link |
00:55:36.440
Everything will rip apart, and no, we'll never have anything in contact, and everything
link |
00:55:39.560
is meaningless.
link |
00:55:40.560
I assume these are some of the topics we're gonna get to, and she goes, what are you talking
link |
00:55:45.000
about?
link |
00:55:46.000
We're in Brooklyn.
link |
00:55:47.000
Brooklyn is not expanding.
link |
00:55:49.200
And that's true.
link |
00:55:50.200
Brooklyn is not expanding.
link |
00:55:51.200
The solar system is not expanding.
link |
00:55:52.200
Oftentimes, they get asked, what is the universe expanding into?
link |
00:55:55.640
That's one of my favorite questions.
link |
00:55:57.480
What is it expanding into?
link |
00:55:59.160
And I say, it's actually an easy question if you think about it.
link |
00:56:02.440
You've seen your friend, Elon, he goes out into space, he's got a rocket, right?
link |
00:56:06.120
What's outside of the rocket?
link |
00:56:07.840
If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle, take the cap off it, go outside the rocket,
link |
00:56:12.560
you know, sip in some tang, screw on the cover of it, what's in there?
link |
00:56:18.320
Is it empty?
link |
00:56:19.320
That's just semantics, I guess.
link |
00:56:23.080
Yeah.
link |
00:56:24.080
No, it's definitely not empty.
link |
00:56:26.120
So you step outside the rocket?
link |
00:56:27.760
Yeah, you're in the vacuum of space, the quote, unquote, vacuum of space.
link |
00:56:30.640
And there's no more liquid in it?
link |
00:56:31.880
There's no more liquid in it.
link |
00:56:32.880
No, it's just a container, one cubic centimeter, let's just make it simple.
link |
00:56:36.000
One cubic centimeter of box, and you take it out into space outside of the Falcon, whatever.
link |
00:56:42.920
What's inside that box?
link |
00:56:44.080
It's not empty.
link |
00:56:45.200
There's actually, I'm going to say, this is going to set your friends up.
link |
00:56:48.560
There's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements that we call the cosmic microwave
link |
00:56:54.240
background inside that box at any second.
link |
00:56:56.720
Okay, all right, hold on a second, what, 420, that's, I've heard of that number before.
link |
00:57:02.960
All right, let's...
link |
00:57:03.960
It used to be 69, but then they changed.
link |
00:57:06.240
Wow, physics works in mysterious ways.
link |
00:57:08.880
In the millimeter box, it's 69.
link |
00:57:11.640
What are we talking about here?
link |
00:57:12.960
What's in the box?
link |
00:57:15.400
I'm going to get it, that's right.
link |
00:57:18.160
Let's think outside the box.
link |
00:57:19.160
No, we're thinking inside the box.
link |
00:57:20.360
So if you have, every cubic centimeter of our observable universe is suffused with heat
link |
00:57:25.280
left over from the big bang, dark matter particles.
link |
00:57:28.640
There's a little ordinary matter in the universe, and every cubic centimeter, there's some probability
link |
00:57:33.760
to find a proton, a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera.
link |
00:57:37.760
There's actually an awful lot of neutrinos inside of that cubic centimeter.
link |
00:57:41.720
Just imagine how many cubic centimeters there are in the universe.
link |
00:57:43.800
It's enormous.
link |
00:57:44.800
That's why there's enormous numbers of particles in our universe.
link |
00:57:47.280
It's a very rich universe.
link |
00:57:49.120
But now let's zoom in on that box.
link |
00:57:51.240
So now inside that box, there might be one, let's say there might be one ordinary matter,
link |
00:57:56.320
like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton.
link |
00:58:00.080
There might be a couple hundred neutrinos, and there'll be a couple hundred photons,
link |
00:58:04.720
as I said, 420.
link |
00:58:07.200
What's between those guys?
link |
00:58:09.920
What's between the protons and the neutrinos and the photons?
link |
00:58:14.400
Just zoom into the cubic micron now.
link |
00:58:17.320
Imagine 420 things inside a box this big.
link |
00:58:19.480
It's actually pretty empty.
link |
00:58:20.480
There's just zipping around in there, right?
link |
00:58:22.520
So between them, there's a lot of empty space.
link |
00:58:24.240
And this is outside the physics based models of fields and all those kinds of things, just
link |
00:58:30.360
actually asking the question, what is this emptiness?
link |
00:58:33.560
What's the particle content in the universe, in every cubic centimeter of the universe?
link |
00:58:38.920
Outside of the 420.
link |
00:58:39.920
So you have the 420.
link |
00:58:40.920
420.
link |
00:58:41.920
They have some mass.
link |
00:58:42.920
Oh, they have energy.
link |
00:58:43.920
They don't have mass.
link |
00:58:44.920
Photons don't have mass.
link |
00:58:45.920
Energy.
link |
00:58:46.920
That's why they don't bring suitcases.
link |
00:58:48.920
That's true, right?
link |
00:58:50.440
Photons never bring suitcases with you, with them because they're traveling light.
link |
00:58:54.320
I don't even get a laugh at you.
link |
00:58:57.640
20 dad jokes.
link |
00:58:58.640
Okay.
link |
00:58:59.640
You'll appreciate something.
link |
00:59:00.640
No, this is pretty good.
link |
00:59:01.640
It's just, I'm laughing on the inside.
link |
00:59:03.160
What's in the box?
link |
00:59:04.160
What's the 420?
link |
00:59:05.160
What's between the photons?
link |
00:59:07.600
That's what space is.
link |
00:59:08.600
That's what the universe is expanding into.
link |
00:59:10.240
Okay.
link |
00:59:11.240
That's the notebook on which the photons are written.
link |
00:59:16.360
That's beautiful.
link |
00:59:17.360
Still, thank you, still, I understand this, but it's still uncomfortable that if the universe
link |
00:59:26.480
is expanding, that this thing is expanding.
link |
00:59:30.240
The canvas is expanding.
link |
00:59:31.520
It's very strange because if we're just sitting there still, I guess if we're in Brooklyn,
link |
00:59:36.480
nothing's expanding.
link |
00:59:37.840
So our cognition, our intuition about the world is based on this local fact that we
link |
00:59:44.880
don't get to experience this kind of expansion.
link |
00:59:49.080
Yeah.
link |
00:59:50.080
And that intuition leads us astray.
link |
00:59:52.480
But you know that gravity is the weakest of the so called four fundamental forces.
link |
00:59:57.400
And yet it has the longest range pervasiveness.
link |
01:00:00.360
Gravity is, we're being pulled towards the Andromeda galaxy at some enormous rate of
link |
01:00:04.600
speed because of its massive counter gravitational force to the force we exert on it.
link |
01:00:09.720
So gravity is enormously long range, but incredibly weak.
link |
01:00:14.040
And because of that, we can think about these effects of expansion as the relationship between
link |
01:00:21.120
the, as you said, the grid lines on the notebook, right?
link |
01:00:25.920
Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship between those points, how far they are from
link |
01:00:32.080
each other, and those can change.
link |
01:00:34.120
Those point distances can change over time because of the force of gravity.
link |
01:00:39.200
So it's weak and what we experience is gravity is the changing of those trajectories from
link |
01:00:46.600
being rectilinear to curvilinear.
link |
01:00:49.000
That's what we experience is gravity.
link |
01:00:51.240
You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish about bowling ball and a trampoline.
link |
01:00:55.880
That's almost right because it's actually, you have to visualize that now in four dimensions,
link |
01:01:00.200
like wrapping a trampoline at every point around the object, including on the sides.
link |
01:01:04.480
And it becomes very hard to visualize.
link |
01:01:06.280
So a lot of people use that.
link |
01:01:08.160
It's also a fraught analogy because you're using gravity, like the notion of gravity
link |
01:01:12.240
pulling something down to explain the notion of gravity.
link |
01:01:15.200
So it's a little overburdening the analogy.
link |
01:01:18.440
But okay.
link |
01:01:19.440
So you mentioned Barry Barish wrote the forward to your book.
link |
01:01:22.680
How do gravitational waves fit into all of this?
link |
01:01:25.040
How do they, on the emotional level, how do they make you feel that they're just moving
link |
01:01:29.480
space time?
link |
01:01:30.480
Yeah.
link |
01:01:31.480
So gravitational waves were the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery the first
link |
01:01:35.920
time.
link |
01:01:36.920
It was discovered twice indirectly by two men named Halson Taylor.
link |
01:01:44.000
And that was given my first year of graduate school.
link |
01:01:46.000
The day I entered graduate school almost, they announced these two guys won it.
link |
01:01:49.800
And the guy who won it did the work that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was
link |
01:01:52.960
my age.
link |
01:01:53.960
Is this in the 40s?
link |
01:01:55.160
This was, no.
link |
01:01:56.160
That was a joke.
link |
01:01:57.160
Yeah.
link |
01:01:58.160
That was good.
link |
01:01:59.160
Thank you.
link |
01:02:00.160
I got it.
link |
01:02:01.160
I got it.
link |
01:02:02.160
You know, to a cosmologist age, it means nothing.
link |
01:02:03.160
And to a tennis player.
link |
01:02:04.160
Not on Tinder.
link |
01:02:05.160
That's right.
link |
01:02:06.160
Right.
link |
01:02:07.160
Sorry.
link |
01:02:08.160
Gravitational waves do fit in because what we're trying to do now is use the properties
link |
01:02:13.720
of gravitational waves, the analogous properties that they have to photons, that they travel
link |
01:02:18.760
at the speed of light, that they go through everything, they can go through everything,
link |
01:02:22.760
and that they're directly detectable, we're using them to try to confirm if or if not
link |
01:02:30.160
inflation occurred.
link |
01:02:32.080
So did inflation, the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part of
link |
01:02:36.640
the universe and the expansion, the initial expansion of the universe, did that take place?
link |
01:02:40.720
There's only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that through the imprint
link |
01:02:45.980
of these primordial gravitational waves, not these old newcomers that Barry studies,
link |
01:02:51.440
the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us a billion years ago, but we're
link |
01:02:56.880
seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch.
link |
01:03:02.240
However, those we cannot build a LIGO and put it at the Big Bang.
link |
01:03:08.000
So if you want to measure, let's say you have the old time firecracker, let's say there's
link |
01:03:12.760
a firecracker, and you want to see if it went off in the building next door to you.
link |
01:03:16.920
You can't see it, so you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it.
link |
01:03:21.360
And what we're trying to do is hear the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang,
link |
01:03:25.960
not by using a camera or even an interferometer like Barry used and his colleagues, but instead
link |
01:03:32.160
using the CMB, the light, the primordial ancient fossils of the universe, the oldest light
link |
01:03:38.520
in the universe.
link |
01:03:39.680
We're going to use that as a film, quote unquote, onto which gravitational waves get exposed.
link |
01:03:46.160
And hope you can know, so what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy for the exposure?
link |
01:03:51.960
So the signal, as I said, so there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter, and there's
link |
01:03:57.040
a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe.
link |
01:03:59.400
However, what we're looking for is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is.
link |
01:04:04.920
We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is.
link |
01:04:07.560
We're looking for what its polarization is.
link |
01:04:09.680
And we'll go there.
link |
01:04:10.680
Let me just ask, are you serious about the per cubic millimeter or 420 is the number?
link |
01:04:15.680
Centimeter.
link |
01:04:16.680
But a cubic centimeter, 420 is the number.
link |
01:04:20.200
That's the number.
link |
01:04:21.200
That's Moses.
link |
01:04:22.200
And if he doesn't, he will truly enjoy this.
link |
01:04:24.200
Okay.
link |
01:04:25.200
Yeah, that's true.
link |
01:04:27.200
Oh, okay.
link |
01:04:28.200
Funding security.
link |
01:04:29.200
Excellent.
link |
01:04:30.200
So, I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak, of triumph, of that you described
link |
01:04:37.120
and losing the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:04:38.440
So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.
link |
01:04:42.000
Yeah.
link |
01:04:43.000
Can you describe what Bicep 1 and Bicep 2 are, Bicep 3, perhaps the instruments that
link |
01:04:49.480
can detect this kind of polarization, what are the challenges, the origin story, the
link |
01:04:54.520
whole thing.
link |
01:04:55.520
Yeah.
link |
01:04:56.520
So, well, the origin story goes back again to like a father son rivalry.
link |
01:04:59.440
It really does.
link |
01:05:00.440
My father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera, but he never won a Nobel Prize.
link |
01:05:04.320
And you know, some parents in America, they compete with their kids, you know, oh, I was
link |
01:05:08.400
a football player in high school, I'll show you and whatever, wrestling, whatever.
link |
01:05:11.800
And some of us could be healthy too.
link |
01:05:14.120
But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy, like we would compete and, you know, he was
link |
01:05:20.160
much more of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist.
link |
01:05:23.120
So we had both different ideas in what was worth prioritizing our time.
link |
01:05:27.960
But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:05:30.300
And I knew I could kind of outdo him.
link |
01:05:32.320
So I feel pretty venal and kind of, you know, a minuscule kind of character why I say that.
link |
01:05:37.360
The only reason you could outdo him is because the field's muddle is given every four years.
link |
01:05:41.840
And only if you're under 40, which he was.
link |
01:05:43.840
So he's working under much more limited conditions.
link |
01:05:47.760
That's right.
link |
01:05:48.760
So even if I had, which, you know, spoiler alert, the book's called Losing the Nobel Prize,
link |
01:05:52.120
so I didn't do it.
link |
01:05:53.620
But I wanted to do something big and I wanted to do something that would really just unequivocally
link |
01:05:58.840
be realized as a discovery for the ages.
link |
01:06:01.800
As in fact, it was when we made the premature announcement that we had been successful.
link |
01:06:05.560
So you were from the beginning reaching for the big questions.
link |
01:06:09.880
That's all I can say.
link |
01:06:10.920
So as an experimenter, you were swinging for the fences.
link |
01:06:14.480
That's all I wanted to do.
link |
01:06:15.600
I felt like if it's not, you know, if it's worth spending, you know, perhaps the rest
link |
01:06:21.640
of my life on as a scientist, it better be damn well, better be interesting to me to
link |
01:06:26.640
carry me through to give me the, you know, the, you know, I always say, passion is great
link |
01:06:30.800
when people say, oh, follow your passion, but it's not enough.
link |
01:06:33.960
Passion's like the spark that ignites the rocket, but that's not enough to get the
link |
01:06:37.040
rocket into space.
link |
01:06:38.520
So then you swung for the fences with bicep one.
link |
01:06:41.880
What is this?
link |
01:06:42.880
So bicep one was born out of a kind of interesting circumstances.
link |
01:06:46.480
So I had gone to a Stanford university for postdocs.
link |
01:06:49.880
So in academic hunger games, Stanford University, yeah, it's a small little school.
link |
01:06:56.760
It's not like that technical college in Massachusetts that you're affiliated with.
link |
01:07:00.760
But as I went there, I was working for a new assistant professor.
link |
01:07:05.800
She had gotten there only a year before I got there, and she had her own priorities
link |
01:07:10.280
that things that she wanted to do.
link |
01:07:12.120
But I kept thinking in my spare time that I wanted to do something completely different.
link |
01:07:16.080
She was studying galaxies at high redshift, and I wanted to study the origin of the universe
link |
01:07:19.680
using this type of technology.
link |
01:07:22.480
And I realized the courtesy of a good friend of mine who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark
link |
01:07:27.120
Hemminkowski, that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope.
link |
01:07:30.540
We didn't need a 30 meter diameter telescope.
link |
01:07:32.960
We needed a tiny refracting telescope.
link |
01:07:35.280
You know, bigger than my head, you know, less than a foot across.
link |
01:07:38.560
And that telescope would have the same power as a Hubble telescope, you know, size telescope
link |
01:07:42.280
could have, because the signals that we're looking for are enormous in wavelength on
link |
01:07:46.160
the sky.
link |
01:07:47.160
They're enormously long, large area signals on the sky.
link |
01:07:50.600
And if we could measure that, it would be proof effectively as close as you get to proof
link |
01:07:54.920
there could be things that mimic it, but that we discovered the inflationary epoch.
link |
01:07:59.320
Inflation being the signal originally conceived by Alan Goothe to explain why the universe
link |
01:08:04.160
had the large scale features that it does, namely that it has so called flat geometry.
link |
01:08:09.120
So there's no, there's no way to make a triangle in space in our universe that has three interior
link |
01:08:14.600
angles that do not sum to 180 degrees.
link |
01:08:18.280
You can do that with spacecraft, you can do that with stars, you can do that with laser
link |
01:08:21.440
beams, you can do that with three different galaxies.
link |
01:08:23.720
All those galaxies, no matter how far you go, have this geometry, it's remarkable.
link |
01:08:27.960
But it's also unstable, it's very unlikely, it's very seemingly finely tuned.
link |
01:08:33.040
And that was one of the motivations that Goothe had to kind of conceive of this new idea called
link |
01:08:37.760
inflation in 1979 when he was a postdoc also at Stanford, Slack.
link |
01:08:42.680
And he was trying to get a permanent job, I was trying to like make my name for myself.
link |
01:08:46.840
And so I realized I could do this, but I was also being paid by this, this professor at
link |
01:08:51.240
Stanford to do a job for her.
link |
01:08:53.320
And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you.
link |
01:08:56.960
And then one day she couldn't take it anymore because I was like sketching notebooks and
link |
01:09:00.080
planning his experiments and I just, I wasn't, no, I actually had big ideas in your mind.
link |
01:09:04.160
You're planning big experiments.
link |
01:09:06.200
And that was difficult to work with on a small scale for like a postdoc type of situation.
link |
01:09:12.320
We have to publish basic papers, deliver on some basic deadlines for a project, all those
link |
01:09:18.000
kinds of things.
link |
01:09:19.000
And support your advisor is paying, she's paying me.
link |
01:09:21.320
And so one day I came in and actually involved another friend of mine, an astronomer named
link |
01:09:27.560
Jill Tarder, one of the pioneers in the SETI science business of detecting extraterrestrials,
link |
01:09:33.560
which I assume you'd never like to talk about aliens, so I'm sure we won't get into aliens.
link |
01:09:38.040
But Jill was visiting Stanford and I was like, I really want to meet her, can you introduce
link |
01:09:41.240
me?
link |
01:09:42.240
And she said, no, in fact, you're fired, my boss.
link |
01:09:45.320
So I was like, this is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to me.
link |
01:09:50.000
I didn't know where it would lead or what happened to it, but getting fired from this
link |
01:09:54.080
ultra prestigious university turned out to be the path, I mean, literally that brings
link |
01:09:58.760
me here today, in that because of that, I ended up working for another person in Caltech,
link |
01:10:05.840
which is in Pasadena.
link |
01:10:08.880
And she, my original boss at our church, she got me the job with her former advisor,
link |
01:10:12.800
a man by the name of Andrew Lang.
link |
01:10:15.080
And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know, like, he's like Steve Jobs or Elon,
link |
01:10:22.080
you know, charismatic, handsome, persuasive, ideal man.
link |
01:10:27.240
Not the guy always in the lab doing everything, but understood where things are going decades
link |
01:10:32.960
from now.
link |
01:10:33.960
And he had been involved in an experiment that actually measured the universe was flat,
link |
01:10:38.000
very close to flat, along with a preceding experiment done at Princeton by Lyman Page
link |
01:10:42.360
and other collaborators.
link |
01:10:43.360
So the shape of the universe is flat.
link |
01:10:45.280
The geometry of the universe is flat.
link |
01:10:47.880
How did he do that experiment?
link |
01:10:49.440
So he used the cosmic microwave background.
link |
01:10:52.080
And so what I said is you have to look for triangles in the universe, so you can measure
link |
01:10:55.920
triangles on Earth, you can actually, it's hard to show that the Earth is curved, but
link |
01:11:00.000
you can show the Earth is curved using triangles, mountaintops, et cetera, if you have an accurate
link |
01:11:03.600
enough protractor.
link |
01:11:04.600
Allegedly.
link |
01:11:05.600
Yeah.
link |
01:11:06.600
Yeah.
link |
01:11:07.600
God, you're like auto canceling.
link |
01:11:09.800
This is great.
link |
01:11:10.800
I asked hard questions.
link |
01:11:11.800
My ratings are going to go up, man.
link |
01:11:12.800
This is going to be great.
link |
01:11:13.800
Take out the figures.
link |
01:11:14.800
If you want actual science, go listen to Brian.
link |
01:11:16.800
If you want all of these conspiracy theories, or a.k.a. the truth about flat Earth, listen
link |
01:11:22.400
to him.
link |
01:11:23.880
So what he used was the following triangle.
link |
01:11:27.520
There are proto galaxy sized objects in the CMB.
link |
01:11:32.360
The cosmic microwave background has these patches.
link |
01:11:34.840
And so you can make a triangle out of the diameter of one of these blobs of primordial
link |
01:11:41.120
plasma, the soup that constitutes the early universe, which is hydrogen.
link |
01:11:44.680
It's very simple material.
link |
01:11:45.880
I understand hydrogen, electrons and radiation.
link |
01:11:48.480
Very simple.
link |
01:11:49.480
Plasma physicist's son, understand it.
link |
01:11:51.800
The diameter is one base of the triangle.
link |
01:11:54.800
And then the distance to the Earth is the other two legs.
link |
01:11:57.440
So he measured along with his colleagues at Caltech and then University of Rome and that's
link |
01:12:01.680
other group at Princeton, measured the angle, interior angle effectively, very, very accurately,
link |
01:12:08.800
and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.
link |
01:12:11.440
Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB?
link |
01:12:15.280
Can you know where they could trace them back location wise?
link |
01:12:19.080
You can know where they are, but more than that, there's so many of these patches.
link |
01:12:22.640
They're about one square degree on the sky.
link |
01:12:25.720
The sky, you may know, a sphere has about 44,000 square degrees in a sphere.
link |
01:12:30.640
So there's literally 44,000 of these sized patches over which he could do these kind
link |
01:12:35.600
of measurements to build up very good statistics.
link |
01:12:37.840
That's not exactly how they do it or how they did it in this experiment called boomerang,
link |
01:12:41.640
but they did measure very accurately what was called the first Doppler peak or acoustic
link |
01:12:46.920
peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.
link |
01:12:49.800
So the sphere has 44, approximately 44,000 square degrees to cover a sphere.
link |
01:12:58.040
That's a very kind of important data collection thing when you're sitting on a sphere and
link |
01:13:01.920
you're looking out into the observable universe.
link |
01:13:04.840
So there's a lot of patches to work with.
link |
01:13:08.640
And in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic decomposition of spheres and machine learning
link |
01:13:13.760
in the early 2000s still used today was created out of this field by data analysts using this
link |
01:13:18.680
thing called hierarchical, equal area triangles called heel picks is what it's called.
link |
01:13:24.720
And just stitch all this stuff together and stitch it together very accurately.
link |
01:13:29.720
Yeah.
link |
01:13:30.720
Get high statistical significance in order to reduce the statistical errors.
link |
01:13:35.120
Very clean signal and measurement device to reduce the systematic errors.
link |
01:13:39.400
Those are the two predominant sources of error in any measurement.
link |
01:13:42.960
Those that can be improved by more and more measurement, you know, you take more and more
link |
01:13:45.440
measurements of this table, you'll get slightly better each time, but you only win as the
link |
01:13:49.200
number of, the one over the square root of the number of measurements.
link |
01:13:53.400
But the square root of 44,000 is pretty big.
link |
01:13:55.660
So they were able to get a very accurate measurement.
link |
01:13:57.520
Again, it's not exactly how they did it.
link |
01:13:59.000
They also have to do a Fourier analysis, decompose that to a power spectrum, filtration,
link |
01:14:03.400
windows.
link |
01:14:04.400
There's a lot of work that goes into it, image analysis.
link |
01:14:07.080
And then comparing that with cosmological parameters, very simple model, just six different
link |
01:14:11.640
numbers that go into a model that made a prediction.
link |
01:14:14.360
And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out.
link |
01:14:16.920
And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature and that was called boomerang.
link |
01:14:21.080
So he had just come off of this.
link |
01:14:22.640
Now let me remind you, who is the first person, you know, to measure the curvature of the
link |
01:14:26.320
earth?
link |
01:14:27.320
It's a guy named Aristophanes in that, you know, whatever lived around Aristotle's time.
link |
01:14:32.120
His name is in the history books.
link |
01:14:33.120
So this guy, Andrew Lang, I was like, he's like the next Aristotle, Aristophanes, like
link |
01:14:37.960
I just wanted to work for this guy, you know, he was clearly had this brand.
link |
01:14:41.560
He was about 40 at the time, California scientist of the year.
link |
01:14:45.720
I was sure he was going to win an Nobel Prize for that.
link |
01:14:48.080
And I knew that he, you know, so I went down to Caltech to give my job talk.
link |
01:14:53.440
And he said, you know, I love it, you got a job.
link |
01:14:56.280
And before I could even, you know, before he finished the sentence, I said, I'll take
link |
01:14:59.040
it, you know, like it was too good to be true.
link |
01:15:02.000
And I started working there at Caltech and slowly but surely, because Caltech's a rich
link |
01:15:06.080
private university, at that time run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore.
link |
01:15:11.520
He just wrote us a check, Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started on this idea.
link |
01:15:15.600
And so we started coming with the idea for what I later named bicep by the background
link |
01:15:19.720
imaging cosmic extragalactic polarization, which is kind of ironic because we ended up
link |
01:15:24.520
measuring galactic polarization, we'll get to that in a minute.
link |
01:15:28.000
But along the way, the idea was very simple, we're going to make the simplest telescope
link |
01:15:31.760
you can possibly make, which is a refracting telescope.
link |
01:15:35.200
Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes in your head.
link |
01:15:38.680
Only way, you know, forward is making things more complex, right?
link |
01:15:41.840
And when you make things complex in science, you introduce the possibility for systematic
link |
01:15:45.880
errors.
link |
01:15:46.880
And so we want to build the cleanest instrument, turns out a cleanest instrument you can build
link |
01:15:49.760
in astronomy is a refracting telescope.
link |
01:15:52.160
We also had to unlike that telescope or Galileo's, we had to use very sensitive detectors that
link |
01:15:58.600
were cooled less than one twentieth of the temperature of the cosmic background itself,
link |
01:16:04.480
which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe.
link |
01:16:07.160
So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.
link |
01:16:12.360
To do that, we need to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the air molecules
link |
01:16:16.520
and water molecules and take it to a very, very special place called the South Pole Antarctica,
link |
01:16:22.600
from which I retrieved for you a patch.
link |
01:16:24.880
There it is over there.
link |
01:16:26.960
So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.
link |
01:16:29.840
Bright.
link |
01:16:30.840
Oh, yeah.
link |
01:16:31.840
You fly down.
link |
01:16:32.840
As somebody who was born in the Soviet Union, we obviously like to call it red, United States
link |
01:16:36.680
Antarctic Program, the National Science Foundation.
link |
01:16:41.680
And the base is called the Amundsen Scott South Polar Station.
link |
01:16:45.560
So it's a little known fact of geopolitics that whatever country occupies a region has
link |
01:16:50.720
ownership over it.
link |
01:16:52.000
Now there is a treaty in Antarctica.
link |
01:16:53.440
You can't use it for military purposes, for mining, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
01:16:57.400
But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago, Putin sent a submarine to the North
link |
01:17:00.960
Pole.
link |
01:17:01.960
There's no land at the North Pole, right?
link |
01:17:04.360
So what did he do?
link |
01:17:05.360
He stuck it on the ocean underneath.
link |
01:17:07.960
But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica, which was first reached about
link |
01:17:11.920
110 years ago, first time in human history.
link |
01:17:15.520
Antarctica means the opposite of the bear.
link |
01:17:18.240
That means like no bears there, basically opposite of where polar bears are.
link |
01:17:21.960
Like it means polar bear, that's where, in Greek.
link |
01:17:24.680
Oh, did not know that.
link |
01:17:25.680
Fascinating.
link |
01:17:26.680
So Antarctic means the opposite place of that.
link |
01:17:27.800
So humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole, which is kind of in the
link |
01:17:31.200
middle of that continent.
link |
01:17:33.640
We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry.
link |
01:17:37.360
It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego, Texan, there's no place like the South Pole
link |
01:17:43.040
or Chile.
link |
01:17:44.040
Those are the two premier places on Earth.
link |
01:17:46.040
Of course, you'd like to go into space.
link |
01:17:47.760
There's no water in space.
link |
01:17:48.760
It's not about cold, it's about dry.
link |
01:17:52.360
Exactly.
link |
01:17:53.360
So that's why, for example, you can take this awadka and you could put it in this cup,
link |
01:17:58.960
right?
link |
01:17:59.960
And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere and heat it up.
link |
01:18:03.240
After two minutes, the water's, three minutes, the water's boiling.
link |
01:18:05.960
You can't touch it.
link |
01:18:06.960
Take it for me, don't touch it.
link |
01:18:08.080
But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to, right?
link |
01:18:10.360
Why?
link |
01:18:11.360
Because the mug is totally bone dry.
link |
01:18:13.120
But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules because water molecules resonate
link |
01:18:16.800
exactly at these microwave frequencies.
link |
01:18:19.080
So we don't want these precious photons, 420 of them, traveling per cubic centimeter,
link |
01:18:24.720
from the Big Bang itself to get absorbed in some water molecule in the Earth's atmosphere.
link |
01:18:29.080
So you take it to a place with the fewest number of water molecules per square centimeter
link |
01:18:32.920
of surface area.
link |
01:18:34.520
And that happens to be either Chile or my other project, the Simons Observatory is located,
link |
01:18:38.680
or you take it to the South Pole.
link |
01:18:40.720
We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months of my life down there.
link |
01:18:46.280
And it's like being on Hoth, you know, it's like, it's a completely otherworldly environment,
link |
01:18:52.760
ice, planar, flat as a pancake, you like, and the buildings are built up on stilts.
link |
01:18:59.400
They're built up on, because the snow will otherwise cover them over.
link |
01:19:03.440
The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away.
link |
01:19:06.880
If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth, they yank them before you go down there.
link |
01:19:11.440
If you have any issues with your appendix, they'll cut it out of you before you go down
link |
01:19:14.440
there.
link |
01:19:15.440
The Vostok base, not too far away, about 600 miles away.
link |
01:19:18.960
The doctors there, there's a famous picture of one of them operating on himself, taking
link |
01:19:23.200
out his own appendix in the middle of winter by himself.
link |
01:19:26.280
It's a harsh condition, science in the harshest of conditions.
link |
01:19:29.920
On Earth at least.
link |
01:19:31.440
And we go to those great lengths because it's a pristine environment to observe these precious
link |
01:19:35.240
photons.
link |
01:19:36.840
And we built this telescope and it weighs, you know, tens of thousands of pounds.
link |
01:19:40.880
And it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot.
link |
01:19:44.600
I mean, it's scanning the sky almost unattended.
link |
01:19:47.200
It needed, we have a guy who spends a year of his life down there, a girl who spends
link |
01:19:51.520
a year of their life down there.
link |
01:19:53.080
They're called winter overs.
link |
01:19:54.400
They arrive in sometimes as early as November and they don't leave until the following December.
link |
01:19:59.440
And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000.
link |
01:20:02.760
You just have to work for one night of your life.
link |
01:20:04.840
That's all.
link |
01:20:05.840
But it's a long night.
link |
01:20:08.040
And what bicep is, and I couldn't bring my polarized sunglasses here, so I brought these
link |
01:20:12.960
actual polarizers here.
link |
01:20:14.600
So if you take this and put it in front of your telescope there, you have now made a
link |
01:20:19.920
polarimeter.
link |
01:20:21.280
You have made a polarization sensitive telescope.
link |
01:20:24.200
Now you may not be able to immediately know how you would use such a thing, but one way
link |
01:20:28.440
to think about it, now take this guy and look at a light, look at a light source, put one
link |
01:20:33.960
up to your eye and now put the other one in front of it anywhere and now rotate them.
link |
01:20:40.000
What happens to the light source?
link |
01:20:41.560
It becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.
link |
01:20:45.480
Yeah.
link |
01:20:46.480
So it's called a quadripolar pattern, right?
link |
01:20:48.280
So it's repeating.
link |
01:20:49.280
It goes bright, dim, bright, dim.
link |
01:20:51.880
It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical rotation.
link |
01:20:57.240
And that's because of the property of the photon.
link |
01:20:58.720
The photon is a spin one field, but the polarization of light is the axis at which its electric
link |
01:21:05.680
field is oscillating.
link |
01:21:07.400
Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down.
link |
01:21:10.200
And so therefore vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical polarization.
link |
01:21:15.080
And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times for every one physical rotation.
link |
01:21:18.960
It's just like a spin, a spin two object.
link |
01:21:22.880
So now if you put that in front of the telescope, you can do one of two things.
link |
01:21:27.600
Now you're polarizing all the light that's going in because you have one of the polarizers
link |
01:21:31.600
and then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one.
link |
01:21:34.120
You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization.
link |
01:21:37.160
Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here.
link |
01:21:40.120
There's a crystal.
link |
01:21:41.120
It's called calcite.
link |
01:21:42.280
This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman.
link |
01:21:45.040
This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes there and tell me what does it look
link |
01:21:49.160
like?
link |
01:21:50.160
There's, like I could see everything twice.
link |
01:21:56.440
It's a double image.
link |
01:21:58.560
That is a special crystal that has two different indices of refraction.
link |
01:22:02.720
So light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink, comes out and it splits into
link |
01:22:08.120
two different directions and it could split even more if I made the crystal, give you
link |
01:22:12.480
my more expensive crystal, but that's all I have.
link |
01:22:14.480
What is the crystal with this kind of property called?
link |
01:22:16.240
It's called calcite.
link |
01:22:17.480
This is crystal.
link |
01:22:18.480
It's called birefringent crystal.
link |
01:22:20.120
By means to, refrigerant means refracting.
link |
01:22:23.520
So this is a special type of material that separates light based on its polarization.
link |
01:22:28.560
Pretty clean by signal.
link |
01:22:32.200
It's cleanly too, I'm seeing too very cleanly.
link |
01:22:36.800
It's very crisp.
link |
01:22:37.800
That's yours to keep with every time you host me.
link |
01:22:40.080
Now take the polarizer underneath your left hand, put it on top of the crystal and kind
link |
01:22:47.040
of move it back and forth.
link |
01:22:48.120
Wow.
link |
01:22:49.120
This is incredible.
link |
01:22:50.800
You can switch as you rotate, you switch from one signal to the other.
link |
01:22:55.840
So it's one of the refractions to the other.
link |
01:22:58.360
Whoa.
link |
01:22:59.360
So that is now you are analyzing the polarization.
link |
01:23:03.040
You're confirming the light comes out of the crystal, two different types of polarization.
link |
01:23:07.440
And effectively what we do is we have those two things, if you like, but working in the
link |
01:23:12.880
microwave, so our detector, that's where the cosmic photons are brightest in the microwave
link |
01:23:17.240
regime in the electromagnetic spectrum.
link |
01:23:20.080
And we're coupling that to refracting telescope, but your eyes are refracting telescopes.
link |
01:23:23.440
So you are a polarimeter right now.
link |
01:23:25.560
The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization, but otherwise it mainly detects
link |
01:23:30.600
its intensity of light and the color.
link |
01:23:32.560
That's what we call color and intensity, brightness.
link |
01:23:35.040
So you're devising an instrument that's very precise in measuring that polarization.
link |
01:23:39.480
Exactly.
link |
01:23:40.480
And doing so in the microwave region with detectors not made of biological human eyes,
link |
01:23:45.120
retina cells, but of superconductors and things called bulometers.
link |
01:23:50.280
And this has to be done at temperatures close to absolute zero.
link |
01:23:54.040
Under vacuum conditions, one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.
link |
01:23:58.700
So why is it that this kind of device could win a Nobel Prize?
link |
01:24:03.240
So when the CMB was discovered, it was discovered serendipitously.
link |
01:24:07.400
There were two radio astronomers working at the time at Bell Laboratories.
link |
01:24:13.040
Now why would Bell Laboratories be employing radio astronomers?
link |
01:24:16.160
Bell Laboratories was kind of like Apple or, you know, it was like a think tank or, you
link |
01:24:21.520
know, it was Google.
link |
01:24:22.520
Let's say it was like Google.
link |
01:24:23.520
Google has like Google X, it has this thing and that thing, right?
link |
01:24:26.880
So they were working there, but imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers.
link |
01:24:31.400
Like they were actively recruiting.
link |
01:24:33.000
Why would they do that?
link |
01:24:34.000
Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s, was the first commercial satellite
link |
01:24:39.120
launch for communication.
link |
01:24:41.120
And so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone, you know, part of AT&T in
link |
01:24:45.440
the early telephone company, later invent the first cell phone the year I was born.
link |
01:24:50.840
And they would take that 1946 and they would take that telescope technology that radio
link |
01:24:56.360
astronomers had developed and they would use that to see if they could improve the signal
link |
01:25:01.640
to noise of the satellites that they were seeing.
link |
01:25:03.360
And they found they couldn't.
link |
01:25:05.080
They found that they could not improve the signal to noise ratio of the first telecommunication
link |
01:25:09.520
satellite.
link |
01:25:10.520
It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second, Malcolm, and they were bouncing
link |
01:25:13.800
signals from, you know, from the West Coast up to the satellite, bouncing it down, landing
link |
01:25:18.600
it in New Jersey of all places in Northern New Jersey, Holmville, New Jersey.
link |
01:25:25.760
And these radio astronomers couldn't get rid of the signal.
link |
01:25:27.400
So they said, well, New Jersey is not far from New York.
link |
01:25:30.240
Let's see if the signal is coming from New York.
link |
01:25:31.760
No, not coming from New York.
link |
01:25:33.120
Let's see if it changes with the year.
link |
01:25:34.400
Maybe it's coming from the galaxy, which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930 something.
link |
01:25:38.760
So in the not being able to reduce the signal or increase the signal to noise ratio, the
link |
01:25:43.520
noise was...
link |
01:25:44.520
It was noise.
link |
01:25:45.520
They knew the signal was right.
link |
01:25:46.760
They couldn't get rid of the noise.
link |
01:25:48.160
And there was excess noise over the model that had not only been predicted by them, but had
link |
01:25:52.320
been measured by a previous guy, a guy by the name of Edward Ohm.
link |
01:25:55.880
He measured the same signal, found that there was this hiss of static, of radio static that
link |
01:26:00.400
he could not get rid of that had a value of about three Kelvin.
link |
01:26:03.600
So you can translate.
link |
01:26:04.600
Remember, I said, if you take a radio telescope and you have pointed at an object that's hot,
link |
01:26:10.600
the radio telescope's detector will get to the same temperature as the object.
link |
01:26:14.200
It's a principle of radiothermodynamics.
link |
01:26:16.520
So it's a really interesting thing.
link |
01:26:17.720
So thermometer, you can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth.
link |
01:26:20.120
It's amazing.
link |
01:26:21.620
And so we in a radio astronomy characterize our signal not by its intensity, but by its
link |
01:26:26.320
temperature.
link |
01:26:27.760
So he found this guy, Edward Ohm, oh, there's this three Kelvin signal, I can't get rid
link |
01:26:31.640
of it.
link |
01:26:32.640
It must be I did my error analysis wrong.
link |
01:26:35.320
And I would give him an F if he was one of my first year students.
link |
01:26:38.960
But he's just attributed to lack of understanding.
link |
01:26:41.680
These other guys, Penzius and Wilson, who are also radio astronomers, they said, no, let's
link |
01:26:46.480
build another experiment, put that inside of our telescope and do what's called calibration,
link |
01:26:52.880
put inject a known source of signal.
link |
01:26:55.760
Every second that has a temperature of about four Kelvin, because the signal that they
link |
01:26:59.600
were trying to get rid of is about three Kelvin, and you want to have it as close as possible
link |
01:27:02.840
to the pernicious signal as possible.
link |
01:27:04.880
They did that once a second, so they got billions of measurements, millions of measurements
link |
01:27:08.360
over the course of several months, years, and even by the end, maybe millions of measurements
link |
01:27:12.960
for sure.
link |
01:27:14.600
And they found they couldn't get rid of it either, but they measured it.
link |
01:27:17.000
It was exactly 2.7265 degrees Kelvin.
link |
01:27:20.440
So how does having a four Kelvin source, how does the calibration work, just that accuracy?
link |
01:27:26.560
It could be larger.
link |
01:27:27.560
I imagine you're trying to calibrate the microphone.
link |
01:27:29.280
You could do it with a really loud sound, but the gain would start to compress.
link |
01:27:33.600
So there are amplifiers downstream from the detector in every experiment that I've ever
link |
01:27:37.680
worked on, and they only have a linear region over a very small region, and you want to
link |
01:27:41.640
keep it as linear as possible.
link |
01:27:43.420
That means you want, if you're trying to get rid of, you're trying to compare like a voice
link |
01:27:46.960
and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine, it's not going to be as easy on the
link |
01:27:51.360
amplifiers as getting a slightly, a gong or something.
link |
01:27:56.040
So the idea of the noise is present in both?
link |
01:27:59.200
There's noise present in both, and you measure, what they did is they made a separate measurement
link |
01:28:03.560
just of the calibration system, which they measured exactly very well.
link |
01:28:07.240
Four Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium.
link |
01:28:09.440
That's a temperature that's not going to change, and it's certainly not going to change
link |
01:28:12.240
of a time scale of one second.
link |
01:28:14.160
And so they could compare unknown signal, known signal, unknown signal, known signal,
link |
01:28:17.760
like a scale, like a balance.
link |
01:28:18.880
So another way to think about it is like this.
link |
01:28:20.400
You've seen these Libra kind of balances, where you put two weights in a pan, right?
link |
01:28:24.400
What happens if you put like a one ounce weight on one side and a 20 kilogram weight in the
link |
01:28:28.200
other?
link |
01:28:29.200
You don't get any measurement, right?
link |
01:28:30.200
You do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight.
link |
01:28:32.400
That's why they use four Kelvin.
link |
01:28:33.920
Got it.
link |
01:28:34.920
But just to linger on the fact that there's a romantic element to the fact that you're
link |
01:28:39.760
arriving at the same temperature.
link |
01:28:41.280
That's kind of fascinating.
link |
01:28:42.280
And you're measuring stuff in terms of, you're measuring signal in terms of temperature at
link |
01:28:45.760
the source.
link |
01:28:46.760
Yeah.
link |
01:28:47.760
So you get a, I mean, there's something about temperature that's intimate.
link |
01:28:51.200
Yeah.
link |
01:28:52.200
It's cool.
link |
01:28:53.200
Yeah.
link |
01:28:54.200
Especially since, you know, all life is basically, you know, conversion of energy and trying
link |
01:28:57.880
to control entropy, which is then related to thermodynamics, exactly in that way.
link |
01:29:02.720
And this was very crucial kind of thing to do in science because they weren't looking
link |
01:29:07.840
for the signal.
link |
01:29:08.840
They found it accidentally, these two scientists, Penzias and Wilson.
link |
01:29:13.040
And I like to think that those kind of discoveries are the purest in science.
link |
01:29:16.680
Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said, like the most important reaction
link |
01:29:20.880
as a scientist is not Eureka, which means in Greek, as you know, I have found it.
link |
01:29:26.360
No, he said, no, he said, like, that's weird.
link |
01:29:29.200
Like that's a much better reaction or that's freaking cool.
link |
01:29:32.000
Like that's a scientist.
link |
01:29:33.600
Not like, oh, I found one because.
link |
01:29:35.360
Surprise.
link |
01:29:36.360
Yeah.
link |
01:29:37.360
If you find what you're going to find, that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias,
link |
01:29:43.080
which is deadly.
link |
01:29:44.080
And so, you know, as close to deadly as possible.
link |
01:29:46.360
So how does that take us to something that's potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize?
link |
01:29:51.240
So Penzias and Wilson weren't looking for a signal.
link |
01:29:54.280
They ended up discovering the heat left over from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, etc.
link |
01:30:01.960
And that was a serendipitous discovery.
link |
01:30:03.080
They won the Nobel Prize in 1978.
link |
01:30:04.560
It was the first one ever awarded in cosmology.
link |
01:30:07.720
My reasoning is what if you could explain not only how the elements got formed, but how
link |
01:30:11.920
the whole universe got formed and kill off every other model of science.
link |
01:30:16.800
So if that weren't enough, every scientist, you know, worth his or her salt had told me
link |
01:30:21.880
and Andrew Lang and our colleagues, this is a slam dunked Nobel Prize if you could do
link |
01:30:27.040
it.
link |
01:30:28.040
Because it was really explaining, again, the stakes of this science is different than like
link |
01:30:31.880
superfluidity, plasma physics.
link |
01:30:33.920
When you talk about the origin of the universe, it ties into everything.
link |
01:30:37.840
It ties into philosophy, theology.
link |
01:30:41.880
You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct, that the Bible can't be correct.
link |
01:30:47.000
In other words, the Bible is correct now, isn't falsified if you like, if you believe
link |
01:30:51.560
it.
link |
01:30:52.560
I'm not, I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously.
link |
01:30:54.960
But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning.
link |
01:30:57.880
What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular, it would be more like the cosmology
link |
01:31:02.320
of Akhenaten and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament, if you will, narrative.
link |
01:31:08.720
So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher.
link |
01:31:11.480
And again, it's not an offense because we need plasma physics, we need, we need every
link |
01:31:14.520
type of physics except maybe biophysics, like we literally use every branch of physics
link |
01:31:19.520
and thermodynamic superconductivity, quantum attack, all that goes into our understanding
link |
01:31:24.160
of the instrument.
link |
01:31:25.160
And even further, if you want to understand the theory that predicts the signal that we
link |
01:31:28.880
purport to measure.
link |
01:31:29.880
So I rationalize that if Pensius and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for this, if Holson Taylor
link |
01:31:36.600
won the Nobel Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves, this is decades before
link |
01:31:40.720
LIGO, by me detecting gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe began,
link |
01:31:48.120
detecting the origin of the initial conditions for the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, which won
link |
01:31:52.800
the Nobel Prize in 1983, these are like five Nobel Prizes, potentially.
link |
01:31:57.920
And for that reason, it seemed as close as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk,
link |
01:32:02.480
to outdo what my father did, to do really this impossible.
link |
01:32:06.240
And at that time, Lex, again, it sounds weird because people are like, oh, you wouldn't,
link |
01:32:13.520
you don't really, you still want the Nobel Prize, you're still like greedy, and look,
link |
01:32:17.120
you wrote another book about, and I always joke, I'm like, well, if you want to see if
link |
01:32:20.640
I'm a hypocrite, just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature.
link |
01:32:24.000
And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite.
link |
01:32:25.920
But wait, well, we'll get to your current feelings on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrites
link |
01:32:30.840
and so on.
link |
01:32:32.160
But so there's this ambition, let's say this device, this kind of signal could unlock many
link |
01:32:39.760
of the mysteries about the early universe.
link |
01:32:41.840
And so there was excitement there.
link |
01:32:44.360
So let's take it then further.
link |
01:32:47.000
I mean, there's a human story here of a bit of heartbreak, not only was this possibly
link |
01:32:52.880
worth the Nobel Prize, if the Nobel Prize was given, you were excluded from the list
link |
01:32:59.000
of three that would get the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:33:01.640
So why were you excluded?
link |
01:33:04.720
Maybe that's a place to tell the story of Bicep 2.
link |
01:33:07.400
Yeah.
link |
01:33:08.400
So Bicep 2, like iPhones, or I know you're an Android fanboy, but every year, they get
link |
01:33:13.840
a little bit better.
link |
01:33:14.840
They get more megapixels, they get more optics, triple X zoom, whatever.
link |
01:33:18.720
Okay, right?
link |
01:33:19.720
We upgraded our detectors as well.
link |
01:33:21.520
The initial detectors were based on what are called semiconductors.
link |
01:33:25.280
They have certain properties that make them very difficult to replicate at scale.
link |
01:33:29.400
And we wanted to make them into superconductors, which had a virtue that you could then mass
link |
01:33:34.680
produce them.
link |
01:33:35.680
Why superconductors?
link |
01:33:36.680
Well, again, we're measuring heat.
link |
01:33:38.280
So one thing about a superconductor is that it transitions from some finite resistance
link |
01:33:43.280
to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature range.
link |
01:33:48.480
That means you can use that very short span dependency as an accurate and sensitive and
link |
01:33:53.000
precise thermometer.
link |
01:33:54.960
And so my brilliant colleagues around the world, in this case, Jamie Bach and nowadays
link |
01:33:58.480
Suzanne Staggs at Princeton, they are just exquisitely making these sensors tens of thousands
link |
01:34:05.000
of them.
link |
01:34:06.000
The initial Bicep 1 instrument, of course, we just call it Bicep, that only had 98 detectors.
link |
01:34:12.520
Simon's Observatory is going to have 100 times more, just in one of our four telescopes.
link |
01:34:17.800
We're going to have 60,000 detectors operating full time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero
link |
01:34:24.480
in the Atacama Desert.
link |
01:34:25.640
We'll get there.
link |
01:34:26.640
But in the case of getting back to what Bicep did, we upgraded it made Bicep 2.
link |
01:34:32.760
In January 2010, we had just installed in the exact same location at the South Pole in
link |
01:34:42.360
the same building, which is ominously called the Dark Sector Laboratory, DSL, still operating
link |
01:34:47.960
through this very day.
link |
01:34:49.920
We installed a new receiver on the same platform as before, very similar identical optics, cryogenics,
link |
01:34:56.960
vacuum, everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors.
link |
01:35:02.040
So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade.
link |
01:35:05.640
And it had certain other features that made it even more powerful than just a naive factor
link |
01:35:09.840
of five.
link |
01:35:11.340
And then we started observing with that, and we knew we'd have years to go, and maybe we'd
link |
01:35:14.480
never see anything.
link |
01:35:15.480
Again, we're looking for these tiny little reverberations in the fabric of space time
link |
01:35:18.760
produced close to the origin of the universes we could ever get to.
link |
01:35:23.080
So I was playing a role in that.
link |
01:35:24.400
Obviously, it had upgraded my version of the original idea that I had had for Bicep, along
link |
01:35:30.560
with Andrew Lang.
link |
01:35:32.720
And in January of 2010, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley, and I got a call from Andrew
link |
01:35:38.360
Lang, or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor, Paul Richards, at UC Berkeley.
link |
01:35:44.320
And he said Andrew is dead, he had taken his life by suicide.
link |
01:35:49.080
And this is a man, and I had already lost my father at this point in 2010, but he was
link |
01:35:53.880
like a father figure to me, Andrew.
link |
01:35:55.840
He would give me advice on marriage, on how I should be with my kids, and what was the
link |
01:36:02.280
most important way to move through the academic ladder.
link |
01:36:04.600
Again, he was preternaturally suited to win the Nobel Prize, everyone always thought he
link |
01:36:09.360
would win it.
link |
01:36:10.360
If he were alive, he still could win it.
link |
01:36:12.360
In fact, his wife, or his ex wife, won it, Francis Arnold in 2018.
link |
01:36:18.000
And it was just a power couple, and it destroyed me for a long time because he was just this
link |
01:36:26.440
magical person.
link |
01:36:27.440
I mean, I couldn't conceive of my career, my life, even like these aspects of raising
link |
01:36:34.000
kids and being married without him.
link |
01:36:37.160
And to do it in that way, it felt like, again, he's got kids, and I feel terrible for them,
link |
01:36:43.480
obviously.
link |
01:36:44.480
But it did feel like a betrayal.
link |
01:36:45.480
I mean, I'm just being honest with you.
link |
01:36:46.640
It felt like, why didn't the F did you not reach out?
link |
01:36:50.160
I thought we were close, and I couldn't.
link |
01:36:52.640
I told him everything, and I felt like he had told me everything.
link |
01:36:56.480
And now he was gone, and then inevitably we had to keep running the instrument.
link |
01:36:59.880
I mean, there's millions of dollars invested, careers at stake, young people working tremendously
link |
01:37:04.560
hard, and then here we were, and who's going to take over the lead?
link |
01:37:08.360
He was the lead of the project at Caltech.
link |
01:37:11.040
And then it turned out that the other collaborators with whom I had been working for years and
link |
01:37:15.720
shared a lot of ups and downs with as well, they had decided to form a collaboration in
link |
01:37:21.040
which I was no longer the principal investigator.
link |
01:37:23.400
I was no longer one of the co principal investigators as I was on Bicep One.
link |
01:37:26.920
So I continue on Bicep One as the co leader of it, but not on Bicep Two.
link |
01:37:31.360
And obviously that was pretty painful.
link |
01:37:34.680
This is all happening at the same time as you lose this father figure.
link |
01:37:40.440
Now there's this one betrayal in a way, and there's another or something that feels like
link |
01:37:47.840
a betrayal.
link |
01:37:49.340
And he had kind of been the only one looking out for my interest in the new experiment.
link |
01:37:54.720
I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego, and there were other postdocs in the mix,
link |
01:37:59.280
all of whom would come there to work with him to get the, you know, the approbation
link |
01:38:03.000
that would then lead to their careers taking off as it did for mine.
link |
01:38:07.080
And you know, so there was a competition.
link |
01:38:08.840
I mean, science is not free from egos and competition and desires rightfully or wrongfully
link |
01:38:15.840
for credit and attribution.
link |
01:38:17.560
Was he the source of strength and confidence for you as a scientist, as a man?
link |
01:38:21.920
I mean, we're kind of alone in this world as when you take on difficult things, we often
link |
01:38:28.960
kind of grasp, but a few folks that give us strength.
link |
01:38:34.200
Was he your basically your only source of strength in this whole journey, like primarily
link |
01:38:39.200
in terms of like this close knit?
link |
01:38:41.920
As a scientist, there were really two.
link |
01:38:43.760
There was one, this Russian cosmologist, Alexander Polnarev, who thankfully is very much alive.
link |
01:38:48.880
It was a Queen Mary university, now he's retired.
link |
01:38:52.600
He was kind of a theoretical, you know, cosmological father to me.
link |
01:38:56.120
And then Andrew was this counterpoint that was teaching me, you need to have a brand
link |
01:39:01.560
as a scientist.
link |
01:39:02.760
Every scientist has a brand and some of them don't protect it.
link |
01:39:05.720
Some of them don't burnish it.
link |
01:39:08.080
But some of the skills about being a scientist, we don't teach our students involve, how do
link |
01:39:12.480
you cultivate a scientific persona?
link |
01:39:16.880
And he was the exemplar for that.
link |
01:39:18.840
In addition to being the avuncular, you know, father figure type character that really,
link |
01:39:24.800
you know, was the person I would talk to.
link |
01:39:26.480
I had issues with when I had issues with my own students and he would tell me how those
link |
01:39:30.520
were.
link |
01:39:31.520
And he would tell me, you know, his misgivings about people that he worked with or things
link |
01:39:35.680
in his personal life.
link |
01:39:36.680
And it was, it was, it was devastating.
link |
01:39:39.280
But again, like, who the hell am I?
link |
01:39:40.760
I'm not his kid.
link |
01:39:41.760
You know, he, his kids lost father, you know, it's, so I feel guilty talking about it in
link |
01:39:46.120
that sense, but it's just a reality, you know.
link |
01:39:48.360
Well, there is something that's not often talked about is people who collaborate on
link |
01:39:53.280
scientific efforts.
link |
01:39:54.280
I mean, that's, I don't, again, don't want to compare, but you know, it's, it's sometimes
link |
01:40:01.040
when the collaboration is a truly great, it sounds similar as when veterans talk about
link |
01:40:09.120
their time serving together, there's, there's a bond that's formed.
link |
01:40:12.960
So like comparing family and this kind of thing is, you know, it is not productive, but
link |
01:40:20.560
the depth of the bond is nevertheless real because you're taking on something, you're
link |
01:40:28.320
taking on the impossible.
link |
01:40:31.140
You're trying to achieve something sort of like there's this darkness, this fog of mystery
link |
01:40:35.280
that we're all surrounded by, which is what the human condition is.
link |
01:40:40.520
And you are like grasping at hope through the tools of science and you're doing that
link |
01:40:45.320
together with like a confidence you probably should not have, but you're boldly pushing
link |
01:40:51.160
through.
link |
01:40:52.160
And then for him to, to take his own life, it can, can I ask you about this kind of moment
link |
01:41:01.080
that combined, I don't want to say betrayal, but perhaps the feeling of betrayal that bicep
link |
01:41:06.960
to kind of goes on without you, even though you're part of it, you're not part of the
link |
01:41:12.280
leadership group.
link |
01:41:13.800
Can you describe those low points?
link |
01:41:18.760
Was there a depression?
link |
01:41:20.000
What was there a crumbling of confidence?
link |
01:41:22.680
Yeah.
link |
01:41:23.680
I mean, it was, it was so wrapped up with my identity as a person, you know, like there's
link |
01:41:30.120
only a few different ways to have identity and, you know, unless you're unhealthy psychologically,
link |
01:41:34.960
one of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist and that sometimes is their primary
link |
01:41:38.520
identity.
link |
01:41:39.520
Now I've got other, you know, husband and father, but, but, you know, at that time that
link |
01:41:43.440
was my identity.
link |
01:41:45.000
So to have that kind of taken away, it, you know what, it reminded me of being, you know,
link |
01:41:51.120
kind of adopted in a sense like my, like the one who created me or that I had played, you
link |
01:41:56.960
know, played a role in Mila, that he abandoned me in the sense, it felt like these people
link |
01:42:01.520
are abandoning me.
link |
01:42:02.520
And the only thing I'd correct about the analogy that you use is like in Mila in the war, they're
link |
01:42:07.200
all working, you know, for common good.
link |
01:42:08.720
It's not like, I want to be, get the most kills or, I compare it more to like a band,
link |
01:42:13.480
like think about the Beatles, you know, and what they did.
link |
01:42:16.520
And then they like, you know, they ripped apart because of Ego's credit, they had solo careers,
link |
01:42:21.240
they had, you know, relations with their intimates and so forth.
link |
01:42:25.600
And there it's not only for the common good, there is more of a zero sum aspect.
link |
01:42:30.280
Like I would say science is not, science is an infinite game.
link |
01:42:34.000
You can't win science.
link |
01:42:35.840
You never get to the, oh, we won science and even the Nobel Prize, they don't feel like,
link |
01:42:38.920
oh, we're done.
link |
01:42:39.920
They feel like a lot of times they're imposters even to that day.
link |
01:42:42.920
However, science is made up of a lot of, lot of, lot of finite games where there is only
link |
01:42:48.480
one winner for tenure.
link |
01:42:50.080
There is only three winner, are only three winners for the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:42:54.080
And because of that, I think it's heterodox and it's very confusing, especially there's
link |
01:42:58.040
no guide.
link |
01:42:59.040
I never got a guide how to be a professor, how to teach, how to lead a research group,
link |
01:43:02.640
how to deal with the death of an advisor, how to deal with an unruly graduate student
link |
01:43:06.840
or two.
link |
01:43:07.840
You know, so we're all like reinventing it, which is kind of ironic and insane if you
link |
01:43:11.880
think about it.
link |
01:43:12.880
Because the academic system that I am a part of and you are a part of is a thousand years
link |
01:43:16.080
old, dates back to Bologna, Northern Italy, 1088 or so, first universities were established.
link |
01:43:24.600
And you know, very little has changed, some guy or gal scratching a rock on another piece
link |
01:43:29.400
of rock and, you know, lecturing in front of, there's only one better aspect nowadays
link |
01:43:33.720
is that back then, the students could go on strike if they didn't like the professor,
link |
01:43:38.360
and then he or she wouldn't get paid, probably mostly it was he's back then.
link |
01:43:42.480
Nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced by tenure, so okay.
link |
01:43:47.240
But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug getting pulled out from underneath
link |
01:43:51.920
me.
link |
01:43:52.920
You know, he was like my consigliore, he was a guy I, you know, sought counsel and counseled
link |
01:43:58.240
me and he's dead and I felt like there is no one who's going to honor the agreements
link |
01:44:04.280
that we had.
link |
01:44:05.640
And he was a very soulful person.
link |
01:44:07.240
He was so much better at being a scientist than I could ever be.
link |
01:44:11.760
And just a loss for the cosmos, it just really hurt.
link |
01:44:15.160
And you know, I thought, oh, like, you know, it's so sad because he could have won the
link |
01:44:18.280
Nobel Prize.
link |
01:44:19.280
I don't think like that anymore.
link |
01:44:21.600
Just I think about his kids felt at first, now there goes my chance at winning a Nobel
link |
01:44:25.960
Prize and hence the title of the book was like, I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:44:31.160
It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize that have to be done away with.
link |
01:44:34.240
It's a double entendre, like we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize to help science
link |
01:44:38.200
out.
link |
01:44:39.200
We can talk about that at a different time, but in the context of like now thinking back
link |
01:44:43.200
on it, that was such a minuscule part of it because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize
link |
01:44:49.120
or I did win the Nobel, you know, any of us did, would that have changed anything?
link |
01:44:53.360
Would that have brought anything back?
link |
01:44:55.240
It's so, you know, we say it's like vanity, it's futility.
link |
01:44:59.760
And I just, you know, for me, the Nobel Prize is like, it's, I don't want to say it's like
link |
01:45:04.840
insignificant because obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence.
link |
01:45:08.760
And you know, I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show, I'm going to name drum, okay?
link |
01:45:13.280
And he prepares.
link |
01:45:14.920
He prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show.
link |
01:45:20.480
So you see him going on Colbert Report, you think, oh, they just have a banter.
link |
01:45:24.400
He's just naturally gifted.
link |
01:45:25.400
No, he said, no, no, no.
link |
01:45:27.160
You say that you're undermining what he does.
link |
01:45:29.840
What he does, he goes back, he watches the last month of Colbert Reports or whatever
link |
01:45:34.000
it's called, late show, and he says, how long does Stephen pause between questions?
link |
01:45:38.640
How long in the news cycle does he go back?
link |
01:45:41.360
What topics has he talked about with people similar to me?
link |
01:45:44.280
So I took Neil and I did that for you.
link |
01:45:46.640
And I look back, how many times has Lex mentioned the words Nobel and prize?
link |
01:45:50.120
And I put it into Google Engram and out came exactly the same number of times as show notes,
link |
01:45:56.440
show episodes as of this moment.
link |
01:45:58.840
So you've said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.
link |
01:46:01.480
Yeah.
link |
01:46:02.480
I mean, it is so strange as a symbol that kind of unites this whole scientific journey,
link |
01:46:08.600
right?
link |
01:46:09.600
And it's both sad and beautiful that a little prize, like a little award, a medal, a little
link |
01:46:20.000
plaque, they'll be most likely forgotten by history completely.
link |
01:46:24.960
Some silly list.
link |
01:46:26.680
It's somehow a catalyst for greatness.
link |
01:46:32.280
It resulted in you doing your life's work, the dream of it.
link |
01:46:37.280
Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize?
link |
01:46:39.040
I don't.
link |
01:46:40.040
I can't necessarily counterfactually state that that would have happened.
link |
01:46:43.600
So no, it definitely has a place.
link |
01:46:47.560
And for me, it is valuable to think about it.
link |
01:46:50.560
But the level of obsession that academics have about it is really, I think it is almost
link |
01:46:57.960
unbalanced becoming unhealthy.
link |
01:47:00.280
And again, I have no, I make no truck with the winners of the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:47:04.960
Obviously, now I've had 11 on the show, and to think about the one rule.
link |
01:47:10.640
So by the way, right after the day new month of the story, which I'll get to in a bit,
link |
01:47:15.600
how our dreams went down to dust and ashes, I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of
link |
01:47:20.960
Sciences to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.
link |
01:47:25.520
So the one that I theoretically could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually, they
link |
01:47:31.560
asked me to nominate.
link |
01:47:32.560
Now, imagine if I ask you.
link |
01:47:33.560
You say, Brian, you know, instead of me inviting myself on the show, if you say, Brian, would
link |
01:47:38.240
you like to come on the Lex Friedman podcast?
link |
01:47:40.000
I say, you know what, Lex, you know, that kind of Rogan, I think you might, can you
link |
01:47:44.280
introduce him to me?
link |
01:47:46.120
Like, do you imagine how that would feel?
link |
01:47:47.800
Like you'd be like, you know, so I was asked to nominate the winners and the one rule that
link |
01:47:52.640
they say of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated, there's only one rule that they
link |
01:47:57.040
maintained.
link |
01:47:58.040
In other words, he said one person can win it for something they discovered in the preceding
link |
01:48:01.720
year that had the greatest benefit to mankind, made the world better, right?
link |
01:48:08.000
None of that was mentioned in the letter.
link |
01:48:09.360
I said, many people can win it for what worked on long ago.
link |
01:48:12.120
They didn't mention anything in the letter to me signed by the secretary general, nothing
link |
01:48:15.960
about benefiting mankind.
link |
01:48:16.960
They said, just one thing, can't nominate yourself.
link |
01:48:20.320
So none of these guys nominated themselves.
link |
01:48:22.120
Actually, little known fact, they sent that exact letter just to you.
link |
01:48:28.200
That rule was created just for you.
link |
01:48:30.120
It's called the Keating Coralit, yes, exactly.
link |
01:48:33.200
Just to like...
link |
01:48:34.200
Good for them.
link |
01:48:35.200
Rub it in.
link |
01:48:36.200
I mean, it's, in this particular case, of course, there's like some weird technicality
link |
01:48:41.560
or whatever.
link |
01:48:42.560
But in this particular case, it's kind of a powerful reminder that the Nobel Prize leaves
link |
01:48:49.600
a lot of people behind in that there's stories behind all of that.
link |
01:48:54.200
Yeah.
link |
01:48:55.200
I mean, here's a good example.
link |
01:48:56.200
Again, this is my friend, Barry Barr.
link |
01:48:57.200
He's become like a mentor and a friend.
link |
01:49:00.280
He wrote the forward to this, my book, Into the Impossible.
link |
01:49:04.400
He won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died.
link |
01:49:07.200
And he admits it.
link |
01:49:08.200
And he said it.
link |
01:49:09.200
And actually, it's funny with him because I've heard you talk, you know, very rhapsodically
link |
01:49:13.400
and loving and romantically about, with Harry Cliff and wonderful podcasts with him, by
link |
01:49:17.880
the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is and how in that, you know, we were about
link |
01:49:23.200
to build the superconducting supercollider right here in Texas and it didn't get built
link |
01:49:28.360
and got canceled by Congress and so on.
link |
01:49:30.400
And I'd say to Barry, that was the best thing that ever happened to you.
link |
01:49:32.880
And he's like, what the hell are you talking about?
link |
01:49:34.200
I'm like, if that didn't get canceled, first of all, even though it did get canceled, the
link |
01:49:39.720
Europeans went on to build it themselves, save the American taxpayers billions of dollars.
link |
01:49:44.480
And we wouldn't have learned anything really substantially new as proven by the fact that
link |
01:49:48.680
as you and Harry talked about, nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note has come out
link |
01:49:53.280
and actually he's had a recent paper, but it's been an upper limit along with his collaborators
link |
01:49:57.520
and LHCP experiment that I'm going to be talking with him about.
link |
01:50:00.920
But the bottom line is it was really built to detect the Higgs.
link |
01:50:03.160
So the SSE for twice as much money would have sucked up Barry's career and he would have
link |
01:50:08.000
been working on that, maybe not.
link |
01:50:09.920
And then he would never have worked on LIGO.
link |
01:50:12.080
And then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize, right?
link |
01:50:14.040
So you look at counterfactual history.
link |
01:50:15.640
That's not actually a big stretch, right?
link |
01:50:17.040
If the SSE had still gone on, he would have worked on it because he was one of the primary
link |
01:50:20.040
leaders of that experiment.
link |
01:50:22.200
Second thing, imagine the following thing had happened.
link |
01:50:26.360
They won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015, they detected unequivocal evidence for
link |
01:50:32.400
the in spiral collision of two massive black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the
link |
01:50:37.360
sun, leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar masses behind.
link |
01:50:43.200
So one solar mass worth of matter got converted to pure gravitational energy, no light was
link |
01:50:49.840
seen by them.
link |
01:50:51.360
This particular date, September 14, 2015, that explosion because of the miracle of time
link |
01:50:59.480
travel that telescopes afford us, that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy
link |
01:51:06.440
far, far away.
link |
01:51:07.440
They actually don't know which galaxy it took place in still and they never will.
link |
01:51:11.800
If that collision between these two things, which have probably been orbiting each other
link |
01:51:15.200
for maybe a million years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier, Barry wouldn't
link |
01:51:20.640
have won the Nobel Prize because...
link |
01:51:23.000
It's hilarious to think that there's one human that won the Nobel Prize because two giant
link |
01:51:29.200
things collided a billion, 200 million years ago.
link |
01:51:34.280
And if it had happened 18 days, 20, 30, because that was the deadline for the Nobel Prize
link |
01:51:40.000
to be announced, they announced the findings in February, but you have to nominate the
link |
01:51:44.200
winners in January.
link |
01:51:45.200
So I could have nominated them up until January 30th, but they didn't announce anything and
link |
01:51:49.880
they were just rumors.
link |
01:51:53.200
But the reason that he wouldn't have won it, because there was another guy who was still
link |
01:51:55.760
alive, considered to be the founder and father of three of the three fathers, Ray Weiss who
link |
01:52:00.600
did win it, Kip Dorn who did win it, and the third gentleman at Caltech named Ron Driever,
link |
01:52:05.200
who passed away again.
link |
01:52:07.120
He was alive in 2016, he died in the middle of 2017, and then he was awarded the Nobel
link |
01:52:12.040
Prize.
link |
01:52:13.040
And here we are, several billion of hairless apes that strangely were clothing, celebrated
link |
01:52:20.400
three other clothed, hairless apes with a metal, with one particular element.
link |
01:52:30.720
And then they made speeches in a particular language that evolved in a...
link |
01:52:35.360
Yeah, to get those metals in front of another guy who wears even fancier clothes, who is
link |
01:52:41.040
the king of Sweden.
link |
01:52:42.920
And then they got some free food afterwards.
link |
01:52:44.920
Get some reindeer meat, that's right.
link |
01:52:47.360
Okay, excellent.
link |
01:52:50.040
Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example, what happened to you in terms of
link |
01:52:54.960
bicep too?
link |
01:52:57.160
I want to kind of speak at a high level about a particular thing I observed.
link |
01:53:02.600
So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast.
link |
01:53:06.120
Just listening to the podcast, I'm a huge fan of podcasts in general.
link |
01:53:09.880
And it also coincided with my entry into grad school and this whole journey of academia.
link |
01:53:17.680
So grad school, getting my PhD, going to MIT, and then Google, and then just looking at
link |
01:53:23.240
this whole world of research.
link |
01:53:26.720
What I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world is that he celebrates others.
link |
01:53:36.360
Like he promotes them.
link |
01:53:37.440
He gets like genuinely, and I now know this from just being a friend privately, he genuinely
link |
01:53:43.920
gets excited by the success of others.
link |
01:53:48.000
And the contrast of that to how folks in academia often behave was always really disappointing
link |
01:53:55.720
to me because the natural, just on a basic human level, there is an excitement.
link |
01:54:03.480
But the nature of that excitement is more like, I'm happy for my friend, but I'm really
link |
01:54:09.240
jealous and I want to even, I'll do them.
link |
01:54:11.320
I want to celebrate them, but I want to do even better.
link |
01:54:14.000
So even that's even for friends.
link |
01:54:16.080
So there's not a genuine, pure excitement for others.
link |
01:54:21.240
And then a couple of that with just you now as a host of a popular podcast know this feeling,
link |
01:54:28.280
which is like, there's not even a willingness to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others.
link |
01:54:35.520
People in academia are often best equipped technically in terms of language to celebrate
link |
01:54:42.960
others.
link |
01:54:43.960
They understand the beauty, like the full richness of why the cool idea is as cool as
link |
01:54:50.560
it is.
link |
01:54:51.560
And they're in the best position to celebrate it.
link |
01:54:53.440
And yet there's a feeling that if I celebrate others, they might end up on the cover of
link |
01:54:58.440
nature or whatever and not me.
link |
01:55:01.760
They turn into zero sum game.
link |
01:55:03.960
The reason why I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me and many others is that it doesn't have
link |
01:55:10.640
to be that way.
link |
01:55:12.480
And forget money and all those kinds of things that I think there's a narrative told that
link |
01:55:18.360
uh, academics are this way because there's a limited amount of money and so they're fighting
link |
01:55:23.840
for this.
link |
01:55:24.840
I don't think that's the reason it's happening this way.
link |
01:55:28.440
I think, uh, I think you, you can have a limited amount of money.
link |
01:55:32.960
The battle for money happens in the space of proposal.
link |
01:55:37.000
There's networking.
link |
01:55:38.000
There's private stuff, public celebration of others and all and just actually just how
link |
01:55:43.080
you feel in the privacy of your own heart is not have to do anything with money.
link |
01:55:48.600
It has to do with you having a big ego and not humbling yourself to the beauty of the
link |
01:55:54.520
journey that we're all on.
link |
01:55:56.600
And there's folks like Joe Rogan who in the comedian circles is also rare, but he inspired
link |
01:56:02.440
all these other comedians to realize, you know what, it's great to celebrate each other.
link |
01:56:07.160
We're promoting each other and therefore the pie grows because, because everybody else
link |
01:56:11.280
gets excited about this whole thing and the pie grows right now.
link |
01:56:14.800
The scientists by fighting, like by not celebrating each other are not growing the pie.
link |
01:56:20.280
And now because of that sort of science becomes less and less popular.
link |
01:56:24.160
The flying wheel and exactly, no, and I want to point out two things.
link |
01:56:26.880
One is that I remember you went on Joe's show maybe a couple of years ago and, um, and then
link |
01:56:32.880
he gave you a watch and gave you like a Rolex, right?
link |
01:56:36.320
And I tweeted to you and I think it's Omega Omega, sorry.
link |
01:56:38.960
Okay, fine.
link |
01:56:39.960
Uh, the watch that went to the, to the moon, which we will get to in a bit.
link |
01:56:44.160
Um, I don't think he could give you what I gave you though, by the way.
link |
01:56:46.840
Um, and we'll get to what that final gift package is for you.
link |
01:56:50.680
And by the way, I also wanted to mention because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset
link |
01:56:55.200
and you should definitely go on Joe Rogan.
link |
01:56:57.200
And we had this conversation with him because I was like when I was, uh, uh, so moving to
link |
01:57:03.920
Austin and had a conversation like, don't you think it's weird like if we have the
link |
01:57:08.280
same guests at the same time or whatever, he's like, fuck that.
link |
01:57:12.560
I want you to be more successful than me.
link |
01:57:14.640
I want, he, he truly wants everybody, like especially people close to him to be more
link |
01:57:20.280
successful.
link |
01:57:21.280
Like there's not even a thought like, but you know why he does.
link |
01:57:24.280
And this is what I tweeted to you in one of the few things I think you have retweeted
link |
01:57:27.320
that I sent you.
link |
01:57:28.320
I said, someday you're going to give that to somebody and today I wanted that to be
link |
01:57:32.120
me.
link |
01:57:33.120
Uh, Joe's Omega, no, but, but the point is he sees in you that same, um, you know, grandiosity,
link |
01:57:41.040
that same genuine spirit, graciousness.
link |
01:57:43.040
And I think that's true.
link |
01:57:44.040
I mean, you do do something very rare.
link |
01:57:45.400
I don't want to turn this into too much of a love fest, but I do want to say even back
link |
01:57:48.600
to Andrew, you know, who I've almost been, hey, he geographic about, you know, just treating
link |
01:57:53.160
him like a saint.
link |
01:57:54.280
He said to me the same thing and a moment of peak said like, God damn it, like I have
link |
01:57:59.040
to train these guys and women that work for me so that they can be better than me so that
link |
01:58:04.480
they can go out and compete with me for the same limited amount of funding from the FANG
link |
01:58:08.560
NSF.
link |
01:58:09.560
You know, that wasn't his, that wasn't who he was.
link |
01:58:12.040
Um, that was just an expression like I'm doing something which is fundamentally, but
link |
01:58:16.560
you know what?
link |
01:58:17.560
Um, when you have kids, hopefully, you know, please God, you will someday because I think
link |
01:58:21.360
and I hope we can get to talk about that later, but part of investment and part of doing something
link |
01:58:27.360
with it.
link |
01:58:28.360
Like you can get married, you can marry someone cause she's rich or he's rich or you can marry
link |
01:58:33.800
someone cause they're good looking or he's good looking.
link |
01:58:36.360
You can marry for all these different reasons that are ultimately selfish.
link |
01:58:40.040
There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish.
link |
01:58:42.000
Nobody says like, oh, you know what?
link |
01:58:43.080
I really want this thing that's three feet tall that doesn't speak English that craps
link |
01:58:46.160
on my floor that wakes me up all hours of the night that interferes my love life.
link |
01:58:49.840
You know, nobody says that cause it doesn't benefit you for months and months.
link |
01:58:53.040
A friend of mine who actually does the videos for me and does a lot of my solo videos, he's
link |
01:58:57.320
having his first kid.
link |
01:58:58.320
He's like, what do I do?
link |
01:58:59.320
Cause it always gets stupid if I will catch up on sleep now.
link |
01:59:01.760
Like yeah, I'm going to store sleep in my sleep bank.
link |
01:59:04.400
Like I don't think Huberman and you talked about that, right?
link |
01:59:06.720
You can't do that.
link |
01:59:07.720
That's stupid.
link |
01:59:08.720
What you can do, give the kid a bath, feed the baby, let the mother relax.
link |
01:59:11.920
Like in other words, do the things and, and this really relates back to what Aristotle
link |
01:59:16.040
once said.
link |
01:59:17.040
Aristotle once said, why do parents love kids more than kids love parents?
link |
01:59:20.880
As much as you love your dad and your mom, they still love you more and because you love
link |
01:59:25.720
that, what you sacrifice for.
link |
01:59:27.320
Here's a proof.
link |
01:59:28.320
Um, I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs.
link |
01:59:31.160
Some, some with severe, uh, my, one of my uncles, uh, my, the Keating side had, uh, severe
link |
01:59:35.760
what they called mental retardation now, it's probably has a different name.
link |
01:59:40.400
That out of the nine other brothers and sisters, he was their favorite cause they had to sacrifice
link |
01:59:45.240
so much for him.
link |
01:59:47.080
And I think of that, you know, in the small case, like Joe is kind of mentoring you or
link |
01:59:50.920
whatever.
link |
01:59:51.920
You're going to mentor someone.
link |
01:59:52.920
You love that, what you sacrifice for.
link |
01:59:54.920
What you sacrifice is reduction of entropy.
link |
01:59:56.600
It's storing and investing and you want to protect that and you know, that, that to me
link |
02:00:01.560
really speaks to this.
link |
02:00:02.560
So I, you know, I don't hold it against, but it is true.
link |
02:00:04.400
Like scientists are, you know, when they're described again, they're often said to be like
link |
02:00:08.560
children, right?
link |
02:00:09.560
You've heard this description.
link |
02:00:10.560
They're inquisitive.
link |
02:00:11.560
They're curious.
link |
02:00:12.560
They're passionate.
link |
02:00:13.560
They love that.
link |
02:00:14.560
And I'm like, yeah, and they don't play well with others.
link |
02:00:15.560
They're jealous.
link |
02:00:16.560
They're petty.
link |
02:00:17.560
They're selfish.
link |
02:00:18.560
They won't share their ball in the go home.
link |
02:00:19.560
We, you can't, there's no such thing as a single edge sword.
link |
02:00:20.560
I wish there were, you know, because you, we, we need some more of that cause you gotta
link |
02:00:23.560
stall it up.
link |
02:00:24.820
But in this case, he, you know, I think when, when you have this kind of investment in,
link |
02:00:31.520
in science, it's going to be natural.
link |
02:00:33.760
But that doesn't mean we have to like, you know, feed the flames of competition.
link |
02:00:37.760
You know, I'm like really, if you go to the homepage of the NSF or the department of energy
link |
02:00:42.160
or the recently released national academy of sciences, future of science for the astronomical
link |
02:00:47.840
sciences for the next 25 years or more, they talk about how many Nobel prizes these different
link |
02:00:52.760
science things could win.
link |
02:00:54.320
Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB, B mode polarization, the nice thing.
link |
02:00:59.080
You know, that's figure two in this thing.
link |
02:01:01.760
And I'm like, what message is that sent to kids like to young people?
link |
02:01:05.520
Like that's what you should be doing so that you win this small, as you said, this prize
link |
02:01:08.160
given out by one hairless ape to another wearing a fancier costume using reindeer.
link |
02:01:11.760
Especially in the case of Nobel prize, it's only currently given to three people.
link |
02:01:15.360
At most.
link |
02:01:16.360
Which was never one of his stipulate.
link |
02:01:17.360
He actually said one.
link |
02:01:18.360
You can only give it to one person.
link |
02:01:19.880
So they change it.
link |
02:01:20.880
Why did they change it?
link |
02:01:21.880
Why did they change it?
link |
02:01:22.880
I speculate.
link |
02:01:23.880
And by the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11 about the Nobel prize.
link |
02:01:26.120
And it's, it's a fact.
link |
02:01:27.560
But you know, one of the things that's been so interesting, like I'm speaking, actually
link |
02:01:31.660
this coming up in December is that the Nobel prize is given out on the day of Alfred Nobel's
link |
02:01:36.320
death.
link |
02:01:37.320
There's a lot of and, and they bring in flowers, not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum,
link |
02:01:42.640
which is in San Romano, Romano in Italy.
link |
02:01:47.320
It's a lot of like death fascination, you know, denial of death features heavily in the Nobel
link |
02:01:51.360
prize because it's like what outlives a person? Well, science can outlive a person. My father has
link |
02:01:56.160
a theorem named after him. It's still, you know, engraved in many places around the world.
link |
02:02:01.040
You or I, we can go to different places around the world. People know who we are based on our
link |
02:02:04.240
publications. We engrave things. We want to store things. We want to compress things. And I think
link |
02:02:08.880
that's, there's something beautiful about that, but there is a notion of denial of death. Like,
link |
02:02:12.640
there is a notion of what will outlast me, especially if you're among the many 90 something
link |
02:02:17.840
percent of members of the National Academy. Don't believe in an active faith and a creator
link |
02:02:23.760
and a God. And science can substitute for that, but it's not ultimately as fulfilling. I just,
link |
02:02:31.440
I don't believe it can fulfill a person the way even practicing but not believing in a religion
link |
02:02:37.280
can fulfill a person. So, which is interesting because you do bring up Ernest Becker and the
link |
02:02:42.640
denial of death in losing the Nobel Prize book. And there is a sense in which that's probably in
link |
02:02:50.320
part at the core of this, especially later dream of the Nobel Prize or a prize or recognition.
link |
02:02:57.040
I've interacted with a few, you know, or a large number of scientists that are getting up in age.
link |
02:03:03.680
And there is the feeling of a real pride of happiness in them from winning awards and getting
link |
02:03:12.400
certain recognitions. And I probably at the core of that is a kind of a mortality or
link |
02:03:20.400
a kind of desire for mortality. And that was always off putting to me as opposed to,
link |
02:03:27.920
I mean, I know it sounds weird to say it's off putting, but it just, rather than celebrating
link |
02:03:36.880
the pure joy of now solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us, just the actual
link |
02:03:49.760
exploration of the mysterious. For its own sake. For its own sake.
link |
02:03:55.120
Yeah. Well, that's why I said, you know, it's like a scientist should, okay, you have to be
link |
02:03:59.280
careful and not have any, you know, physical, it has to be platonic. But you can think of
link |
02:04:04.560
scientists and mentor. I have a chart in the book and in my plaque made by one of my graduate
link |
02:04:08.960
students, former graduate students, she's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Barron. And
link |
02:04:13.760
she made this plaque and it has 17 generations. So, here I am, 17, you know, levels down. There's a
link |
02:04:19.280
guy, Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz, different Leibniz, 1596 he was born. And I'm in this
link |
02:04:24.800
chain. And I don't know if you know this, but in the Russian language, the word scientist
link |
02:04:29.520
means someone who was taught. I'll say it very slowly. One who was taught, right?
link |
02:04:33.760
Hachoni. Hachoni. So, it probably means the guy who was taught, right?
link |
02:04:38.000
No. No, no, no, it's, it's, it's literally someone who was taught.
link |
02:04:42.480
Someone who was taught, right? Yeah.
link |
02:04:43.760
So, what does that mean? To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning. One is
link |
02:04:47.760
that you have to be a good student to be a scientist because you have to learn from somebody
link |
02:04:51.840
else. Two, you have to be a teacher. You have to pay it forward. If you don't, I claim you're really
link |
02:04:56.880
not a scientist in the truest sense. And I feel like with the work that I do and outreach and
link |
02:05:02.160
stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale. I'm influencing more than the, you know, 24 kids
link |
02:05:06.560
I might have in my graduate class or undergraduate class. And they're, you know, potentially could
link |
02:05:10.240
reach thousands of people around the world and make them into scientists themselves.
link |
02:05:15.840
Because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial. There is no competition. There's no zero
link |
02:05:20.880
some fixed, fixed mindset versus growth mindset. Because it is an infinite game. Imagine a culture
link |
02:05:27.680
that had none of the trappings of the negativity of the Soviet Union or pre World War One,
link |
02:05:33.280
Germany or Imperial Japan, you know, science celebrated. And we're just making like a nation
link |
02:05:39.360
of scientists and like, we're not doing it to become multi billionaires or necessarily, you know,
link |
02:05:43.840
for any military purpose whatsoever. But if we had that, you know, sometimes I'm flying, you know,
link |
02:05:49.120
home at night, like when you fly into LA, you literally, it's very rare. You can see like the
link |
02:05:53.760
number 10 million, like it's very hard to like visualize things. You see a brick wall you ask,
link |
02:05:58.080
how many bricks are there? It might be a thousand, two thousand, 10 million lights,
link |
02:06:01.600
there's 10 million souls. And you can see in their discreet, they're not like the Milky Way
link |
02:06:05.920
all blending together. Each loss in their own busy lives, excited, fall in love, afraid of losing
link |
02:06:12.560
their job, all that. By the way, people should know that you're a pilot. So you literally mean fly.
link |
02:06:17.600
Yeah, sometimes I get to do it. You get to look at the eye of God perspective on these 10 million,
link |
02:06:24.640
on these millions of... And I don't think they're like constellations, but upside down,
link |
02:06:29.040
like the city is like a constant. Hopefully, I'll stay to keep the plane the right way up.
link |
02:06:32.400
But when you think about like, imagine they're all working together. And imagine like, you always
link |
02:06:37.120
talk about love. But like, you don't know, you don't know that they're not where they have love.
link |
02:06:41.920
Like, so you're looking down on them. And it's just amazing. Because you think like,
link |
02:06:45.200
what amazing creation is man and humans? And what can we do? It's phenomenal. It's so exciting.
link |
02:06:51.920
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 |
02:06:56.560
I love what I do. But to think about like, oh, if my student succeeds, no, it's unfortunate
link |
02:07:04.160
that you have experience that I've certainly experienced it. And I think there are ways
link |
02:07:08.240
around it. I think it is a vexing problem because people want to... It's very tempting to keep your
link |
02:07:14.880
own kind of garden fertilized. One thing that's interesting is like, people are like, why are
link |
02:07:20.480
you doing this thing? And podcasts and you're supposed to be as serious scientists leading
link |
02:07:24.400
this huge project and collaborators. And I'm like, well, most of what I do, as I said before,
link |
02:07:30.160
it's for you, it's Velcro. For me, it's like, what is the deal with the safety standards on the
link |
02:07:36.320
truck that we're driving up to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator that will allow
link |
02:07:39.840
the concrete truck to... It has nothing to do with the Big Bang inflation, the multiverse.
link |
02:07:44.160
God's existence has nothing to do with that. So those are people I say I have to talk to,
link |
02:07:48.400
the people that come on the show, those are people I want to talk to. And that's super fun.
link |
02:07:52.240
I mean, it's a real honor that I get to do it. I'm using... I have some unfair advantages, right?
link |
02:07:57.440
I'm at a top university. We have people that's affiliated with the Arthur C. Clark Foundation,
link |
02:08:02.080
brilliant scientists coming through. But I felt like it would be kind of a shame if I didn't allow
link |
02:08:08.480
them to teach at scale because they're better teachers than I am. Let me ask you an interesting,
link |
02:08:15.040
maybe difficult question. Have you ever considered talking on your podcast with the people who would
link |
02:08:22.320
get the Nobel Prize for Bicep 2 if it turned out to be detecting what it is? Yeah. I mean,
link |
02:08:28.480
I'm still friends with them and they have still gone on too. So we should say like,
link |
02:08:33.120
why we didn't win the Nobel Prize and then what happened with the group that is now leading it
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02:08:38.960
completely, that I'm completely divorced from in a secular sense. We're friends. We see each other.
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02:08:45.760
We send each other emails and stuff like that. I would love to get their sense of what the natural
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02:08:51.440
heartbreak built into the whole process of the Nobel Prize, what their sense is. I would love
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02:08:56.400
to hear an honest, real conversation. I understand you're friends. There's some hard truth that
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02:09:01.840
even friends will talk about it too. They weren't happy I wrote the book. I mean, I remember one of
link |
02:09:05.200
them was like, well, what's this I hear about a book? I mean, a lot of people told me not to
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02:09:09.440
write the book. They said it's going to give too much attention to the Nobel Prize. It's going to
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02:09:13.440
look like sour grapes. Again, I say you can prove I have sour grapes or not. Just give me the next
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02:09:18.480
prize. So you would, if you get a Nobel Prize for Literature, you would turn it down? I don't know.
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02:09:24.000
It's funny because Sabina Hasenfelder, who is a fellow kind of YouTube sensation and
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02:09:30.080
an issue in for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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02:09:33.120
You're right. She's so gracious and so good. She has that German, just gentleness.
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02:09:40.160
She's a little too nice for my taste, I would say.
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02:09:42.960
I wish she could really say what she thinks and be snarky on occasion. So she wrote a review of
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02:09:47.280
my book when it came out three or four years ago and she said, well, Brian Keating, she said,
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02:09:53.440
well, it's good. It's interesting. He talks about cosmology, but they can do whatever the hell
link |
02:09:59.280
they want and he presumably has these problems with it, but it's none of his business, basically.
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02:10:05.680
And at the end, she said, but if you want one good thing, he's a really good writer and who
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02:10:10.160
knows? He could win the Nobel Prize in Literature someday. I said, and then she allowed me to
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02:10:13.680
publish a rebuttal on her blog, which was kind of funny. But anyway, no. So getting back to the
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02:10:18.160
guys that we were kind of collaboratemies or frenemies and, look, we don't wish each other
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02:10:25.360
active ill. I've visited them. They're welcome to visit me. They have visited me. The thing I have
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02:10:30.320
to say is that I just wonder about introspection. Like for me, literally, I don't care about the
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02:10:37.680
Nobel Prize other than what it can do to benefit science. But I no longer, I did, but by the way,
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02:10:43.680
I did seriously care about how I benefit Brian Keating early on in my career. I'm just totally
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02:10:48.000
honest. I'm not proud of it. It's kind of embarrassing. But now I would hope that people
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02:10:52.960
would say like, okay, the guy is like, he's obsessed with it. My next book is not about this.
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02:10:58.400
It's about something completely different. And I do feel like people lack introspection
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02:11:05.120
a lot of times in science. We don't think about why we're doing what we're doing.
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02:11:08.560
And I think it comes down to curiosity. One thing about Joe, and again, I've only listened to like,
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02:11:15.280
I have to confess, you're like my father. Now I'm confessing my sins to you,
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02:11:18.800
Father Lex, Father Friedman. I haven't listened to like that many of your episodes start to finish,
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02:11:25.040
okay? I'm with our friend, a mutual friend, Eric, I've listened to a bunch of recent ones.
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02:11:30.320
Einstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, that's what it is.
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02:11:35.440
I get confused with the brother. The brother's car amounts up,
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02:11:39.120
the brother's wines, and a few others. I haven't ever listened to a full Joe Rogan episode.
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02:11:43.840
But from what I've seen with him, he has a preternatural curiosity. He doesn't have passion.
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02:11:49.120
There are a lot of podcasts about passion, like I've been on their show. He has curiosity, like
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02:11:53.360
he's not going to stop talking about something until he hops it, until he understands it,
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02:11:57.120
until he gets it viscerally. And I respect that because as I say in this more recent book,
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02:12:02.800
passions like kind of like the dopamine hit that gets you started, like, oh, I'm going to be great.
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02:12:07.120
I'm going to maybe I could win a Nobel Prize. Like that's not going to sustain you. The sustenance
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02:12:11.440
comes from the passion converting to curiosity. And what I want to do is convert as many things
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02:12:17.520
as possible to things that I can then, because actually I've had on people that discuss addiction.
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02:12:23.840
And there is an addictive quality to doing podcasts or whatever, but there's an addictive
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02:12:28.800
quality being a scientist. And you get to do things that are very specialized and specialized
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02:12:33.920
locations with special people paid for by other people have no frickin idea what you do. I mean,
link |
02:12:39.360
imagine you worked in some like some job and you know, Feynman said he said all these contradictory
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02:12:44.400
things like when he was he was once said like, he said, if you can't explain it to your grandmother,
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02:12:49.280
you don't understand it yourself. Then the day you won the Nobel Prize, a reporter asked him,
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02:12:52.640
what did you win it for? He said, if I could explain it to you, bud, it wouldn't be worth a
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02:12:55.840
Nobel Prize. So let's let's leave aside his inherent contradictions. But but in reality,
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02:13:00.640
there is a kind of like dopamine rush that you get from it. But but you know, what is ultimately
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02:13:06.000
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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02:13:12.080
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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02:13:16.320
into a I used to ask this question all the time? Like, can you make someone creative? Like, can
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02:13:21.520
you teach someone to be creative? I don't know. Can you teach someone to be curious? I don't know.
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02:13:26.800
I do know that kids are naturally curious. As they get older, they get less curious,
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02:13:31.280
just like I heard from the other forward authors, James Altucher, he said once he did a study,
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02:13:37.840
kids smile 300 times a day or smile or laugh adults five or six, five or six. No, I'm trying to get
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02:13:44.080
you to laugh, but anyway, no, it's true. So somewhere he lose 30, you know, to 50%. I'm not
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02:13:49.360
entertained. But that's because I'm an adult. No. And then I do remember there's some some
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02:13:54.240
distribution on those studies with a happier adult smile a little more, but still the kids
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02:13:58.720
blow them out of the water. Just crushing. So can you is it or should in other words,
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02:14:02.400
should we invest our energy in getting the half life decay constant stretched out more for curiosity
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02:14:08.800
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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02:14:13.840
open course. Well, I think it goes to David Foster Wallace, the key to life is to be unboreable.
link |
02:14:19.120
I think I think you could train this kind of thing, which is in every single situation. So like,
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02:14:25.600
which I think is at the core, at least this correlated with curiosity is in every situation,
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02:14:33.680
try to find the exciting, the fascinating, like in every situation, you sitting at the,
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02:14:40.000
I don't know, waiting for something at a DMV or something like that, find something that excites
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02:14:45.600
you like a thought, like watch people or start to think about, well, I wonder how many people
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02:14:53.440
have to go to the DMV every day. And they try to go into the the pothead mode of thinking like,
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02:14:59.600
wow, isn't this weird that there's a bunch of people that are having to get a stamp of approval
link |
02:15:05.360
from the government to drive their cars. And then there's millions of cars driving every day.
link |
02:15:09.440
How can I do this better? Maybe some blockchain and they could like VIN transfer. Yeah, exactly.
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02:15:13.760
Yeah. No, that is a good. And then every situation, I think if you rigorously like,
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02:15:19.200
just practice that at a young age, I think you can learn to do that because like sometimes people
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02:15:24.880
like ask me for advice and like to do this thing or that thing is, I think you at the core really
link |
02:15:31.280
have to have this muscle of finding the awesomeness in everything because if you're able to find the
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02:15:38.000
awesomeness in everything, like whatever journey you take, whatever, whatever weird
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02:15:42.320
man that you take through life is going to be productive is going to end up in a great place.
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02:15:50.480
So like that muscle is at the core of it. And I guess curiosity is central to that.
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02:15:58.240
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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02:16:06.000
Nobel Prize because of some space dust. That's right. Kick schmutz. Which one is the moon?
link |
02:16:15.200
Which one is? That one's the dust. Space dust, yeah.
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02:16:20.480
What are we looking at? So why is space dust the villain of this whole story?
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02:16:25.760
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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02:16:29.200
these books, I'm sure you get books and people send you books. They always come in these dust
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02:16:32.320
jackets, right? I was like, what the hell is a dust jacket? Like how much dust is raining down at
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02:16:37.040
any moment? I mean, this is immaculate. This room is Russian tidiness, but in a normal household,
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02:16:42.720
how much dust is raining down? It's not really until I wrote a book. And I realized, you know,
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02:16:48.560
I'm writing a story about the origin of the universe, then the prologue, you know, to the
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02:16:53.040
cosmos, and dust is going to cover this story. It's actually more a story about
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02:16:59.520
astrophysics and cosmology than dust. And this is the link between the cosmological and the
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02:17:04.880
astrophysical. So what does that mean? So astrophysics is broadly speaking, the study of physical
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02:17:09.920
phenomena manifest in the heavens, astronomical phenomena. Cosmology is concerned with the origin,
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02:17:15.760
evolution, composition of the universe as a whole, but it's not really concerned with stars,
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02:17:19.680
galaxies, and planets per se, other than how they might help us measure the Hubble constant,
link |
02:17:24.560
the density of the universe, the neutrino content, etc. So we tend to have a tendency to kind of
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02:17:30.880
look a little bit, you know, they're like, not all astronomers and astrophysicists are equal,
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02:17:35.280
they're all equal, but some are more equal than others. So we have kind of a prejudice,
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02:17:38.400
a little swagger, right? And cosmologists are studying, you know, we're using Einstein,
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02:17:42.240
we're not using like, you know, Boltzmann, we're thinking of the biggest possible pictures.
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02:17:46.720
In so doing, you can actually become blinded to otherwise obvious effects that people,
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02:17:53.520
you know, would have not overlooked. In our case, when we sought out the signal,
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02:17:58.480
we were using the photons that make up this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe,
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02:18:03.600
luckily only at three degrees Kelvin approximately, we're using those as a type of film onto which
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02:18:08.640
gravitational waves will reverberate it, make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way,
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02:18:14.000
and then we can use our polarized sunglasses, but in a microwave format to detect the characteristic
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02:18:19.520
twofold symmetry pattern of under rotation. That's the technical way that we undergo,
link |
02:18:24.000
I mean, there's a lot more to it. But there are more than one thing that can mimic exactly that
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02:18:29.040
signal. First of all, when you look at the signal, the signal, if inflation took place, big if,
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02:18:34.080
but if it took place, the signal would be about one or two parts per billion of the CMB temperature
link |
02:18:41.680
itself. So a few nano Kelvin, the CMB is a few Kelvin, the signal from these B modes would be a
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02:18:49.040
few nano Kelvin. It's astonishing to think, Penzies and Wilson in 1965 measured something
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02:18:55.280
that's a billion times brighter. And that was what 60 years ago, let's call it 60 years ago,
link |
02:19:00.800
since they discovered it. Moore's Law, you're more expert on this, call it every two years.
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02:19:05.760
So you're talking about like two to the 30th power, doubling or something like that at that.
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02:19:10.560
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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02:19:15.920
thousand, correct my math, I'm wrong. Two to the 20th is a million, two to the 30th is a billion.
link |
02:19:21.920
So we're outpacing Moore's Law in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments to detect these
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02:19:28.080
feeble signals from the cosmos. And they don't have to deal with, on the semiconductor factory
link |
02:19:33.840
in Santa Clara, California, they don't have to deal with meteorites and things like coming into
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02:19:38.640
the laboratory. It's a clean room, it's pristine, they can control everything about it. We can't
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02:19:42.960
control the cosmos. And the cosmos is literally littered with particles of schmutz, of failed
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02:19:48.400
planets, asteroids, meteoroids, things that didn't coalesce to make either the Earth, the moon,
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02:19:55.440
the planet Jupiter or its moons or get sucked into them and make craters on them, etc., etc.
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02:20:00.880
The rest of it is falling and it comes in a power spectrum. There's very few, thank God,
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02:20:05.440
chicks of love size, impact or progenitors that will take out all life on Earth.
link |
02:20:10.880
But there's extremely large number of tiny dust particles and microscopic grains and then there's
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02:20:16.800
a fair number of intermediate sized particles. It turns out this little guy here is the end
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02:20:23.840
product of a collapsing star that explodes in what's called the supernova, type 2 supernova.
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02:20:30.000
So stars spend most of their life using helium nuclei protons and neutrons into helium
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02:20:37.440
nuclei. And then from there it can make other things like beryllium and briefly make beryllium
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02:20:43.120
and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the way up until it tries to make iron and nickel.
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02:20:48.560
Iron and nickel are endothermic. It takes more energy than gets liberated to make
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02:20:53.520
an atom of iron. When that happens, there's no longer enough heat supplying pressure to resist
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02:20:59.920
the gravitational collapse of the material that was produced earlier. So the star form
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02:21:03.520
is going to go inside out. That's how scientists discovered helium was discovered on the sun.
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02:21:08.400
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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02:21:13.120
Oh, well done.
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02:21:13.920
They went there at night. No, helium means heliosis, the god of the sun. It was discovered in its
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02:21:17.600
spectrum from observations of the telescope like 150 years ago. It wasn't discovered like when
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02:21:22.400
oxygen and iron was discovered. So it's only a relatively recent comer to the pure activity.
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02:21:28.320
The helium came after oxygen.
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02:21:30.960
Oh, no, first hydrogen forms into helium. So that's the first thing that formed.
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02:21:34.800
No, in terms of discoveries.
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02:21:36.160
Oh, yeah, after oxygen. Yeah, I think priestly and others, the Dalton discovered it in the 1700s.
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02:21:42.720
No, helium was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing
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02:21:46.080
the weird atomic absorption and Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum.
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02:21:51.680
When it tries to make iron, there's no longer any leftover heat. In other words,
link |
02:21:55.760
there's heat left over from fusing, as you know, the sun of a plasma physicist. He fused to hydrogen
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02:22:01.760
nuclei, you get excess energy plus you get helium. So that's why fusion energy could be the energy
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02:22:06.320
source of the future and always will be. Hopefully, it'll come much sooner than that.
link |
02:22:11.200
And so doing trying to make iron, it takes more energy, doesn't give off enough energy,
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02:22:14.960
star collapses, explodes. And what does it spray out into the cosmic interstellar medium?
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02:22:20.080
It sprays out the last thing it made, which is that stuff. Luckily for us, because some of that
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02:22:24.400
coalesced and made the core of the earth onto which the lighter like silica and carbon and the
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02:22:29.680
dirt and the crust of the earth were formed. And some of that made its way to the crust,
link |
02:22:33.440
the iron, made its way to the crust. Some of that, your mother ate and synthesized hemoglobin
link |
02:22:38.640
molecules. And hemoglobin has iron particles in it. It's a quite amazing substance. Without it,
link |
02:22:43.600
we wouldn't have our red blood. We wouldn't exist as we are.
link |
02:22:47.200
Is this a very long complicated mom joke?
link |
02:22:49.520
I've done enough dad jokes. My quote is up. So I'm taking this object,
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02:22:56.160
seriously, not all of it gets bound up in a planet. In fact, forming planets is very inefficient.
link |
02:23:01.680
And so there's a lot of schmutz left over, some of which gets in the way
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02:23:05.440
of our telescopes looking back to the beginning of time. And some of those molecules like iron
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02:23:10.240
is used in compass needles. They're magnetized. And magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them
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02:23:16.160
and make the exact polarization pattern that we're looking for. As if the compass needles get all
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02:23:21.120
aligned, that's like the polarization of the dust grain. It's like that polarizing filter.
link |
02:23:26.080
That means light polarized like this will get absorbed. And light polarized like this will
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02:23:29.920
go through. So it's absorbing, it's making 100% polarized light out of an initially unpolarized
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02:23:34.720
light source. And that's what happened. And what we ended up claiming on March 17th,
link |
02:23:41.440
and I'm sure if you were there, you might remember this, at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics,
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02:23:46.640
there was an announcement. There were like three or four Nobel Prize winners in the audience.
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02:23:50.160
And the bicep two team, which I was no longer leading, I was still a member of it. In fact,
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02:23:54.960
in the announcement, the first person they mentioned, besides, you know, thank you all for
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02:23:59.360
being here as me and my team at UC San Diego, although I wasn't invited to go to the press
link |
02:24:03.600
conference because that Harvard complicated. Yes, exactly. It's a little school up there in
link |
02:24:10.240
the Cambridge area. And so they ended up making this announcement that we had discovered the
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02:24:16.240
aftershocks of inflation. We detected the gravitational waves, shaking up the CMB. And on
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02:24:21.840
that day, past Lex Friedman podcast, back when it was called artificial intelligence,
link |
02:24:26.320
Max Tagmark said, Goodbye, Universe, Hello, Multiverse, and Hello, Nobel Prize. See, he saw
link |
02:24:32.560
that as confirmatory evidence, not only of inflation, not only of gravitational waves,
link |
02:24:37.360
but of the multiverse, Goodbye, Universe, Hello, Multiverse. Multiverse is a natural consequence
link |
02:24:44.240
consequence of inflation. Yes, according to its prominent, you know, supporters. Yeah.
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02:24:49.360
Yeah. And of course, leave the poetry to Max, which he does masterfully. Okay. So that the
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02:24:56.480
excitement was there. I mean, maybe the initial heartbreak for you is there too. That's that's
link |
02:25:03.280
some of the darker moments you're going through. But broadly for the space of science, there's
link |
02:25:08.000
excitement there. Huge excitement. And I often note that this is a problem in what I call, you
link |
02:25:13.200
know, the science media complex, because oftentimes you'll see things like past guest air seeker,
link |
02:25:19.520
Venus life, you know, exists. And that will be really, I mean, it's fascinating, right? And
link |
02:25:23.680
with the work that she's doing, or her colleagues are doing, Clara, who's on your show as well.
link |
02:25:28.080
And that will be on front page, New York Times, Boston Globe, San Diego Union Tribune, and it'll
link |
02:25:34.240
be above the fold, make headlines around the world. And then six months, 12 months later, as
link |
02:25:39.120
is the case for us, retraction, page C17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads, you know,
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02:25:45.120
and underneath the personal. So we have a problem in science that the, you know, if it if it if it
link |
02:25:51.200
explodes, it leads, you know, and we get this huge fanfare. And this is not unique to my experiment.
link |
02:25:56.720
This happened with the earlier discovery of so called Martian life of discovered in Antarctica,
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02:26:03.840
which was announced after peer review. We weren't peer reviewed at the point when we made
link |
02:26:07.840
the announcement, we had a press conference and there are other reasons that the team leaders
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02:26:11.680
felt it was important to do that so that we don't get scooped by a referee who's unethical.
link |
02:26:15.760
We thought we had done everything right, but that's confirmation by
link |
02:26:18.160
There's like levels to this. And there were people, you know, me,
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02:26:23.280
warning about how it would be interpreted and wanting to also make sure that we put all the
link |
02:26:27.600
data out, including the maps, which we still haven't released. And so there were a lot of
link |
02:26:31.840
reasons to be skeptical, but the audience, the, the public never knows this. I think it's,
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02:26:37.280
so I've made a rule that if I am ever in charge of, you know, doling out large amounts of science
link |
02:26:41.920
funding, that when you should keep kind of an option, in other words, you should have money
link |
02:26:46.560
for publicity, fine, have money for your press conference, but hold in reserve in a bond to
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02:26:52.640
be used, hopefully never. But if it's to be used, an equal fund for the retraction, if it should
link |
02:26:58.800
occur. So you would like to see, because that's a big part of transparency is the, is the,
link |
02:27:06.000
to me, in the space of science, at least, that's as beautiful because it reveals
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02:27:12.000
the, it's like, it's, uh, it does a great story. There's a, there's an excitement. There's, um,
link |
02:27:18.240
humanity. There, so there's a climax to the triumph, but there's also a climax to the,
link |
02:27:23.280
like the disappointment at the end, because that also eventually leads to triumph again.
link |
02:27:29.440
That sets up, that's the drama that sets up the triumph. Like with Andrew Wiles,
link |
02:27:33.280
for me, Fermat's last, uh, Fermat's theorem, I guess it's not last name, whatever, the,
link |
02:27:40.000
is like the ups and downs of that, the roller coaster, the whole thing should be documented.
link |
02:27:44.560
That is science. That is science. And when we don't do that, then we cultivate this aura
link |
02:27:48.960
that excludes other scientists, often from minorities or women, that you have to be Einstein,
link |
02:27:54.320
like Einstein came out of the womb and he was just like this guy with like curly, no, he wasn't.
link |
02:27:58.480
He was, he wasn't bad at math. That was all, that's all nonsense. But he said that he,
link |
02:28:02.720
you know what he said? He attributed his success to Alex. He said, I never asked my dad
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02:28:07.520
what happened when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid. And thank God I didn't, because had I,
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02:28:13.280
he would have told me the best answer of the day, which by the way, you know, he would create 20
link |
02:28:18.240
years later as a 26 year old in the patent office, obviously in Switzerland. And in so doing, by delaying
link |
02:28:24.880
when he asked these questions, he said, I approached it with the intellect of a mature scientist,
link |
02:28:30.160
not a little kid. And I wouldn't have accepted the same explanation. So sometimes assuming that
link |
02:28:35.680
scientists are infallible, inevitable, omniscient, you know, being, I think that really does a
link |
02:28:41.040
disturbance. And Jim Gates said, you know, he's like, Einstein wasn't always Einstein.
link |
02:28:44.880
And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we're humans,
link |
02:28:49.200
until we have artificial Einstein, which I don't think will ever exist.
link |
02:28:54.080
You've launched the assayer project where you hope to assess theories of everything with
link |
02:29:00.560
experiments. You have a YouTube video where you're announcing that. That's, it looks super cool.
link |
02:29:06.160
Can you describe this project? And you also mentioned kind of, you give a shout out to
link |
02:29:10.400
little known fellow by the name of Galileo Galilei as an inspiration to this project.
link |
02:29:17.040
Yeah. So Galileo is kind of my avatar, my hero, kind of all around scientists that I would love to
link |
02:29:24.560
approach the, you know, logarithm of Galileo. He was not only a phenomenal scientist,
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02:29:30.960
he was an incredible artist, a writer, a poet, a philosopher. And back then they didn't have
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02:29:37.600
distinctions between, you know, scientists and, you know, it was like a physician, was like a
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02:29:41.120
physicist. And he would indulge, you know, kind of these really intellectual flights of fancy,
link |
02:29:48.160
thinking about phenomena, such as the Earth's tides or the, you know, the composition of the
link |
02:29:54.400
Milky Way. And what's interesting about Galileo is that he was almost as wrong often as he was
link |
02:30:00.400
right. And Galileo was not alone like this. I always say like Einstein had at least seven
link |
02:30:06.640
Nobel Prizes that he could have won for discoveries that later became true. But he also had seven,
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02:30:12.000
you know, huge, you know, impossible to believe blunders in some sense.
link |
02:30:16.800
It's too bad because he could have had a good career, as I would say. And Galileo was like that
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02:30:20.880
too. In other words, he would fall victim to, I think, this confirmation bias that all scientists
link |
02:30:27.120
have to guard their lives against, their careers, their brands, their reputations against,
link |
02:30:31.920
which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn't conform to what you're trying to prove
link |
02:30:36.480
for one reason or another, or the radical acceptance of things that do comport with it
link |
02:30:42.080
in order to bolster your confidence. And both are equally intoxicating. It's, you know,
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02:30:46.880
confirmation bias is a hell of a drug because it really reinforces this notion,
link |
02:30:52.960
which is partially sunk cost. You've put so much time, effort, money, reputation into it.
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02:30:57.360
You don't want to be wrong and go back on it. And with Galileo, he would be incredibly perceptive
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02:31:04.240
about things such as, you know, the Earth being not located at the center of the solar system,
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02:31:10.960
and the Sun being the center, so called Copernican hypothesis. And he would use as evidence very,
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02:31:17.520
very interesting ideas that all of which were wrong, basically. And in fact, we weren't able
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02:31:22.240
to prove that the Earth orbited around the Sun. And I ask you, like, can you prove the Earth is
link |
02:31:27.600
not flat? No, well, you're a flat Earth or anyway. But, but, but it's, I asked my...
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02:31:31.840
Proud, flat Earth society member, t shirts coming out soon, lexstreaming.com, merch,
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02:31:38.800
last merch. But it's actually not trivial to do that. But most of my students,
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02:31:42.880
graduate students can prove that the Earth is rounder. Explain how the Earth...
link |
02:31:46.000
It is actually not trivial to do, though. It's not. Yeah.
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02:31:48.960
And much harder is to prove that the Earth goes around the Sun. In fact, that's extremely hard
link |
02:31:52.640
to prove. And almost none of my students, even after they get their PhD and the final exam,
link |
02:31:57.120
I kind of like to just, you know, give them a little bit of humility. Because I think they'd
link |
02:31:59.920
be a good scientist. You need to be humble. You need to have a little humility. And you need to
link |
02:32:03.920
have swagger. You need to feel like a little cocky. Like, I can do this. I can do this thing
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02:32:08.080
that Einstein, by definition, couldn't do. I'm going to attempt it. I'm going to attempt to do
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02:32:12.320
what was impossible just a generation ago. How do you prove that the Earth goes around the Sun?
link |
02:32:19.920
Is it by the motion of other planets? So there are many ways to do it. I mean,
link |
02:32:23.520
obviously, you could take a spaceship, park it at the North celestial pole of our solar system and
link |
02:32:28.400
just watch what happens. But obviously, that wasn't how it was discovered in the late 1700s.
link |
02:32:32.720
So it's called aberration. So if you look at stars as the Earth orbits around the Sun,
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02:32:39.440
the position of the stars will shift slightly because of the tilt of the Earth and because
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02:32:43.520
the Earth is in motion around the Earth and around the Sun. And because the Earth has a non
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02:32:48.320
trivial amount of velocity compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the Sun,
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02:32:53.520
the stars will trace out little tiny ellipses and those will correspond to the fact that
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02:32:57.440
we're moving around. If they're at infinite distance, which we assume that they are, they're not
link |
02:33:01.760
really. But for all intents and purposes and the scale of the solar system, they're infinitely
link |
02:33:05.120
far away. So that's called stellar aberration. And that was the first way it was discovered.
link |
02:33:10.400
And actually, we still use that. We have to correct for that effect when we measure
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02:33:14.000
the cosmic microwave background. Because imagine you're inside of an oven. It has some
link |
02:33:18.560
temperature three Kelvin and a thousand Kelvin whenever. If you're moving towards you, the
link |
02:33:22.720
photons that are coming to me in that direction will be blue shifted hotter. And the ones behind
link |
02:33:26.720
me will be redshifted. I'll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount of matter
link |
02:33:31.440
or energy where you are and then extension of the Doppler effect. So we actually
link |
02:33:35.520
make use of that and construct what's called like a local standard of rest.
link |
02:33:39.440
Anyway, so you can do it. But Galileo said, no, no, no, I'm not going to wait for that. I have other
link |
02:33:44.320
proofs for it. One of which is that the Earth has tides and the tides come in and out twice a day,
link |
02:33:50.000
high tide and low tide. And it's he made the analogy of because the Earth is moving around
link |
02:33:55.600
the sun, say this is the sun here, and it's moving around the sun, but it's also rotating on its
link |
02:34:00.000
axis. See how the water is sloshing up and down inside the vodka bottle. As that happens, he
link |
02:34:05.360
said that's what the tides are caused by. Totally wrong. Most people listen to this podcast. Just
link |
02:34:10.640
so you know, if you're listening to this, he actually has a bottle of vodka in his hand.
link |
02:34:14.720
Half drunk. And we're both drunk and whatever else is possible. So as it sloshed around,
link |
02:34:22.000
he claimed that was what now has nothing to do with that. The moon over there, the moon pulls
link |
02:34:27.520
differentially on the Earth and the Earth's ocean. That causes the oceans to bulge slightly
link |
02:34:32.960
towards and away from where the moon is. And the moon is actually the source of the Earth's tides.
link |
02:34:37.280
It has nothing to do with Copernicus, the orbit of the center. So he was totally wrong about that.
link |
02:34:42.320
He also thought that the Milky Way was comprised only of stars when we know it's made of gas,
link |
02:34:47.120
dust, nebulae, and things like that. So he had a fair share of blunders. Now, one thing I always
link |
02:34:52.720
kind of make note of, and I'm actually producing along with Jim Gates, Fabiola Gianatti, Frank
link |
02:34:58.720
Wilczek, and Carlo Revelli and my friend, Lucio Picharillo, the first ever audiobook of one of
link |
02:35:06.080
Galileo's Dialogue, the one where he claimed to find evidence for the orbit of the Earth around
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02:35:10.560
the Sun. But it was an error. So you're reading parts of this text. Yeah. It's a brilliant book.
link |
02:35:16.320
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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02:35:21.440
house arrest and almost threatened to be tortured. And that book laid out his arguments for what was
link |
02:35:28.000
called the Copernican or the nonparapetetic Aristotelian, et cetera, notion of the planetary
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02:35:36.000
dynamic. And eventually he was forced to recant that he believed in it and allegedly he said he
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02:35:42.320
still believes the Earth moves. Anyway, so it's written in the form of a trilog. It's actually
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02:35:46.560
called the Dialogue with three people. There's one named Salviati, who is espousing Galileo's
link |
02:35:52.560
notions about how the heavens were orchestrated. And Salviati means like the salvation, the savior.
link |
02:35:58.080
Then there's a middleman, Segredo. So Carlo Revelli is playing Salviati, a brilliant one.
link |
02:36:04.000
I am playing Segredo, who's like an intelligent interlocutor. I'm kind of just,
link |
02:36:09.280
I can appreciate Aristotle. I can appreciate Copernicus. Then there's this guy, Simpliccio,
link |
02:36:14.080
the simpleton. And he espouses the words of the pope. So you can imagine like, you know,
link |
02:36:19.440
you're working in the Putin's government or you're working in whatever. And all of a sudden,
link |
02:36:25.040
you're kind of putting the words of like the fool, literally calling the fool, but you're using the
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02:36:30.240
words of the all supreme powerful being on Earth at that time as the Vatican Church,
link |
02:36:34.560
especially for an Italian like Galileo. So he wasn't as brilliant, you know, politically
link |
02:36:40.880
as he was astrophysically and otherwise.
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02:36:43.840
Who's doing Simpliccio?
link |
02:36:46.320
Simpliccio is a friend of mine in University of Manchester named Lucio Picciarillo. He's
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02:36:51.600
an Irish guy, but he has a full blooded Italian. They all speak English and Italian. I only speak
link |
02:36:58.400
and the forwards are written by, so one forward and this place has three forwards,
link |
02:37:02.640
which is like a 12 word. Okay, the four words are written for me. Yeah, that was a good one.
link |
02:37:09.920
The forward three forward. One of them is written by Albert Einstein, in which he says Galileo
link |
02:37:16.400
was not only one of the greatest scientists in history. This is Einstein telling Galileo,
link |
02:37:21.520
but he was one of the greatest writers and minds of all of human history. That forward is read
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02:37:27.600
by Frank Wilczak, who you've had. Jim Gates, who you've also had. He reads the translation,
link |
02:37:34.160
the translator, Stelman Drake is a renowned scientific translator. And then Fabiola Gianotti,
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02:37:40.800
she reads the introduction and dedication from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany and some of the
link |
02:37:48.160
different introductions that Galileo himself had. It's such a thrill to be able to do it.
link |
02:37:52.880
I only randomly found out because I wanted to study it and it's like 500 pages long. And I was
link |
02:37:58.240
like, let me get the audio book because I'm an audio medium kind of guy. Didn't exist. So I said,
link |
02:38:02.480
let's do it ourselves. And so we did it. And hopefully it'll be out on Galileo's birthday,
link |
02:38:06.720
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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02:38:13.360
Galileo wrote many books, one of which is called the Military Compass. And this is an
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02:38:18.480
interesting book for my blockchain and your blockchain aficionados. In this book, he talks
link |
02:38:23.920
about a compass, which is not a magnetic compass, but an actual slide roll. It's basically a slide
link |
02:38:28.640
roll. And it's a manual. It's like, imagine if your phone came with a manual nowadays,
link |
02:38:34.240
they don't, right? But this was a manual for how to use this slide roll, which is enormously
link |
02:38:39.040
important. And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples. It's a brilliant book. One of the examples
link |
02:38:43.680
is how do you convert money? So he does a money conversion, currency conversion between Ducati
link |
02:38:48.880
and Florentine Ducati and Scootie and whatever, you know, Lyra, whatever, he does all these currency
link |
02:38:54.720
conversions. One copy of this book, or maybe maybe two exist, first printings from 1600 still exist.
link |
02:39:02.080
If Galileo had just kept those in his family, they're worth $100 million. Nowadays, you can't
link |
02:39:09.280
get a Scootie. A Scootie's worth nothing. Like a Ducati's worth not, I mean, maybe some collector
link |
02:39:13.840
wants a piece of paper, right? So it's a lesson. Like there are value in physical, you know,
link |
02:39:18.640
non fungible tokens, this original non fungible token. So, but then a third book is called The
link |
02:39:23.520
Assayer. So what is an assayer? So assayers were kind of like these alchemists, you know,
link |
02:39:28.880
physicists, chemists that would, would, would be around a court. And every so often for the
link |
02:39:33.920
treasurer, they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens and convert that to script
link |
02:39:38.880
or, you know, paper money. And to do that, they needed someone to verify with a standard of gold
link |
02:39:44.560
that they knew to be gold and do some kind of semi non destructive evaluation of the purported
link |
02:39:50.800
object, the metal that was supposed to be gold. So they would take these pieces of gold,
link |
02:39:55.360
theoretically gold, and they would rub it on something called a touchstone. Touchstone was
link |
02:39:59.520
a special piece of rock, granite, whatever. It has no intrinsic value. It's just a piece of rock.
link |
02:40:04.960
But with that rock, you could assay and determine the content of this thing that could be worth,
link |
02:40:11.040
you know, millions of lira or whatever, right? So it was an incredibly important job.
link |
02:40:15.040
And so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock and use it to do something valuable.
link |
02:40:20.560
What I want to do in the assayer project is take this plethora of physical theories of everything.
link |
02:40:26.800
I said recently, you know, we should give a nub all prize to someone who doesn't come up with
link |
02:40:30.800
a theory of everything because there's just, there's just like, it's just rotten with them.
link |
02:40:37.200
And I think it's great. You know, I often say that theory is kind of like software,
link |
02:40:42.800
and I'm not denigrating software at all. But like, you can create a lot of software,
link |
02:40:46.400
you can make a quine, and it'll make its own quine. And like, you can make infinite amounts of
link |
02:40:51.040
software. Look it up, kids. That's one of my favorite videos. And you could see, you can
link |
02:40:54.800
replicate, you can't replicate, you can't make a telescope that makes a telescope that makes it
link |
02:40:57.920
so. In other words, hardware is kind of like the non fungible token, that's ultimate minted,
link |
02:41:01.920
you know, limited edition, the book, the compass book. And so it's very expensive. That means
link |
02:41:07.840
you have to be very careful before you invest decades, billions, and humans into pursuing
link |
02:41:14.000
one of these theories of everything. You have to have good intuition for it. And lately, what
link |
02:41:18.480
I've seen is not predictions, but retradictions. So you see that the Large Hadron Collider will
link |
02:41:25.200
come out with a measurement. And then so and so, we'll say, oh, this is, you know, this is compatible
link |
02:41:30.800
with string theory, or g minus two of the muon. It has these bizarre properties. Fifth force,
link |
02:41:36.240
string theory predicts this. String theory solves this. Neutrinos, sterile neutrinos,
link |
02:41:43.440
Large Hadron Collider Bottom or B experiment, blah, blah, blah. They'll say that it's compatible
link |
02:41:49.040
after the fact. And it's not so bad, right? Because look, what did Einstein do with GR,
link |
02:41:53.040
general relativity? The first thing he did was not predict something new. He looked at the anomalous
link |
02:41:59.360
behavior of the planet Mercury. And he saw it was behaving strangely. And people had said, oh,
link |
02:42:04.480
that's because there's another planet hiding behind the sun that we can't see that perturbs the orbit
link |
02:42:08.960
of the planet Mercury. It's always called Vulcan. That was one approach. That's kind of like the
link |
02:42:13.680
dark matter approach where it's like, there's a clump of matter that we can't see that's influencing
link |
02:42:18.160
the planet that we can't see. And we use that to divine and intuit the existence of the other
link |
02:42:23.280
planet. That's actually how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was discovered because of the anomalous
link |
02:42:27.120
behavior of the planet Uranus. So Neptune was dark. We couldn't see it. It was tugging on Uranus in a
link |
02:42:32.160
certain way. And that led to Laverier discovering the planet, predicting where this planet should
link |
02:42:37.120
be found. So it had a good heritage and physics, right, to predict this planet that you couldn't
link |
02:42:42.000
see that work. But Einstein said, no, it's caused by the warping and bending of spacetime
link |
02:42:47.520
due to the presence of matter will later become known as the Einstein equations.
link |
02:42:51.440
So he explained why Mercury did that. And it was known since the time of Newton
link |
02:42:55.760
that Mercury was behaving in this really freaky way. So he didn't predict it. He retrojected it.
link |
02:43:00.480
That's fine. But at some point, you should come up with something new that's uniquely
link |
02:43:05.040
predictive of your theory, as I just said. The theory of dark matter in the context of Neptune
link |
02:43:09.840
is actually a valid theory. It just happens not to make sense in the context of Vulcan. And so
link |
02:43:14.800
if he had kept doing that, maybe perhaps he wouldn't have come up with these other predictions
link |
02:43:20.480
that he would later reject. Like, he rejected the existence of gravitational waves. You and Barry
link |
02:43:24.880
talked about that. He didn't actually believe it. It was the one peer reviewed paper that he had.
link |
02:43:28.800
He used to send back in those days, he sent a letter to Nature, physical review, publish this,
link |
02:43:33.440
you know, let me know how much it cost. And they got it rejected because he said,
link |
02:43:37.600
you can't detect gravitational waves. And actually, or they're not real. And the guy showed that
link |
02:43:42.000
they're real because he corrected a math error in Einstein and Rosen's paper. So it's fascinating.
link |
02:43:47.760
What should the assayer do? He or she should look at these theories, look what things they explain
link |
02:43:53.280
that already exist, and look at what new predictions they can claim to explain if we can build
link |
02:43:59.600
experiments to test them. You have to kind of challenge yourself to think about what kind of
link |
02:44:04.320
predictions can they make such that we can construct experiments. So that's like ultimately
link |
02:44:10.800
back going to the signal to the experimenter theorist, essentially. That's right.
link |
02:44:19.040
So like very experiment centric exploration of the fundamental theory of everything.
link |
02:44:25.760
That's right. And the best scientists, the best physicists were both experimentalists and theorists.
link |
02:44:31.920
Or at least that they, if they were experimentalists, they understood the theory well enough
link |
02:44:36.080
to make predictions or to explore the predictions and the consequences of those predictions.
link |
02:44:40.560
Or if they were theorists, they were like Galileo, like Einstein has patents for things that he
link |
02:44:45.280
invented. And then, you know, some of his work led to the laser and the maser. So he had practically,
link |
02:44:51.120
it wasn't just pure airy fairy, you know, quantum reality and expanding universe.
link |
02:44:56.160
So in this case, what I want to do is look at, you know, there's 10 different theories of everything
link |
02:45:00.000
or cosmological models, they make predictions, they have advantages and disadvantages. And I'm
link |
02:45:04.560
just asking the question, why aren't we applying Bayesian reasoning with confidence intervals?
link |
02:45:08.880
Why don't we have updates every time an experiment comes out? We can update our
link |
02:45:12.560
credulity in that experiment or that theory, rather, based on the results of the experiment.
link |
02:45:17.040
And we shouldn't do it after the fact. Or as, you know, Michio Kaku has said, well,
link |
02:45:21.200
you have to tell me what the initial conditions are. And that's not my job. You're supposed to
link |
02:45:25.200
tell me if string theory is correct. What should it predict if it's true? There's one big problem,
link |
02:45:30.320
which I should say, that to be a good ass air, I think you have to be worldly in the sense of
link |
02:45:40.240
worldly and curious, like we were talking about before with you and Joe. And you can't only talk
link |
02:45:46.560
your own book. You can't only understand your own pet theory of everything. You can't only say, well,
link |
02:45:54.000
I only understand string theory, and I don't have time for these other theories, or as if it's
link |
02:45:59.120
beneath me to even go into Garrett Leasy, or Eric Weinstein, or Stephen Wolfram, or aspects of M
link |
02:46:06.880
theory, et cetera, et cetera. And there are some that say, you know, like, why do we give string
link |
02:46:12.000
theory so much of an advanced past when we... There are actually predictions it's made that are
link |
02:46:18.480
completely anathema to what we observe in physics. Like, the dark energy should be negative, and we
link |
02:46:24.000
see it as positive. Like, that's a huge strife. You know, if you told somebody, here's my tenure
link |
02:46:28.160
application, and what they'll be like, oh, I've made this pretty... If it wasn't done by, you know,
link |
02:46:31.440
Maldesena and, you know, Witten and folks like that, I don't know if it would have had the traction,
link |
02:46:36.800
the endurance, the resiliency that's had. And that worries me, because all these men and some
link |
02:46:42.080
women are making these fantastic, brilliant, beautiful ideas, and they're not even looking
link |
02:46:46.960
at what their neighbor's doing. There's a thing that I really enjoyed seeing, and I don't see often
link |
02:46:52.960
enough of these theories, which is others who are also experts kind of studying them sufficiently
link |
02:47:00.560
well to steel man the theory, to show the beautiful aspects of the theory. You know,
link |
02:47:07.600
I see that with Stephen Wolfram. He has a very different sort of formulation of physics with
link |
02:47:15.280
his physics project. Now, physics is a foreign land to me, but his formulation, especially
link |
02:47:24.080
in the context of cellular talent or hypergraphs, just as objects, as mathematical objects themselves
link |
02:47:29.680
are familiar. And so I'm able to see the real beauty there, and it saddens me that others
link |
02:47:37.760
in the physics community can't also see the beauty. Like, give it a chance. Give it a chance
link |
02:47:43.360
to see the beauty. Give it your respect. So there is one person who does take time and is
link |
02:47:49.680
what I consider to be a great scientist in terms of what he thinks. He obviously has invested
link |
02:47:54.640
interest in his own theory, and it's Eric. Eric's got a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the history
link |
02:48:00.960
of physics, and he has a great warmth and graciousness when it comes to giving others. And I've
link |
02:48:08.240
witnessed this, and I've had, look, first of all, I think debate is pointless. Like, I don't know
link |
02:48:12.400
about you, but if you've ever voted, like, oh, I saw this debate, and, you know, because Trump did
link |
02:48:17.040
so badly, now I'm going to vote for Biden. No, never have. You almost never change anybody's mind
link |
02:48:21.280
unless you debate with love, unless you have almost like, we're going to win together,
link |
02:48:26.640
like the red team approach in the military, they're trying to win a war. So they may disagree on
link |
02:48:31.840
the tactics day to day, but the strategy, we have to win this war. I love you, and I want to protect
link |
02:48:36.720
you. I don't see that in very many of these physicists from Kaku. I almost see it. It's
link |
02:48:41.520
embarrassing in some ways, because they'll almost mock with the exception of Eric. You know, Garrett's
link |
02:48:46.480
interesting, you know, his theory is, you know, people have a lot of issues, very technical,
link |
02:48:51.440
but Eric has taken the time to try to understand it. Eric has taken the time to understand
link |
02:48:56.080
Peter White's theory, and I don't see the same graciousness extended from them, I'm sorry.
link |
02:49:01.360
Yes, you're right. I mean, with Eric, he hasn't, he wants to, but he hasn't extended the same
link |
02:49:06.960
for Stephen Wolfram, because I think... No, he did. No, actually, no, he did. I had a debate with
link |
02:49:12.160
them live on my show. No, I did. I listened to it, but like, I just think it's outside of the two
link |
02:49:16.640
kit that Eric is comfortable with. So it's not, it's not that he's not, but you're, the main thing
link |
02:49:22.720
that's often absent and Eric does have is like the willingness and like not just like dismissing
link |
02:49:30.080
or mocking though that he's, he's reaching out, but okay. I mean, what if it's not, you know,
link |
02:49:34.880
I made a joke when they were on, I was like, how many theories of everything can there be,
link |
02:49:38.160
you know, Highlander, you know, there can be only one, you know, I don't know, maybe.
link |
02:49:42.080
But he of course also like the other folks who propose a theory has an ego. He rides a dragon
link |
02:49:52.560
with the dragon representing the ego. Well, let me ask you about your friend, Eric Weinstein.
link |
02:49:58.880
So he proposed initial sketches of geometric community, which is his theory of everything.
link |
02:50:05.040
Maybe you can elucidate some aspect of it that you find interesting, but
link |
02:50:11.920
what do you think about the response he got from the scientific community?
link |
02:50:17.600
Well, you know, some of the response came from people, academicians, professors. Some came from
link |
02:50:23.520
a lay audience and some came from trained scientists or no longer, you know, maybe practicing
link |
02:50:28.400
in universities. I thought it was, there was a lot of vitriol, which surprised me because
link |
02:50:36.080
I look at what he's trying to do. And it was always, the vitriol would always come with some
link |
02:50:41.840
element of ad hominem. And maybe that's his personality, maybe that engenders this or whatever.
link |
02:50:48.080
Maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency. You know, I always get these emails,
link |
02:50:51.920
Professor Keating, I have a new theory, Weinstein was wrong. I'm going to prove it. I'm not going
link |
02:50:56.960
to math, but if you help me, I will share my Nobel Prize with you. Oh, thanks. Have you read
link |
02:51:02.320
my books? In other words, it's always taking down the dragon. It's always taking down the
link |
02:51:08.320
kung fu master, right? That you get the hit points from D&D. You get their hit points,
link |
02:51:12.320
you take their cards, you get their wrist tokens from Kamchatka. And thinking about
link |
02:51:16.880
with Eric, it's like, because what he's doing is so aspirational, it is grandiose in a good sense.
link |
02:51:22.800
What he's trying to do is construct a geometric theory of everything that has aspects of supersymmetry
link |
02:51:28.560
and stuff embedded in it. He's trying to meld that. It has very unusual features and that it
link |
02:51:34.640
features not only multiple spatial dimensions, multiple time dimensions. It uses new mathematical
link |
02:51:40.000
objects that he's invented. And look, I had had him on my show. I've talked with him. We've had
link |
02:51:47.040
consultations with other physicists, you know, where he'll come down and I have a visitor's
link |
02:51:51.360
office and he comes down to San Diego sometimes and spends time there. And we talk with eminent
link |
02:51:55.840
mathematicians and physicists. Eric's been out of the academic world for a long time.
link |
02:52:02.480
And there is, as I said before, an aspect of persuasion that must take place
link |
02:52:07.280
in order to get anything through. And I think there was a slight amount of good nature, not
link |
02:52:12.960
ignorance, naivete, but just the sense that if this is right, everyone will recognize it.
link |
02:52:18.160
If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door as the expression goes.
link |
02:52:22.560
That's completely untrue. That doesn't even happen with mousetraps. I mean,
link |
02:52:25.760
you know how many freaking mousetrap types there are? It's like, no, they don't beat a
link |
02:52:29.440
path to your door. You have to sell that freaking thing. You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or
link |
02:52:33.520
Elon. I have never, I've had one paper, I have 200 papers I've published in peer reviewed journals.
link |
02:52:39.280
I've only had one, half a percent published with no referees comments. In other words,
link |
02:52:44.320
published like Dream, submitted it, and happened to be in a prestigious journal. I thought I was
link |
02:52:47.840
pretty psyched about that. But you almost have to crave the response, getting it back from a journal.
link |
02:52:52.400
And I think he doesn't see, first of all, he doesn't subscribe to the peer review process.
link |
02:52:56.240
He thinks that is anathema to way sciences, invest interest in public journals, etc., etc.
link |
02:53:03.200
I think you can have elements of peer review that are substantive and valuable. I think you have to
link |
02:53:09.280
learn from your critics. One of my conversations with John Mather, he talks about loving your
link |
02:53:13.600
critics in this book, but not being so open to their criticism, that their criticism goes to your
link |
02:53:19.120
heart, and not being so open to their compliments, that their compliments go to your head. It's a
link |
02:53:24.960
very tough sila and carib this to walk. Well, there's something, I mean, I want to be careful here
link |
02:53:30.640
because I'd like to talk to Eric about this directly, but I'll just, from a perspective of a friend,
link |
02:53:39.120
I want to ask about the drug of fame. So there's also the public
link |
02:53:53.440
perception of the battles of physics. And so there's a very narrow community,
link |
02:53:59.680
but then there's the way that's perceived, the exploration of ideas is perceived by the public.
link |
02:54:06.160
And so there is a certain drug to the excitement that the public can show
link |
02:54:13.040
when they sense that you have something big. And that in itself might become the thing that gives
link |
02:54:21.680
you pleasure. And I think that with theories of everything or with any kind of super, super
link |
02:54:29.600
ambitious projects, and this is taking us back to when you were ambitious about trying to understand
link |
02:54:35.760
the origins of the universe, if you convince yourself that you have an intuition about the
link |
02:54:41.760
origins of the universe, and you have a platform like you do now, where you start to communicate
link |
02:54:49.920
your intuition, it's hazy like all the science, you're still unsure, but you have a sense. I mean,
link |
02:54:55.920
perhaps you don't have that as much as an experimentalist because you always kind of start
link |
02:55:00.000
going, okay, how can I build a device to see through the fog? But if you're more like a
link |
02:55:06.960
theoretician who kind of works in the realm of ideas, in the realm of intuitions, it is also
link |
02:55:15.760
a source of pleasure. You mentioned dopamine, a source of dopamine, that you can communicate to
link |
02:55:21.600
others that you're really excited by the possibility of solving the deepest mysteries of the universe.
link |
02:55:28.400
Yeah. So there's some aspect to which you want to be a Gregori Grisha Perlman and go into the
link |
02:55:36.240
hole and get the work done and shut the hell up about the, I'm speaking about myself about
link |
02:55:43.920
talking about the dream and planning and exploring how great it will be if my intuition
link |
02:55:49.680
turns out to be correct. If the sketches I have turn out to actually build the bridge that takes
link |
02:55:56.800
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 |
02:56:08.080
give? What is your role? Is it to be a supporter given that he has many critics or is it to be in
link |
02:56:15.440
private a critic? Like a lot of my friends will say, hey, shut the hell up. Just get it done.
link |
02:56:22.720
Well, first of all, I want to ask you a question I've asked him and then it comes from Animal Farm.
link |
02:56:29.280
My favorite book. Yeah. So you remember Benjamin the donkey?
link |
02:56:32.880
Yes. And he's talking to the pig. I forget the pig's name. You probably know. Anyway,
link |
02:56:37.200
the pig says to him, you got this long, lustrous, beautiful tail. You're so lucky. I got this short,
link |
02:56:42.880
curly, little squiggly thing. Does Jack squat? Tell me, how does it feel to have such a lustrous
link |
02:56:49.040
tail? And Benjamin says, well, the good Lord, he gave me a tail to swat away the flies. But you
link |
02:56:56.320
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 |
02:57:04.240
is it worth it? You've got these beautiful tail, but there are flies. I'm not saying in a negative
link |
02:57:10.960
way. I'm just saying you get unwanted distractions, dopamine, kind of the highlight, the spotlight
link |
02:57:17.680
effect. It's obviously allowing you to do things that you could never do alone. And I think,
link |
02:57:23.760
you know, first of all, I'd love to know how you answer that because that's something I don't feel
link |
02:57:27.840
I can relate to myself. Well, this has to do with more like
link |
02:57:33.440
platform, platform stuff. Yeah, scale. Oh, I, that has no very little effect on me. I enjoy it.
link |
02:57:43.440
I enjoy meeting new people, but that has nothing to do with platform. Yeah, no, that has no effect
link |
02:57:48.320
on me. Do I want somebody that enjoys the act itself. So this conversation, the reason I'm
link |
02:57:57.840
doing this podcast with you today is because that allows me to trick you into talking to me for a
link |
02:58:03.360
prolonged period of time. I don't care about platform. I assume nobody listens. It really
link |
02:58:07.520
doesn't matter. Yeah, I forgot it right. My whole test of it was a good podcast. Because how do you
link |
02:58:13.760
know? Like podcasts have been around, what, 12 years? How do we know as podcasters we're doing a
link |
02:58:17.680
good job? Like sometimes you get someone say, that was the best interview I ever had, but that
link |
02:58:20.560
doesn't happen that often, at least for me. But if you realize that you forgot to put the SD card
link |
02:58:26.560
in that little guy and the zoom didn't work, would you do it again? And I think if you say yes to
link |
02:58:31.840
that, that was a good podcast. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. So in that space, yeah,
link |
02:58:39.520
all of it is worth it. But the dream, I'm more referring to the psychological effects. Forget
link |
02:58:48.080
the platform, forget all of that. Maybe you shouldn't even brought up the platform because it
link |
02:58:52.880
really has to do even in your own private mind, which is what I'm struggling with.
link |
02:58:57.200
Because I enjoy the planning, the dreaming, the early stages,
link |
02:59:07.200
so much that I often don't take projects to completion. This is a psychological effect
link |
02:59:13.920
that I'm sure basically everybody, every engineer, everybody that does anything,
link |
02:59:18.240
goes through. I just, in this case particular, I think it also applies. And I wonder as a friend,
link |
02:59:24.000
what is the role? So yeah, I mean, that effect has been documented, everything from planning
link |
02:59:28.880
telescopes to dieting. So there's a tiny bit of dopamine that you get visualizing how you're
link |
02:59:35.040
going to feel, you don't need to know this, but you don't deal, but losing five pounds.
link |
02:59:39.200
I say, oh, I'm going to lose five pounds. And I'm going to be able to run a minute faster.
link |
02:59:43.200
So there's a part of me when I'm planning the diet and the meals and the exercise that I get a
link |
02:59:47.600
little bit of that thrill. And that actually saps a little bit of my willpower to actually
link |
02:59:51.360
complete the task that will take me to that goal. So that's a documented effect. And that happens
link |
02:59:55.120
in project planning and project management. It's a very, very important thing to guard against as
link |
03:00:00.640
a manager of a big project. With Eric, it's interesting because with him, first of all,
link |
03:00:06.080
we relate extremely well on a friendship level and very close. He does remind me a lot of my
link |
03:00:12.880
father. And I've told him that just as a mathematician, as a big thinker, as in his case,
link |
03:00:20.240
as a father, you know, the father kind of figure that I didn't have a sense. But that he is a
link |
03:00:26.160
true lover of life. He knows he's got a huge platform. He knows he gets a lot of attention
link |
03:00:30.480
for what he does. And, you know, I jokingly say, well, it's one thing, like, how do you know,
link |
03:00:35.520
Lex, that someone's an expert? So experts say there's a good rule Ray Dalio writes about in
link |
03:00:40.800
principles. He says an expert is someone who's done something three times successfully. Like,
link |
03:00:45.120
you can do something correctly once you could do something correctly. It's very hard to pull off
link |
03:00:49.280
like three projects, three telescopes, three, whatever, right? So look for that. It's arbitrary.
link |
03:00:56.160
It could be four, it could be two, right? But the point is, look at Eric. So how many things
link |
03:01:00.240
has he contributed to and made, you know, pretty substantive kind of paradigm shifts for different
link |
03:01:06.080
people? I would say he's been right many times. Does that mean he's infallible, that he's ineffable?
link |
03:01:11.280
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 |
03:01:17.360
something purely as a scientist, something completely outside of what I do, mathematics,
link |
03:01:23.520
gauge theory, the kind of very advanced geometry, topology that he's interested in.
link |
03:01:31.600
But every now and then, I will sneak in that I want, you know, I've told him, I'm going to turn
link |
03:01:36.400
your son into an experimentalist despite you. You know, like, he is not going to be a theorist.
link |
03:01:40.160
Zev is not going to be a theorist. He is working with me. He is learning from me. We're trying to
link |
03:01:43.680
get him into, he wants to bypass all of the, you know, kind of nonsense of undergraduate and go
link |
03:01:48.640
straight to graduate school. And I've tried to encourage him that maybe he could do it, maybe
link |
03:01:52.720
he can't, but there's no other way than to try. And so we, I prepared a whole curriculum for Zev
link |
03:01:57.520
to basically bypass all of undergraduate and to his credit, he's done, earns all the credit.
link |
03:02:02.000
He's learned it to a level that matches many of my graduates.
link |
03:02:04.960
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 |
03:02:09.840
talk to Eric about this, but to say you said, Eric's done, was right on multiple things.
link |
03:02:19.120
I think Eric has a great deep insight about human nature and how societies work. And he says a lot
link |
03:02:28.400
of wise words on that world. But I think if we're talking about experts, you kind of have to prove
link |
03:02:35.760
you, you know, it's like Michael Jordan playing baseball, like he's proved it many times that
link |
03:02:40.160
he can play basketball, but he's also got to prove that he can play baseball. And I would say the
link |
03:02:45.600
whole point of, I mean, of radical ideas is you're not, I mean, it's very hard to be sitting on a
link |
03:02:54.000
track record of, I mean, you're, when you're swinging for the fence as always, you're, there's
link |
03:02:59.040
not a track record to sit on. And like Max Tagmark is an example of somebody who has a huge track
link |
03:03:06.560
record of more like acceptable stuff, but he also keeps swinging for the fences in every other world.
link |
03:03:12.800
So he has that track record with Eric, if you look at just the number of publications, all
link |
03:03:17.680
this stuff, he did really, he chose not to travel the academic class. So there's no
link |
03:03:22.560
proof of expertise, except sort of an obvious linguistic demonstration of brilliance. But
link |
03:03:30.960
that's not how physics works. So there's a polite way to damn somebody as a scientist and say,
link |
03:03:35.760
he or she, she, they really know the history of physics, right? Like physicists always love
link |
03:03:40.960
it. Like Sean Carroll always jokes about like, you know, like physicists should never talk about
link |
03:03:44.240
history of physics. But it's more than that. So Eric has certainly contributed in finance
link |
03:03:51.360
and finance specifically and gauge theory and economics and inflation dynamics and the non
link |
03:03:58.080
cosmological. Hold on a second. That's yet to be proven. He has a lot of powerful interest.
link |
03:04:02.960
Well, gauge theory is calculated. It's calculus proven. I mean, he has a gauge model for currency
link |
03:04:10.320
exchanges between different nations that is explanatory. It's not, you know, is it something,
link |
03:04:16.720
in other words, it's a model and it's used for pedagogical purposes. And it might be,
link |
03:04:20.640
okay. It's unique to him. I mean, him and Pia. Yes. It might be a powerful model.
link |
03:04:27.280
It might be one that's actually deserves a huge amount of applause and celebration, but
link |
03:04:32.400
does not yet receive that. And that's one of the things that Eric talks about is not received the
link |
03:04:36.560
attention it deserves. But it has not yet received the attention it deserves. And so like the
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03:04:41.920
proven expertise thing, I mean, there's a lot of people that go to their grave without the
link |
03:04:47.440
recognition they deserve. And it's a tragedy. But the fact is, like, you have to fight for
link |
03:04:54.400
that recognition. The tragedy happens for a reason. You can't just say this person is obviously
link |
03:04:59.920
brilliant and therefore they deserve the credit in every single domain. It doesn't, it doesn't
link |
03:05:07.520
like transfer immediately. There's nobody that's, well, at least I wouldn't argue Eric is one of
link |
03:05:12.560
the special minds in our generation. But you still have to fight the fight of physics and prove
link |
03:05:19.120
it within the community. And I think the same applies in economics. You can't, I mean, as somebody
link |
03:05:25.600
that, you know, I've gone through the academic journey, just like you said, the peer review,
link |
03:05:33.280
all those things, flawed as they are, that's the part of the process. You have to convince your
link |
03:05:38.720
peers, the people that are as obsessed for whatever the hell reason about that particular thing that
link |
03:05:45.360
you're working on. Yes, there's egos. Yes, there's politics. It's a giant mess. But I think it's a
link |
03:05:51.360
beautiful mess through which you have to go through in order to reveal the power of your idea to
link |
03:06:00.560
yourself and to the world. Well, let me use an example. So you know of James Clerk Maxwell,
link |
03:06:05.920
and he invented the laws of electromagnetism, which is the first example of a unification
link |
03:06:10.240
principle ever displayed by the human mind in history. Purely mathematics, unifying completely
link |
03:06:16.720
disparate phenomena. In one case, electricity, charges, static electricity, lightning, and the
link |
03:06:21.920
other magnets, bar magnets, currents, etc. Unified them. You know what he did? I like to do a thought
link |
03:06:27.920
experiment. Imagine Twitter exists 1864. Maxwell's working away. And he goes, I have this wonderful
link |
03:06:33.520
idea with fluctuations and inductive virtue and blah, blah, blah. And it revolves around this
link |
03:06:38.640
thing called an ether. And by the way, there are these little vortices and gears. And the gears
link |
03:06:43.440
have these planetary things, and they suck up vortices. And the vortices determine the density
link |
03:06:46.800
of the electromagnetic potential. You feel like this guy's a fricking moron. And what would you do?
link |
03:06:52.400
Come on. Honestly, you would say everything this guy does is wrong. I mean, he's got this
link |
03:06:56.160
idiotic idea. And it would be falsified a couple of decades later by Mark Wilson and Morley. And
link |
03:07:02.560
in so doing, you would have thrown out a very beautiful baby with bathwater or as in Twitter,
link |
03:07:08.000
imagine the twitstorm, you know, clerk Maxwell at clerk Maxwell, one would get it would be brutal,
link |
03:07:14.320
right? And to the detriment, and that might even set back history. Imagine Yang Mills doing the
link |
03:07:18.800
same thing churned Simon's. A lot of these things are very fantastic. But but why Lex? Why does Ed
link |
03:07:23.760
Witton? Why does one know the same? Let me give a good good example. One guest, brilliant guy,
link |
03:07:29.200
I love him. He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded his black hole information
link |
03:07:34.400
paradox loss issue. What did he conceive it conceded based upon mild the same as calculation
link |
03:07:40.160
in ADS CFT and five dimensional wormholes? But is any of that? First of all, we don't live in
link |
03:07:46.480
ADS universe. Second of all, we don't know if wormholes are traversable if they exist even.
link |
03:07:51.440
You know, these are devices that are kept thorn is popularized for movies is like to say that
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03:07:55.840
this is something on which I will concede a bet. Now, obviously Hawking was doing that for publicity.
link |
03:08:00.720
Why does Mal Desena? Why does and he's got a pretty high H index, pretty well respected guy at IAS.
link |
03:08:06.480
Love talking to him, brilliant guy. By the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia's work on gauge
link |
03:08:12.560
theory and economics. Originally, and one, I believe the breakthrough, I can't remember exactly
link |
03:08:17.360
what but partially, you know, credit some of the work that he did, which appears there's a footnote
link |
03:08:22.240
to Pia Milani's thesis and some conversations, Eric, I think in it. Anyway, getting back to that,
link |
03:08:27.760
why is there not the same skepticism? Is it because Mal Desena, who's an eminent physicist,
link |
03:08:33.040
obviously, has published, you know, realistic work and done and done? What about Whitton?
link |
03:08:38.480
You know, Whitton gets a pass. I mean, if you...
link |
03:08:40.800
Well, Whitton gets a pass on which aspect? The string theory?
link |
03:08:43.600
Well, yeah, that M theory is correct. I mean, here's, let me just say Hawking. Hawking gets
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03:08:46.960
the ultimate pass. Hawking would say things like M theory, there's zero evidence for it. I mean,
link |
03:08:52.240
there's the famous meme that went around this weekend, like, what does string theory predict
link |
03:08:55.840
it and it's nothing? And by the way, that's actually wrong. I talked to Cumberland. I know
link |
03:08:58.880
you talked to Cumberland. Cumberland says that string theory does make predictions.
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03:09:02.080
It predicts the mass of the electron, lies between 10 to the minus one plank mass and 10 to the minus
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03:09:06.480
30 plank. Whatever, our electron. It's a big range.
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03:09:10.080
It's a huge range. Imagine Cumberland comes up and again, he's just some nobody, but he actually,
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03:09:16.160
you know, he doesn't have a profile. He's not a Harvard, has zero H and X or whatever Eric's is.
link |
03:09:21.120
Why do we not like, in other words, why are we more harsh on people that are trying?
link |
03:09:25.680
You know the answer to that. So I get a million emails, just like you said, yourself, where they
link |
03:09:32.640
provenize in my world is artificial intelligence, the equivalence of that.
link |
03:09:37.680
I figured out how to build consciousness, how to engineer intelligence, how to...
link |
03:09:42.800
You should send your emails to me and I'll send my emails.
link |
03:09:46.480
And we'll reply to you. I mean, and I don't want to sort of mock this because I think
link |
03:09:51.200
it's very possible that there is either kernels of interesting ideas or in the whole like,
link |
03:09:57.040
there is geniuses out there that are unheard, but because of the so much noise,
link |
03:10:02.960
you do have to weigh, like,
link |
03:10:06.320
hire the Ed Wittons of the world when they make statements. And that's why you build up a track
link |
03:10:14.320
record. As you said with Ray Dalio, you have to show that you can, like, if you're a Pollock and
link |
03:10:23.040
you show us a painting of a bunch of chaos, you have to, and this is a bad example, probably,
link |
03:10:28.320
because he probably never showed this proof. I think he could do it.
link |
03:10:30.320
Yeah. It's much more comforting to see that they can paint a good,
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03:10:38.640
accurate picture of still life of an apple on the table. So there's...
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03:10:44.080
Meteorite at a time.
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03:10:45.120
Because then, I mean, because then there's something about the scientific community that
link |
03:10:51.440
they have perhaps an oversensitive bullshit sensor to where they're not going to give the full effort
link |
03:10:57.040
of their attention if you don't have the track record. Now, you could say that's a kind of
link |
03:11:02.000
club that only you have to, like, you have to have 10, you have to have this, yes, that exists,
link |
03:11:06.880
but there's some aspect in which you have to play the game a little bit to get the machine of signs
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03:11:13.040
going. Otherwise, if you're always saying, well, I have my ball and I don't want to play your game,
link |
03:11:20.000
your game sucks, then nobody's going to want to play with you.
link |
03:11:22.800
That's true in there. Look, inherent in all of this is an underlying grandiosity. Look,
link |
03:11:28.320
how could you talk about doing what Kaku said on here and elsewhere? We're looking for the
link |
03:11:34.080
umbilical cord that connects our universe to another universe that will then reveal in a one
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03:11:38.080
inch equation that will surely win a Nobel Prize, the mind of God, the...
link |
03:11:41.280
That's like a prerequisite, I guess, to tackle these questions.
link |
03:11:44.080
I think it's detrimental. I think doing that, first of all, I think there's an element of
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03:11:49.760
almost snarkiness because none of these scientists are believing, you know,
link |
03:11:53.360
nostics. They're not theists, right? So they're using it as kind of a stand in,
link |
03:11:57.440
and they always talk about Einstein didn't mean it was like a Spinoza, and he wasn't, you know,
link |
03:12:01.200
a The... God doesn't play dice. God doesn't play dice.
link |
03:12:03.360
Yeah, Einstein mentions of God, yeah. Yeah, and then Stephen Hawking says,
link |
03:12:07.280
if when we come, we get an M theory understood, we'll know the mind of God.
link |
03:12:11.440
That's the title of Kaku's book, the God Particle, the God Equation, you know,
link |
03:12:17.040
do any of them really believe in God? No, is that a prerequisite? No, I'm not saying that.
link |
03:12:22.080
But the point being, you're talking about something that has to do with God, right?
link |
03:12:25.040
I mean, where else do you go from there? I mean, I think God, for now, enjoys a little bit more,
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03:12:29.360
you know, kind of PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right? So, like, it's, you know,
link |
03:12:34.720
God's got a pretty good, you know, H index himself.
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03:12:37.200
He has a, by the way, a Twitter account, just so you know, it's pretty good.
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03:12:40.240
The tweets of God, yeah. The tweets of God.
link |
03:12:43.120
So, if you look at that, you have to go in there. Again, you have to go in with some swagger.
link |
03:12:47.600
You have to have a little bit of arrogance, but you should, I agree, mix with a little bit of
link |
03:12:52.240
humility. So, he's doing something. He comes from outside of academia. Now, if he rails against,
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03:12:57.120
I'm talking about Eric now, if he's just railing, oh, the system, and I'm not going to publish,
link |
03:13:00.320
because F that, and that's only created by greedy journals, I don't think he's doing
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03:13:04.400
himself any favors. On the other hand, if he's shopping it, if he's talking it, if he's willing
link |
03:13:09.200
to expose it to criticism, and to even embrace people who may not have the purest intentions,
link |
03:13:17.280
perhaps, but in the sense of, like, they're not arguing solely to get to the truth with a capital
link |
03:13:23.040
T, what they're trying to do is take down, hopefully those people aren't out there,
link |
03:13:27.520
but on the other hand, looking at what Eric does for other people, looking at the fact that he has
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03:13:33.840
courtesy, he will look at Wolfram, he will look at Lisey, who's one of his closest friends.
link |
03:13:37.840
I mean, he calls him as Ant, not as Ant. Nemesis.
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03:13:40.640
Nemesis, right, right. I think that's interesting that they're loving friends.
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03:13:44.080
I really enjoyed that portal conversation, which, and Gary Lisey, Eric, Eric has torn about that
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03:13:49.120
conversation because, I guess, because of the nemesis of the beautiful dance of minds playing
link |
03:13:55.440
these ideas with the years of everything. Some of these things, you know, look, so fundamentally,
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03:13:58.960
now, I may disagree with him, Eric, on a different aspect, which is the only one I'm capable of,
link |
03:14:03.280
but let me say one thing, which is experimental, but let me say one thing. I understand probably
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03:14:08.240
a third of what Eric's talking about with GU. I understand, you know, GR, I understand mathematics,
link |
03:14:13.760
I understand some group theory, fiber bone, I can get a little of it, the age theory,
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03:14:19.040
but I also understand what I don't understand, and I understand that there are people like
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03:14:23.360
Witt and Maldesena, Nima, other people that can understand it, and they're not trying to understand.
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03:14:29.760
Sabina, she can understand it. She makes all these, you know, oh, I don't understand it,
link |
03:14:33.280
I don't want to understand it. I don't have time, and then she makes a video, a music video,
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03:14:37.360
you know, kind of mocking Eric and Steven and Garrett. I'm like, oh, you have a time to do,
link |
03:14:41.360
and I love Sabina, and I've actually promoted my show on her, and I love her, and she's doing
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03:14:46.400
a wonderful job, but you have a video that you said yourself takes eight weeks to produce from
link |
03:14:50.880
Start to Fit, and you couldn't have spent, you know, 30 minutes, two hours. I, Brian Keating,
link |
03:14:55.440
have done it as an experimental cosmologist, and I have enough to say, like, this is interesting,
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03:15:00.080
it's part of the assayer project, and it actually, I shouldn't say that there are no people,
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03:15:03.840
they're very serious. Louis Alvarez Gommet at SUNY, Stony Brook, Simon Center for Geometrical
link |
03:15:09.120
Physics, so he and I are running this seminar, hopefully this summer, we're going to reenact
link |
03:15:13.760
the famous Shelter Island conferences in 1900s, where, you know, Feynman got together and they
link |
03:15:19.280
calculated the lamb shift and all, but what did that feature? The harmony, the resonant minds
link |
03:15:25.520
behind the best experimentalists in cosmology, particle physics, condensed matter physics
link |
03:15:30.400
is now teaching us tremendous things about, you know, lower dimensional systems that can be applied.
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03:15:35.680
Theorists and experimentalists, observers, cosmologists, we all were get together,
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03:15:40.480
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
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03:15:45.120
a loud man, I don't have time for that. I really don't. I don't think it's an interesting way to
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03:15:49.200
spend my time. There's an aspect that I hope to see, and it goes back to our sort of discussion
link |
03:15:56.400
about Joe Rogan. I do hope to see sort of love and humility in the presentation, like, let go of
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03:16:01.840
this kind of fear of your ideas being stolen and the ego that's inherent to the scientific pursuit,
link |
03:16:09.440
and not that everybody is established and known entities. Let go of that a little bit so we can
link |
03:16:18.240
explore and celebrate ideas. I would love to see more of that, just because you're saying,
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03:16:22.480
especially with these big ideas of theories of everything.
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03:16:25.440
And I've talked, I mean, this isn't talking in tales out of school, but I mean,
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03:16:28.960
he has made claims that I fundamentally disagree with, you know, in terms of like,
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03:16:33.120
you know, he's had this Twitter baiting, you know, loving trolling of Elon, you know,
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03:16:37.280
why are you spending all this money to get to Mars? You know, we should be spending money on
link |
03:16:40.000
interdimensional travel and we can unlock it. And I said to him, like, and he makes the point,
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03:16:44.400
you know, that, oh, the atomic theory, you know, that unleashed the nuclear age and that, you know,
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03:16:50.880
could lead to planetary destruction. But I make the point pushing back with love on him. And I
link |
03:16:56.160
say, look, nobody looked into the equations, you know, like Fermi didn't like look into all these
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03:17:00.560
equations of the unification, which still doesn't exist. By the way, we spent all this time, Lex,
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03:17:05.200
and I don't know why it is, it's a phenomenon purely in theoretical physics. People are looking for
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03:17:09.520
the toe, and they're overlooking the gut. In other words, they're spending all this time in
link |
03:17:14.000
the theory of everything, the God equate, and there's this gut that unifies the three stronger
link |
03:17:18.160
forces. We don't have a single theory for that. And people like lash out, they've tried and failed
link |
03:17:22.640
at it. For people don't know, there's four forces, gut grant unification theories that
link |
03:17:27.360
unifies the three forces stuff and don't try to get a shortcut to the theory of everything,
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03:17:31.840
which unifies the four. And then there's this whole thing that may be quantum gravity is not
link |
03:17:37.040
even a thing. So we're trying to solve, we're trying to solve the puzzle of everything at the
link |
03:17:47.440
physics level. And then already before solving it, already saying once we solve it, here's going to
link |
03:17:54.000
be all the beautiful time. Yeah, I suppose you need that kind of ego, that confidence,
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03:18:06.800
that ambition in order to even have a chance at some of these. The only two people in this
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03:18:11.280
book of Nine Noble Laureates who told me they don't have the imposter syndrome or two theorists,
link |
03:18:16.720
Frank Wilczuk and Sheldon Glashow. And Frank, is it pretty interesting? And I know eventually
link |
03:18:21.760
we're going to talk about the meaning of life, but you talk about Frank. Frank invented this
link |
03:18:26.240
theory along with his advisor and another third person in the early 1970s, which from 1974,
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03:18:33.520
three, when he was a Princeton, all the way up until 2004, when he won the Nobel Prize, every
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03:18:37.200
day of his life. Imagine this, Lex, you're going to have this startup, someone tells you're going
link |
03:18:41.760
to win a lottery. You're going to win a lottery in 40 years. What becomes your singular focus
link |
03:18:46.960
in your life from now until the next 40 years? Well, I'm not sure. I mean, would it be winning
link |
03:18:55.600
a lottery or if I'm so confident? I'm saying you're guaranteed to win a lottery. Here's this
link |
03:18:59.760
wallet, Bitcoin wallet. It's going to guarantee you don't have this much money. It's stablecoin,
link |
03:19:02.880
whatever. You're going to win it 40, but you have to wait 40 years. To me, it would be surviving
link |
03:19:07.920
for the next 40 years. You wouldn't leave your house. You would go out in a bubble wrap hat.
link |
03:19:12.320
You wouldn't go out with that 20 masks on, right? Your whole life would be consumed with... Now,
link |
03:19:17.120
imagine everyone's telling you you're going to win the Nobel Prize, which is bigger than the
link |
03:19:20.080
lottery. I mean, many P prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize, and every person who wins a prize
link |
03:19:24.960
that's worth three times the money, like Maldesena, he would trade the breakthrough prize for a Nobel
link |
03:19:29.600
Prize and a heartbeat. So these guys had to wait 40 years. Imagine the excruciating pain.
link |
03:19:35.360
What got him through it? He didn't feel like he didn't deserve it. He felt like, hell, yeah,
link |
03:19:39.600
I earned it. He has that swagger. And what I'm looking for in this asset is to try to find
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03:19:45.920
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 |
03:19:49.360
I am. But can we bypass? Can we get shortcuts? What's called the low energy regime? And to me,
link |
03:19:54.000
that's what's interesting. What can we do now? I don't care. Isaac Newton came up with color
link |
03:19:59.200
theory, and he did something really interesting. Next time I come, I'll bring you some prisms.
link |
03:20:02.000
So what did he do? He took a white light. He took a prism from the sun, actually. He put it through
link |
03:20:06.320
a slit, put it through a prism, and it made a beautiful rainbow, like you've seen. And then he
link |
03:20:10.880
took another prism, and he put it upside down, like, you know, dark side of the moon, whatever.
link |
03:20:15.440
And the light went through the first prism, turned into a rainbow, and then the rainbow
link |
03:20:18.880
went into a prism and came out a white light. That's pretty cool. Then he took a popsicle stick
link |
03:20:24.160
or whatever, a pipe tobacco, and he put it in the beam, like, blocked out the orange,
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03:20:29.520
and it didn't make white light come out. So he showed, like, colors of synthesis.
link |
03:20:33.920
It's a common... He didn't use, like, the Large Hadron Collider to do that. You know, he used a
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03:20:38.720
very low energy experiment to prove a unification in this color physics and different kind of color
link |
03:20:43.280
physics than in quantum chromodynamics. But nevertheless, can we find things like that?
link |
03:20:47.680
Are we spending way too much time and energy thinking about the future circular collider,
link |
03:20:52.000
which, even if it gets built, will cost $30 billion just to build? By the way, any time,
link |
03:20:56.000
from now on, if I leave you with anything, any time an experimental physicist tells you a number,
link |
03:20:59.920
always double it, maybe triple it. How much is it going to cost? To operate it. So, like, do we
link |
03:21:04.640
build an aircraft carrier to build an aircraft carrier? Do we build a nuclear reactor, a semiconductor
link |
03:21:09.680
facility? And the rule of thumb that works pretty well in project management is it costs about 10
link |
03:21:13.440
percent per year to operate a given object of sufficient complexity. And in this case, so in
link |
03:21:19.120
10 years, it'll cost double the cost. So never believe a number, whether it's from our mutual
link |
03:21:23.280
friend Harry or whoever, don't believe the number. Double it and then say, is it worth it? And so
link |
03:21:28.000
building a solar system size accelerator, even if it were possible, do we have to do that? Or can
link |
03:21:32.960
we use these two 30 solar mass objects colliding together to test the number of large extra spatial
link |
03:21:39.600
dimensions? Can we do that? People are working on it. I think it's fascinating. So focus on building
link |
03:21:44.800
detectors. Experiments. That, like, where the cosmos is part of the experiment, I suppose,
link |
03:21:55.840
that's doing the hard work. Because when you're saying low energy regime, because for some of these,
link |
03:22:01.280
especially big questions like theories of everything, you need some high energy events.
link |
03:22:07.200
And so somehow figure out how the high energy events that are already happening out there,
link |
03:22:12.320
how to leverage them to understand here on Earth. So one of the alternative theories of
link |
03:22:18.160
cosmology that is not singular quantum gravitational requiring as the Big Bang and
link |
03:22:22.720
inflation are, are these balancing models. Some of them feature a similar kind of entity called
link |
03:22:29.200
the quantum field. And that quantum field in the initial stages of the universe of our current,
link |
03:22:34.560
after the bounce, which is not a singularity, it compresses to a classical kind of rebound,
link |
03:22:39.200
and the universe starts expanding. During that process, the expansion is governed by what's
link |
03:22:44.880
called a scalar field, of which we only know one that exists. That's called the Higgs boson. Higgs
link |
03:22:49.440
is a scalar fundamental particle, fundamental field. That field then later does double duty,
link |
03:22:56.240
and it becomes dark energy. So it solves two problems. And I'm not saying it's correct,
link |
03:23:01.760
we don't know yet. But are there observations of, and so dark energy is manifest today,
link |
03:23:06.240
it's manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions, etc., etc. We see the effects of
link |
03:23:12.080
accelerating universe caused by presumably dark energy. Is dark energy a constant, or does it vary?
link |
03:23:17.600
That has to vary in order for this theory to be true, because that eventually has to decay so
link |
03:23:22.400
that the universe can not support itself and collapse again, again, classically. So we could
link |
03:23:27.120
use low energy phenomena. It's hard to think of supernova as being a low energy phenomenon,
link |
03:23:31.280
but we use that as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field and see, does it change or
link |
03:23:35.680
is it a constant? That's an example of a low energy limit to prove a high energy phenomenon
link |
03:23:40.080
like this collapsing universe in the cyclic model. Speaking of things that cost a lot, but are super
link |
03:23:45.600
exciting. Page two? No, we'll wrap it up. There's more than page two. What do you think this is?
link |
03:24:00.960
Louis de Broglie's thesis was three pages long. Anyone want to know about prize for the wave
link |
03:24:04.480
particle duality? So size matters in different dimensions in life. I think the lessons I've
link |
03:24:12.480
learned about life is the short of the paper or the short of the thesis. Some of the greatest
link |
03:24:19.520
papers I've ever written are short. I feel like some of the best ideas in this world,
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03:24:25.920
not to sound like a contradiction of Feynman, a contradiction on top of a contradiction,
link |
03:24:30.240
but it could be written on a napkin, honestly, which just kind of tells you something about ideas.
link |
03:24:36.720
What are your thoughts about the James Webb Space Telescope? Is this somebody who likes telescopes
link |
03:24:49.840
and this is one of the, I think it says, took 20 years to build, $9.7 billion. Is that way too
link |
03:24:58.240
much too little? Are you excited about this thing? It's sufficiently different from what I do in my
link |
03:25:03.680
field that it's incredibly interesting to me because I have no horse in that race and so I'm
link |
03:25:10.240
not competing with them for time or money or resources or people or whatever. So I can purely
link |
03:25:15.040
be an advocate and an aficionado of science. It is in some sense the successor to Hubble.
link |
03:25:21.680
It will do things that Hubble can't do. It will also may or may not have the impact on a visceral
link |
03:25:28.240
kind of artistic level that Hubble had. What are some of the most iconic things that Hubble did?
link |
03:25:34.080
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the pillars of creation, storms and imaging of these twisted
link |
03:25:40.560
deep sky galaxies, those resonated with the public. Just visually, they're beautiful.
link |
03:25:46.880
Yeah, when you look at these images, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, you'll maybe put that in,
link |
03:25:51.280
you'll show every speck of light except for one, 4,000 blobs of light. There's one star in our
link |
03:25:57.200
galaxy, the rest are galaxies. Now, that image is less than one tenth of your fingernail held
link |
03:26:02.400
out at arm's length. It contains 4,000 galaxies. So now you can figure out how many galaxies there are
link |
03:26:08.400
in the whole sky just by seeing how long does it take you to move your fingernail over the whole
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03:26:12.640
sky. So we have another couple of hours. No, so it comes out to be that's how we get 500 billion
link |
03:26:17.680
or more galaxies. Now, it's not exact to the galaxy, but it's a good order of magnitude estimate,
link |
03:26:22.720
maybe even better. Hubble produced that and it was basically serendipitous. They pointed to some
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03:26:27.520
dark blank piece of sky what they thought was blank and they saw it. Same thing that happened
link |
03:26:31.680
with the CMB. They were looking for something they didn't find. Same thing they found when they
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03:26:35.360
were looking for the deceleration of the universe and found it was accelerating. So what I sometimes
link |
03:26:41.920
hear is that we don't know what we're going to discover. I never think that's a good idea to
link |
03:26:46.000
spend billions of dollars on something. You should have some guaranteed low hanging fruit
link |
03:26:50.160
and then there should be swinging for the fences. And I think in this case, it was really everything
link |
03:26:55.520
is swinging for the fences because it's either it's kind of a single point failure. If that
link |
03:26:58.640
telescope, which is this origami construction of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly
link |
03:27:05.280
and then orient themselves a million miles from Earth beyond the Earth Moon distance by a factor of
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03:27:10.160
four and still transmit telecommunication back to the Earth, get solar energy, keep it away from
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03:27:16.880
the sun. You don't want to look through the telescope of the sun with your remaining good eye
link |
03:27:20.960
and you do that and you cover. It's going to be phenomenal for science, for sure, if it works.
link |
03:27:27.760
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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03:27:33.440
and what if it does fail? I mean, there's no guarantee. Yes, it's insured, but so what? You're
link |
03:27:37.760
not going to get back those 20 years of people. Well, let's start building it again. They didn't
link |
03:27:41.440
build two copies of it. And then if it fails, it kind of has a dampening effect on the prospects
link |
03:27:50.640
and the inspiration of the public for what science can do, what science engineer can do
link |
03:27:54.400
is all in space. It will make a huge impact scientific. Let's hope for the best. Let's assume
link |
03:27:58.800
it does succeed. It's launched in a couple of weeks and when it does, it will transform our
link |
03:28:04.720
understanding of we just discovered not only like extra solar planets that have moons on them
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03:28:11.040
and asteroid belt, we discovered an extra solar planet in another galaxy. This will be able to
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03:28:15.520
see crazy stuff like that, spectroscopy, imaging. But it will be able to go back farther in time
link |
03:28:22.880
such that we will be doing cosmology. Hubble did some cosmology and measured the Hubble constant.
link |
03:28:27.280
That was its key project when it was designed and launched. But because it is optical telescope,
link |
03:28:33.360
it's sensitive to more close in redshift, so shorter distances. Now, James Webb is much,
link |
03:28:38.320
much higher redshift. It can probe the darker, deeper distant universe.
link |
03:28:42.160
Okay. Let's talk about not the distant universe, but our neighboring planets.
link |
03:28:47.120
First, I got to ask you about the moon. So there's a piece of the moon on this table
link |
03:28:55.040
that you've given me that we didn't have to pick up that arrived here.
link |
03:29:00.080
That's right. So how did a piece of the moon arrive here on Earth?
link |
03:29:03.360
So this chunk of the moon, if it were delivered by the Apollo and NASA missions,
link |
03:29:10.160
you and I would be guilty of a felony right now because they legal to own pieces of the moon
link |
03:29:14.480
collected by the Apollo astronauts. So don't even joke about that when you go over to Houston.
link |
03:29:19.520
This piece of moon, rock, was delivered via the old fashioned way by gravity. So
link |
03:29:24.400
this was a chunk of the moon, which is blasted off because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids
link |
03:29:30.560
and meteoroids. Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon into space.
link |
03:29:36.080
And it will then orbit the common moon Earth system. And it will then eventually enter our
link |
03:29:42.960
atmosphere. And if the piece is large enough and the trajectory is proper, it can land intact.
link |
03:29:47.680
And this one landed with a few hundred grams worth and they sliced it up. And then it was
link |
03:29:53.040
delivered via US Postal Service to my house. So you can buy these pieces and actually you can buy
link |
03:29:58.080
a piece of Mars. You can buy a piece of Mars delivered by the same route. Now, what's so
link |
03:30:03.280
interesting about that? Well, if a piece of Mars can get here, a piece of Earth can get there,
link |
03:30:08.560
some piece of Earth has some life forms on it, it could get there. And if that can happen in our
link |
03:30:13.840
solar system, it could happen throughout the galaxy. So I'm actually not of the opinion
link |
03:30:18.320
that there is life elsewhere in the universe, at least technological life that we can see.
link |
03:30:23.440
I see this look of horror on your face. I view it, I am personally extremely pessimistic,
link |
03:30:30.000
would be extremely surprised. I'm just, I'm curious by the transition,
link |
03:30:34.400
because you just said that life could have arrived from Mars or like from planet to planet
link |
03:30:40.560
by because of the meteorite striking it and so on. Yeah. And then you went to, you don't think
link |
03:30:45.600
there might be life out there in the universe. Technological life. Technological life,
link |
03:30:50.640
yeah, advanced intelligence civilizations. Okay. Okay, so go on.
link |
03:30:56.400
Yeah. So that's the generalization of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called,
link |
03:31:00.960
I know this is a PG 13 power, it's called panspermia. Panspermia.
link |
03:31:06.320
Beep that out, please. Yeah, please. And that's the exchange of
link |
03:31:10.800
genetic life form material from other reaches on Earth, which explains the origin of life on Earth,
link |
03:31:16.640
but not the origin of life itself, which I think is a much grander mystery and much more interesting.
link |
03:31:22.000
How did life get here? And you've talked with many eminent people about that.
link |
03:31:25.840
I'm not going to add that much, but just thinking about the reverse process. Let's say
link |
03:31:30.240
life started on the Earth somehow and then made its way out into the universe. Is there enough
link |
03:31:35.280
time for the whatever material went from Earth via panspermic direction, spraying the love gun
link |
03:31:41.600
out into the universe, did that then have enough time to incubate and go onto a planet that could
link |
03:31:46.320
support it? Certainly not within our solar system, which traveling at the meteorite speeds would
link |
03:31:51.440
require hundreds of millions of years, then looking at the evolutionary history from bacteria to Bach,
link |
03:31:57.680
from rocks to Rachmaninoff. I don't know, I can do this all day.
link |
03:32:01.680
Oh, wow, that's pretty good.
link |
03:32:02.800
How do you get from those very simple inanimate objects to life? I just simply think there's
link |
03:32:07.200
not enough time for Earth to seed life, technological life throughout the galaxy. I
link |
03:32:10.640
don't think there's any evidence for that.
link |
03:32:12.480
But so you really think that the origin of life on Earth is a really special event.
link |
03:32:19.840
Yeah, if it did originate on Earth, my question for those that search for life outside the Earth
link |
03:32:26.160
is what if you had a letter from God and the letter said life didn't originate on Earth?
link |
03:32:32.160
Like, would you choose a different profession? It would seem hopeless. In other words,
link |
03:32:36.880
we only have a sample of one. In fact, we only know of one conscious life form,
link |
03:32:40.160
let alone one planet that has life on it. What if you knew for sure it didn't start here?
link |
03:32:44.960
That means that there's almost nothing about Earth that is originated. It didn't
link |
03:32:50.720
originate the life process. So to study purely the origin of life, not life itself,
link |
03:32:54.480
I think that's still fascinating. But how could we learn about the origin of, remember,
link |
03:32:59.360
you have to go from inanimate object to a living object, whatever that definition of life is.
link |
03:33:04.080
And I'm not an expert in many definitions, Max, Sarah, many different definitions.
link |
03:33:09.360
But how do you actually go from inanimate to animate? It's a huge question.
link |
03:33:14.640
Yeah, but then you don't have to be the place where life originated to replicate the origin.
link |
03:33:21.600
Yeah, that's one way to understand something is to build it. But another way is to just observe
link |
03:33:27.440
it. You don't have to truly reengineer for scratch. But then, yes, if it didn't originate on Earth,
link |
03:33:37.040
then your intuitions about the basic prerequisites of life are off.
link |
03:33:43.440
What's the governing principle? And then you can have just an almost an arbitrary number
link |
03:33:50.240
of possible, like, if life didn't start on Earth. So to me, that's exciting because
link |
03:33:58.480
it's like, we know even less than we thought. The thing is, it can prosper on Earth though.
link |
03:34:04.320
Yeah. So maybe the origin of life is fundamentally different from the maintenance of life.
link |
03:34:11.120
Right. And maybe the existence of the Earth life symbiosis is critical. I think Sarah,
link |
03:34:17.200
you talked about Sarah Walker, that it's a planetary phenomenon, etc. So doesn't that
link |
03:34:22.880
make it less like, in other words, not only do you need special life conditions to create life,
link |
03:34:28.000
but then sustenance of life, as you say, that also has to be maintained under very specific
link |
03:34:34.560
circumstances by very specific planets and with very specific tectonic activity and moon.
link |
03:34:39.440
And by the way, you need a Jupiter nearby. You need an Earth and a moon system so that you
link |
03:34:44.000
don't get bombarded too early. And I always think like this, like, technological life.
link |
03:34:48.560
I haven't said this before, really, so I'm just speaking. I usually like to write down before I
link |
03:34:52.080
say this differently. But one of the things I thought about this... Somebody hosts a podcast.
link |
03:34:55.120
You should probably accept the fact that you're going to say stupid things every once in a while.
link |
03:35:00.080
Not every once in a while. Every while. I claim that, you know, to get to sending, you know,
link |
03:35:06.320
people to the moon, you know, our planet needed whales and dinosaurs, right? Like,
link |
03:35:12.000
you don't make a solar panel from another solar panel. Like, you made a solar panel from a factory
link |
03:35:16.960
that melted down glass, silica, you know, aluminum extruded that using fossil fuels.
link |
03:35:21.520
Where do those fossil fuels come from? Like, so any civilization that's going to be a Dyson,
link |
03:35:26.000
you know, Kardashev's, do they have dinosaurs? Like, do they have, like, prebiotic life?
link |
03:35:31.120
Did they have a great oxygenation event? Did they have a dimorphism between prokaryotic,
link |
03:35:36.000
eukaryotic? All those hurdles... Let's say you give each one... Let's say there's eight hurdles.
link |
03:35:40.720
And each one of those has a probability of one in the thousand to go from, you know,
link |
03:35:44.560
eukaryotic, prokaryotic, whatever. Let's say that's a one in a thousand chance. I think it's like one
link |
03:35:48.720
in 10 to the 40th or whatever if you really do it. But let's say it's first generous nature,
link |
03:35:53.040
one in 10 to the 3. Let's say there's eight of those hurdles. That means you have, you know,
link |
03:35:57.680
10 to the 24th power, different possibility. And that's just with eight. Like, the moon has to be
link |
03:36:05.360
there, Jupiter has to be there, dinosaurs had to be there, all the different things that we have
link |
03:36:08.720
to get to technological life. There's only 10 to the... Only. There's 10 to the 22nd, we think,
link |
03:36:15.120
earth, not earth, planets in the observable universe, not the galaxy. So that's 100 times
link |
03:36:21.680
fewer than the probability to get, you know, 100% clearing these eight very low hurdles of one in
link |
03:36:27.600
a thousand. That's fascinating. Because now I really need to listen to your conversation with
link |
03:36:31.920
Lee Cronin, who I believe you had, because he believes the opposite. Yes, I'm gonna have a debate
link |
03:36:38.320
with him. He believes that the way biology evolved on earth could have evolved almost an
link |
03:36:47.040
infinite number of other ways. So like, if you ran earth over and over and over, you would keep
link |
03:36:51.680
getting life and it'll be very different. So the fact that our particular life seems unique
link |
03:36:59.920
is just like, well, because every freaking life is going to seem unique, but it'll be very different.
link |
03:37:04.960
It's not like we shouldn't be asking the question of what's the likelihood of getting a human like
link |
03:37:10.560
thing. Because that seems to be super special. It's more like, how easy is it to make anything
link |
03:37:22.000
that has the skills of a human. And I don't mean like something with thumbs, but achieving basically
link |
03:37:27.840
a technological civilization. And according to Lee, at least, it's like, it's trivial. I know,
link |
03:37:34.000
we fought a little bit. I'd love to debate him. I think it'd be a lot of fun because we debate
link |
03:37:37.520
with love when I talk with Lee, I love him and he loves me, I think. I hope. But let me ask you
link |
03:37:41.440
a question. I asked this of him and Sarah on our clubhouse ones. So what do you think would happen
link |
03:37:46.720
the next day? Let's say we discovered life. It's Proxima Centauri B. It looks just like slime mold,
link |
03:37:54.800
like you get on your breed cheese or whatever. We discover it. What would happen the next day?
link |
03:38:00.240
And they were like, oh, this would be transformative. And I'm not trying to be
link |
03:38:05.040
like, you know, total Cassandra about this. But I said, I don't think anything would happen.
link |
03:38:09.760
What are you talking about? This would be transformational. I'm like, I stipulate that life
link |
03:38:13.680
exists. Go down to like the river, you know, I'm in San Diego, go down to the Pacific Ocean,
link |
03:38:17.760
scoop up a glass, you know, you're gonna find life in there. And what are we doing? What are we
link |
03:38:23.760
doing to our earth? We're destroying it callously. We're like pumping crap into there. Like we have
link |
03:38:29.280
this toxic waste bill a couple of months ago in San Diego, I couldn't go to the beach. Let me take
link |
03:38:33.920
it a step further. You know how many people, I'm sorry that you do know, but how many people died
link |
03:38:39.040
in the 20th century killed? These are advanced civil. This isn't slime mold. We kill, we mean,
link |
03:38:45.120
we harm, we hurt, we hate. I don't think anything would happen the next day. We go back to what
link |
03:38:50.880
we had and I said, if that weren't proof enough, life has been discovered at least two or three
link |
03:38:54.880
times just in my professional career. Once in 1996, these Alan Landhills meteorites in Antarctica,
link |
03:39:01.280
so like microbial respiration processes, still we don't know. It was a press conference held by
link |
03:39:06.560
Bill Clinton on the White House lawn that's featured in the movie Contact. We purpose for that movie.
link |
03:39:12.800
And then there's this phosphorus life, this toxic life in the pools of Mono Lake,
link |
03:39:20.320
many, you know, extremophile, we don't give a crap. We continue to treat. So why are we thinking
link |
03:39:26.480
that like our salvation, from whence will our salvation come as the Bible says? Like, it's not
link |
03:39:31.360
going to change how we are. It's not going to magnify how I treat you or you treat me. And we're
link |
03:39:36.640
pretty knowledgeable people you and I compared to, you know, laypeople. Okay, that's interesting.
link |
03:39:40.640
That's a really interesting argument. I wonder if you're right, but my intuition is I can maybe
link |
03:39:48.800
present a different argument that you can think about in the realm of things you care about,
link |
03:39:53.520
even deeper, which is like, what happens once we figure out the origins of the universe?
link |
03:39:58.640
Like how would that change your life? I would say there are certain discoveries
link |
03:40:03.280
that even in their very ideal will change the fabric of society. I tend to see if there's
link |
03:40:08.480
definitive proof that there's life in the more complex, the more powerful that idea is elsewhere
link |
03:40:15.680
that I'm not exactly sure how it will change society because it's such a slap in the face.
link |
03:40:24.480
It's like such a humbling force, or maybe not, or maybe it's a motivator to say,
link |
03:40:31.040
yeah, I don't know which force would take over. Maybe it'll be governments with military
link |
03:40:36.080
start to think like, well, how do we kill it? If there's a lot of life out there,
link |
03:40:41.360
how do we create the defenses? How do we extract it? Or mine it for benefits?
link |
03:40:47.840
I mean, I just see like there's 100 million literal counter examples of that. I mean,
link |
03:40:52.480
right now there's like 700 million kids in poverty. How do we go about our life and just
link |
03:40:59.200
not deal with that? I mean, look, I put it aside. I eat hamburgers, and 100 years I'll be canceled
link |
03:41:04.720
for being a carnivore or whatever. So obviously to get through life, you have to make certain
link |
03:41:10.240
compromise. You're not going to think about certain things. But I just think there is a
link |
03:41:14.560
sort of wish fulfillment. Like every time there's, why are we going to Mars and digging and flying
link |
03:41:18.560
this cool ass helicopter? We're looking for water. Like stipulate that water was there.
link |
03:41:23.600
Like I believe there was water. I think we should investigate and see what the geology was like.
link |
03:41:27.520
But don't you think, so you're saying?
link |
03:41:29.600
I don't think you're going to get meaning from it. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying it's
link |
03:41:32.880
not worth doing. I'm just saying there's a wish fulfillment aspect that people will find meaning
link |
03:41:37.920
for life from science. Okay. But there's a complicated line here. What if it's this
link |
03:41:46.000
intelligence civilization living, obviously, probably not on Mars, but somewhere like in a
link |
03:41:53.600
neighboring galaxy that we, sorry, in a neighboring star system that we discover.
link |
03:42:02.160
Don't you think that profound change in meaning?
link |
03:42:05.200
I mean, I guess, again, I assume that because of this pansemaramic process or whatever,
link |
03:42:09.760
that the probability is much, much greater than zero. I mean, it's not one 100%, but it's much
link |
03:42:15.760
likelier than that, that at least some living material from Earth has ejaculated itself into
link |
03:42:20.800
the solar system, into the universe, right, into our galaxy.
link |
03:42:23.280
Beats that, please. As well.
link |
03:42:26.080
That's right. So the fact that that could happen and that you're holding a piece from a planetary
link |
03:42:31.600
body, one that couldn't support life as far as we know. But next time, if you play nice and you
link |
03:42:37.600
come on my podcast someday, I will give you a tiny chunk of Mars. So Mars theoretically could
link |
03:42:42.000
support stuff, right? Moving on up.
link |
03:42:43.440
So yeah. So I believe that there could be remnants of Earth in this. So that means
link |
03:42:47.440
there could be evolution. I don't think there's any chance that there's like,
link |
03:42:51.280
people using iPhones and having podcasts and stuff.
link |
03:42:53.680
No, there's so much, some chance, though, right?
link |
03:42:56.960
Again, yeah. I think the, well, the simple statement to say,
link |
03:43:02.720
it's much, much, much higher probability that life exists than technological life exists,
link |
03:43:07.200
right? I don't think we can argue that. It doesn't mean it's forbidden. Again,
link |
03:43:10.480
I'm not saying any of this is forbidden, not worth studying, not interesting.
link |
03:43:13.440
It's a likelihood thing.
link |
03:43:14.480
Yeah. And to answer your, I think you're wise to push back and like,
link |
03:43:18.000
what does it matter what I'm doing? And I like to think about that, you know,
link |
03:43:21.760
because it's like, what is the value of what you're doing? Like, you have to answer that
link |
03:43:25.280
question or else at the end of your life, you'll have these existential, you know,
link |
03:43:28.480
kind of crises, right? So when I think about like who I am, part of my identity is
link |
03:43:33.360
answering and asking scientific questions. For me, though, there is a religious kind of
link |
03:43:37.520
undercurrent that does undergird in some sense, this quest. Again, I'm not like a practicing,
link |
03:43:42.800
I'm not like wearing, you know, like I'm not like full on into my birth religion, Judaism.
link |
03:43:49.520
But at the same token, I think as, you know, one of the things Einstein did say is that,
link |
03:43:53.680
you know, religion without science is blind or is lame, and science without religion is lame,
link |
03:44:00.960
is blind and lame. Anyway, the point is that like, you can't get meaning,
link |
03:44:05.840
you know, from just knowing facts. Like Wikipedia knows more than all of us will ever know,
link |
03:44:10.000
right? It has no wisdom. You know, wisdom, it means, you know, sapien, the word wisdom in
link |
03:44:14.720
Latin is sapien. We are wise. And by the way, do you know what we're, what our real name is
link |
03:44:19.520
homo sapien sapien. So it's man who knows that he knows. Do you know what he knows? Do you know
link |
03:44:24.640
what the knowing is? It's that he's going to die. We're the only creatures that know that we are
link |
03:44:29.040
going to die. We don't know when we're going to die. But like, you know, I have a cat,
link |
03:44:33.760
a fierce attack cat. It's beautiful. She doesn't know when she's going to die.
link |
03:44:38.000
It doesn't mean I'm more valuable than I think I am.
link |
03:44:40.640
The survival instinct is fundamentally different from like the knowledge of death. And that's
link |
03:44:46.640
where the earner specter comes in with the terror of death. And that that's a creative force
link |
03:44:52.000
that seems to be more feature than bug about the human condition is that
link |
03:45:00.240
I mean, it's a gift of knowing our own mortality. Yeah, to me, I mean, that's, that's why,
link |
03:45:09.360
you know, I agree with you in some sense in terms of the aliens not being a thing that solves all
link |
03:45:15.520
mysteries. That's why, you know, my love has always been the human mind. So understanding
link |
03:45:22.800
who we are, what the hell are we? And I think your love has been an echo of that, which is,
link |
03:45:29.920
where do we come from? Yeah. Or basically, as cheesy as the sounds, you know,
link |
03:45:36.560
Michio Kaku is away with words. If you if you can just like enjoy the, you know,
link |
03:45:42.800
he speaks in complete, he's like Sam Harris of cosmology. I mean, he speaks in complete paragraphs.
link |
03:45:47.360
But like also unapologetically, he says, you know, we will know God, or we will know the
link |
03:45:53.600
mind of God, or whatever the quotes, those kinds of things. That's exciting, that physics might
link |
03:46:01.520
be able to find equations that unlock our origins at the very core. And like the fabric of it all
link |
03:46:08.880
too. And that's just our origins. You know, what's, you know, what's at the beginning.
link |
03:46:15.360
Something tells me we're too dumb to truly understand what's at the beginning. But
link |
03:46:19.120
I think we should be humble in that way. I mean, again, another thing is, you know,
link |
03:46:24.000
you ever hear the saying like we shared 99% of our DNA with chimps or bonobos or whatever.
link |
03:46:31.120
I share like pie more than that. You know, sometimes I wish we shared like 100%.
link |
03:46:34.560
Like, that'd be so much more interesting. Like, oh, there's 50% of a fruit fly or banana, like
link |
03:46:41.040
no, no, no, there's something, but that should make us feel more precious. And I almost feel
link |
03:46:45.360
like discovering life on another planet, whatever solar system, would cause a diminution of humanity.
link |
03:46:52.080
Like the one thing I do hold fast to from a religion, I don't know where I am with God,
link |
03:46:55.760
like, do I believe in God? I think that's an unanswerable question. But I have some thoughts
link |
03:47:01.760
about it. But by the same token, I think the one thing I do get from religion is that every human
link |
03:47:07.360
has infinite worth, because we are in a religious capacity considered to be equal to God. In other
link |
03:47:12.720
words, we are gods, not to be like, you know, but we can contemplate what God did. We have aspects
link |
03:47:17.680
of God. We have free will. God had free will. If he exists, again, I can't prove that God exists.
link |
03:47:22.880
Otherwise, you wouldn't have any credit for believing in God.
link |
03:47:25.200
This is interesting. I mean, it's like I'm talking to Einstein here, but let me ask anyway.
link |
03:47:30.960
Can you clip that for my clip shot?
link |
03:47:34.560
For somebody who's looking at the young universe, at the early universe,
link |
03:47:42.320
and are talking about God and are agnostic, who do you think is God?
link |
03:47:50.800
So I thought you had just like one of the best podcasts with Sam Harris this past summer.
link |
03:47:56.720
And one of the things I liked about that conversation is he talked a lot about happiness
link |
03:48:03.040
and meditation. And he said something that's really resonated with me, and I've been working
link |
03:48:07.120
on it around and trying to work on it my own way. But he said like, you can never be happy.
link |
03:48:13.840
You can only become happy. And I try to take a little bit further than that, because I think
link |
03:48:18.640
it's interesting. Like meditation is like, you're not like, oh, I'm happy and now like,
link |
03:48:22.880
oh, my kid came in and now I'm not happy. No, like you can be satisfied. Kurt Vonnegut said,
link |
03:48:27.360
like, you ever catch this? Sometimes you're like walking around and you're like,
link |
03:48:30.240
life is freaking amazing. Like I'm happy. And Kurt Vonnegut said, you should say to yourself
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03:48:35.360
every time that happens, like a little mantra, like, if this isn't goodness, if this isn't happiness,
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nothing is. Just remind yourself how awesome it is every breath, everything that you do,
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when you make an impact, even some of the bad stuff that happens. Good, it's good.
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So Sam said that. And it made me think, because I was like, well, what does it really mean to be
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happy? Because like, I can think of, I can think of about, you know, two or three ways that right
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now I could double my happiness. No, like win the lottery or whatever, like I could double my
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happiness. There's only a few ways though, right? Like, you know, I had this kind of thought like,
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03:49:12.640
how many boats can you waterski behind? Like you had twice as many followers, now you got
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two million followers, five million, whatever. It doesn't do anything. It's called the hedonic
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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?
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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
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you're reducing entropy, like a kid, like anyone who's a parent knows instantly what I'm talking
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about. Like how to make your life a billion times worse. But there's no way to make your life a
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billion times better. And so thinking about that, now turning into the question of God's existence,
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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
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03:50:32.480
level that there is some, and let's not call it God because that's a freighted term. Let's just call
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it some infinite source of goodness or our beautiful power in the universe, right? Simple
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03:50:42.960
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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03:51:41.840
ever have two friends that are fighting and like you're kind of upset, even though you're not
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03:51:45.360
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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03:52:05.440
So that is a source of meaning, maximizing the goodness in life and the way you know it's good
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03:52:12.960
as if it's taken away, it would devastate you. That's one way. Think about it, your brand,
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03:52:20.000
your business, your spouse, your kids. I mean, parents can't count though. I've known parents
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03:52:25.760
that have. Jim Simons, here's a perfect example. He's one of my oldest friends and mentors.
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03:52:31.840
He is one of the richest people on earth, Gulfstream, Megayan. This is all documented,
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03:52:37.760
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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03:52:45.440
Would you take everything? I don't know where he has that strength in his wife,
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03:52:51.520
Marilyn, and his first wife, Barbara. I'm not, I'm not like that. Some people are,
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03:52:57.920
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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03:53:13.440
or whatever, or NFL football players after their careers over, they get, they're broke, right?
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03:53:18.560
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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03:53:53.600
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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03:54:17.520
that would disappoint me when I was younger, that would, that wouldn't recognize, you know,
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03:54:24.240
because change happens gradually. But are you using yourself as the, as the touchstone to use
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03:54:30.720
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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03:54:36.880
whatever year old lacks? Like, how will you know or not know if you've let yourself down? Or like,
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03:54:42.880
I always think live to impress yourself. Like, I don't care if I have followers. Like, it's nice
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03:54:48.160
or whatever. But it's hedonic. And it's just never ending. Because you'll always see the next
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03:54:52.720
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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03:55:02.320
into the future through my children. And I've had ideological children that I, so by what metric,
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03:55:09.440
you know, have you not already A, impressed yourself? And B, could you let yourself down?
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03:55:13.200
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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03:55:29.680
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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03:56:08.960
going to be the self critical. It's like they were a cold Delphi, right? You know that yourself.
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03:56:13.600
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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03:56:22.960
of the 711. You know, it could be that we have no other taste buds. And, you know,
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03:56:29.200
Eric's talked about the four dimensions of the, you know, the vibration of your tongue, right?
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03:56:33.360
It could be like there's one and it's just like not, you know, Memphis barbecue or whatever you
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03:56:39.760
like in your slim gym. It could be something, it could be very boring. Similarly, what if like
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03:56:46.080
that's a clue? Like what if that's giving us evidence? Here's another clue. There are many
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03:56:50.960
animals, most animals have single monocolor vision. They only see in black and white intensity. They
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03:56:56.880
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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03:57:06.720
God's not going to like hit you over the head and say like, here I am because then everybody
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03:57:10.560
would believe in him. And there's very simplistic. I've had debates even with like famous atheists
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03:57:14.080
like Lawrence Krauss, who's like self declared militant atheists. And I was like, well, I don't
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03:57:19.840
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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03:57:24.160
that's infantile. Like I gave that away a long time ago. But what if there are clues? What if
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03:57:29.840
Yang Mills theory, you know, Maxwell's equation, like what, those are beautiful. If you've ever
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03:57:35.360
seen like, you know, expressed in tensor notation, Einstein's equations or, or Maxwell's equations
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03:57:41.360
or, and then Maxwell's equations riding on Einstein's, it's unbelievably beautiful.
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03:57:46.720
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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03:57:52.960
the light gets in. And the light is what reveals what's beautiful. So I don't believe in God.
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03:57:58.960
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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03:58:03.600
believes in me, you know, like more than if I believe in like, he needs Brian Keating. Like,
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03:58:07.840
you know, what, you know, it's like one of my friends is a rabbi. He's like,
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03:58:12.400
what would I be doing if I were God? Exactly what God's doing right now. Like,
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03:58:16.240
you think I know more than God? Give me your proof.
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03:58:18.080
Leaving clues of beauty for, for these hairless apes.
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03:58:23.200
Yeah.
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And to see what they do with this. And then Marvel at,
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03:58:29.200
at both the tragedy of what the, what those apes do to each other and the,
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03:58:36.320
the rare moments of when they have, when they understand, understand deeply about how the
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03:58:42.000
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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03:58:54.400
Space dust and crystals, magical crystals, healing crystals that you can, you can use for good.
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03:59:01.680
And tell me your story and spend your really valuable time with me today. This was amazing.
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03:59:06.560
That was a great pleasure for me, Lex. Thank you so much.
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03:59:08.480
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Keating. To support this podcast,
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03:59:14.080
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
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03:59:19.440
Galileo Galilei. In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble
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03:59:26.480
reasoning of a single individual. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.