0
SPEAKER_00
The following is a conversation with Brian Keating, experimental physicist at USSD and author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.
0
SPEAKER_00
Plus, he s a host of the amazing podcast of the same name called Into the Impossible.
0
SPEAKER_00
And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
0
SPEAKER_00
Check them out in the description.
0
SPEAKER_00
It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast.
0
SPEAKER_00
First is InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data.
0
SPEAKER_00
Second is Aesthetic Greens, the all-in-one nutrition drink I drink twice a day.
0
SPEAKER_00
Third is Magic Spoon, low-carb, keto-friendly cereal.
0
SPEAKER_00
Fourth is Masterclass, online courses from world-class experts, and fifth is Onnit, a nutrition, supplement, and fitness company.
0
SPEAKER_00
So the choice is health or wisdom.
0
SPEAKER_00
Choose wisely, my friends.
0
SPEAKER_00
And now onto the full ad reads.
0
SPEAKER_00
As always, no ads in the middle.
0
SPEAKER_00
I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors.
0
SPEAKER_00
I enjoy their stuff.
0
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you will, too.
0
SPEAKER_00
This show is brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track my biological data.
0
SPEAKER_00
They have a bunch of plans, most of which include blood tests, that give you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on.
0
SPEAKER_00
They have algorithms.
0
SPEAKER_00
They re using your data, they re using machine learning to come up with brilliant analysis of that data.
0
SPEAKER_00
This data includes blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data, and the point is to use this data and the machine learning algorithms to provide you with a clear picture of what s going on inside you and to offer you science-backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes.
0
SPEAKER_00
Andrew Huberman, the great Andrew Huberman, host of the Huberman Lab podcast, talks a lot about it.
0
SPEAKER_00
David Sinclair, who has a new podcast out, talked a lot about it in my conversation with him.
0
SPEAKER_00
It s obvious that we should be making lifestyle decisions based on our personal data, not some generic population data.
0
SPEAKER_00
For a limited time, you can get 25% off the entire InsideTracker store if you go to insidetracker.com slash lex.
0
SPEAKER_00
That s insidetracker.com slash lex.
0
SPEAKER_00
This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its newly renamed AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
0
SPEAKER_00
It replaced the multivitamin for me and went far beyond that with 75 vitamins and minerals.
0
SPEAKER_00
It is the first thing I drink every day.
0
SPEAKER_00
I drink it twice a day now.
0
SPEAKER_00
I really enjoy it.
0
SPEAKER_00
It forms a nutritional base.
0
SPEAKER_00
First of all, it s delicious, but it also forms a nutritional base for all the
0
SPEAKER_00
dietary sort of wanderings that I do.
0
SPEAKER_00
So I m currently eating carnivore, mostly carnivore, with very, very few exceptions, sometimes vegetables.
0
SPEAKER_00
Not that I m allergic to the other stuff, it s just what makes me feel good, but you know, if you re not careful, you re not gonna get all the nutrition you need.
0
SPEAKER_00
A lot of greens.
0
SPEAKER_00
Got your back.
0
SPEAKER_00
Got my back.
0
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, they ll give you one month supply of fish oil, which is another thing I take, when you sign up to AthleticGreens.com slash Lex.
0
SPEAKER_00
That s AthleticGreens.com slash Lex.
0
SPEAKER_00
This show is also brought to you by Magic Spoon, the OG sponsor of this podcast, the delicious, the incredible, the low-carb, keto-friendly cereal.
0
SPEAKER_00
It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only four and a half grams of carbs, and 140 calories in each serving.
0
SPEAKER_00
You can build your own box or get a variety pack with a bunch of flavors.
0
SPEAKER_00
You can go to the website, check out the flavors.
0
SPEAKER_00
It has cocoa, fruity, frosted, peanut butter, blueberry cinnamon.
0
SPEAKER_00
I think it goes on and they keep adding new ones.
0
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
0
SPEAKER_00
For me still, cocoa is the best flavor.
0
SPEAKER_00
It s the flavor of champions.
0
SPEAKER_00
It s the one I go to.
0
SPEAKER_00
In this life, a man must choose.
0
SPEAKER_00
And that is the choice I have made.
0
SPEAKER_00
And it has brought to me much happiness without sacrificing the nutritional sort of fortitude.
0
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, Magic Spoon have a 100% happiness guarantee.
0
SPEAKER_00
So if you don t like it, they refund it.
0
SPEAKER_00
Go to magic spoon.com slash Lex and use code Lex.
0
SPEAKER_00
At checkout to save $5 off your order.
0
SPEAKER_00
That s magic spoon.com slash Lex and use code Lex.
0
SPEAKER_00
This show is also brought to you by Masterclass.
0
SPEAKER_00
$180 a year gets you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines.
0
SPEAKER_00
Exploration, Chris Hadfield, Neil deGrasse Tyson, you all know who Neil deGrasse Tyson is.
0
SPEAKER_00
Will Wright, the game designer, the guitarist, Carl Santana, Garry Kasparov, Daniel Negrano, Neil Gaiman, Martin Scorsese, Tony Hawk, Jane Goodall, it just keeps going.
0
SPEAKER_00
And they keep adding new ones.
0
SPEAKER_00
Like I m doing one on,
0
SPEAKER_00
portrait photography currently.
0
SPEAKER_00
I ve been interested in understanding how a single photograph can capture an emotion, a deep, complicated emotion.
0
SPEAKER_00
That s so fascinating to me.
0
SPEAKER_00
The way you should learn, whether you re a beginner or you re an expert, is you should listen to the masters of those arts.
0
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership if you go to masterclass.com slash lex.
0
SPEAKER_00
That s masterclass.com slash lex for 15% off the annual membership at masterclass.com slash lex.
0
SPEAKER_00
This episode is also brought to you by Onnit, nutrition, supplement, and fitness company.
0
SPEAKER_00
They make AlphaBrain, they make a ton of stuff, but AlphaBrain is probably my favorite.
0
SPEAKER_00
It s a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus.
0
SPEAKER_00
Long stretches of deep work, so deep focus, where I m sitting there in the silence of my mind focusing on a difficult thinking task.
0
SPEAKER_00
Something that requires you think deeply and whatever thoughts that come into your mind and try to distract you, you slowly let them drift past.
0
SPEAKER_00
It s a kind of meditation.
0
SPEAKER_00
I use AlphaBrain to
0
SPEAKER_00
help me when I know that it s going to be especially difficult.
0
SPEAKER_00
So I don t use it every day, I use it when I need that extra super rocket boost for a deep work session.
0
SPEAKER_00
It works, it helps me clear the mind and maintain focus.
0
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, go to lexfriedman.com slash Onnit to get up to 10% off AlphaBrain.
0
SPEAKER_00
That s lexfriedman.com slash Onnit.
0
SPEAKER_00
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Brian Keating.
0
SPEAKER_00
As an experimental physicist, what do you think is the most amazing or maybe the coolest measurement device you ve ever worked with or humans have ever built?
0
SPEAKER_00
Maybe for now, let s exclude the background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization instruments.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I m slightly biased towards that particular instrument.
0
SPEAKER_00
Talk about that in a little bit.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
But certainly the telescope, to me, is a lever that has literally moved the Earth throughout history.
0
SPEAKER_00
So the OG telescope?
0
SPEAKER_01
The OG telescope, yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
The one invented not by Galileo, as most people think, but by this guy Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s, 14, 1500s, 1600s, it was the beginning of movable type.
0
SPEAKER_01
And so people for the first time in history had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight.
0
SPEAKER_01
So looking at a printed word now, we just take it for granted, 12-point font, whatever, and that s what the eye charts are based on.
0
SPEAKER_01
They re just fixed height.
0
SPEAKER_01
But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn t have perfect vision, and there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type.
0
SPEAKER_01
And at that time, people realized, hey, wait, I can t read this.
0
SPEAKER_01
My priest or my friend over here, he can read it.
0
SPEAKER_01
She can read it.
0
SPEAKER_01
I can t read it.
0
SPEAKER_01
What s going on?
0
SPEAKER_01
And that s when these people in Venice and in the Netherlands saw that they could take this kind of glass material and hold it up and maybe put another piece of glass material, and it would make it clearer.
0
SPEAKER_01
And what was so interesting is that nobody thought to take that exact same device, you know, two lenses and go like, let me go like this and look at that bright thing in the sky over there until Galileo.
0
SPEAKER_01
So Galileo didn t invent it, but he did something kind of amazing.
0
SPEAKER_01
He improved on it by a factor of 10.
0
SPEAKER_01
So he 10Xed it, which is almost as good as going from zero to one as going from one to 10.
0
SPEAKER_01
And when he did that, he really
0
SPEAKER_01
transformed both how we look at the universe and think about it, but also who we are as a species, because we re using tools not to get food faster or to preserve our legacy for future generations, but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.
0
SPEAKER_00
Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans weren t able to see the stars, maybe there was some kind of makeup of the atmosphere, which for the early humans made it impossible to see the stars, that we would never develop human civilization, or at least raising the question of how important is it to look up to the sky and wonder what s out there, as opposed to,
0
SPEAKER_00
Maybe this is an over-romanticized notion, but looking at the ground, it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival, not being eaten by a bear slash lion.
0
SPEAKER_00
If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder, what is my place in the universe?
0
SPEAKER_00
You think that s modern humans romanticizing?
0
SPEAKER_01
I think it s a little romantic, because they also took the same- I tried.
0
SPEAKER_01
They took the same two lenses and they looked inward, right?
0
SPEAKER_01
They looked at bacteria, they looked at hares.
0
SPEAKER_01
In other words, they made the microscope.
0
SPEAKER_01
And we re still doing that.
0
SPEAKER_01
And so to have a telescope serves a dual purpose.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s not only a way of looking out, it s looking in, but it s also looking back in time.
0
SPEAKER_01
In other words, when you see a microscope, you don t think, oh, I m seeing this thing as it was one nanosecond ago.
0
SPEAKER_01
Light travels one foot per nanosecond.
0
SPEAKER_01
I m seeing it on that.
0
SPEAKER_01
No, you don t think about it like that.
0
SPEAKER_01
But when you see something that s happening, you know, on Jupiter, the moon, Andromeda galaxy, you re seeing things, you know, back when Lucy was walking around the Serengeti plains.
0
SPEAKER_01
And for that, I think that took then the knowledge of relativity and time travel and so forth.
0
SPEAKER_01
It took that before we could really say, oh, we really unlocked some cheat codes in the human brain.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I think that might be a little too much.
0
SPEAKER_01
But nevertheless, I mean, what s better than having a time machine?
0
SPEAKER_01
It s like we can look back in time.
0
SPEAKER_01
We see things as they were, not as they are.
0
SPEAKER_01
And that allows us to do many things, including speculate about that.
0
SPEAKER_01
But one of the coolest things, I don t know if you re familiar with, so I m a radio astronomer.
0
SPEAKER_01
I don t actually look through telescopes very often, except on rare occasions when I take one out to show the kids.
0
SPEAKER_01
But a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral.
0
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s much less cool, because you look at it, and you re like, all right, it looks cool.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of a weird-shaped thing.
0
SPEAKER_01
It looks like it belongs in sci-fi.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s going to blast the Death Star or whatever.
0
SPEAKER_01
But when you realize that when you point a radio telescope at a distant object,
0
SPEAKER_01
If that object fills up what s called the beam, which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope is called this beam.
0
SPEAKER_01
If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor, just a simple absorbing piece of material at the focus of the radio telescope, that resistor will come to the exact same temperature as the object that s looking at.
0
SPEAKER_01
which is pretty amazing.
0
SPEAKER_01
It means you re actually remotely measuring, you re taking the temperature of Jupiter or whatever in effect.
0
SPEAKER_01
And so it s allowing you to basically teleport.
0
SPEAKER_01
And there s no other science that you can really do that, right?
0
SPEAKER_01
If you re an archaeologist, you can t, let me get into my time machine and go back and see what was Lucy really like?
0
SPEAKER_01
It s not possible.
0
SPEAKER_00
So the same thing happens, this is where I learned about this from March of the Penguins, when the penguins huddle together, the body temperature arrives at the same place.
0
SPEAKER_00
So you re doing this remotely.
0
SPEAKER_00
This is the March of the Penguins, but remote.
0
SPEAKER_01
We do it from Antarctica too, so there are some penguins around when we do it.
0
SPEAKER_00
Okay, excellent.
0
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned time machine.
0
SPEAKER_00
I think in your book, Losing the Nobel Prize, you talk about time machines.
0
SPEAKER_00
So let me ask you the question of, take us back in time.
0
SPEAKER_00
What happened at the beginning of our universe?
0
SPEAKER_01
Okay, usually people preface this by saying I have a simple question.
0
SPEAKER_01
So what happened before the universe began?
0
SPEAKER_00
Brian Keating teaching me about comedy.
0
SPEAKER_00
I have a simple question for you.
0
SPEAKER_00
Let s take two.
0
SPEAKER_00
I have a simple question.
0
SPEAKER_00
What happened at the beginning of our universe?
0
SPEAKER_00
There you go.
0
SPEAKER_01
All right, good.
0
SPEAKER_01
So when we think about what happened, it s more correct, it s more logical, it s more practical to go back in time starting from today.
0
SPEAKER_01
So if you go back,
0
SPEAKER_01
13.874 billion years from today.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s some day, right?
0
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you could translate it as some day, right?
0
SPEAKER_01
So on that day, something happened earlier than the moment exactly now.
0
SPEAKER_01
Let s say we re talking around one o clock.
0
SPEAKER_01
So at some point during that day, the universe started to become a fusion reactor.
0
SPEAKER_01
It started to fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier elements and isotopes of those heavier elements.
0
SPEAKER_01
Um, after that period of time, you know, going forward back closer to today, less, you know, 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier, or later rather coming towards us today, we know more and more about what the universe was like.
0
SPEAKER_01
And in fact, all the hydrogen, you know, to very good approximation in the water molecules in this bottle, almost all of them were produced during that first 20 minute period.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I would say, you know, the actual fusion and production of the lightest elements on the periodic table occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show, The Big Bang Theory.
0
SPEAKER_00
Well done, sir.
0
SPEAKER_01
You know, most of those light elements, besides hydrogen, aren t really used in your encounter.
0
SPEAKER_01
We don t encounter helium that often, unless you go to a lot of birthday parties, or pilot a blimp.
0
SPEAKER_01
You don t need lithium, hopefully.
0
SPEAKER_01
But other than that, those are the kind of things that were produced during that moment.
0
SPEAKER_01
The question became, how did the heavier things, like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I brought some samples for us to discuss, and how those came from a very different type of process called a different type of fusion reactor.
0
SPEAKER_01
and a different type of process explosion as well called a supernova.
0
SPEAKER_01
However, if you go back to the – beyond those first three minutes, we really have to say almost nothing because we are not capable – in other words, going backwards from the first three minutes as famous Steven Weinberg titled his book.
0
SPEAKER_01
We actually marks a point where ignorance takes over.
0
SPEAKER_01
In other words, we can t speculate on what happened three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen was formed in our universe.
0
SPEAKER_01
We just don t know enough about that epoch.
0
SPEAKER_01
There are many people, most people, most practicing card-carrying cosmologists believe the universe began in what s called the singularity.
0
SPEAKER_01
And we can certainly talk about that.
0
SPEAKER_01
However, singularity is so far removed from anything we can ever hope to prove, hope to confront, or hope to observe as evidence, and really only occurs in two instantiations, the Big Bang and the core of a black hole, neither of which is observable.
0
SPEAKER_01
And so for that reason, there are now flourishing alternatives that say, you can actually for the first time ask the question, that day,
0
SPEAKER_01
Tuesday, in the first moments of our universe, there was a Tuesday a week before that.
0
SPEAKER_01
24 hours times seven days before that.
0
SPEAKER_01
That has a perfectly well understood meaning in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent of cosmologists working today.
0
SPEAKER_01
When I was in grad school over 25 years ago, no one really considered anything besides that Big Bang, that there was a singularity.
0
SPEAKER_01
And people would have to say, as I said, we just don t know.
0
SPEAKER_01
But they would say some future incarnation of some experiment will tell us the answer.
0
SPEAKER_01
But now there are people that are saying there is an alternative to the Big Bang.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it s not really fringe science as it once was 50, 80 years ago when these models, by the way, the first cosmology in history was not a singular universe.
0
SPEAKER_01
The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten Ra and the temples of Egypt in the third millennium BC.
0
SPEAKER_01
And in that, they talked about cyclical universes.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I always joke, you know, that guy Akhenaten s court, you know, he d have a pretty high H index right about now, because people have been using that cyclical model from Penrose to Paul Steinhardt and Aegis, and right up until this very moment.
0
SPEAKER_00
Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives to the Big Bang Theory?
0
SPEAKER_01
So there are many alternatives starting with – so the singularity quantum cosmologically demanding singular origin of the universe, that stands in contrast to these other models in which time does not have a beginning.
0
SPEAKER_01
Many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles called by Sir Roger Penrose and they all have things in common, these alternatives.
0
SPEAKER_01
As does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis, which is inflation.
0
SPEAKER_01
Inflation is sort of – can be thought of as this spark that ignites the hot big bang that I said we
1
SPEAKER_00
So it s an earlier condition, but it s still not an initial condition.
1
SPEAKER_00
In physics, imagine I show you a grandfather clock or a pendulum swinging back and forth.
1
SPEAKER_00
You look away for a second.
1
SPEAKER_00
You come into the room, pendulum swinging back and forth.
1
SPEAKER_00
Alex, tell me, where did it start?
1
SPEAKER_00
How many cycles is it gonna make before the, you can t answer that question without knowing the initial conditions.
1
SPEAKER_00
In a very simple system, like a one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum, think about understanding the whole universe without understanding the initial conditions.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s a tremendous lacuna gap that we have as scientists that we may not be able to, in the inflationary cosmology, determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe prior to what s called the inflationary epoch.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you re saying for the pendulum in that epoch, we can t, because you can infer things about the pendulum before you show up to the room in our current epoch, correct?
1
SPEAKER_00
Right, yeah, so if you look at it right now, but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating?
1
SPEAKER_00
So that depends on how much energy it got initially, and you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance, you had infrared camera, you could see it s getting hotter maybe, and you could do some calculations.
1
SPEAKER_00
But to know the two things in physics to solve a partial differential equation are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions.
1
SPEAKER_00
Boundary condition, we re here on Earth, it has a gravitational field, it s not going to make excursions wildly beyond the length of the pendulum.
1
SPEAKER_00
It has simple properties.
1
SPEAKER_00
In other words, you can t tell me when did the solar system start orbiting in the way that it does now.
1
SPEAKER_00
In other words, when did the moon acquire the exact angular momentum that it has now?
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, that s a pretty pedestrian example, but what I m telling you is that the inflationary epoch purports and is successful at providing a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved after inflation took place and ended, but it says nothing about how it itself took place.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s really what you re asking me.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you don t, look, you care about Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and the elements got made, and these fusion reactors, and the whole universe was a fusion reactor, but don t you really care about what happened at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time?
1
SPEAKER_00
And the problem is, we can t really answer that in the context of the Big Bang.
1
SPEAKER_00
We can t answer that in the context of these alternatives.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you asked me about some of the alternatives.
1
SPEAKER_00
So one is aeon theory, the conformal cyclic cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose.
1
SPEAKER_00
Another one that was really popular in the 60s and 70s, until the discovery of the primary component of my research field, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, or CMB, the three Kelvin all-pervasive signal that astronomers detected in 1965.
1
SPEAKER_00
That kind of spelled the death knell, in some sense, to what was called the quasi-steady state universe.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then there was another.
1
SPEAKER_00
a model that kind of came out of that.
1
SPEAKER_00
You hear the word quasi, so it s not steady state.
1
SPEAKER_00
Steady state means always existed.
1
SPEAKER_00
That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe.
1
SPEAKER_00
And most scientists believed in that for millennia, basically.
1
SPEAKER_00
The universe is eternal, static, unchanging.
1
SPEAKER_00
They couldn t believe that after Hubble, so they had to append onto it, concatenate this new feature that it wasn t steady, it was quasi-steady.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen every century in a given volume of space, and that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant, but because it was producing more and more every century, the centuries pile up and the volume piles up, the universe could expand.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so that s how they developed.
1
SPEAKER_00
Very slowly.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it doesn t match observational evidence.
1
SPEAKER_00
But that is an alternative.
1
SPEAKER_01
By the way, did Einstein think the steady state universe is infinite or finite?
1
SPEAKER_01
Do you know?
1
SPEAKER_00
I would assume that he thought it was infinite because there was really, you know, if something had a no beginning in time, then it would be very unlikely we re in like the center of it or it s bounded or it has
1
SPEAKER_00
in that case, a finite edge to it.
1
SPEAKER_01
I wonder what he thought about infinity, because that s such an uncomfortable concept.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s a silly joke.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m sure you re familiar with that silly joke, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
The silly joke was that there are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I m not sure about the universe.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, me saying I m not aware of the joke is a good example of the joke.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s very meta.
1
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so, sorry, you were saying about quasi- All the alternatives.
1
SPEAKER_01
All the alternatives in the quasi-steady state.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the most kind of promising, although I hate to say that, you know, people say like, what s your favorite alternative, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
This is not investment advice.
1
SPEAKER_00
Inflation is not transitory.
1
SPEAKER_00
It is quasi-permanent.
1
SPEAKER_00
So a very prominent— Sorry to interrupt.
1
SPEAKER_01
We re talking about cosmic inflation, so calm down cryptocurrency folks.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
1
SPEAKER_00
Although the first Nobel Prize—and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind.
1
SPEAKER_00
So most people don t know that.
1
SPEAKER_00
Inflation has already won a Nobel Prize.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s a good topic to work on if you won a Nobel Prize.
1
SPEAKER_01
Doesn t matter the field.
1
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s time translation invariant.
1
SPEAKER_00
So when we look at the alternative that s called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies, these have serious virtues, according to some.
1
SPEAKER_00
One of the virtues to me, just as a human, I m just speaking as a human,
1
SPEAKER_00
One of the founders of the new version of the cyclic cosmology called the bouncing cosmology is Paul Steinhardt.
1
SPEAKER_00
He s the Einstein professor of natural sciences at Princeton University.
1
SPEAKER_00
You may have heard of it.
1
SPEAKER_00
He was one of the originators of what was called new inflation.
1
SPEAKER_00
In other words, he was one of the founding fathers of inflation, who now not only has no belief or support for inflation, he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious, dangerous, malevolent, not to science, not just to cosmology, but to society.
1
SPEAKER_00
So here s a man who created a theory that s captivated the world or universe of cosmologists, such as it is.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s not a huge universe, but there are more podcasters than cosmologists.
1
SPEAKER_00
Some do both, but this man created this theory with collaborators, and now he s, I joke, I m like, Paul, you re denying paternity.
1
SPEAKER_00
You re like a deadbeat dad.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now you re saying inflation is bogus.
1
SPEAKER_00
But he doesn t just attack.
1
SPEAKER_00
See, this is what s very important about approaching things as an experimentalist.
1
SPEAKER_00
You ve got a lot of theorists on, and that s wonderful, and I think that s a huge service.
1
SPEAKER_00
An experimentalist has to say no.
1
SPEAKER_00
he or she has to be confident to say, like, I don t care if I prove you right or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever.
1
SPEAKER_00
We have to be like exterminators.
1
SPEAKER_00
And nobody likes the exterminator until they need one, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Or the garbage collectors, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
But it s vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry and the simplicity of some idea.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like inflation is a beautiful idea.
1
SPEAKER_00
But it also has consequences, and what Paul claims, and I don t agree with him fully on this point, is that those consequences are dangerous, because they lead to things like the multiverse, which is outside the purview of science.
1
SPEAKER_00
And in that sense, I can see support for what he does, but none of that detracts from my respect for a man.
1
SPEAKER_00
Imagine Elon comes up with this really great idea, space, and then he s like, actually, it s not gonna work.
1
SPEAKER_00
But here s this better idea.
1
SPEAKER_00
And he s like, SpaceX is not going to work.
1
SPEAKER_00
But he s now created an alternative to it.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s extremely hard to do what Paul has done.
1
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t mean he s right.
1
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t mean I m going to have more and more attention paid to it because he s my friend, or because I respect the idea, or I respect the man and his colleague, Anna Aegis, who works really hard with him.
1
SPEAKER_00
But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it, and what it does most foremost is that it removes the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it takes away 50% of the motivation for a theory of quantum gravity.
1
SPEAKER_00
You talked a lot about quantum gravity.
1
SPEAKER_00
You talked to people, eminent people on the show.
1
SPEAKER_00
Always latent in those conversations is sort of the teleological expectation that there is a theory of everything.
1
SPEAKER_00
There is a theory of quantum gravity.
1
SPEAKER_00
But there s no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.
1
SPEAKER_01
So that kind of implicit expectation has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory, so in cosmic inflation, so is that at the core?
1
SPEAKER_01
So okay, maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts on society from believing in cosmic inflation?
1
SPEAKER_00
So one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation according to its other two patriarchs, considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Guth at MIT and Andre Linde at Stanford, although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhardt, was that the universe has to eventually get into a quantum state.
1
SPEAKER_00
It has to exist in this Hilbert space, and the Hilbert space has certain features, and those features are quantum mechanical, endowed with quantum mechanical properties.
1
SPEAKER_00
Then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off.
1
SPEAKER_00
Inflation can get started, but then it s like one of SpaceX rockets.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s hard to turn off a solid rocket booster.
1
SPEAKER_00
It continues the thrusting.
1
SPEAKER_00
You need another mechanism to douse the flames of the inflationary expansion.
1
SPEAKER_00
Which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere, it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times, including now, spawning an ever-increasing set of universes.
1
SPEAKER_00
Some will die stillborn, some will continue and flourish, and this is known as the multiverse paradigm.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s a robust, seemingly robust consequence, not only of inflationary cosmology, but more and more we re seeing it in string theory as well.
1
SPEAKER_00
So that, you know, sometimes two, you know, branches coming to the same conclusion is, you know, taken as evidence for its reality.
1
SPEAKER_01
So one of the negative consequences is it creates phenomena that we can t, that are outside the reach of experimental science?
1
SPEAKER_01
Or is it that the multiverse somehow has a philosophical negative effect on humanity?
1
SPEAKER_01
Like it makes us...
1
SPEAKER_01
maybe makes life seem more meaningless?
1
SPEAKER_01
Is that where he s getting at a little bit, or is it not reaching that far?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, I think those are both kind of perceptive.
1
SPEAKER_00
The answer is a little of both, because in one sense, it s meant kind of to explain this fine-tuning problem, that we find ourselves in a universe that s particularly façade, that has features consistent with our existence, and how could we be otherwise?
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, the sort of weak anthropic principle.
1
SPEAKER_00
On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything, literally everything, can be said to predict nothing.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like if I say, Lex, you know, you ve been working out, you look like, you know, you look like you re about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, all right, yeah, you re right, but that s horribly imprecise.
1
SPEAKER_00
So what good is that?
1
SPEAKER_00
That s meaningless.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t contribute any what s called surprise or reduction in entropy or reduction of your ignorance about the system.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know exactly how much you weigh.
1
SPEAKER_00
So me telling you that tells you nothing.
1
SPEAKER_00
In this case, it s basically saying that we re living in a universe because of the overwhelming odds of our existence.
1
SPEAKER_00
dictate that we would exist.
1
SPEAKER_00
There has to be at least one place that we exist.
1
SPEAKER_00
But the problem is it s a manifestation of infinity.
1
SPEAKER_00
So humans – and I m sure you know this from your work with AI and ML and everything else – that humans
1
SPEAKER_00
as far as we know, really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity, but we do so very imperfectly, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So if I say to you, what s bigger, the number of water molecules in this thing or the number of real numbers?
1
SPEAKER_00
Or if I say, what s bigger, the number of real numbers or rational numbers?
1
SPEAKER_00
They re all different classifications of the amount of infinities that there could be.
1
SPEAKER_00
infinity to the infinity power.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, when you have kids someday, they ll tell you, I love you, infinity.
1
SPEAKER_00
You have to come back, I love you, infinity plus one, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
But the human brain can t really contemplate infinity.
1
SPEAKER_00
Let me illustrate that.
1
SPEAKER_00
They say in the singularity, the universe had an infinite temperature.
1
SPEAKER_00
So, let me ask you a question.
1
SPEAKER_00
Is there anything that you can contemplate in the – Einstein s little quip aside, that s infinite?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, a physical property – density, pressure, temperature, energy – that s infinite?
1
SPEAKER_00
And if you can think of such thing, I d like to know it.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one?
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids.
1
SPEAKER_00
How does it go from, like, to half of infinity?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because that s still infinity.
1
SPEAKER_00
How did it cool down?
1
SPEAKER_00
How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied?
1
SPEAKER_00
So now it s only infinity over two in terms of pascals.
1
SPEAKER_01
Less infinite, more infinite.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, that s one of the biggest troubling things to me about infinity is
1
SPEAKER_01
you can t truly hold it inside our minds.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s a mathematical construct that doesn t, it feels like intuition fails.
1
SPEAKER_01
But nevertheless, we use it nonchalantly and then use, like physicists, they re incredible intuition machines, 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.
1
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it s something cyclical, you can imagine infinity just going around the same, kind of like a Mobius strip situation.
1
SPEAKER_01
But then the question then arises, how do you make it more or less infinite?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, all of that intuition fails completely.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
It s either some placeholder for infinity or it s one divided by a very, the smallest, you know, possible.
1
SPEAKER_00
you know, real number that you can represent in the memory.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s basically my undergraduate study in computer science is how to represent a floating point in a computer.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think I took 17 courses on this topic.
1
SPEAKER_01
It was very useful.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I came to the right place.
1
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, in terms of what a physicist will mean, you re right.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, physicists will blithely, nonchalantly subtract infinity, you know, renormalization, and do things to get finite answers, and it s miraculous, but
1
SPEAKER_00
At a certain point, you have to ask, well, what are the consequences for the real world?
1
SPEAKER_00
So one of them, you ask, what s the problem?
1
SPEAKER_00
Does it make us more meaningless?
1
SPEAKER_00
They purport, and many of the people that support it, like Andre Linde.
1
SPEAKER_00
In fact, Andre Linde says, you have a bias, you, Lex, me, Brian, you have a bias that you believe in a universe.
1
SPEAKER_00
But shouldn t you believe in a multiverse?
1
SPEAKER_00
What evidence do you have that there s not?
1
SPEAKER_00
So he turns it around.
1
SPEAKER_00
Whereas Paul Steinhardt will say, no, if anything can happen, then there s no predictive power within the theory.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
But that doesn t mean that inflation didn t happen.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s logically 100% correct.
1
SPEAKER_00
But it s like, it s like kind of chewing, you know, wonder, wonder bread, you know, hums.
1
SPEAKER_00
I apologize if they re one of your sponsors, but, you know.
1
SPEAKER_01
Wonderbreads slash flex.com.
1
SPEAKER_00
Type in code Kleb, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Kleb, that s my favorite Russian word.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like, would you like a piece of Kleb?
1
SPEAKER_01
By the way, even that word Kleb, which means bread in Russian, as you say it, you re jokingly saying it now, it made me hungry because it made me remember how much I loved bread when I was in the Soviet Union.
1
SPEAKER_01
When you were hungry, that was the things you dreamed about, I don t know.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, what s amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists contributed to so much of what we understand today.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they were completely in hiding.
1
SPEAKER_00
There was no Google.
1
SPEAKER_00
They couldn t look up on Scholar.
1
SPEAKER_00
They had nothing.
1
SPEAKER_00
They had to wait for journals to get approved by the Communist Party to get approved.
1
SPEAKER_00
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 that said Jew on your passport.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
And Zeldovich, the famous Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnareff.
1
SPEAKER_00
And he had to – only because he was like at a Nobel level and was one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb program, could he even get his Jewish – and he was Jewish too.
1
SPEAKER_00
But only by virtue of his standing of his intellectual accomplishments would they give him the dispensation to let his student travel to Georgia or something.
1
SPEAKER_00
It makes what we complain about, and I complain about academia and it s like, oh, well, what can I talk about?
1
SPEAKER_00
We have no idea of how good it is and that they were able to create things like inflation completely isolated from the West.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, some of these people didn t meet people like Stephen Hawking until he was almost dead.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they just learn this thing through smuggled in, you know, it s a work of heroism, especially in cosmology.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard, probably because they were working the, they could pass off as, well, we re doing stuff for the atomic bomb program as well, which they were.
1
SPEAKER_01
At the same time, there is interesting incentives in the Soviet system that maybe we can take this tangent for a brief moment.
1
SPEAKER_01
that because there s a dictatorship, authoritarian regime throughout the history of the 20th century for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized.
1
SPEAKER_01
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.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like you were highly valued in society, maybe that s a better way to say it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I would say, you re saying like we have it easy now, in that sense,
2
SPEAKER_01
it was kind of beneficial to be a scientist in that society because you were seen as a hero, as there s famous stories.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that, you know, there s positives to that.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
in a capitalist system, or maybe not capitalist, let s just say the American system, the celebrities are the athletes, the actors and actresses, maybe business leaders, musicians, and the people we elect are sort of lawyers and lawyers,
2
SPEAKER_01
lawyers.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s, uh... Yeah, same in Germany.
2
SPEAKER_00
Germany had, you know, highly prized science.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, one of the most famous tragic-to-me cases is Fritz Haber.
2
SPEAKER_00
who invented the Haber-Bosch process that allowed us to, I don t know, have you eaten yet?
2
SPEAKER_00
You look, I mean, I know you fast, intermittent fast every day, and you do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
I said chleb, and you got, it s a little drool, but.
2
SPEAKER_01
He says I m lifting and I look slim.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m gonna clip this out and put it on Tinder.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think that s a website.
2
SPEAKER_00
You gotta swipe left or right for that, I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
But when you think about what he did and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy and we eat from every day,
2
SPEAKER_00
He was a German nationalist first and foremost, even though he was a Jew.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he personally went to witness the application of ammonia, chlorine gas, applied during trench warfare in 1916 in battles in Brussels and whatever.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he was – they had a whole cadre of Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics that would go and witness these atrocities.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that was also – they were almost putting science above – I don t want to say human dignity, but of like
2
SPEAKER_00
the fact that he would later be suppressed and actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz because of the chemical that he invented also called Zyklon B. And so it s just unbelievable.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I feel like that does have resonance today in this worship of science, you know, and listen to science and follow the science, which is more like scientism.
2
SPEAKER_00
And there is still a danger.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, I always say,
2
SPEAKER_00
Just because you re an atheist doesn t mean you don t have a religion.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, just because you, you know, in my case, in my books, I talk a lot about the Nobel Prize.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of like a kosher idol.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s something that you can worship, you know, it doesn t do any harm.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
But there s something really cool about that.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so, for me, it s hard to find that balance point between looking to science for wisdom, which I don t think it has—they re two different words—but also recognizing how much good and transformative power, maybe our only hope, comes from science.
2
SPEAKER_01
You open so many doors, because you also bring up Ernest Becker in that book.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there s a lot of elements of religiosity to science and to the Nobel Prize.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s fascinating to explore.
2
SPEAKER_01
and we will, and we still haven t finished the discussion of the beginning of the universe, which we ll return to.
2
SPEAKER_01
But now, since you opened the book, wow, pun unintended, of losing the Nobel Prize,
2
SPEAKER_01
Can you tell me the story of BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization Experiment, BICEP-1 and BICEP-2, and then maybe you can talk about BICEP-3.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the thing that you cover in your book, the human story of it, what happened?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that book is, in contrast to the second book, that s like a memoir.
2
SPEAKER_00
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 I cover in a later book in more detail, but to really feel like you re doing something and it s all you think about.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is all-consuming.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s something I couldn t have done now, because I have too many other wonderful, delightful demands on my time.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I call myself a practicing agnostic.
2
SPEAKER_00
In other words, I do things that religious people do, and I don t do things that atheist people do.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I once had this conversation, you know, with my first podcast guest, actually, I shouldn t say, oh, I was just having a conversation with Freeman Dyson, but he was actually my first guest.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I miss him.
2
SPEAKER_00
Name drop.
2
SPEAKER_00
Name drop, yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m sure there s gonna be plenty of comments.
2
SPEAKER_01
So in case people don t know, Brian Keating is the host of Into the Impossible podcast, where he s talked
2
SPEAKER_01
to some of the greatest scientists in the history of science, physicists especially in the history of science.
2
SPEAKER_00
So when I talked to Freeman, I said, you know, Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic too.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can you tell me something like what do you do on Sundays?
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you go to church?
2
SPEAKER_00
He s like, no, I don t go to church.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, well, imagine there was like an intelligent alien.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he was looking down, or she, I don t know.
2
SPEAKER_00
Thing was looking down, and it saw Freeman.
2
SPEAKER_00
And on Sundays, a group of people go to church, but Freeman doesn t go to church.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then there s another group of people that don t go to church, and those are called atheists.
2
SPEAKER_00
But Freeman calls himself an agnostic, but he does the things that Richard Dawkins... He doesn t go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn t go to.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I said, how would you distinguish yourself if not practice?
2
SPEAKER_00
So I m a behaviorist.
2
SPEAKER_00
I believe you can change your mentality, you can influence your mind via your bodily, physical actions.
2
SPEAKER_00
So when I was a 12-year-old, I got my first telescope.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic church, which is kind of strange for a Jewish kid who grew up in New York.
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe we ll get into that, maybe not.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I was just fascinated by these... Can we get into it for a second?
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
All right, let s go.
2
SPEAKER_00
All right, let s go there.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let s go to Baby Brian, or Young Brian, the new sitcom on CBS.
2
SPEAKER_00
Young Brian, born to two Jewish parents.
2
SPEAKER_00
My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook.
2
SPEAKER_00
He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician.
2
SPEAKER_00
And my mother was an eminent mom and a brilliant English major, et cetera.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they raised, they were secular.
2
SPEAKER_00
We d go to, I always joke, we d go to synagogue two times a year on Christmas and Easter.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, no, we would go, yeah, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
That s the typical two-day-a-year Jews.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we d have matzahs once a year on Passover.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that was about it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And for years I was like that until my parents got divorced, my mother remarried, and she married an Irish Catholic man by the name of Ray Keating.
2
SPEAKER_00
My father s name is James X. So when she remarried Ray Keating,
2
SPEAKER_00
I was immediately adopted.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m actually adopted into the Keating family.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he had nine brothers and sisters, and just warm and gregarious.
2
SPEAKER_00
They, you know, did Christmas and Easter.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I do things with great gusto.
2
SPEAKER_00
Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way.
2
SPEAKER_00
So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity, in this case, Catholicism.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I was baptized, confirmed, and I said, I want to go all the way.
2
SPEAKER_00
I became an altar boy in the Catholic church.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you re gonna be the best altar boy there ever was.
2
SPEAKER_00
I had like serious skills, you pass that collection basket, I could push people and get them to 2X their contributions.
2
SPEAKER_00
But in this case, I was 13, I don t know if you remember when you were 13, but if you extrapolate the next level up, it s like you go graduate student, postdoc, professor, the next level up from confirmation, altar boy, is priest.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I don t know if you re aware of this, but priests are not entitled to have relations with women.
2
SPEAKER_00
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, I found that maybe I— The math is not up.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
2
SPEAKER_00
There was a serious gap in that future.
2
SPEAKER_00
And instead, when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah, as most Jewish boys would be, a 12, 13-year-old boy, I actually got a telescope and became infatuated with all the things you could see with it.
2
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t bigger than that one over there that your hedgehog s looking through.
2
SPEAKER_00
Is that a hedgehog?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a hedgehog in the fog.
2
SPEAKER_01
I should mention, and we ll go one by one these things, you ve given me some incredible gifts.
2
SPEAKER_01
Maybe this is a good place to ask about the telescope that I put some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now you re officially an experimental astrophysicist.
2
SPEAKER_00
Why experimentalist versus an engineer?
2
SPEAKER_00
Because you assembled this telescope, you gave it a mount,
2
SPEAKER_00
and you connected it to a very powerful.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but there s no experiment going on.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just engineering for show.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s very shallow.
2
SPEAKER_01
Experiment is taking it to the next level and actually achieving something.
2
SPEAKER_01
Here, I just built a thing for show.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s always a joke.
2
SPEAKER_00
People say, oh, you re an experimental cosmologist.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m like, yeah, I build a lot of universes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things, soldering things.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not actually doing the stroking of my non-existent beard, contemplating the cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological model.
2
SPEAKER_01
And just like most of robotics is just using Velcro for things.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not like having dancing dogs and whatever, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So telescope.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, this telescope.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s the story of this little telescope?
2
SPEAKER_00
So this telescope s a very precious thing in some ways.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a symbol of what got me into, what brought me all the blessings I have in my life.
2
SPEAKER_00
Came from a telescope.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I always advise parents, or even people for themselves, you right here, wherever we are,
2
SPEAKER_00
Biggest city on Earth, Manhattan, where I was growing up as a 12-year-old outside of Manhattan.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can see the exact same craters on the moon, the same rings of Saturn, the same moons of Jupiter, the same phases of Venus.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, Lex, two and a half million light years away from Earth.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you can do that with that little thing over there, or one that s a little more expensive.
2
SPEAKER_00
Get one that has a mount, and you could attach now your smartphone.
2
SPEAKER_00
What the hell is that?
2
SPEAKER_00
I wouldn t have known what that was in 1984.
2
SPEAKER_00
And with that, you can do something that no other science to my knowledge can really replicate – maybe biology in some sense – 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, or that Saturn had ears as he called it.
2
SPEAKER_00
or that the moon was not crystalline, polished, smooth, and made of this heavenly substance, the quintessence substance, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So where else can you be viscerally connected with the first person to ever make that discovery?
2
SPEAKER_00
Try doing that with the Higgs boson.
2
SPEAKER_00
Get yourself an LHC and smash together high luminosity, call up Harry Cliff, and say, I want a replica.
2
SPEAKER_00
How did you feel?
2
SPEAKER_00
He didn t feel anything.
2
SPEAKER_00
None of them felt anything.
2
SPEAKER_00
It took years to come out.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can t do it.
2
SPEAKER_00
But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s fascinating.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s almost like maybe there s another one like that is fire.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like when you build a bonfire, can you actually get it?
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then you get to experience the magic of it, of what early humans, homo sapiens did.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you feel what Og felt when he did it that first time.
2
SPEAKER_01
By the way, is this a gift?
2
SPEAKER_01
This is a gift, of course.
2
SPEAKER_00
You need a little bit of a swag upgrade, so I got you some gifts.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m pulling a Putin, like, ask if this is a gift, making it very uncomfortable for you to say.
2
SPEAKER_01
Not really.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is actually my childhood telescope here, you know.
2
SPEAKER_01
but now I m keeping it.
2
SPEAKER_00
All right.
2
SPEAKER_01
So looking through this telescope.
2
SPEAKER_01
Was when your love for science was first born.
2
SPEAKER_00
Changed my life.
2
SPEAKER_00
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 Galilei, okay, if there s any confusion out there.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I did replicate exactly what he did, and I was like, holy crap, this is weird.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let me write it down.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it had another effect, which all good scientists, budding scientists should do, and all parents should do.
2
SPEAKER_00
Get your kid a book, a little notebook, tape a pencil to it, write down what you see, what you hypothesize, what you think it s gonna be.
2
SPEAKER_00
Not like in the high school, you know, like hypothesis, thesis, but just like, wow, how did I feel?
2
SPEAKER_00
Better yet, astronomy is a visual science.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sketch what you see.
2
SPEAKER_00
The Lagoon Nebula, the Pleiades Seven Sisters.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can see them anywhere on Earth.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips, in your connection between what you see, what you observe, and what you write down.
2
SPEAKER_00
Then, you do research, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
The goal of science is not to just replicate what other people did, it s do something new.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that s why we call it research and not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia.
2
SPEAKER_00
And in so doing, you start to train a kid at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s unbelievable.
2
SPEAKER_00
And now we can do even better because you got to share it on Instagram or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know,
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let me pour in some facts, intellects.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not like machine learning, you re just showing billions of cats.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re not forcing it in, you re bringing it out.
2
SPEAKER_00
It means to pour out of, in Latin, educare.
2
SPEAKER_00
And what more could a teacher want than to have something, the kid is just gushing.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re not gonna see- To inspire the kid.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Inspire.
2
SPEAKER_01
Shout out to Mrs. Tompkins.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins.
2
SPEAKER_00
She s watching, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
She s a big fan.
2
SPEAKER_00
Me, she doesn t care for, but you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, excellent.
2
SPEAKER_01
We take those we love for granted.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is in Manhattan.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is in Westchester County, New York.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, got it.
2
SPEAKER_01
But then that s where the dream is born.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
but then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist.
2
SPEAKER_01
So going to university, graduate school, post-doc, all the way to where you are today.
2
SPEAKER_01
What are some notable moments in that journey?
2
SPEAKER_00
So I call that the academic hunger games.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because it s like you re competing against these people who are just getting smarter all the time, as you re getting smarter all the time.
2
SPEAKER_00
They want to get into a fewer and fewer number of slots.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s fewer slots to get into college than not in high school.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s fewer slots in graduate school.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc.
2
SPEAKER_00
And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number.
2
SPEAKER_00
We just did a faculty search at UC San Diego.
2
SPEAKER_00
400 applicants for one position.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s almost getting impossible.
2
SPEAKER_00
I almost can t conceive of doing what these new brilliant young people applying to become an assistant professor at a state university that they re doing.
2
SPEAKER_00
It takes so much courage to do that.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I went from this kid in New York thinking I would never be a professional astronomer, A, because I didn t know any.
2
SPEAKER_00
I d never seen any.
2
SPEAKER_00
I didn t even know that they existed.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I thought, who the hell s going to pay me to look at the stars?
2
SPEAKER_00
Won t they pay me to be an ice cream taster?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s just not something I could conceive of getting paid to do, even if I had the brilliance to do it, which I didn t feel I did.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then I went to graduate school.
2
SPEAKER_00
And during graduate school, I had this on-again, off-again relationship with my father.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I knew that he was a mathematician.
2
SPEAKER_00
He had left and gotten remarried himself and moved across the country.
2
SPEAKER_00
I didn t see him for 15 years.
2
SPEAKER_00
And in that time, I learned a lot about him and I learned that he had gotten very interested not in pure mathematics, which he had been a number theorist and contributed seminal work on Diophantine equations, which play a role in Turing s work that you may have seen.
2
SPEAKER_00
But anyway, he had become interested, turned completely away from that into the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics.
2
SPEAKER_00
And by that time, I was at Brown University.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I was thinking, oh, maybe I ll be a condensed matter physicist or experimentalist.
2
SPEAKER_00
I never thought I d be a theorist, and I m not a theorist.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it was pretty prescient.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it always appealed to me.
2
SPEAKER_00
Why not do what made me happy as a 12-year-old?
2
SPEAKER_00
We often forget about those primitive things about us are probably the most sustainable, durable, and resilient attributes of our character.
2
SPEAKER_00
So with my own kids, I m like, what are they interested in now when they re young?
2
SPEAKER_00
And it doesn t mean that s what they re going to do.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, some of them want to play Fortnite, like professional Fortnite, which there are.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the odds of that is less than the odds of being a professor.
2
SPEAKER_01
Can I ask you, is your father still with us?
2
SPEAKER_01
No.
2
SPEAKER_01
Just in a small tangent, do you miss him?
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you think about him?
2
SPEAKER_01
Does his mathematical journey reverberate through who you are?
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it did in very many ways.
2
SPEAKER_00
And he s been gone for a long time now.
2
SPEAKER_00
Thinking back to that time with him, he must have instilled some capacity for me to only want to spend my time, which is a limited
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think it s the most limited quantity.
3
SPEAKER_01
Maybe we ll talk about that later.
3
SPEAKER_01
But to go into only the most challenging, interesting things with the limited time that we have while we re alive.
3
SPEAKER_01
And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics.
3
SPEAKER_01
For me, it was the foundations of the universe.
3
SPEAKER_01
And how did it come to be?
3
SPEAKER_01
And I felt like, well, people have been trying since Einstein to outdo Einstein, really have made great progress in the foundations of quantum mechanics.
3
SPEAKER_01
But this is an exciting time.
3
SPEAKER_01
The COBE satellite had just released its data that the universe had this anisotropy pattern.
3
SPEAKER_01
Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God and so forth.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it seemed like this is a good golden age for what I m going to do and what I m most interested in.
3
SPEAKER_01
But always throughout that, I wanted to understand.
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t want to be a wrench monkey.
3
SPEAKER_01
No offense to people that just do experiment.
3
SPEAKER_00
And no offense to monkeys.
3
SPEAKER_01
No offense to monkeys.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_01
This little guy.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sorry, man.
3
SPEAKER_01
But thinking back to what animates me, it s not doing the engineering as much as it is getting the data, but there s a lot of steps.
3
SPEAKER_01
I want to be the guy understanding what made the universe produce the signal that we saw.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I always joke with my theorist friends, you know, call me a closeted theorist.
3
SPEAKER_01
I wanna be what they call a guy who hangs out with musicians, a drummer.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I wanna be like that for physics, for theoretical physics.
3
SPEAKER_01
I wanna be like the guy who doesn t do new theory, but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing.
3
SPEAKER_00
I love that formulation of a theorist is understanding the source of the signal you re getting.
3
SPEAKER_00
Signal is primary.
3
SPEAKER_00
The thing you measure is primary, and theory is just,
3
SPEAKER_00
The search of explaining how that signal originated, but it s all about the signal.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I see the same search for the human mind and neuroscience in that same kind of way.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s ultimately about the signal, but you kind of hope to understand how that signal originated.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s fascinating.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s such a beautiful way to,
3
SPEAKER_00
to explain experimental physics, because it ultimately, at the end of the day, is all about the signal.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and maybe those two things, the neuroscience and the cosmos, not getting too romantic, but yeah, maybe they re linked in some fundamental way, some fundamental cosmic consciousness.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re gonna get to that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, no, we definitely have to get to that.
3
SPEAKER_01
But getting back to, yeah, so my origins.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I always say, and I want to try this on you.
3
SPEAKER_01
You said you wouldn t answer any of my questions, but I m going to ask you some questions.
3
SPEAKER_01
What s the most important day in the calendar?
3
SPEAKER_01
Don t tell me the date, but to you, what s the most important day to you every year?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do I have to answer, or do I have to think about that?
3
SPEAKER_01
No, no, answer.
3
SPEAKER_01
You don t have to tell me the exact date of the encounter.
3
SPEAKER_01
It could be your mistress s birthday or whatever, but- I have so many I lose track.
3
SPEAKER_00
Even though I m single, how does that even make sense?
3
SPEAKER_00
I know.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, I m sorry.
3
SPEAKER_00
A day, like a month and a day, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
For me, it would be December 31st.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I was gonna say, New Year s Eve, New Year s Day, some people say birthday, anniversary, kid s birth, they re usually signifying beginnings and ends, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
January means the portal between, the god was the portal between the beginning and the end.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you re looking back, maybe because you re Russian, you know, like the death side, the light side looking forward into January, the beginning, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So everybody s most important date
3
SPEAKER_01
It s usually some beginning or something significant.
3
SPEAKER_01
For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like, why did the universe get born, as I said before?
3
SPEAKER_01
And I didn t think there – again, I didn t – I just – there was some mental obstruction that I didn t realize that I could get past because I didn t think like anybody does it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like I knew astronomers knew these answers, like the universe at that time, between 10 and 20 billion years old.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now we know it s 13.872 billion years old.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s incredible the five digit, you know, per significant, five.
3
SPEAKER_01
What is it again, 13 point?
3
SPEAKER_01
13.872 billion years.
3
SPEAKER_01
872 million.
3
SPEAKER_00
So is there a lot of plus or minus on that?
3
SPEAKER_00
What are the error bars on that?
3
SPEAKER_01
So for me, I m 50.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me and telling me within 12 hours how old I am.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
So half a percent, percent level accuracy.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a confidence behind that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, I mean, there s a significance, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, it s extremely well measured.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s one of the most precise things that we have.
3
SPEAKER_01
In contrast to, again, 25 years ago, we didn t know if the universe was 10 billion or 20 billion years old, but there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be as they are, it s about 12 billion years old, or in the universe that were 12 billion.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that would be like you being older than your father.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was embarrassing.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can we actually take a tangent on a tangent on a tangent on a tangent?
3
SPEAKER_00
How old is the universe?
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you dig in onto this number?
3
SPEAKER_00
How do we know currently with those, I guess you said four or five significant digits?
3
SPEAKER_01
So we can come about it from two different ways.
3
SPEAKER_01
One, basically, they rely on the most important number in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant.
3
SPEAKER_01
The Hubble constant is this weird number that has the following units.
3
SPEAKER_01
It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s a speed per distance, which means you multiply it by distance, and you get a speed.
3
SPEAKER_01
And what is the speed you re measuring?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, you re measuring the speed of a distant galaxy at many megaparsecs away.
3
SPEAKER_01
So a galaxy at one megaparsec away.
3
SPEAKER_01
This isn t actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects.
3
SPEAKER_01
But if you go out, say, one megaparsec away, I would say that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers per second away from you.
3
SPEAKER_01
And every galaxy, except for the very most local group surrounding us, maybe a half a dozen galaxies, out of 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies, so 12 out of that number are moving towards us.
3
SPEAKER_01
The rest are moving away from us.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that number, if you invert it, if you say, well, when did those things last touch each other, all those galaxies?
3
SPEAKER_01
Now they re really far apart.
3
SPEAKER_01
We know how fast they re moving away.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a very simple algebra problem to solve.
3
SPEAKER_01
When were they touching?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s where you get that number from.
3
SPEAKER_00
So there s the local 12 and then the rest.
3
SPEAKER_00
Ignore the 12, yep.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then ignore the 12 and then look at the others and yeah, then solve the algebra problem.
3
SPEAKER_00
How does the stuff in the beginning, the mystery of that beginning epoch change this calculation of?
3
SPEAKER_01
Very little, because actually we understand how, there s some other ingredients that go into it, namely how much dark energy there is in the universe, how much dark matter there is in the universe, how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera, there are, and how much ordinary matter, like we re made up of, neutrons, protons, croutons.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so let me.
3
SPEAKER_00
Morons.
3
SPEAKER_00
it appears that the universe is bigger than it is older.
3
SPEAKER_00
How does that make sense?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so you re talking about the fact that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe that s located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the universe.
3
SPEAKER_01
Naively, you would say that.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you re right, if the universe were static,
3
SPEAKER_01
If the universe came into existence and you can conceive of this universe came into a Big Bang in a fixed universe So the universe just started off those galaxies were you know, they could be moving towards us away from us.
3
SPEAKER_01
Who knows?
3
SPEAKER_01
That you could say I can see a galaxy that s at a distance of only 13.8 billion years times the speed of light that would be true.
3
SPEAKER_01
So
3
SPEAKER_01
But the fact that the light is expanding along with the expansion of the universe – so imagine there was some very distant past.
3
SPEAKER_01
We were near a galaxy.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s going to produce some light, and that galaxy is going to be moving away from us.
3
SPEAKER_01
The light s going to be getting more and more red-shifted, as it s called.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s going to be moving farther and farther away from us as time goes on.
3
SPEAKER_01
There ll be some acceleration as we get into the era of dark energy.
3
SPEAKER_01
The light signals, there ll be some cone of acceptance, if you will.
3
SPEAKER_01
from which, which represents all the events that we could have received information from.
3
SPEAKER_01
We can t currently communicate with that galaxy.
3
SPEAKER_01
It sent us some light, and now it s moving away, and it sent us some light, and because the space is also dragging the photons with it, if you like, the photons are participating in the expansion of the universe, that s why they re redshifting, that we can see things out to where the universe first began expanding, not just when it began existing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And because the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years with no sign of slowing down yet, which is a huge surprise, serendipitous surprise, that we can see things approximately three times the age of the universe away from us.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we can see – it s called the age of the universe 15 billion years, just to make the math simple.
3
SPEAKER_01
We see things at 45 billion light years distance in that direction.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we see things at 45 billion light years in that direction, just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that means we see things that themselves are 90 billion light years away from each other.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s sort of the diameter of the observable universe.
3
SPEAKER_01
Is there another universe beyond that?
3
SPEAKER_01
We don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
Some conjecture there s not only one, there s an infinite number of them.
3
SPEAKER_00
How are you emotionally okay with the fact that our universe is expanding?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s going to be like Annie Hall, like with Alvy Singer.
3
SPEAKER_00
I grew up in the Soviet Union.
3
SPEAKER_00
We watched Propagandist.
3
SPEAKER_01
I realize that you did, yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s a famous- Annie Hall?
3
SPEAKER_01
Is that some kind of- It s a communist party!
3
SPEAKER_01
Propagandist!
3
SPEAKER_01
Movie with Woody Allen.
3
SPEAKER_01
Certainly canceled, but nevertheless, back when he was not canceled yet.
3
SPEAKER_01
He made a movie called Annie Hall, in which, it s a self-depiction.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s like a Larry David before Larry David was Larry David.
3
SPEAKER_01
neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s in Brooklyn, and he all of a sudden tells his mother he s not doing his homework anymore.
3
SPEAKER_01
He refuses to do his homework.
3
SPEAKER_01
His mother says, why?
3
SPEAKER_01
He goes, because the universe is expanding, and it keeps on expanding.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everything will rip apart, and we ll never have anything in contact, and everything is meaningless.
3
SPEAKER_01
I assume these are some of the topics we re gonna get to.
3
SPEAKER_01
And she goes, what are you talking about?
3
SPEAKER_01
We re in Brooklyn.
3
SPEAKER_01
Brooklyn is not expanding.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
Brooklyn is not expanding.
3
SPEAKER_01
The solar system is not expanding.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oftentimes I get asked, what is the universe expanding into?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s one of my favorite questions.
3
SPEAKER_01
What is it expanding into?
3
SPEAKER_01
And I say, it s actually an easy question if you think about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
You ve seen your friend Elon.
3
SPEAKER_01
He goes out into space.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s got a rocket, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
What s outside of the rocket?
3
SPEAKER_01
If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle, take the cap off it, go outside the rocket, sip in some Tang, screw on the cover of it, what s in there?
3
SPEAKER_01
Is it empty?
3
SPEAKER_00
That s just semantics, I guess.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah?
3
SPEAKER_01
No, it s definitely not empty.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you step outside the rocket?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you re in the vacuum of space, the quote-unquote vacuum of space.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there s no more liquid in it?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s no more liquid in it, no.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just a container, one cubic centimeter.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s make it simple.
3
SPEAKER_01
One cubic centimeter of box, and you take it out into space, outside the Falcon, whatever, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
what s inside that box.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not empty.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s actually, I m gonna say, this is gonna set your friends up.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements that we call the cosmic microwave background inside that box at any second.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, all right, hold on a second.
3
SPEAKER_00
What?
3
SPEAKER_00
420, that s, I ve heard of that number before.
3
SPEAKER_00
All right, let s- It used to be 69, but then they changed it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow, physics works in mysterious ways.
3
SPEAKER_00
In the millimeter box, it s 69.
3
SPEAKER_00
What are we talking about here?
3
SPEAKER_00
What s in the box?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s think outside the box.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, we re thinking inside the box.
3
SPEAKER_01
Every cubic centimeter of our observable universe is suffused with heat left over from the Big Bang.
3
SPEAKER_01
dark matter particles, there s a little ordinary matter in the universe, and every cubic centimeter there s some probability to find a proton, a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s actually an awful lot of neutrinos inside of that cubic centimeter.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, just imagine how many cubic centimeters there are in the universe.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s enormous.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why there s enormous numbers of particles in our universe.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a very rich universe.
3
SPEAKER_01
But now let s zoom in on that box.
3
SPEAKER_01
So now inside that box, there might be one, let s say there might be one ordinary matter, like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton.
3
SPEAKER_01
There might be a couple hundred neutrinos, and there ll be a couple hundred photons, as I said, 420.
3
SPEAKER_01
What s between those guys?
3
SPEAKER_01
What s between the protons and the neutrinos and the photons?
3
SPEAKER_01
Just zoom into a cubic micron now.
3
SPEAKER_01
Imagine 420 things inside a box this big.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s actually pretty empty.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re just zipping around in there, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So between them, there s a lot of empty space.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is outside the kind of physics-based models of fields and all those kinds of things.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just asking the question, what is this emptiness?
3
SPEAKER_01
What s the particle content in the universe, in every cubic centimeter of the universe?
3
SPEAKER_00
Outside of the 420, so you have the 420, they have some mass.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, they have energy, they don t have mass, photons don t have mass.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why they don t bring suitcases, you know that s true, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Photons never bring suitcases with them, because they re traveling light.
3
SPEAKER_00
See, I don t even get to laugh at you.
3
SPEAKER_00
Corny dad jokes, okay, you ll appreciate some of this.
3
SPEAKER_00
God will.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, this is pretty good, it s just, I m laughing on the insides.
3
SPEAKER_00
What s in the box, what s the 420, what s between the photons?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what space is, that s what the universe is expanding into.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so that s the notebook on which the photons are written.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s beautiful.
3
SPEAKER_00
But still, thank you, still,
3
SPEAKER_00
I understand this, but it s still uncomfortable that if the universe is expanding, that this thing is expanding, the canvas is expanding.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s very strange.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like if we were just sitting there still, I guess if we re in Brooklyn, nothing s expanding.
3
SPEAKER_00
So our cognition, our intuition about the world is based on this local fact that we don t get to experience this kind of expansion.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and that intuition leads us astray.
3
SPEAKER_01
But you know that gravity is the weakest of the so-called four fundamental forces, and yet it has the longest range pervasiveness.
3
SPEAKER_01
Gravity is, you know, we re being pulled towards the Andromeda Galaxy at some enormous rate of speed because of its massive counter-gravitational force to the force we exert on it.
3
SPEAKER_01
So gravity is enormously long range, but incredibly weak.
3
SPEAKER_01
And because of that, we can think about these effects of expansion as the relationship between the, as you said, the grid lines on the notebook, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship between those points, how far they are from each other, and those can change.
3
SPEAKER_01
Those point distances can change over time because of the force of gravity.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s weak, and what we experience as gravity,
3
SPEAKER_01
is the changing of those trajectories from being rectilinear to curvilinear.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what we experience as gravity.
3
SPEAKER_01
You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish about bowling ball and a trampoline.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s almost right, because it s actually – you have to visualize that now in four dimensions, like wrapping a trampoline at every point around the object.
3
SPEAKER_01
including on the sides, and it becomes very hard to visualize.
3
SPEAKER_01
So a lot of people use that.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s also a fraught analogy because you re using gravity, like the notion of gravity pulling something down to explain the notion of gravity.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s a little overburdening, the analogy.
3
SPEAKER_00
But okay, so you mentioned Barry Barish wrote the foreword to your book.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do gravitational waves fit into all of this?
3
SPEAKER_00
How do they, on the emotional level, how do they make you feel that they re just moving space-time?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so gravitational waves were, the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery the first time, you know, it was discovered twice.
3
SPEAKER_01
Indirectly by two men named Halston Taylor, and that was given my first year of graduate school the day I entered graduate school almost they they announced these two guys want it and the guy who won It did the work that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was my age.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is this in the 40s?
3
SPEAKER_01
This was not You know to a cosmologist age it means nothing and to a tennis player not on tinder I
3
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_01
Gravitational waves do fit in because what we re trying to do now is use the properties of gravitational waves, the analogous properties that they have to photons, that they travel at the speed of light, that they go through everything, they can go through everything.
3
SPEAKER_01
and that they re directly detectable, we re using them to try to confirm if or if not inflation occurred.
3
SPEAKER_01
So did inflation, the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe and the expansion, the initial expansion of the universe, did that take place?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that.
3
SPEAKER_01
through the imprint of these primordial gravitational waves, not these old newcomers that Barry studies, the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us a billion years ago.
3
SPEAKER_01
But we re seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch.
3
SPEAKER_01
However, those we cannot build a LIGO and put it at the Big Bang.
3
SPEAKER_01
So if you
4
SPEAKER_01
If you wanna measure, let s say you have the old time firecracker, let s say there s a firecracker, and you wanna see if it went off in the building next door to you.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can t see it, so you can t see the imprint of it, but you can hear it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And what we re trying to do is hear the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang, not by using a camera or even an interferometer like Barry used and his colleagues,
4
SPEAKER_01
But instead, using the CMB, the light, the primordial ancient fossils of the universe, the oldest light in the universe, we re going to use that as a film, quote unquote, onto which gravitational waves get exposed.
4
SPEAKER_00
and hope you can, so what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy for the exposure?
4
SPEAKER_01
So the signal, as I said, so there s 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter, and there s a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe.
4
SPEAKER_01
However, what we re looking for is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re not looking for its color, what wavelength it is.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re looking for what its polarization is.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we ll go, let me just ask, are you serious about the per cubic millimeter of 420 is the number?
4
SPEAKER_00
Centimeter.
4
SPEAKER_00
Cubic centimeter, 420 is the number.
4
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if Elon knows this and if he doesn t, he will truly enjoy this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s true.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, okay, funding secured, excellent.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak, of triumph.
4
SPEAKER_00
that you described in losing the Nobel Prize.
4
SPEAKER_00
So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can you describe what BICEP1 and BICEP2 are?
4
SPEAKER_00
BICEP3, perhaps, the instruments that can detect this kind of polarization?
4
SPEAKER_00
What are the challenges?
4
SPEAKER_00
The origin story, the whole thing.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, the origin story goes back again to a father-son rivalry.
4
SPEAKER_01
It really does.
4
SPEAKER_01
My father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera, but he never won a Nobel Prize.
4
SPEAKER_01
And some parents in America, they compete with their kids.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I was a football player in high school.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ll show you.
4
SPEAKER_01
And whatever, wrestling, whatever.
4
SPEAKER_01
And some of us could be healthy too.
4
SPEAKER_01
But with me and my dad, it wasn t super healthy.
4
SPEAKER_01
We would compete, and he was much more of a pure mathematician, and I was an experimental physicist, so we had both different ideas in what was worth prioritizing our time.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I knew for sure he didn t win the Nobel Prize, and I knew I could kinda outdo him.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I feel pretty venal and kinda minuscule kinda character-wise saying that.
4
SPEAKER_00
The only reason you could outdo him is because the Fields Medal is given every four years,
4
SPEAKER_01
and only if you re under 40, which he was.
4
SPEAKER_00
So he s working under much more limited conditions.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_01
So even if I had, which, you know, spoiler alert, the book s called Losing the Nobel Prize, so I didn t do it.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I wanted to do something big, and I wanted to do something that would really just unequivocally be realized as a discovery for the ages, as in fact it was when we made the premature announcement that we had been successful.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you were, from the beginning, reaching for the big questions.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s all I care about.
4
SPEAKER_00
So as an experimenter, you were swinging for the fences.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s all I wanted to do.
4
SPEAKER_01
I felt like if it s worth spending perhaps the rest of my life on as a scientist, it better be damn well better be interesting to me, to carry me through, to give me the, I always say, passion is great when people say, oh, follow your passion, but it s not enough.
4
SPEAKER_01
Passion s like the spark that ignites the rocket, but that s not enough to get the rocket into space.
4
SPEAKER_00
So then you swung for the fences with BICEP-1.
4
SPEAKER_00
What is this?
4
SPEAKER_01
So BICEP-1 was born out of kind of interesting circumstances.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I had gone to Stanford University for a postdoc, so an academic Hunger Games.
4
SPEAKER_01
Stanford?
4
SPEAKER_01
Stanford University.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s this small little school.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not like that technical college in Massachusetts that you re affiliated with.
4
SPEAKER_01
But as I went there, I was working for a new assistant professor, she had gotten there,
4
SPEAKER_01
only a year before I got there, and she had her own priorities, the things that she wanted to do.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I kept thinking in my spare time that I wanted to do something completely different.
4
SPEAKER_01
She was studying galaxies at high redshift, and I wanted to study the origin of the universe using this type of technology.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I realized, courtesy of a good friend of mine who s now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Heminkowski, that we didn t need this enormous Hubble telescope.
4
SPEAKER_01
We didn t need a 30-meter diameter telescope.
4
SPEAKER_01
We needed a tiny refracting telescope, no bigger than my head, less than a foot across.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that telescope would have the same power as a Hubble telescope, you know, size telescope could have, because the signals that we re looking for are enormous in wavelength on the sky.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re enormously long, large area signals on the sky.
4
SPEAKER_01
And if we could measure that, it would be proof, effectively, as close as you get to proof, there could be things that mimic it, but that we discovered the inflationary epoch.
4
SPEAKER_01
Inflation being the signal originally conceived of by Alan Guth to explain why the universe had the large-scale features that it does, namely that it has so-called flat geometry.
4
SPEAKER_01
So there s no way to make a triangle in space in our universe that has three interior angles that do not sum to 180 degrees.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can do that with spacecraft.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can do that with stars.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can do that with laser beams.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can do that with three different galaxies.
4
SPEAKER_01
All those galaxies, no matter how far you go, have this geometry.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s remarkable.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it s also unstable.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s very unlikely.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s very seemingly finely tuned.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that was one of the motivations that Guth had to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation, 1979, when he was a postdoc also at Stanford, at SLAC.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he was trying to get a permanent job.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was trying to make my name for myself.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I realized I could do this.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I was also being paid by this professor at Stanford to do a job for her.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then one day, she couldn t take it anymore because I was sketching notebooks and planning these experiments.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, no.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you had big ideas in your mind, you were planning big experiments, and that was difficult to work with on a small scale for like a postdoc type of situation, where you have to publish basic papers, deliver on some basic deadlines for a project, all those kinds of things.
4
SPEAKER_01
And support your advisors, paying, she was paying me.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so one day I came in, and it actually involved another friend of mine, an astronomer named Jill Tartar, one of the pioneers in the SETI science business of detecting extraterrestrials, which I assume you d never like to talk about aliens, so I m sure we won t get into aliens.
4
SPEAKER_01
But Jill was visiting Stanford, and I was like, I really want to meet her, can you introduce me?
4
SPEAKER_01
And she said, no, in fact, you re fired, my boss.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I was like, this is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to me.
4
SPEAKER_01
I didn t know where it would lead or what would happen to it, but getting fired from this ultra prestigious university turned out to be the path, I mean, literally, that brings me here today.
4
SPEAKER_01
In that, because of that, I ended up working for another person in Caltech, which is in Pasadena.
4
SPEAKER_01
And she, my original boss, Sarah Church, she got me the job with her former advisor, a man by the name of Andrew Lang.
4
SPEAKER_01
And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don t know, like, he was like Steve Jobs or Elon, you know, charismatic, handsome, persuasive, idea man.
4
SPEAKER_01
Not the guy always in the lab, you know, doing everything, but understood the, where things are going decades from now.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he had been involved in an experiment that actually measured the universe was flat.
4
SPEAKER_01
very close to flat, along with a preceding experiment done at Princeton by Lyman Page and other collaborators.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the shape of the universe is flat.
4
SPEAKER_01
The geometry of the universe is flat.
4
SPEAKER_00
How did he do that experiment?
4
SPEAKER_01
So he used the cosmic microwave background.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so what I said is you have to look for triangles in the universe.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you can measure triangles on Earth.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can actually, it s hard to show that the Earth is curved, but you can show the Earth is curved using triangles, mountaintops, et cetera, if you have an accurate enough protractor.
4
SPEAKER_01
Allegedly, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
God, you re like auto-canceling.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is great.
4
SPEAKER_01
My ratings are gonna go up, man.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is gonna be great.
4
SPEAKER_01
Take out the gate.
4
SPEAKER_01
Take out the gate.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you want actual science, go listen to Brian.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you want all of these conspiracy theories, or AKA the truth about Flat Earth, listen to him.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what he used was the following triangle.
4
SPEAKER_01
There are proto-galaxy-sized objects in the CMB.
4
SPEAKER_01
The cosmic microwave background has these patches, and so you can make a triangle out of the diameter of one of these blobs of primordial plasma, the soup that constitutes the early universe, which is hydrogen.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s very simple material.
4
SPEAKER_01
Understand hydrogen, electrons, and radiation, very simple.
4
SPEAKER_01
Plasma physicist s son, understand it.
4
SPEAKER_01
The diameter is one base of the triangle, and then the distance to the Earth is the other two legs.
4
SPEAKER_01
So he measured, along with his colleagues at Caltech and University of Rome and this other group at Princeton, measured the angle, interior angle effectively, very, very accurately, and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB?
4
SPEAKER_00
Can you know where they could trace them back location-wise?
4
SPEAKER_01
You can know where they are, but more than that, there s so many of these patches.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re about one square degree on the sky.
4
SPEAKER_01
The sky, you may know, a sphere has about 44,000 square degrees in a sphere.
4
SPEAKER_01
So there s literally 44,000 of these size patches over which he could do these kind of measurements to build up very good statistics.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s not exactly how they do it or how they did it in this experiment called Boomerang, but they did measure very accurately what was called the first Doppler peak or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the sphere has 44, approximately 44,000 square degrees to cover a sphere.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a very kind of important data collection thing when you re sitting on a sphere and you re looking out into the observable universe.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there s a lot of patches to work with.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic decomposition of spheres in machine learning in the early 2000s, still used today, was created out of this field by data analysts using this thing called hierarchical equal area triangles called heel picks is what it s called.
4
SPEAKER_00
And she has to stitch all this stuff together and stitch it together very accurately.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
Get high statistical significance in order to reduce the statistical errors.
4
SPEAKER_01
Very clean signal and measurement device to reduce the systematic errors.
4
SPEAKER_01
Those are the two predominant sources of error in any measurement.
4
SPEAKER_01
those that can be improved by more and more measurement, you know, you take more and more measurements of this table, you ll get slightly better each time, but you only win as the number of the one over the square root of the number of measurements.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the square root of 44,000 is pretty big.
4
SPEAKER_01
So they were able to get a very accurate measurement.
4
SPEAKER_01
Again, it s not exactly how they did it.
4
SPEAKER_01
They also have to do a Fourier analysis, decompose that, do a power spectrum, filtration, windows.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of work that goes into it, image analysis, and then comparing that with cosmological parameters, very simple model,
4
SPEAKER_01
just six different numbers that go into a model that made a prediction.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that was called Boomerang.
4
SPEAKER_01
So he had just come off of this.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, let me remind you, who is the first person, you know, to measure the curvature of the earth?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a guy named Aristophanes in the, you know, whatever lived around Aristotle s time.
4
SPEAKER_01
His name is in the history books.
4
SPEAKER_01
So this guy, Andrew Lang,
4
SPEAKER_01
I was like, he s like the next Aristotle, Aristophanes.
4
SPEAKER_01
I just wanted to work for this guy.
4
SPEAKER_01
He clearly had this brand.
4
SPEAKER_01
He was about 40 at the time, California Scientist of the Year.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was sure he was gonna win a Nobel Prize for that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I knew that he, so I went down to Caltech to give my job talk, and he said, I love it, you got a job.
4
SPEAKER_01
And before I could even, before he finished the sentence, I said, I ll take it.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was too good to be true.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I started working there at Caltech and slowly but surely, because Caltech s a rich private university, at that time run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore.
4
SPEAKER_01
He just wrote us a check, Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started on this idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so we started coming up with the idea for what I later named BICEP, Background Imaging Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, which is kind of ironic because we ended up measuring galactic polarization.
4
SPEAKER_01
We ll get to that in a minute.
4
SPEAKER_01
But along the way, the idea was very simple.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly make, which is a refracting telescope.
4
SPEAKER_01
Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes in your head.
4
SPEAKER_01
only way forward is making things more complex, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And when you make things complex in science, you introduce the possibility for systematic errors.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so we want to build the cleanest instrument.
4
SPEAKER_01
It turns out the cleanest instrument you can build in astronomy is a refracting telescope.
4
SPEAKER_01
We also had to, unlike that telescope or Galileo s, we had to use very sensitive detectors
4
SPEAKER_01
that were cooled less than 1 20th of the temperature of the cosmic background itself, which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.
4
SPEAKER_01
To do that, we need to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the air molecules and water molecules and take it to a very, very special place called the South Pole, Antarctica, from which I retrieved for you a patch.
4
SPEAKER_01
There it is over there.
4
SPEAKER_01
So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.
4
SPEAKER_00
Bright, oh yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
You fly down.
4
SPEAKER_00
As somebody who was born in the Soviet Union, we obviously like to call it red.
4
SPEAKER_00
United States Antarctic Program, the National Science Foundation.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the base is called the Amundsen Scott South Polar Station.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s a little known fact of geopolitics that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, there is a treaty in Antarctica.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can t use it for military purposes, for mining, et cetera, et cetera.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I don t know if you know, but about 12 years ago, Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s no land at the North Pole, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
So what did he do?
4
SPEAKER_01
He stuck it on the ocean underneath.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica, which was first reached about 110 years ago, the first time in human history.
4
SPEAKER_01
Antarctica means the opposite of the bear.
4
SPEAKER_01
It means no bears there.
4
SPEAKER_01
Basically, opposite of where polar bears are.
4
SPEAKER_01
Arctic means polar bear.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s where, in Crete.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wow, I did not know that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Fascinating.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
So Antarctica means the opposite place of that.
4
SPEAKER_01
So humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole, which is kind of in the middle of the continent.
4
SPEAKER_01
We wanted to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry.
4
SPEAKER_01
It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego, Texas, there s no place like the South Pole or Chile.
4
SPEAKER_01
Those are the two premier places on Earth.
4
SPEAKER_01
Of course you d like to go into space, there s no water in space.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s not about cold, it s about dry.
4
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
So that s why, for example, you can take this vodka and you can put it in this cup, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And we can take it over to a microwave somewhere and heat it up.
4
SPEAKER_01
After two minutes, the water s, three minutes, the water s boiling.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can t touch it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Take it from me, don t touch it.
4
SPEAKER_01
But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Why?
4
SPEAKER_01
Because the mug is totally bone dry.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules, because water molecules resonate exactly at these microwave frequencies.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we don t want these precious photons.
4
SPEAKER_01
420 of them traveling per cubic centimeter from the Big Bang itself to get absorbed in some water molecule in the Earth s atmosphere.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you take it to a place with the fewest number of water molecules per square centimeter of surface area, and that happens to be either Chile, where my other project, the Simons Observatory, is located, or you take it to the South Pole.
4
SPEAKER_01
We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months of my life down there.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s like being on Hoth.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a completely otherworldly environment.
4
SPEAKER_01
Ice, planar, flat as a pancake.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the buildings are built up on stilts.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re built up because the snow will otherwise cover them over.
4
SPEAKER_01
The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth, they yank them before you go down there.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you have any issues with your appendix, they ll cut it out of you before you go down there.
4
SPEAKER_01
The Russians at Vostok base, not too far away, about 600 miles away.
4
SPEAKER_01
The doctors there, there s a famous picture of one of them operating on himself, taking out his own appendix in the middle of winter by himself.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a harsh condition, science in the harshest of conditions.
4
SPEAKER_01
On Earth, at least.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we go to those great lengths because it s a pristine environment to observe these precious photons.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we built this telescope, and it weighs tens of thousands of pounds, and it had to scan the sky almost like it s a robot.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s scanning the sky almost unattended.
4
SPEAKER_01
We have a guy who spends a year of his life down there, a girl who spends a year of their life down there,
4
SPEAKER_01
They re called winter overs.
4
SPEAKER_01
They arrive in sometimes as early as November, and they don t leave until the following December.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we always joke, we ll pay you $75,000, you just have to work for one night of your life.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s all.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it s a long night.
4
SPEAKER_01
And what Bicep is, and I couldn t bring my polarized sunglasses here, so I brought these actual polarizers here.
4
SPEAKER_01
So if you take this and put it in front of your telescope there,
4
SPEAKER_01
You have now made a polarimeter.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have made a polarization sensitive telescope.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now you may not be able to immediately know how you would use such a thing, but one way to think about it, now take this guy and
5
SPEAKER_01
look at a light, look at a light source, put one up to your eye, and now put the other one in front of it, anywhere, and now rotate them, what happens to the light source?
5
SPEAKER_00
Becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so that s called a quadrupolar pattern, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So it s repeating, it goes bright, dim, bright, dim.
5
SPEAKER_01
It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical rotation.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s because of the property of the photon.
5
SPEAKER_01
The photon is a spin one field, but the polarization of light is the axis at which its electric field is oscillating.
5
SPEAKER_01
Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so therefore vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical polarization.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times for every one physical rotation.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s just like a spin two object.
5
SPEAKER_01
So now if you put that in front of the telescope,
5
SPEAKER_01
You can do one of two things.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now you re polarizing all the light that s going in, because you have one of the polarizers, and then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one.
5
SPEAKER_01
You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization.
5
SPEAKER_01
Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s a crystal, it s called calcite.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman.
5
SPEAKER_01
This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes there, and tell me what does it look like?
5
SPEAKER_00
Like I could see everything twice.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s a double image.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s a double image.
5
SPEAKER_01
That is a special crystal that has two different indices of refraction.
5
SPEAKER_01
So light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink, comes out and it splits into two different directions.
5
SPEAKER_01
and it could split even more if I made the crystal, give you my more expensive crystal, but that s all I have.
5
SPEAKER_00
What is the crystal of this kind of property called?
5
SPEAKER_01
It s called calcite.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is crystal, it s called birefringent crystal.
5
SPEAKER_01
Bi means two, refringent means refracting.
5
SPEAKER_01
So this is a special type of material that separates light based on its polarization.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s a pretty clean bi-signal.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s cleanly two.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m seeing two very cleanly.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s very crisp, right, so that s yours to keep with every time you host me.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, take the polarizer underneath your left hand, put it on top of the crystal, and kind of move it back and forth.
5
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is incredible.
5
SPEAKER_00
You can switch, as you rotate, you switch from one signal to the other, so one of the refractions to the other.
5
SPEAKER_01
So that is now you are analyzing the polarization, you re confirming the light comes out of the crystal, two different types of polarization.
5
SPEAKER_01
And effectively what we do is we have those two things, if you like, but working in the microwave, so our detector, that s where the cosmic photons are brightest in the microwave regime.
5
SPEAKER_01
electromagnetic spectrum, and we re coupling that to a refracting telescope.
5
SPEAKER_01
But your eyes are refracting telescopes, so you are a polarimeter right now.
5
SPEAKER_01
The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization, but otherwise it mainly detects its intensity of light and the color.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s what we call color and intensity of brightness.
5
SPEAKER_00
So you re devising an instrument that s very precisely measuring that polarization.
5
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
5
SPEAKER_01
and doing so in the microwave region with detectors not made of biological human retina cells, but of superconductors and things called bolometers.
5
SPEAKER_01
And this has to be done at temperatures close to absolute zero under vacuum conditions, one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.
5
SPEAKER_00
So why is it that this kind of device could win a Nobel Prize?
5
SPEAKER_01
So when the CMB was discovered, it was discovered serendipitously.
5
SPEAKER_01
There were two radio astronomers working at the time at Bell Laboratories.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now why would Bell Laboratories be employing radio astronomers?
5
SPEAKER_01
Bell Laboratories was kind of like Apple, or it was like a think tank, or it was Google.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s say it was like Google.
5
SPEAKER_01
Google has like Google X, it has this thing and that thing, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So they were working there.
5
SPEAKER_01
But imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers like they were actively recruiting.
5
SPEAKER_01
Why would they do that?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s was the first commercial satellite launch for communication.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone – part of AT&T and the early telephone company, later invent the first cell phone the year I was born.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they would take that – 1946 – and they would take that telescope technology that radio astronomers had developed and they would use that to see if they could improve the signal-to-noise of the satellites that they were seeing.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they found they couldn t.
5
SPEAKER_01
they found that they could not improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the first telecommunications satellite.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they were bouncing signals from the West Coast up to the satellite, bouncing it down, landing it in New Jersey, of all places, in northern New Jersey, Holmdel, New Jersey.
5
SPEAKER_01
And these radio astronomers couldn t get rid of the signal.
5
SPEAKER_01
So they said, well, New Jersey s not far from New York.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s see if the signal s coming from New York.
5
SPEAKER_01
Nope, not coming from New York.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s see if it changes with the year.
5
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it s coming from the galaxy, which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930-something.
5
SPEAKER_00
So not being able to reduce the signal or increase the signal-to-noise ratio, the noise was- It was noise.
5
SPEAKER_01
They knew the signal was right.
5
SPEAKER_01
They couldn t get rid of the noise.
5
SPEAKER_01
And there was excess noise over the model that had not only been predicted by them, but had been measured by a previous guy, a guy by the name of Edward Ohm.
5
SPEAKER_01
He measured the same signal, found that there was this hiss of static, of radio static that he could not get rid of that had a value of about 3 Kelvin.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you can translate—remember I said if you take a radio telescope and you have pointed at an object that s hot, the radio telescope s detector will get to the same temperature as the object.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a principle of radio thermodynamics.
5
SPEAKER_01
So it s a really interesting thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a thermometer, you can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth, it s amazing.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal not by its intensity, but by its temperature.
5
SPEAKER_01
So he found this guy, Edward Ohm, oh, there s this three Kelvin signal, I can t get rid of it, it must be I did my error analysis wrong, and I would give him an F if he was one of my first year students.
5
SPEAKER_01
But he s just attributed to lack of understanding.
5
SPEAKER_01
These other guys, Penzias and Wilson, who are also radio astronomers, they said, no, let s build another experiment, put that inside of our telescope, and do what s called calibration.
5
SPEAKER_01
Inject a known source of signal.
5
SPEAKER_01
every second that has a temperature of about four Kelvin, because the signal that they were trying to get rid of is about three Kelvin, and you want to have it as close as possible to the pernicious signal as possible.
5
SPEAKER_01
They did that once a second, so they got billions of measurements, millions of measurements over the course of several months, years, and even by the end, millions of measurements for sure.
5
SPEAKER_01
and they found they couldn t get rid of it either, but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 degrees Kelvin.
5
SPEAKER_00
So how does having a four Kelvin source, how does the calibration work?
5
SPEAKER_00
Just out of curiosity.
5
SPEAKER_01
It could be larger.
5
SPEAKER_01
Imagine you re trying to calibrate the microphone.
5
SPEAKER_01
it with like a really loud sound, but the gain would start to compress.
5
SPEAKER_01
So there are amplifiers downstream from the detector in every experiment that I ve ever worked on, and they only have a linear region over a very small region, and you want to keep it as linear as possible.
5
SPEAKER_01
That means you want, if you re trying to get rid of, you re trying to compare like a voice, and you re trying to compare that to a jet engine, it s not gonna be as easy on the amplifiers as getting, you know, a slightly loud, a gong or something, you know, a violin.
5
SPEAKER_00
So the idea of the noise is present in both?
5
SPEAKER_01
There s noise present in both, and you measure.
5
SPEAKER_01
What they did is they made a separate measurement just of the calibration system, which they measured exactly very well.
5
SPEAKER_01
4 Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s a temperature that s not going to change.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s certainly not going to change over a time scale of one second.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so they could compare unknown signal, known signal, unknown signal, known signal, like a scale, like a balance.
5
SPEAKER_01
So another way to think about it is like this.
5
SPEAKER_01
You ve seen these Libra kind of balances where you put two weights in a pan, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
What happens if you put like a one ounce weight on one side and a 20 kilogram weight on the other?
5
SPEAKER_01
You don t get any measurement, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
You do get kind of a measurement if they re close in weight.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s why they use four Kelvin.
5
SPEAKER_00
Got it, but just to linger on the fact that there s a romantic element to the fact that you re arriving at the same temperature.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s kind of fascinating.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you re measuring stuff in terms of, you re measuring signal in terms of temperature at the source.
5
SPEAKER_00
So you get to, I mean, there s something about temperature that s intimate.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s cool.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, especially since all life is basically conversion of energy and trying to control entropy, which is then related to thermodynamics exactly in that way.
5
SPEAKER_01
And this is a very crucial kind of thing to do in science, because they weren t looking for the signal.
5
SPEAKER_01
They found it accidentally, these two scientists, Penzias and Wilson.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I like to think that those kind of discoveries are the purest in science.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said, like the most important reaction as a scientist is not eureka, which means in Greek, as you know, I have found it.
5
SPEAKER_01
No, he said no, he said like that s weird.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like that s a much better reaction or that s freaking cool Like that s a scientist not like oh, I found one because surprise.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, cuz if you find what you re gonna find That s what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias, which is deadly inside.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s close to deadly as possible
5
SPEAKER_00
So how does that take us to something that s potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize?
5
SPEAKER_01
So Penzias and Wilson weren t looking for a signal.
5
SPEAKER_01
They ended up discovering the heat left over from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, et cetera.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that was a serendipitous discovery.
5
SPEAKER_01
They won the Nobel Prize in 1978.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was the first one ever awarded in cosmology.
5
SPEAKER_01
My reasoning is, what if you could explain not only how the elements got formed, but how the whole universe got formed?
5
SPEAKER_01
and kill off every other model of science.
5
SPEAKER_01
So if that weren t enough, every scientist, you know, worth his or her salt, had told me and Andrew Lang and our colleagues, this is a slam dunk Nobel Prize, if you could do it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because it was really explaining, again, the stakes of this science is different than like super fluidity, plasma physics.
5
SPEAKER_01
When you talk about the origin of the universe,
5
SPEAKER_01
It ties into everything.
5
SPEAKER_01
It ties into philosophy, theology.
5
SPEAKER_01
You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct, that the Bible can t be correct.
5
SPEAKER_01
In other words, what the Bible is correct now isn t falsified, if you like, if you believe it.
5
SPEAKER_01
I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously.
5
SPEAKER_01
But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning.
5
SPEAKER_01
What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular?
5
SPEAKER_01
It would be more like the cosmology of Akhenaten and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament, if you will, narrative.
5
SPEAKER_01
So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher.
5
SPEAKER_01
And again, it s not an offense, because we need plasma physics.
5
SPEAKER_01
We need every type of physics except maybe biophysics.
5
SPEAKER_01
We literally use every branch of physics, thermodynamics, superconductivity, quantum mechanics, all that goes into our understanding of the instrument.
5
SPEAKER_01
further, if you want to understand the theory that predicts the signal that we purport to measure.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I rationalize that if Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for this, if Holson Taylor won the Nobel Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves, this is decades before LIGO,
5
SPEAKER_01
By me detecting gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe began, detecting the origin of the initial conditions for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which won the Nobel Prize in 1983, these are like five Nobel Prizes, you know, potentially.
5
SPEAKER_01
For that reason, it seemed as close as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk, to outdo what my father did, to do, you know, really this impossible.
5
SPEAKER_01
And at that time, Lex, you know, again,
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, it sounds weird because people are like, oh, you wouldn t, you know, you don t really, you still want the Nobel Prize.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re still like greedy.
5
SPEAKER_01
And Luke, you wrote another book about it.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I always joke, I m like, well, if you want to see if I m a hypocrite, just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature.
5
SPEAKER_01
And if I accept it, then I m a hypocrite.
5
SPEAKER_00
But- Oh wait, well, we ll get to your current feelings on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrite and so on.
5
SPEAKER_00
But, so there s this ambition,
5
SPEAKER_00
let s say this device, this kind of signal could unlock many of the mysteries about the early universe.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so there s excitement there.
5
SPEAKER_00
So let s take it then further.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there s a human story here of a bit of heartbreak, not only
5
SPEAKER_00
was this possibly worth a Nobel Prize?
5
SPEAKER_00
If the Nobel Prize was given, you were excluded from the list of three that would get the Nobel Prize.
5
SPEAKER_00
So why were you excluded?
5
SPEAKER_00
Maybe that s a place to tell the story of Bicep 2.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so BICEP2, like iPhones, or I know you re an Android fanboy, but every year they get a little bit better.
5
SPEAKER_01
They get more megapixels, they get more optics, triple X zoom, whatever, okay, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
We upgraded our detectors as well.
5
SPEAKER_01
The initial detectors were based on what are called semiconductors.
5
SPEAKER_01
They have certain properties that make them very difficult to replicate at scale.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we wanted to make them into superconductors, which had a virtue that you could then mass produce them.
5
SPEAKER_01
Why superconductors?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, again, we re measuring heat.
5
SPEAKER_01
So one thing about a superconductor is that it transitions from some finite resistance to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature range.
5
SPEAKER_01
That means you can use that very short span dependency as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so my brilliant colleagues around the world, in this case, Jamie Bach, and nowadays, Suzanne Staggs at Princeton, they are just exquisitely making these sensors, tens of thousands of them.
5
SPEAKER_01
The initial BICEP-1 instrument, of course, we just called it BICEP, that only had 98 detectors.
5
SPEAKER_01
Simon s Observatory is going to have 100 times more just in one of our four telescopes.
5
SPEAKER_01
We re going to have 60,000 detectors operating full-time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero in the Atacama Desert.
5
SPEAKER_01
We ll get there.
5
SPEAKER_01
But in the case of getting back to what BICEP did, we upgraded and made BICEP2.
5
SPEAKER_01
In January 2010, we had just installed in the exact same location at the South Pole, in the same building, which is ominously called the Dark Sector Laboratory, DSL, still operating to this very day.
5
SPEAKER_01
We installed a new receiver on the same platform as before, very similar, identical optics, cryogenics, vacuum, everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors.
5
SPEAKER_01
So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it had certain other features that made it even more powerful, but then just a naive factor of five.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then we started observing with that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we knew we d have years to go, and maybe we d never see anything.
5
SPEAKER_01
Again, we re looking for these tiny little reverberations in the fabric of spacetime produced close to the origin of the universes we could ever get to.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I was playing a role in that.
5
SPEAKER_01
Obviously, it had upgraded my version of the original idea that I had had for BICEP along with Andrew Lang.
5
SPEAKER_01
And in January of 2010, we were – I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley and I got a call from Andrew Lang s – or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang s thesis advisor, Paul Richards at UC Berkeley.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he said that Andrew is dead.
5
SPEAKER_01
He had taken his life by suicide.
5
SPEAKER_01
And this is a man, and I d already lost my father at this point in 2010, but he was like a father figure to me, Andrew.
5
SPEAKER_01
He would give me advice on marriage, on how I should be with my kids, and what was the most important way to move through the academic ladder.
5
SPEAKER_01
Again, he was preternaturally suited to win the Nobel Prize.
5
SPEAKER_01
Everyone always thought he would win it.
5
SPEAKER_01
If he were alive, he still could win it.
5
SPEAKER_01
In fact, his wife, or his ex-wife, won it, Frances Arnold, in 2018.
5
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, it was this power couple.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it destroyed me for a long time because, you know, he was just this magical person.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I couldn t conceive of my career, my life, even like, you know, these aspects of raising kids and being married without him.
5
SPEAKER_01
And to do it in that way, it felt like, again, I m not, you know, he s got kids and I feel terrible for them, obviously, but it did feel like a betrayal.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I m just being honest with you.
5
SPEAKER_01
It felt like, why the F did you not reach out?
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, I thought we were close and I couldn t, you know, I told him everything and I felt like he had told me everything.
5
SPEAKER_01
And now he was gone.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then inevitably we had to keep running the instrument.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s millions of dollars invested, careers at stake, young people working tremendously hard.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then here we were.
5
SPEAKER_01
And like, who s going to take over the lead?
5
SPEAKER_01
He was the lead of the project at Caltech.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then it turned out that the other collaborators with whom I had been working for years and shared a lot of ups and downs with as well,
5
SPEAKER_01
They had you know decided to form a collaboration in which I was no longer the principal investigator I was no longer one of the co principal investigators as I was on bicep one so I continue on bicep one is the co-leader of it, but not on bicep two and You know obviously that was pretty painful.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is all happening at the same time as you are
5
SPEAKER_00
as you lose this father figure.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now there s this kind of, this one betrayal in a way, and there s another, or something that feels like a betrayal.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and he had kind of been the one, the only one looking out for
6
SPEAKER_00
my interest in the new experiment.
6
SPEAKER_00
I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego, and there were other postdocs in the mix, all of whom would come there to work with him to get the, you know, the approbation that would then lead to their careers taking off, as it did for mine.
6
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, so there was a competition.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, science is not free from egos and competition and desires, rightfully or wrongfully, for credit and attribution.
6
SPEAKER_01
Was he the source of strength and confidence for you as a scientist, as a man?
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we re kind of alone in this world.
6
SPEAKER_01
When you take on difficult things, we often kind of grasp at a few folks that give us strength.
6
SPEAKER_01
Was he basically your only source of strength in this whole journey?
6
SPEAKER_01
Like primarily in terms of like this close-knit?
6
SPEAKER_00
As a scientist, there were really two.
6
SPEAKER_00
There was one, this Russian cosmologist, Alexander Polnareff, who thankfully is very much alive.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was at Queen Mary University.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now he s retired.
6
SPEAKER_00
He was kind of a theoretical cosmological father to me.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then Andrew was this counterpoint that was teaching me
6
SPEAKER_00
You need to have a brand as a scientist.
6
SPEAKER_00
Every scientist has a brand and some of them don t protect it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Some of them don t burnish it.
6
SPEAKER_00
But some of the skills about being a scientist we don t teach our students involve how do you cultivate a scientific persona?
6
SPEAKER_00
And he was the exemplar for that, in addition to being the avuncular father figure type character that really was the person I would talk to.
6
SPEAKER_00
I had issues with when I had issues with my own students.
6
SPEAKER_00
And he would tell me how those were.
6
SPEAKER_00
And he would tell me his misgivings about people that he worked with or things in his personal life.
6
SPEAKER_00
It was devastating, but again, who the hell am I?
6
SPEAKER_00
I m not his kid.
6
SPEAKER_00
His kids lost father.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I feel guilty talking about it in that sense, but it s just a reality.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, there is something that s not often talked about is people who collaborate on scientific efforts.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s, I don t, again, don t wanna compare, but sometimes when the collaborations are truly great,
6
SPEAKER_01
it sounds similar as when veterans talk about their time serving together.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s a bond that s formed.
6
SPEAKER_01
So like comparing family and this kind of thing is, you know, it s not productive, but the depth of the bond is nevertheless real because you re taking on something, you re taking on the impossible.
6
SPEAKER_01
you re trying to achieve something sort of like there s this darkness, this fog of mystery that we re all surrounded by, which is what the human condition is.
6
SPEAKER_01
And you are like grasping at hope through the tools of science.
6
SPEAKER_01
And you re doing that together with like a confidence you probably should not have.
6
SPEAKER_01
But you re boldly pushing through.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then for him to take his own life, can I ask you about this kind of moment
6
SPEAKER_01
that combined, I don t want to say betrayal, but perhaps the feeling of betrayal that Bicep 2 kind of goes on without you, even though you re part of it, you re not part of the leadership group.
6
SPEAKER_01
Can you describe those low points?
6
SPEAKER_01
Was there a depression?
6
SPEAKER_01
Was there a crumbling of confidence?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, it was so wrapped up with my identity as a person.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s only a few different ways to have identity, unless you re unhealthy psychologically.
6
SPEAKER_00
One of them for scientists is often that they re a scientist, and that sometimes is their primary identity.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now I ve got other, you know, I m a husband and father.
6
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, at that time, that was my identity.
6
SPEAKER_00
So to have that kind of taken away.
6
SPEAKER_00
It, you know what, it reminded me of being, you know, kind of adopted in a sense, like the one who created me or that I had played, you know, played a role in my life, that he abandoned me in a sense.
6
SPEAKER_00
It felt like these people are abandoning me.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the only thing I d correct about the analogy that you used is like in the war, they re all working, you know, for a common good.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not like, I want to be, get the most kills.
6
SPEAKER_00
I compare it more to like a band, like think about the Beatles, you know, and what they did.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then they like, you know, they ripped apart because of egos, credit, they had solo careers, they had, you know, relations of their intimates and so forth.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there it s not only for the common good.
6
SPEAKER_00
There is more of a zero sum aspect.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like I would say, science is not, science is an infinite game.
6
SPEAKER_00
You can t win science.
6
SPEAKER_00
You never get to the, oh, we won science.
6
SPEAKER_00
And even the Nobel Prize, they don t feel like, oh, we re done.
6
SPEAKER_00
They feel like a lot of times they re imposters, even to that day.
6
SPEAKER_00
However, science is made up of a lot of, lot of, lot of finite games where there is only one winner for tenure.
6
SPEAKER_00
There is only three winner, are only three winners for the Nobel Prize.
6
SPEAKER_00
And because of that, I think it s heterodox and it s very confusing, especially there s no guide.
6
SPEAKER_00
I never got a guide how to be a professor, how to teach, how to lead a research group, how to deal with the death of an advisor, how to deal with an unruly graduate student or two.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, so we re all like reinventing it, which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it, because the academic system that I am a part of and you are a part of is a thousand years old.
6
SPEAKER_00
Dates back to Bologna, northern Italy, 1088 or so, first universities were established.
6
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, very little has changed.
6
SPEAKER_00
Some guy or gal scratching a rock on another piece of rock and, you know, lecturing in front.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there s only one better aspect nowadays is that back then the students could go on strike if they didn t like the professor and then he or she wouldn t get paid.
6
SPEAKER_00
Probably mostly it was he s back then.
6
SPEAKER_00
Nowadays, that barbaric process has been replaced by tenure, so I m okay.
6
SPEAKER_00
But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug getting pulled out from underneath me, because he was like my consigliore.
6
SPEAKER_00
He was a guy I sought counsel and counseled me, and he s dead, and I felt like there is no one who s gonna honor the agreements that we had, and he was a very soulful person.
6
SPEAKER_00
He was so much better at being a scientist than I could ever be.
6
SPEAKER_00
And just the loss for the cosmos, it just really hurt.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I thought, oh, it s so sad, because he could have won the Nobel Prize.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t think like that anymore.
6
SPEAKER_00
First, I think about his kids.
6
SPEAKER_00
Felt at first, now there goes my chance at winning a Nobel Prize.
6
SPEAKER_00
And hence, the title of the book was like, I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize.
6
SPEAKER_00
It also means that there s parts of the Nobel Prize that have to be done away with.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a double entendre.
6
SPEAKER_00
We need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize to help science out.
6
SPEAKER_00
We can talk about that a different time.
6
SPEAKER_00
In the context of like now thinking back on it, that was such a minuscule part of it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because let s say he did win the Nobel Prize or I did win the, or, you know, any of us did.
6
SPEAKER_00
Would that have changed anything?
6
SPEAKER_00
Would that have brought anything back?
6
SPEAKER_00
It s so, you know, we say it s like vanity, it s futility.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I just, for me, the Nobel Prize is like, I don t wanna say it s insignificant, because obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show, I m gonna name drop, okay?
6
SPEAKER_00
And he prepares, he prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you see him going on Colbert Report, you think, oh, they just have a banter, he s just naturally gifted.
6
SPEAKER_00
No, he said, no, no, no.
6
SPEAKER_00
You say that, you re undermining what he does.
6
SPEAKER_00
What he does, he goes back, he watches the last month of Colbert Reports, or whatever it s called, Late Show, and he says, how long does Stephen pause between questions?
6
SPEAKER_00
How long in the news cycle does he go back?
6
SPEAKER_00
What topics has he talked about with people similar to me?
6
SPEAKER_00
So I took Neil, and I did that for you.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I look back, how many times has Lex mentioned the words Nobel and prize?
6
SPEAKER_00
And I put it into Google Ngram, and out came
6
SPEAKER_00
exactly the same number of times as show episodes as of this moment.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you ve said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, it is so strange as a symbol that kind of unites this whole scientific journey, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
It s both sad and beautiful that a little prize, a little award, a medal, a little plaque, they ll be most likely forgotten by history completely.
6
SPEAKER_01
some silly list.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s somehow a catalyst for greatness.
6
SPEAKER_01
It resulted in you doing your life s work.
6
SPEAKER_01
The dream of it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize?
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, I can t necessarily counterfactually state that that would have happened.
6
SPEAKER_00
So no, it definitely has a place.
6
SPEAKER_00
And for me, you know, it is valuable to think about it.
6
SPEAKER_00
But the level of obsession that that academics have about it is really, I think it is
6
SPEAKER_00
I m almost on balance becoming unhealthy.
6
SPEAKER_00
And again, I have no, I make no truck with the winners of the Nobel Prize.
6
SPEAKER_00
Obviously, I ve, you know, now I ve had 11 on the show.
6
SPEAKER_00
And to think about, you know, like the one rule, so by the way, right after the denouement of the story, which I ll get to in a bit, you know, how our dreams went down to dust and ashes, I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics.
6
SPEAKER_00
So like the one that I theoretically could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually, they asked me to nominate.
6
SPEAKER_00
Now imagine if I ask you, Lex, you say, Brian, you know, instead of me inviting myself on the show, if you say, Brian, would you like to come on the Lex Friedman podcast?
6
SPEAKER_00
You know what, Lex?
6
SPEAKER_00
You know that guy Rogan?
6
SPEAKER_00
I think you might have heard of him.
6
SPEAKER_00
Can you introduce him to me?
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, can you imagine how that would feel?
6
SPEAKER_00
Like, you d be like, I m humiliated.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I was asked to nominate the winners.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the one rule that they say, of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated, there s only one rule that they maintained.
6
SPEAKER_00
In other words, he said one person can win it for something they discovered in the preceding year,
6
SPEAKER_00
that had the greatest benefit to mankind, made the world better, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
None of that was mentioned in the letter.
6
SPEAKER_00
It said, many people can win it for what worked on long ago.
6
SPEAKER_00
They didn t mention anything in the letter to me signed by the Secretary General, nothing about benefiting mankind.
6
SPEAKER_00
They said, just one thing, can t nominate yourself.
6
SPEAKER_00
So none of these guys nominated themselves.
6
SPEAKER_01
Actually, little known fact, they sent that exact letter just to you.
6
SPEAKER_01
That rule was created just for you.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s called the Keating Correlate.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yes, exactly.
6
SPEAKER_00
Good for them.
6
SPEAKER_01
Rub it in.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, in this particular case, of course, there s some weird technicality or whatever, but in this particular case, it s kind of a powerful...
6
SPEAKER_01
reminder that the Nobel Prize leaves a lot of people behind, and there s stories behind all of that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, here s a good example.
6
SPEAKER_00
Again, this is my friend, Barry Barish.
6
SPEAKER_00
He s become like a mentor and a friend.
6
SPEAKER_00
He wrote the foreword to this, my book, Into the Impossible.
6
SPEAKER_00
He won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died.
6
SPEAKER_00
And he admits it, and he said it.
6
SPEAKER_00
And actually, it s funny with him, because I ve heard you talk very rhapsodically and lovingly and romantically with Harry Cliff, and a wonderful podcast with him, by the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is, and how in that, we were about to build this superconducting supercollider right here in Texas, and it didn t get built, and it got canceled by Congress, and blah, blah, blah.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I say to Barry, that was the best thing that ever happened to you.
6
SPEAKER_00
And he s like, what the hell are you talking about?
6
SPEAKER_00
I m like, if that didn t get canceled, first of all, even though it did get canceled, the Europeans went on to build it themselves, saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars.
6
SPEAKER_00
And we wouldn t have learned anything really substantially new as proven by the fact that as you and Harry talked about, nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note has come out.
6
SPEAKER_00
And actually, he s had a recent paper, but it s been an upper limit along with his collaborators, an LHCb experiment that I m going to be talking with him about.
6
SPEAKER_00
But the bottom line is, it was really built to detect the Higgs.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the SSC, for twice as much money, would have sucked up Barry s career.
6
SPEAKER_00
He would have been working on that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Maybe not.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then he would never have worked on LIGO.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then he wouldn t have won the Nobel Prize, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
So you look at counterfactual history.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s not actually a big stretch, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
If the SSC had still gone on, he would have worked on it, because he was one of the primary leaders of that experiment.
6
SPEAKER_00
Second thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
Imagine the following thing had happened.
6
SPEAKER_00
They won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015, they detected unequivocal evidence for the in-spiral collision of two massive black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the sun, leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar masses behind.
6
SPEAKER_00
So one solar mass worth of matter, mass, got converted to pure gravitational energy.
6
SPEAKER_00
No light was seen by them.
6
SPEAKER_00
This particular date, September 14, 2015.
6
SPEAKER_00
That explosion, because of the miracle of time travel that telescopes afford us, that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away.
6
SPEAKER_00
They actually don t know which galaxy it took place in still, and they never will.
6
SPEAKER_00
If that collision between these two things, which have probably been orbiting each other for maybe a million years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier, Barry wouldn t have won the Nobel Prize.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because- It s hilarious to think that there s one human that won the Nobel Prize because two giant things collided.
6
SPEAKER_00
A billion, 200 million years ago, and if it had happened 18 days, 20 days, 30 days, because that was the deadline,
6
SPEAKER_00
for the Nobel Prize to be announced, they announced the findings in February, but you have to nominate the winners in January.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I could have nominated them up until January 30th, but they didn t announce anything, and there were just rumors.
6
SPEAKER_00
But the reason that he wouldn t have won it, because there was another guy who was still alive, considered to be the founding father of three of the three fathers, Ray Weiss, who did win it, Kip Thorne, who did win it, and the third gentleman at Caltech named Ron Drever, who passed away, again,
6
SPEAKER_00
He was alive in 2016, he died in the middle of 2017, and then he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
6
SPEAKER_01
And here we are, several billion of hairless apes that strangely wear clothing celebrated three
6
SPEAKER_01
other clothed hairless apes with a medal, with one particular element, and then they made speeches in a particular language that evolved.
6
SPEAKER_00
And bent down to get those medals in front of another guy who wears even fancier clothes, who is the king of Sweden.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then they got some free food afterwards.
6
SPEAKER_00
They get some reindeer meat, that s right.
6
SPEAKER_01
Okay, excellent.
6
SPEAKER_01
Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example, what happened to you in terms of Bicep 2?
6
SPEAKER_01
I wanna kinda speak...
6
SPEAKER_01
at a high level about a particular thing I observed.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast.
6
SPEAKER_01
I was just listening to the podcast.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m a huge fan of podcasts in general.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it also coincided with my entry into grad school and this whole journey of academia.
6
SPEAKER_01
So grad school, getting my PhD, then going to MIT, and then Google, and then just looking at this whole world of research.
6
SPEAKER_01
What I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world is that he celebrates others, like he promotes them.
6
SPEAKER_01
He gets genuinely, and I now know this from just being a friend privately, he genuinely gets excited by the success of others.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the contrast of that to how folks in academia often behave was always really disappointing to me.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because the natural, just on a basic human level, there is,
6
SPEAKER_01
an excitement, but the nature of that excitement is more like I m happy for my friend, but I m really jealous and I want to even outdo them.
6
SPEAKER_01
I want to celebrate them, but I want to do even better.
6
SPEAKER_01
So that s even for friends.
6
SPEAKER_01
So there s not a genuine, pure excitement.
6
SPEAKER_01
for others, and then couple that with just the, you now as a host of a popular podcast know this feeling, which is like, there s not even a willingness to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others.
6
SPEAKER_01
People in academia,
6
SPEAKER_01
are often best equipped, technically, in terms of language, to celebrate others.
6
SPEAKER_01
They understand the beauty, like the full richness of why the cool idea is as cool as it is, and they re in the best position to celebrate it, and yet there s a feeling that if I celebrate others, they might end up on the cover of Nature or whatever, and not me.
6
SPEAKER_01
They turn it into a zero-sum game.
6
SPEAKER_01
The reason why,
6
SPEAKER_01
I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me and many others, is that it doesn t have to be that way.
6
SPEAKER_01
And forget money and all those kinds of things.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think there s a narrative told that academics are this way because there s a limited amount of money, and so they re fighting for this.
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t think that s the reason it s happening this way.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think you can have a limited amount of money.
7
SPEAKER_01
The battle for money,
7
SPEAKER_01
happens in the space of proposal, there s networking, there s private stuff.
7
SPEAKER_01
Public celebration of others and just actually just how you feel in the privacy of your own heart is not have to do anything with money.
7
SPEAKER_01
It has to do with you having a big ego, not humbling yourself to the beauty of the journey that we re all on.
7
SPEAKER_01
And there s folks like Joe Rogan, who in the comedian circles is also rare, but he inspired all these other comedians to realize
7
SPEAKER_01
you know what, it s great to celebrate each other, we re promoting each other, and therefore the pie grows, because everybody else gets excited about this whole thing, and the pie grows.
7
SPEAKER_01
Right now, the scientists, by fighting, by not celebrating each other, are not growing the pie, and now, because of that, science becomes less and less popular.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a flying whale, exactly.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, and I want to point out two things.
7
SPEAKER_00
One is that I remember you went on Joe s show maybe a couple years ago, and then he gave you a watch,
7
SPEAKER_00
Give you like a Rolex, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and I tweeted to you and I think it s Omega Omega.
7
SPEAKER_00
Sorry.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay, fine The watch that went to the to the moon which we will get to in a bit I don t think he could give you what I gave you though, but
7
SPEAKER_00
And we ll get to what that final gift package is for you.
7
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, I also wanted to mention, because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset, and you should definitely go on Joe Rogan.
7
SPEAKER_01
And we had this conversation with him, because I was like, when I was moving to Austin, and had a conversation, like, don t you think it s weird, like, if we have the same guests at the same time, or whatever, he s like,
7
SPEAKER_01
Fuck that, I want you to be more successful than me.
7
SPEAKER_01
He truly wants everybody, especially people close to him, to be more successful.
7
SPEAKER_01
There s not even a thought.
7
SPEAKER_00
But you know why he does, and this is what I tweeted to you, and one of the few things I think you have retweeted that I sent you.
7
SPEAKER_00
I said, someday you re gonna give that to somebody.
7
SPEAKER_00
And today I wanted that to be me.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, no.
7
SPEAKER_00
Joe s Omega.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, but but the point is he sees in you that same You know grandiosity that same genuine spirit graciousness, and I think that s true.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean you do do something very rare I don t turn us into too much of a love fest, but I do want to say even back to Andrew You know who I ve almost been hate hagiographic about you know, just treating him like a saint He said to me the same thing when in a moment of peak
7
SPEAKER_00
He said, like, God damn it, like, I have to train these guys and women that work for me so that they can be better than me, so that they can go out and compete with me for the same limited amount of funding from the effing NSL.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, that wasn t his, that wasn t who he was.
7
SPEAKER_00
That was just an expression, like, I am doing something which is fundamentally, but you know what?
7
SPEAKER_00
When you have kids, hopefully, you know, please God, you will someday, because I think, and I hope we can get to talk about that later, but part of investment and part of doing something when you have a kid, like, you can get married.
7
SPEAKER_00
You can marry someone because she s rich, or he s rich, or you can marry someone because they re good looking, or he s good looking.
7
SPEAKER_00
You can marry for all these different reasons that are ultimately selfish.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s no way you can have a kid and be selfish.
7
SPEAKER_00
Nobody says, like, oh, you know what?
7
SPEAKER_00
I really want this thing that s three feet tall, that doesn t speak English, that craps on my floor, that wakes me up all hours of the night, that interferes with my love life.
7
SPEAKER_00
Nobody says that, because it doesn t benefit you.
7
SPEAKER_00
For months and months, a friend of mine, who actually does the videos for me, does a lot of my solo videos, he s having his first kid.
7
SPEAKER_00
He s like, what do I do?
7
SPEAKER_00
Because it always gets stupid advice.
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh, catch up on sleep now.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, yeah, I m going to store sleep in my sleep bank.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, I don t think Huberman and you talked about that, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
You can t do that.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s stupid.
7
SPEAKER_00
What you can do, give the kid a bath.
7
SPEAKER_00
feed the baby, let the mother relax.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, in other words, do the things, and this really relates back to what Aristotle once said.
7
SPEAKER_00
Aristotle once said, why do parents love kids more than kids love parents?
7
SPEAKER_00
As much as you love your dad and your mom, they still love you more.
7
SPEAKER_00
And because you love that which you sacrifice for.
7
SPEAKER_00
Here s a proof.
7
SPEAKER_00
I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs.
7
SPEAKER_00
Some with severe, one of my uncles on the Keating side had severe, what they called mental retardation, now it probably has a different name.
7
SPEAKER_00
That, out of the nine other brothers and sisters, he was their favorite, because they had to sacrifice so much for him.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think of that, you know, in the small case, like, Joe is kind of mentoring you or whatever, and you re going to mentor someone else.
7
SPEAKER_00
You love that which you sacrifice for.
7
SPEAKER_00
Sacrifice is reduction of entropy, it s storing and investing, and you want to protect that.
7
SPEAKER_00
you know, that to me really speaks to this.
7
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, I don t hold it against.
7
SPEAKER_00
But it is true, like scientists are, you know, when they re described, again, they re often said to be like children, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
You ve heard this description, they re inquisitive, they re curious, they re passionate, they love, and I m like, yeah, and they don t play well with others, they re jealous, they re petty, they re selfish, they won t share their ball and they ll go home.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s no such thing as a single-edged sword.
7
SPEAKER_00
I wish there were, you know, because we need some more of that, because you gotta dull it up.
7
SPEAKER_00
But in this case, I think when you have this kind of investment in science, it s gonna be natural.
7
SPEAKER_00
But that doesn t mean we have to feed the flames of competition.
7
SPEAKER_00
If you go to the homepage of the NSF, or the Department of Energy, or the recently released National Academy of Sciences Future of Science for the Astronomical Sciences, for the next 25 years or more, they talk about how many Nobel Prizes these different science things could win.
7
SPEAKER_00
exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB, B-mode polarization, you know, that s figure two in this thing.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, what message does that send to kids?
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, to young people?
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, that s what you should be doing so that you win this small, as you said, this prize given out by one hairless ape to another wearing a fancier costume eating reindeer?
7
SPEAKER_01
Especially in the case of the Nobel Prize, it s only currently given to three people.
7
SPEAKER_01
At most.
7
SPEAKER_00
which was never one of his stipulate.
7
SPEAKER_00
He actually said one.
7
SPEAKER_00
You can only give it to one person.
7
SPEAKER_00
So they change it.
7
SPEAKER_00
Why did they change it?
7
SPEAKER_00
I talk about speculating.
7
SPEAKER_00
By the way, the book s only three chapters out of 11 about the Nobel Prize and its effect.
7
SPEAKER_00
But one of the things that s been so interesting, like I m speaking actually this coming up in December, is that the Nobel Prize is given out on the day of Alfred Nobel s death.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of, and they bring in flowers, not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum, which is in San Romano in Italy.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a lot of like death fascination.
7
SPEAKER_00
Denial of death features heavily in the Nobel Prize, because it s like, what outlives a person?
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, science can outlive a person.
7
SPEAKER_00
My father has a theorem named after him.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s still engraved in many places around the world.
7
SPEAKER_00
You or I, we can go to different places around the world.
7
SPEAKER_00
People know who we are based on our publications.
7
SPEAKER_00
We want to store things, we want to compress things.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think there s something beautiful about that.
7
SPEAKER_00
But there is a notion of denial of death.
7
SPEAKER_00
There is a notion of what will outlast me, especially if you re among the many, 90-something percent of members of the National Academy don t believe in an active
7
SPEAKER_00
faith in a creator, in a God, and science can substitute for that, but it s not ultimately as fulfilling.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t believe it can fulfill a person the way even practicing but not believing in a religion can fulfill a person.
7
SPEAKER_01
Which is interesting, because you do bring up Ernest Becker and the denial of death in Losing the Nobel Prize book, and there is a sense in which
7
SPEAKER_01
That s probably in part at the core of this especially later dream of the Nobel Prize or a prize of recognition.
7
SPEAKER_01
I ve interacted with a few, or a large number of scientists that are getting up in age, and there is the feeling of real pride of happiness in them from winning awards and getting certain recognitions.
7
SPEAKER_01
And probably at the core of that is a kind of immortality or a kind of desire for immortality.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that was always off-putting to me as opposed to, I mean, I know it sounds weird to say it s off-putting, but it just,
7
SPEAKER_01
rather than celebrating the pure joy of solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us, just the actual.
7
SPEAKER_01
the actual exploration of the mysterious.
7
SPEAKER_00
For its own sake.
7
SPEAKER_01
For its own sake, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s why I said, you know, it s like a scientist should, okay, you have to be careful and not have any, you know, physical, it has to be platonic, but you can think of scientists and mentor, I have a chart in the book and a plaque made by one of my graduate students, former graduate students, she s now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Barron, and she made this plaque, and it has 17 generations.
7
SPEAKER_00
So here I am, 17 levels down, there s a guy, Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz, different Leibniz, 1596 he was born, and I m in this chain, and I don t know if you know this, but in the Russian language, the word scientist means someone who was taught.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ll say it very simply.
7
SPEAKER_00
One who was taught, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
So it probably means a guy who was taught, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
I could just be a person.
7
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no, it s literally someone who s taught.
7
SPEAKER_00
Someone who s taught, right.
7
SPEAKER_00
So what does that mean?
7
SPEAKER_00
To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning.
7
SPEAKER_00
One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist, because you have to learn from somebody else.
7
SPEAKER_00
Two, you have to be a teacher, you have to pay it forward.
7
SPEAKER_00
If you don t, I claim you re really not a scientist in the truest sense.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I feel like with the work that I do in outreach and stuff like that, I m doing it at scale.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m influencing more than the 24 kids I might have in my graduate class or undergraduate class, and potentially could reach thousands of people around the world.
7
SPEAKER_00
and make them into scientists themselves because that s the flywheel that is only beneficial.
7
SPEAKER_00
There is no competition.
7
SPEAKER_00
There is no zero-sum fixed mindset versus growth mindset because it is an infinite game.
7
SPEAKER_00
Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings of the negativity of the Soviet Union or pre-World War I Germany
7
SPEAKER_00
or Imperial Japan, you know, science celebrated.
7
SPEAKER_00
And we re just making like a nation of scientists.
7
SPEAKER_00
And like, we re not doing it to become multibillionaires or necessarily, you know, for any military purpose whatsoever.
7
SPEAKER_00
But if we have that, you know, sometimes I m flying, you know, home at night, like when you fly into L.A.
7
SPEAKER_00
You literally, it s very rare, you can see the number 10 million.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s very hard to visualize things.
7
SPEAKER_00
You see a brick wall, you ask, how many bricks are there?
7
SPEAKER_00
It might be 1,000, 2,000.
7
SPEAKER_00
10 million lights, there s 10 million souls.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you can see, and they re discreet, they re not like the Milky Way all blending together.
7
SPEAKER_01
each lost in their own busy lives, excited, fall in love, afraid of losing their job, all that.
7
SPEAKER_01
By the way, people should know that you re a pilot, so you literally mean fly.
7
SPEAKER_01
You get to look at the eye of God perspective on these 10 million, on these millions of people.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I don t think they re like constellations, but upside down.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like the city is like a constellation.
7
SPEAKER_00
Hopefully I ll stay and keep the plane the right way up.
7
SPEAKER_00
But when you think about that, like imagine they re all working together and imagine like you always talk about love and, but like, you don t know, you don t know that they re not worthy of love.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, so you re looking down on them and it s just amazing.
7
SPEAKER_00
Cause you think like what an amazing creation is man and humans and what can we do?
7
SPEAKER_00
It s phenomenal.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s so exciting.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then I get to do it.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a job I say, don t tell Gavin Newsom, but I do it for free.
7
SPEAKER_00
I love what I do.
7
SPEAKER_00
But to think about, oh, if my student succeeds, then I m not, no.
7
SPEAKER_00
It is unfortunate that you have experienced it.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve certainly experienced it.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think there are ways around it.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think it is a vexing problem because people want to, it s very tempting to keep your own garden fertilized.
7
SPEAKER_00
One thing that s interesting is people are like, why are you doing this thing and podcasting?
7
SPEAKER_00
You re supposed to be a serious scientist leading this huge project and collaborators.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I m like, well, most of what I do, as I said before, for you, it s Velcro.
7
SPEAKER_00
For me, it s like, you know.
7
SPEAKER_00
What is the deal with the safety standards on the truck that we re driving up to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator that will allow the concrete truck to move?
7
SPEAKER_00
It has nothing to do with the Big Bang, inflation, the multiverse, God s existence.
7
SPEAKER_00
It has nothing to do with that, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
So those are people I say I have to talk to.
7
SPEAKER_00
the people that come on the show, those are people I wanna talk to.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s super fun.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s a real honor that I get to do it.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m using, I have some unfair advantages, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
I m at a top university, we have people that s affiliated with the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, brilliant scientists coming through, but I felt like it would be kind of a shame if I didn t allow them to teach at scale, because they re better teachers than I am.
7
SPEAKER_01
Interesting, maybe difficult question.
7
SPEAKER_01
Have you ever considered talking on your podcast with the people who would get the Nobel Prize for Bicep 2 if it turned out to be detecting what it is?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, I m still friends with them, and they have still gone on to.
7
SPEAKER_00
So we should say why we didn t win the Nobel Prize, and then what happened with the group that is now leading it, that I m completely divorced from in a secular sense.
7
SPEAKER_00
We re friends.
7
SPEAKER_00
We see each other.
7
SPEAKER_00
We send each other emails and stuff like that.
7
SPEAKER_01
I would love to get their sense of what the natural heartbreak built into the whole process of the Nobel Prize, what their sense is.
7
SPEAKER_01
I would love to hear an honest, real conversation.
7
SPEAKER_01
I understand you re friends, but there s some hard truth that even friends don t talk about it until you put it right.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, they weren t happy I wrote the book.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I remember one of them was like, well, what s this I hear about a book?
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, a lot of people told me not to write the book.
7
SPEAKER_00
They said it s going to give
7
SPEAKER_00
too much attention to the Nobel Prize, it s gonna look like sour grapes.
7
SPEAKER_00
Again, I say you can prove I have sour grapes or not, just give me the next prize.
7
SPEAKER_01
No, if I- So you would, if you get a Nobel Prize for literature, you would turn it down?
7
SPEAKER_00
It s funny, because Sabine Hassenfelder, who is a fellow kind of YouTube sensation.
7
SPEAKER_01
And a shoe-in for the Nobel Peace Prize.
7
SPEAKER_00
Right.
7
SPEAKER_00
She s so gracious.
7
SPEAKER_00
She has that German just gentleness.
7
SPEAKER_01
She s a little too nice for my taste, I would say.
7
SPEAKER_00
I wish she could really say what she thinks, and be snarky on occasion.
7
SPEAKER_00
So she wrote a review of my book when it came out three or four years ago.
7
SPEAKER_00
And she said, well, Brian Keating, she said, well, it s good.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s interesting.
7
SPEAKER_00
He talks a lot about cosmology.
7
SPEAKER_00
But they can do whatever the hell they want.
7
SPEAKER_00
And he presumably has problems with it.
7
SPEAKER_00
But it s none of his business, basically.
7
SPEAKER_00
And at the end, she said, but if you want one good thing, he s a really good writer.
7
SPEAKER_00
And who knows?
7
SPEAKER_00
He could win the Nobel Prize in literature someday.
7
SPEAKER_00
I said, and then she allowed me to publish a rebuttal on her blog, which was kind of funny.
7
SPEAKER_00
But anyway, no, so getting back to the guys that we were, you know, kind of collaboratemies or frenemies, and we re still, look, you know, we don t wish each other active ill.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve visited them.
7
SPEAKER_00
They re welcome to visit me.
7
SPEAKER_00
They have visited me.
7
SPEAKER_00
The thing I have to say is that I just wonder about introspection.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like for me, literally, I don t,
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t care about the Nobel Prize other than what it can do to benefit science, but I no longer, I did, but by the way, I did seriously care about how it would benefit Brian Keating early on in my career.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m just totally honest.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m not proud of it.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of embarrassing.
7
SPEAKER_00
But now I would hope that people would say, okay, the guy is like, he s obsessed with it.
7
SPEAKER_00
My next book is not about this.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s about something completely different.
7
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, I do feel like people lack introspection a lot of times in science.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, we don t think about why we re doing what we re doing.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think it comes down to curiosity.
7
SPEAKER_00
One thing about Joe, and again, I ve only listened to like, I have to confess.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, you re like, my father, now I m confessing my sins to you, Father Lex, Father Friedman.
7
SPEAKER_00
Um, I haven t listened to like that many of your episodes Start to finish.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay with our friend mutual friend eric.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve listened to a bunch of recent ones, uh, einstein Weinstein, uh, weinstein weinstein, that s what it is.
7
SPEAKER_01
Um, I get that I get three wines with a brother
7
SPEAKER_00
the Brothers Karamazov, the Brothers Wines, and a few others.
7
SPEAKER_00
I haven t ever listened to a full Joe Rogan episode, but from what I ve seen with him, he has a preternatural curiosity.
7
SPEAKER_00
He doesn t have passion.
7
SPEAKER_00
There are a lot of podcasts that have passion, like I ve been on their show.
7
SPEAKER_00
He has curiosity.
7
SPEAKER_00
He s not gonna stop talking about something until he hops it, until he understands it, until he gets it viscerally, and I respect that, because as I say in this more recent book,
7
SPEAKER_00
Passion s kinda like the dopamine hit that gets you started, like, oh, I m gonna be great.
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe I can win a Nobel Prize.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s not gonna sustain you.
7
SPEAKER_00
The sustenance comes from the passion converting to curiosity.
7
SPEAKER_00
And what I wanna do is convert as many things as possible to things that I can then, because actually I ve had on people that discuss addiction.
7
SPEAKER_00
And there is an addictive quality to doing podcasts or whatever, but there s an addictive quality being a scientist.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you get to do things that are very specialized in specialized locations with special people, paid for by
8
SPEAKER_01
by other people who have no freaking idea what you do.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, imagine you worked in some, like some job and, you know, Feynman said, he said all these contradictory things.
8
SPEAKER_01
Like when he was, he was once said, like, he said, if you can t explain it to your grandmother, you don t understand it yourself.
8
SPEAKER_01
Then the day you won the Nobel prize, a reporter asked him, what d you win it for?
8
SPEAKER_01
He said, if I could explain it to you, bud, it wouldn t be worth a Nobel prize.
8
SPEAKER_01
So let s, let s leave aside his inherent contradictions.
8
SPEAKER_01
But in reality, there is a kind of like dopamine rush that you get from it, but what is ultimately gonna be the sustenance of it?
8
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, I do feel like we have to find a way to nucleate that.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know, actually, I don t know if it s like, can you turn someone into a, I used to ask this question all the time, like, can you make someone creative?
8
SPEAKER_01
Like, can you teach someone to be creative?
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_01
Can you teach someone to be curious?
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_01
I do know that kids are naturally curious.
8
SPEAKER_01
As they get older, they get less curious.
8
SPEAKER_01
Just like I heard from the other forward authors, James Altucher, he said once they did a study, kids smile 300 times a day or smile or laugh, adults five or six.
8
SPEAKER_01
Five or six, no, I m just trying to get you to laugh, but you re not gonna laugh.
8
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, no, it s true.
8
SPEAKER_01
So somewhere you lose 30 to 50%.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m not entertained, but that s because I m an adult.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, and then I do remember there s some distribution in those studies with the happier adults smile a little more, but still the kids blow them out of the water.
8
SPEAKER_01
So can you, is it, or should, in other words, should we invest our energy in getting the half-life decay constant stretched out more for curiosity for kids?
8
SPEAKER_01
Or should we try to reset the dopamine hit and then, you know, I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s an open question.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think it goes to David Foster Wallace, the key to life is to be unboreable.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think you could train this kind of thing, which is in every single situation.
8
SPEAKER_00
So like, which I think is at the,
8
SPEAKER_00
at the core, at least this correlated with curiosity, is in every situation...
8
SPEAKER_00
try to find the exciting, the fascinating.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like in every situation, you sitting at the, I don t know, waiting for something at a DMV or something like that.
8
SPEAKER_00
Find something that excites you, like a thought, like watch people or start to think about, well, I wonder how many people have to go to the DMV every day.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then try to go into the pothead mode of thinking like,
8
SPEAKER_00
Wow, isn t this weird that there s a bunch of people that are having to get a stamp of approval from the government to drive their cars, and then there s millions of cars driving every day.
8
SPEAKER_01
Or like, how can I do this better?
8
SPEAKER_01
Maybe there s some blockchain, and they could like, VIN transfer.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
No, that is a good idea.
8
SPEAKER_00
And then every situation, I think if you rigorously just practice that at a young age, I think you can learn to do that because sometimes people ask me for advice and to do this thing or that thing is, I think you at the core really have to have this,
8
SPEAKER_00
muscle of finding the awesomeness in everything.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because if you re able to find the awesomeness in everything, like whatever journey you take, whatever weird meandering path that you take through life is going to be productive.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s gonna end up in a great place.
8
SPEAKER_00
So that muscle is at the core of it.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I guess curiosity is central to that.
8
SPEAKER_00
But,
8
SPEAKER_00
You didn t win the Nobel Prize.
8
SPEAKER_00
The team of Bicep that led the Bicep 2 didn t win the Nobel Prize because of some space dust.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
8
SPEAKER_00
Which one is the moon, which one is?
8
SPEAKER_01
That one s the dust.
8
SPEAKER_01
The space dust, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
What are we looking at?
8
SPEAKER_00
So why is space dust the villain of this whole story?
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s funny, you know, I wrote these books, and I don t know about you, but when you get all these books, I m sure you get books, people sending books, they always come in these dust jackets, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
I was always like, what the hell is a dust jacket?
8
SPEAKER_01
Like, how much dust is raining down at any moment?
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, this is immaculate, this room is Russian tidiness galore, but in a normal household, how much dust is raining down?
8
SPEAKER_01
It s not really pretty, until...
8
SPEAKER_01
I wrote a book, and I realized I m writing a story about the origin of the universe, the prologue to the cosmos, and Dust is going to cover this story.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s actually more a story about astrophysics and cosmology than Dust, and this is the link between
8
SPEAKER_01
the cosmological and the astrophysical.
8
SPEAKER_01
So what does that mean?
8
SPEAKER_01
So astrophysics is, broadly speaking, the study of physical phenomena manifest in the heavens, astronomical phenomena.
8
SPEAKER_01
Cosmology is concerned with the origin, evolution, composition of the universe as a whole, but it s not really concerned with stars, galaxies, and planets per se, other than how they might help us measure the Hubble constant, the density of the universe, the neutrino content, et cetera, et cetera.
8
SPEAKER_01
So we have a tendency to kind of look a little bit, you know, they re like, not all astronomers and astrophysicists are equal.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re all equal, but some are more equal than others.
8
SPEAKER_01
So we have kind of a prejudice, a little swagger, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
And cosmologists are studying, you know, we re using Einstein, we re not using like, you know, Boltzmann.
8
SPEAKER_01
We re thinking of the biggest possible pictures.
8
SPEAKER_01
In so doing, you can actually become blinded to
8
SPEAKER_01
Otherwise obvious effects that people you know would have not overlooked in our case when we sought out the signal We were using the photons that make up this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe luckily only at three degrees Kelvin approximately
8
SPEAKER_01
We re using those as a type of film onto which gravitational waves will reverberate it, make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way, and then we can use our polarized sunglasses, but in a microwave format, to detect the characteristic two-fold symmetry pattern under rotation.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s the technical way that we undergo it.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s a lot more to it.
8
SPEAKER_01
But there are more than one thing that can mimic exactly that signal.
8
SPEAKER_01
First of all, when you look at the signal, the signal, if inflation took place, big if, but if it took place,
8
SPEAKER_01
the signal would be about one or two parts per billion of the CMB temperature itself.
8
SPEAKER_01
So a few nanokelvin, the CMB is a few kelvin, the signal from these BMODs would be a few nanokelvin.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s astonishing to think, Penzias and Wilson, 1965, measured something that s a billion times brighter, and that was what, 60 years ago, let s call it 60 years ago, since they discovered it?
8
SPEAKER_01
Moore s law, you re more expert, let s call it every two years.
8
SPEAKER_01
So you re talking about like two to the 30th power doubling or something like that, at that.
8
SPEAKER_01
So let s call it two to the 20th, something like that.
8
SPEAKER_01
So that s like only two to the 10th is a thousand, correct my math, I m wrong.
8
SPEAKER_01
Two to the 20th is a million, two to the 30th is a billion.
8
SPEAKER_01
So we re outpacing Moore s law in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments to detect these feeble signals from the cosmos.
8
SPEAKER_01
And they don t have to deal with, you know, in the semiconductor fabric factory in Santa Clara, California, they don t have to deal with like, you know, meteorites and things like coming into the laboratory.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a clean room, it s pristine, they can control everything about it, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
We can t control the cosmos.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the cosmos is literally littered with particles of schmutz, of failed planets, asteroids, meteoroids, things that didn t coalesce to make either the Earth,
8
SPEAKER_01
the moon, the planet Jupiter, or its moons, or get sucked into them and make craters on them, et cetera, et cetera.
8
SPEAKER_01
The rest of it is falling, and it comes in a power spectrum.
8
SPEAKER_01
There s very few, thank God, Chicxulub-sized impact or progenitors that will take out all life on Earth.
8
SPEAKER_01
But there s an extremely large number of tiny dust particles and microscopic grains, and then there s a fair number of intermediate-sized particles.
8
SPEAKER_01
It turns out this little guy here is the end product of a collapsing star that explodes in what s called a supernova, a type two supernova.
8
SPEAKER_01
So stars spend most of their life fusing helium nuclei protons and neutrons into helium nuclei.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then from there it can make other things like beryllium and briefly make beryllium and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the way up until it tries to make iron.
8
SPEAKER_01
and nickel.
8
SPEAKER_01
Iron and nickel are endothermic.
8
SPEAKER_01
It takes more energy than gets liberated to make an atom of iron.
8
SPEAKER_01
When that happens, there s no longer enough heat supplying pressure to resist the gravitational collapse of the material that was produced earlier.
8
SPEAKER_01
So the star forms and goes inside out.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s how scientists discovered helium was discovered on the sun.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know, did you know?
8
SPEAKER_01
That s why it s called helium.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they went there at night.
8
SPEAKER_00
Well done.
8
SPEAKER_01
They went there at night.
8
SPEAKER_01
Now, helium means Helios, it s the god of the sun.
8
SPEAKER_01
It was discovered in its spectrum from observations of the telescope like 150 years ago.
8
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t discovered like when oxygen and iron was discovered.
8
SPEAKER_01
So it s only a relatively recent comer to the periodic table.
8
SPEAKER_00
So helium came after oxygen.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh no, first hydrogen forms into helium.
8
SPEAKER_01
So that s the first thing that formed.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, in terms of discoveries.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, after oxygen.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think Priestley and others, Dalton, discovered it in the 1700s.
8
SPEAKER_01
No, helium was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing the weird atomic absorption called Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum.
8
SPEAKER_01
So, but when it tries to make iron, there s no longer any leftover heat.
8
SPEAKER_01
In other words, there s heat left over from fusing, as you know, the son of a plasma physicist, he fused to a hydrogen nuclei, you get excess energy, plus you get helium.
8
SPEAKER_01
So that s why fusion energy could be the energy source of the future and always will be.
8
SPEAKER_01
No, no, I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_01
Hopefully it ll come much sooner than that and so doing trying to make iron it takes more energy doesn t give off enough energy star collapses Explodes and what does it spray out into the you know cosmic interstellar medium?
8
SPEAKER_01
It sprays out the last thing it made which is that stuff luckily for us because some of that coalesced and made the core of the earth and
8
SPEAKER_01
onto which the lighter, like silica and carbon and the dirt and the crust of the earth were formed.
8
SPEAKER_01
And some of that made its way to the crust.
8
SPEAKER_01
The iron made its way to the crust.
8
SPEAKER_01
Some of that your mother ate and synthesized hemoglobin molecules.
8
SPEAKER_01
And hemoglobin has iron particles in it.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a quite amazing substance.
8
SPEAKER_01
Without it, we wouldn t have our red blood.
8
SPEAKER_01
We wouldn t exist as we are.
8
SPEAKER_00
Is this a very long, complicated mom joke?
8
SPEAKER_01
I ve done enough dad jokes, my quote is up.
8
SPEAKER_01
So taking this object seriously, not all of it gets bound up in a planet.
8
SPEAKER_01
In fact, forming planets is very inefficient.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so there s a lot of schmutz left over, some of which gets in the way of our telescopes looking back to the beginning of time.
8
SPEAKER_01
And some of those molecules, like iron, is used in compass needles, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
They re magnetized.
8
SPEAKER_01
And magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them and make the exact polarization pattern that we re looking for.
8
SPEAKER_01
As if the compass needles get all aligned, that s like the polarization of the dust grain.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like that polarizing filter.
8
SPEAKER_01
That means light polarized like this will get absorbed.
8
SPEAKER_01
and light polarized like this will go through, so it s absorbing, it s making 100% polarized light out of an initially unpolarized light source.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s what happened, and what we ended up claiming on March 17th, and I m sure if you were there, you might remember this, at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, there was an announcement.
8
SPEAKER_01
There were like three or four Nobel Prize winners in the audience, and the BICEP2 team, which I was no longer leading, I was still a member of it,
8
SPEAKER_01
In fact, in the announcement, the first person they mentioned besides, you know, thank you all for being here is me and my team at UC San Diego, although I wasn t invited to go to the press conference because that are very complicated.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yes, exactly.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a little school up there in the Cambridge area.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so they ended up making this announcement that we had discovered the aftershocks of inflation.
8
SPEAKER_01
We detected the gravitational waves, shaking up the CMB, and on that day, past Lex Friedman podcast, back when it was called Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark said, goodbye universe, hello multiverse, and hello Nobel Prize.
8
SPEAKER_01
See, he saw that as confirmatory evidence, not only of inflation, not only of gravitational waves, but of the multiverse.
8
SPEAKER_01
Goodbye universe, hello multiverse.
8
SPEAKER_00
Multiverse is a natural consequence.
8
SPEAKER_01
The direct consequence of inflation, yes.
8
SPEAKER_01
According to its prominent, you know supporters.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and of course leave the poetry to Max, which he does masterfully.
8
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so that, the excitement was there.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, maybe the initial heartbreak for you is there too.
8
SPEAKER_00
That s some of the darker moments you re going through, but broadly for the space of science, there s excitement there.
8
SPEAKER_01
Huge excitement.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I often note that this is a problem in what I call the science media complex, because oftentimes you ll see things like past guest Sarah Seger,
8
SPEAKER_01
Venus Life exists, and that will be really – I mean it s fascinating, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
With the work that she s doing or her colleagues are doing.
8
SPEAKER_01
Clara, who s on your show as well.
8
SPEAKER_01
That will be on front page, New York Times, Boston Globe, San Diego Union Tribune.
8
SPEAKER_01
It will be above the fold, make headlines around the world.
8
SPEAKER_01
six months, 12 months later, as is the case for us, retraction.
8
SPEAKER_01
Page C17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads, you know, and underneath the personal.
8
SPEAKER_01
So we have a problem in science, that the, you know, if it explodes, it leads, you know, and we get this huge fanfare.
8
SPEAKER_01
And this is not unique to my experiment.
8
SPEAKER_01
This happened with an earlier discovery of so-called Martian life discovered in Antarctica.
8
SPEAKER_01
Um, which was announced after peer review.
8
SPEAKER_01
We weren t peer reviewed at the point when we made the announcement.
8
SPEAKER_01
We had a press conference and there are other reasons that the team leaders felt it was important to do that so that we don t get scooped by a referee who s unethical.
8
SPEAKER_01
We thought we had done everything right, but that s confirmation bias.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s like levels to this.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there were many levels.
8
SPEAKER_01
And there were people, you know, me warning about how it would be interpreted and wanting to also make sure that we put all the data out, including the maps, which we still haven t released.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical, but the public never knows this.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think it s, so I ve made a rule that if I am ever in charge of doling out large amounts of science funding, that when you, you should keep kind of an option.
8
SPEAKER_01
In other words, you should have money for publicity, it s fine, have money for your press conference.
8
SPEAKER_01
But hold in reserve, in a bond, to be used, hopefully never, but if it s to be used, an equal fund for the retraction, if it should occur.
8
SPEAKER_00
So you would like to see, because that s a big part of transparency is the,
8
SPEAKER_00
To me, in the space of science at least, that s as beautiful.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because it reveals the, it tells a great story.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s an excitement, there s a- Humanity.
8
SPEAKER_00
So there s a climax to the triumph, but there s also a climax to the disappointment at the end.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because that also eventually leads
8
SPEAKER_00
to triumph again, that sets up, that s the drama that sets up the triumph.
8
SPEAKER_00
Like with Andrew Wiles bringing Fermat s last, Fermat s theorem, I guess it s not last name, whatever, is like the ups and downs of that, the rollercoaster, the whole thing should be documented.
8
SPEAKER_01
That is science, that is science.
8
SPEAKER_01
And when we don t do that, then we cultivate this aura that excludes other scientists.
8
SPEAKER_01
often from minorities or women – that you have to be – like Einstein came out of the womb and he was just like this guy with curly – no, he wasn t.
8
SPEAKER_01
He wasn t bad at math.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s all nonsense.
8
SPEAKER_01
But he said that he – you know what he said he attributed his success to, Lex?
8
SPEAKER_01
He said, I never asked my dad.
8
SPEAKER_01
what happened when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid?
8
SPEAKER_01
And thank God I didn t, because had I, he would have told me the best answer of the day, which, by the way, he would create 20 years later as a 26-year-old in the patent office, obviously, in Switzerland.
8
SPEAKER_01
And in so doing, by delaying when he asked these questions, he said, I approached it with the intellect of a mature scientist, not a little kid.
8
SPEAKER_01
and I wouldn t have accepted the same explanation.
8
SPEAKER_01
So sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible, ineffable, omniscient, you know, being, I think that really does a disservice.
8
SPEAKER_01
And Jim Gates said, you know, he s like, Einstein wasn t always Einstein.
8
SPEAKER_01
And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we re humans until we have artificial Einstein, which I don t think will ever exist.
8
SPEAKER_00
You ve launched the Assayer Project, where you hope to assess theories of everything with experiments.
8
SPEAKER_00
You have a YouTube video where you re announcing that.
8
SPEAKER_00
That looks super cool.
8
SPEAKER_00
Can you describe this project?
8
SPEAKER_00
And you also mentioned, you give a shout out to a little-known fellow by the name of Galileo Galilei as an inspiration to this project.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so Galileo is kind of my avatar, my hero, the kind of all-around scientist that I would love to approach the logarithm of Galileo.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was not only a phenomenal scientist.
8
SPEAKER_01
He was an incredible artist, a writer, a poet, a philosopher.
8
SPEAKER_01
And back then, they didn t have distinctions between scientists and – it was like a physician was like a physicist.
8
SPEAKER_01
Um, and he would indulge, you know, kind of these really intellectual flights of fancy, thinking about, uh, phenomena such as the Earth s tides or the, or, you know, the composition of the Milky Way.
8
SPEAKER_01
And what s interesting about Galileo is that he was
9
SPEAKER_00
almost as wrong often as he was right.
9
SPEAKER_00
And Galileo was not alone like this.
9
SPEAKER_00
I always say like Einstein had at least seven Nobel prizes that he could have won for discoveries that later became true.
9
SPEAKER_00
But he also had seven, you know, huge, you know, impossible to believe blunders in some sense.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s too bad, because he could have had a good career, as I would say.
9
SPEAKER_00
And Galileo was like that too.
9
SPEAKER_00
In other words, he would fall victim to, I think, this confirmation bias that all scientists have to guard their lives against, their careers, their brands, their reputations against, which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn t conform to what you re trying to prove for one reason or another.
9
SPEAKER_00
or the radical acceptance of things that do comport with it in order to bolster your confidence.
9
SPEAKER_00
And both are equally intoxicating.
9
SPEAKER_00
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug because it really reinforces this notion, which is partially sunk cost.
9
SPEAKER_00
You put so much time, effort, money, reputation into it.
9
SPEAKER_00
You don t want to be wrong and go back on it.
9
SPEAKER_00
And with Galileo, he would be incredibly perceptive
9
SPEAKER_00
about things such as, you know, the Earth being not located at the center of the solar system and the sun being the center, so-called Copernican hypothesis.
9
SPEAKER_00
And he would use as evidence very, very interesting ideas that all of which were wrong, basically.
9
SPEAKER_00
And in fact, we weren t able to prove that the Earth orbited around the sun.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I ask you, like, can you prove the Earth is not flat?
9
SPEAKER_00
No, well, you re a flat earther anyway.
9
SPEAKER_01
But, um, but, but it s, I asked my graduate- Proud, uh, Flat Earth Society member.
9
SPEAKER_01
T-shirt s coming out soon.
9
SPEAKER_01
Let s stream it dot com.
9
SPEAKER_01
Merch.
9
SPEAKER_01
Slash merch.
9
SPEAKER_00
But it s actually not trivial to do that, but most of my students, graduate students, can prove that the Earth is rounder.
9
SPEAKER_01
Explain how the Earth- It is actually not trivial to do, though.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s not.
9
SPEAKER_00
And much harder is to prove that the earth goes around the sun.
9
SPEAKER_00
In fact, that s extremely hard to prove.
9
SPEAKER_00
And almost none of my students, even after they get their PhD and the final exam, I kind of like to just give them a little bit of humility.
9
SPEAKER_00
Because I think to be a good scientist, you need to be humble, you need to have a little humility, and you need to have swagger.
9
SPEAKER_00
You need to feel a little cocky, like, I can do this.
9
SPEAKER_00
I can do this thing that Einstein, by definition, couldn t do.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m going to attempt it.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m going to attempt to do what was impossible just a generation ago.
9
SPEAKER_01
How do you prove that the Earth goes around the Sun?
9
SPEAKER_01
Is it by the motion of other planets?
9
SPEAKER_00
So there are many ways to do it.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean, obviously, you could take a spaceship, park it at the north celestial pole of our solar system, and just watch what happens.
9
SPEAKER_00
But obviously, that wasn t how it was discovered in the late 1700s.
9
SPEAKER_00
So it s called aberration.
9
SPEAKER_00
So if you look at stars, as the Earth orbits around the Sun, the position of the stars will shift slightly because of the tilt of the Earth and because the Earth is in motion around the Sun.
9
SPEAKER_00
And because the Earth has a non-trivial amount of velocity compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the Sun, the stars will trace out little tiny ellipses, and those will correspond to the fact that we re moving around.
9
SPEAKER_00
If they re at infinite distance, which we assume that they are, they re not really.
9
SPEAKER_00
But for all intents and purposes, on the scale of the solar system, they re infinitely far away.
9
SPEAKER_00
So that s called stellar aberration.
9
SPEAKER_00
And that was the first way it was discovered.
9
SPEAKER_00
And actually, we still use that.
9
SPEAKER_00
We have to correct for that effect when we measure the cosmic microwave background.
9
SPEAKER_00
Because imagine you re inside of an oven.
9
SPEAKER_00
It has some temperature, three Kelvin, 1,000 Kelvin, whatever.
9
SPEAKER_00
If I m moving towards you, the photons that are coming to me in that direction will be blue-shifted, hotter.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the ones behind me will be red-shifted.
9
SPEAKER_00
I ll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount of matter or energy where you are.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s an extension of the Doppler effect.
9
SPEAKER_00
make use of that and construct what s called like a local standard of rest.
9
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, so you can do it.
9
SPEAKER_00
But Galileo said, no, no, no, I m not gonna wait for that.
9
SPEAKER_00
I have other proofs for it.
9
SPEAKER_00
One of which is that the Earth has tides.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the tides come in and out twice a day, high tide and low tide.
9
SPEAKER_00
And he made the analogy, because the Earth is moving around the sun, say this is the sun here, and it s moving around the sun, but it s also rotating on its axis.
9
SPEAKER_00
See how the water s sloshing up and down inside the vodka bottle?
9
SPEAKER_00
As that happens, he said that s what the tides are caused by.
9
SPEAKER_00
Totally wrong.
9
SPEAKER_01
Most people listen to this podcast.
9
SPEAKER_01
Just so you know, if you re listening to this, he actually has a bottle of vodka in his hand.
9
SPEAKER_00
Half drunk.
9
SPEAKER_01
And we re both drunk and whatever else is possible.
9
SPEAKER_00
So as it sloshed around, he claimed that was what... No, it has nothing to do with that.
9
SPEAKER_00
The moon...
9
SPEAKER_00
over there, the moon pulls differentially on the Earth and the Earth s ocean.
9
SPEAKER_00
That causes the oceans to bulge slightly towards and away from where the moon is.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the moon is actually the source of the Earth s tides.
9
SPEAKER_00
It has nothing to do with Copernicus, the orbit of the sun.
9
SPEAKER_00
So he was totally wrong about that.
9
SPEAKER_00
He also thought that the Milky Way was comprised only of stars, when we know it s made of gas, dust, nebulae, and things like that.
9
SPEAKER_00
So he had his fair share of blunders.
9
SPEAKER_00
Now, one thing I always kind of make note of, and I m actually
9
SPEAKER_00
producing along with Jim Gates, Fabiola Gianatti, Frank Wilczek, and Carlo Rovelli, and my friend Lucio Piccirillo, the first ever audiobook of one of Galileo s dialogue, the one where he claimed to find evidence for the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, but it was an error.
9
SPEAKER_01
So you re reading parts of this text, which is incredible.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a brilliant book.
9
SPEAKER_00
So this book was written in 1632.
9
SPEAKER_00
It was written and it was the one that caused him to go into house arrest and almost threatened to be tortured.
9
SPEAKER_00
And that book laid out his arguments for what was called the Copernican or the non-peripatetic, Aristotelian, et cetera, notion of the planetary dynamic.
9
SPEAKER_00
And eventually, he was forced to recant that he believed in it.
9
SPEAKER_00
And allegedly, he said he still believes the Earth moves.
9
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, so we re making that.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s written in the form of a trilogue.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s actually called The Dialogue, but it s three people.
9
SPEAKER_00
There s one named Salviati, who is espousing Galileo s notions about how the heavens were orchestrated.
9
SPEAKER_00
And Salviati means, like, the salvation, the savior.
9
SPEAKER_00
Then there s a middleman, Segredo.
9
SPEAKER_00
So Carlo Rovelli is playing Salviati, the brilliant one.
9
SPEAKER_00
I am playing Segredo, who s like an intelligent interlocutor.
9
SPEAKER_00
I can appreciate Aristotle.
9
SPEAKER_00
I can appreciate Copernicus.
9
SPEAKER_00
Then there s this guy Simplicio, the simpleton, and he espouses the words of the pope.
9
SPEAKER_00
So you can imagine you re working in Putin s government or you re working in whatever.
9
SPEAKER_00
And all of a sudden, you re kind of putting the words of, like, the fool—literally calling him a fool, but you re using the words of the all-supreme powerful being on Earth at that time as the Vatican Church, especially for an Italian like Galileo.
9
SPEAKER_00
So he wasn t as brilliant, you know, politically as he was astrophysically and otherwise.
9
SPEAKER_01
Who s doing some Pliccio?
9
SPEAKER_00
So Pliccio is a friend of mine in University of Manchester named Lucio Picciarello.
9
SPEAKER_00
He s an Irish guy, but he has a full-blooded Italian.
9
SPEAKER_00
They all speak English and Italian.
9
SPEAKER_00
I only speak and that four words are written by so one forward and this place has three forwards, which is like a 12 word.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, the four words are written by- Can you explain that joke for me?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that was a good one.
9
SPEAKER_00
The four word, three four words.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m too slow for this.
9
SPEAKER_00
One of them is written by Albert Einstein, in which he says Galileo was not only one of the greatest scientists in history, this is Einstein telling Galileo, but he was one of the greatest writers and minds of all of human history.
9
SPEAKER_00
That foreword is read by Frank Wilczek, who you ve had.
9
SPEAKER_00
Jim Gates, who you ve also had.
9
SPEAKER_00
He reads the translation, the translator, Stillman Drake, who s a renowned scientific translator.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then Fabiola Gianatti, she reads the introduction and dedication
9
SPEAKER_00
from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany, and some of the different introductions that Galileo himself had.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s such a thrill to be able to do it.
9
SPEAKER_00
I only randomly found out, because I wanted to study it, and it s like 500 pages long.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, let me get the audio book, because I m an audio medium kind of guy.
9
SPEAKER_00
Didn t exist.
9
SPEAKER_00
So I said, let s do it ourselves.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so we did it.
9
SPEAKER_00
And hopefully it ll be out on Galileo s birthday, which is February 15, 2022.
9
SPEAKER_00
It ll be a ripe 457.
9
SPEAKER_00
But that s not the only one of his books.
9
SPEAKER_00
Galileo wrote many books.
9
SPEAKER_00
one of which is called The Military Compass.
9
SPEAKER_00
And this is an interesting book for my blockchain and your blockchain aficionados.
9
SPEAKER_00
In this book, he talks about a compass, which is not a magnetic compass, but an actual slide rule.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s basically a slide rule.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s a manual.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s like, imagine if your phone came with a manual.
9
SPEAKER_00
Nowadays, they don t, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
But this was a manual for how to use this slide rule, which is enormously important.
9
SPEAKER_00
And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s a brilliant book.
9
SPEAKER_00
One of the examples is how do you convert money?
9
SPEAKER_00
So he does a currency conversion between Ducati and Florentine Ducati and Scuti and whatever, lira, whatever.
9
SPEAKER_00
He does all these currency conversions.
9
SPEAKER_00
One copy of this book, or maybe two exist, first printings from 1600 still exist.
9
SPEAKER_00
If Galileo had just kept those in his family, they re worth $100 million.
9
SPEAKER_00
Nowadays, you can t get a Scootie.
9
SPEAKER_00
A Scootie s worth nothing.
9
SPEAKER_00
A Ducati s worth nothing.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean, maybe some collector wants a piece of paper, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
So it s a lesson.
9
SPEAKER_00
There are value in physical, non-fungible tokens, this original non-fungible token.
9
SPEAKER_00
But then a third book is called The Assayer.
9
SPEAKER_00
So what is an assayer?
9
SPEAKER_00
So assayers were kind of like these alchemists, physicists, chemists that would be around a court.
9
SPEAKER_00
And every so often for the treasurer, they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens and convert that to script or paper money.
9
SPEAKER_00
And to do that, they needed someone to verify with a standard of gold that they knew to be gold and do some kind of semi-non-destructive evaluation of the purported object, the metal that was supposed to be gold.
9
SPEAKER_00
So they would take these pieces of gold, theoretically gold, and they would rub it on something called a touchstone.
9
SPEAKER_00
Touchstone is a special piece of rock, granite, whatever.
9
SPEAKER_00
It has no intrinsic value.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s just a piece of rock.
9
SPEAKER_00
But with that rock, you could assay and determine the content of this thing that could be worth, you know, millions of lira or whatever, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
So it was an incredibly important job.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock and use it to do something valuable.
9
SPEAKER_00
What I want to do in the Assayer Project is take this plethora of physical theories of everything.
9
SPEAKER_00
I said recently, you know, we should give a Nobel Prize to someone who doesn t come up with a theory of everything.
9
SPEAKER_00
Because there s just, there s just like, it s just rotten with them.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I think it s great.
9
SPEAKER_00
You know, I often say that,
9
SPEAKER_00
Theory is kind of like software, and I m not denigrating software at all, but you can create a lot of software.
9
SPEAKER_00
You can make a quine, and it ll make its own quine.
9
SPEAKER_00
You can make infinite amounts of software.
9
SPEAKER_00
Look it up, kids.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s one of my favorite videos.
9
SPEAKER_00
You can t replicate.
9
SPEAKER_00
You can t make a telescope that makes a telescope that makes a telescope.
9
SPEAKER_00
In other words, hardware is kind of like the non-fungible token that s the ultimate limited edition, the book, the compass book.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so it s very expensive.
9
SPEAKER_00
That means you have to be very careful before you invest decades, billions, and humans into pursuing one of these theories of everything.
9
SPEAKER_00
You have to have good intuition for it.
9
SPEAKER_00
And lately what I ve seen is not predictions, but retrodictions.
9
SPEAKER_00
So you see that the Large Hadron Collider will come out with a measurement.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then so-and-so will say, oh, this is compatible with string theory.
9
SPEAKER_00
Or G minus two of the muon, it has these bizarre properties, fifth force, string theory predicts this.
9
SPEAKER_00
String theory solves this.
9
SPEAKER_00
Neutrinos, sterile neutrinos, large hadron collider bottom, or B experiment, blah, blah, blah.
9
SPEAKER_00
They ll say that it s compatible after the fact.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s not so bad, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
Because look, what did Einstein do with GR, general relativity?
9
SPEAKER_00
The first thing he did was not predict something new.
9
SPEAKER_00
He looked at the anomalous behavior of the planet Mercury.
9
SPEAKER_00
And he saw it was behaving strangely.
9
SPEAKER_00
And people had said, oh, that s because there s another planet hiding behind the sun that we can t see that perturbs the orbit of the planet Mercury.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s called Vulcan.
9
SPEAKER_00
That was one approach.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s kind of like the dark matter approach, where it s like there s a clump of matter that we can t see that s influencing the planet that we can t see.
9
SPEAKER_00
And we use that to divine and intuit the existence of the other planet.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s actually how Neptune was discovered.
9
SPEAKER_00
Neptune was discovered because of the anomalous behavior of the planet Uranus.
9
SPEAKER_00
So Neptune was dark.
9
SPEAKER_00
We couldn t see it.
9
SPEAKER_00
It was tugging on Uranus in a certain way.
9
SPEAKER_00
And that led to Le Verrier discovering the planet, predicting where this planet should be found.
9
SPEAKER_00
So it had a good heritage in physics, right, to predict this planet that you couldn t see that worked.
9
SPEAKER_00
But Einstein said, no, it s caused by the warping and bending of space-time due to the presence of matter, and would later become known as the Einstein equations.
9
SPEAKER_00
So he explained why Mercury did that.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it was known since the time of Newton that Mercury was behaving in this really freaky way.
9
SPEAKER_00
So he didn t predict it.
9
SPEAKER_00
He retrodicted it.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s fine.
9
SPEAKER_00
But at some point, you should come up with something new that s uniquely predictive of your theory, as I just said.
9
SPEAKER_00
The theory of dark matter in the context of Neptune is actually a valid theory.
9
SPEAKER_00
It just happens not to make sense in the context of Vulcan.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so if he had kept doing that, maybe perhaps he wouldn t have come up with these other predictions that he would later reject.
9
SPEAKER_00
He rejected the existence of gravitational waves.
9
SPEAKER_00
You and Barry talked about that.
9
SPEAKER_00
He didn t actually believe it.
9
SPEAKER_00
It was the one peer-reviewed paper that he had.
9
SPEAKER_00
He used to send back in those days, he d send a letter to Nature, physical review, publish this, let them know how much it costs.
9
SPEAKER_00
And they got it rejected because he said you can t detect gravitational waves, or they re not real.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the guy showed that they re real because he corrected a math error in Einstein and Rosen s paper.
9
SPEAKER_00
So it s fascinating.
9
SPEAKER_00
What should the assayer do?
9
SPEAKER_00
He or she should look at these theories, look what things they explain that already exist, and look at what new predictions they can claim to explain if we can build experiments to test them.
9
SPEAKER_01
So you have to kind of challenge yourself to think about what kind of predictions can they make such that we can construct experiments?
9
SPEAKER_01
So that s like ultimately back going to the signal, to the experimenter s theorist, essentially.
9
SPEAKER_01
So like very experiment-centric exploration of the fundamental theory of everything.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the best scientists, the best physicists, were both experimentalists and theorists.
9
SPEAKER_00
Or at least that if they were experimentalists, they understood the theory well enough to make predictions or to explore the predictions and the consequences of those predictions.
9
SPEAKER_00
Or if they were theorists, they were like Galileo.
9
SPEAKER_00
Einstein has patents for things that he invented.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then some of his work led to the laser and the maser.
9
SPEAKER_00
So it wasn t just pure airy-fairy quantum reality and expanding universe.
9
SPEAKER_00
So in this case, what I want to do is look at – there s 10 different theories of everything or cosmological models.
9
SPEAKER_00
They make predictions.
9
SPEAKER_00
They have advantages and disadvantages.
9
SPEAKER_00
I m just asking the question, why aren t we applying Bayesian reasoning with confidence intervals?
9
SPEAKER_00
Why don t we have updates every time an experiment comes out?
9
SPEAKER_00
we can update our credulity in that experiment, or that theory rather, based on the results of the experiment.
9
SPEAKER_00
And we shouldn t do it after the fact, or as Michio Kaku has said, well, you have to tell me what the initial conditions are.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s not my job.
9
SPEAKER_00
You re supposed to tell me if string theory is correct, what should it predict if it s true?
9
SPEAKER_00
There s one big problem, which I should say that to be a good Assayer.
9
SPEAKER_00
I think you have to you have to be worldly in the sense of worldly and curious like we were talking about before with with you and Joe and and
9
SPEAKER_00
you can t only talk your own book.
9
SPEAKER_00
You can t only understand your own pet theory of everything.
9
SPEAKER_00
You can t only say, well, I only understand string theory, and I don t have time for these other theories, or as if it s beneath me to even go into Garrett Lisey, or Eric Weinstein, or Stephen Wolfram, or aspects of M-theory, et cetera, et cetera.
9
SPEAKER_00
And there are some that say, why do we give string theory so much
9
SPEAKER_00
so much of an advanced past, when there are actually predictions it s made that are completely anathema to what we observe in physics.
9
SPEAKER_00
Like the dark energy should be negative, and we see it as positive.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s a huge strike.
9
SPEAKER_00
If you told somebody, here s my tenure application, and one day it ll be, oh, I ve made this prediction.
9
SPEAKER_00
If it wasn t done by Maldacena and Witten and folks like that, I don t know if it would have had the traction, the endurance, the resiliency that it s had.
9
SPEAKER_00
And that worries me because
9
SPEAKER_00
All these men and some women are making these fantastic, brilliant, beautiful ideas, and they re not even looking at what their neighbor s doing.
9
SPEAKER_01
There s a thing that I really enjoyed seeing and that I don t see often enough with these theories, which is others who are also experts kind of studying them sufficiently well to steel man the theory, to show the beautiful aspects of the theory.
9
SPEAKER_01
You know, I see that with Stephen Wolfram.
9
SPEAKER_01
He has a very different sort of formulation of physics with his physics project.
9
SPEAKER_01
Now I m, it s, you know, physics is a foreign language.
10
SPEAKER_01
to me, but his formulation, especially in the context of cellular automata or hypergraphs, just as objects, as mathematical objects themselves are familiar, and so I m able to see the real beauty there, and it saddens me that others in the physics community can t also see the beauty.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like, give it a chance.
10
SPEAKER_01
Give a chance to see the beauty.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that-
10
SPEAKER_00
So there is one person who does take time and is what I consider to be a great scientist in terms of what he thinks.
10
SPEAKER_00
He obviously has invested interest in his own theory, and it s Eric.
10
SPEAKER_00
Eric s got a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of physics.
10
SPEAKER_00
And he has a great warmth and graciousness when it comes to giving others.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I ve witnessed this, and I ve had—look, first of all, I think debate is pointless.
10
SPEAKER_00
Like, I don t know about you, but if you ve ever voted like, oh, I saw this debate, and because Trump did so badly, now I m going to vote for Biden.
10
SPEAKER_00
You almost never change anybody s mind, unless you debate with love.
10
SPEAKER_00
Unless you have, almost like, we re gonna win together, like the red team approach in the military, they re trying to win a war.
10
SPEAKER_00
So they may disagree on the tactics day to day, but the strategy, we have to win this war, I love you and I wanna protect you, I don t see that in very many of these physicists.
10
SPEAKER_00
From Kaku, I almost see it, it s embarrassing in some ways, because they ll almost mock.
10
SPEAKER_00
With the exception of Eric,
10
SPEAKER_00
You know, Garrett s interesting, you know, his theory is, you know, people have a lot of issues, very technical.
10
SPEAKER_00
But Eric has taken the time to try to understand it.
10
SPEAKER_00
Eric has taken the time to understand Peter White s theory.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I don t see, I don t see the same graciousness extended from them, I m sorry to say.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yes, you re right, you re right.
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, with Eric, he hasn t, he wants to, but he hasn t extended the same for Stephen Wolfram because I think,
10
SPEAKER_00
No, he didn t.
10
SPEAKER_00
No, actually, no, he did.
10
SPEAKER_01
I had a debate with them live on my show.
10
SPEAKER_01
No, I did.
10
SPEAKER_01
I listened to it.
10
SPEAKER_01
But like, I just think it s outside of the toolkit that Eric is comfortable with.
10
SPEAKER_01
So it s not that he s not.
10
SPEAKER_01
But the main thing that s often absent and Eric does have is like the willingness and like not just like dismissing or mocking that he s reaching out.
10
SPEAKER_00
But I mean, what if it s not?
10
SPEAKER_00
I made a joke when they were on, I was like, how many theories of everything can there be?
10
SPEAKER_00
Highlander, there can be only one, I don t know, maybe.
10
SPEAKER_01
But he, of course, also, like the other folks who propose a theory, has an ego.
10
SPEAKER_01
He rides a dragon, with the dragon representing the ego.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, let me ask you about your friend, Eric Weinstein.
10
SPEAKER_01
So he proposed initial sketches of geometric unity, which is his theory of everything.
10
SPEAKER_01
Maybe you can elucidate some aspect of it that you find interesting, but what do you think about the response he got from the scientific community?
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, some of the response came from people, academicians, professors.
10
SPEAKER_00
Some came from a lay audience, and some came from trained scientists who are no longer maybe practicing in universities.
10
SPEAKER_00
I thought it was, there was a lot of vitriol, which surprised me, because I look at what he s trying to do, and it was always, the vitriol would always come with some element of ad hominem,
10
SPEAKER_00
Um, and maybe that s his personality.
10
SPEAKER_00
Maybe that engenders this or whatever.
10
SPEAKER_00
Maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency.
10
SPEAKER_00
You know, I always get these emails, professor Keating.
10
SPEAKER_00
Um, I have a new theory Einstein was wrong.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m going to prove it.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m not good at math, but if you help me, I will share my Nobel prize with you.
10
SPEAKER_00
Um,
10
SPEAKER_00
Oh, thanks.
10
SPEAKER_00
Have you read my books?
10
SPEAKER_00
In other words, it s always taking down the dragon.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s always taking down the Kung Fu master, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
That you get the hit points from D&D.
10
SPEAKER_00
You get their hit points.
10
SPEAKER_00
You take their cards.
10
SPEAKER_00
You get their risk tokens from Kamchaka.
10
SPEAKER_00
And thinking about with Eric, it s like because what he s doing is so aspirational, it is grandiose in a good sense.
10
SPEAKER_00
What he s trying to do is
10
SPEAKER_00
is construct a geometric theory of everything that has aspects of supersymmetry and stuff embedded in it.
10
SPEAKER_00
He s trying to meld that.
10
SPEAKER_00
It has very unusual features in that it features not only multiple spatial dimensions, multiple time dimensions.
10
SPEAKER_00
It uses new mathematical objects that he s invented.
10
SPEAKER_00
And look, I had him on my show.
10
SPEAKER_00
I ve talked with him.
10
SPEAKER_00
We ve had consultations with other physicists where he ll come down, and I have a visitor s office, and he comes down to San Diego sometimes and spends time there.
10
SPEAKER_00
And we talk with eminent mathematicians and physicists.
10
SPEAKER_00
Eric s been out of the academic world for a long time.
10
SPEAKER_00
And there is, as I said before, an aspect of persuasion that must take place.
10
SPEAKER_00
in order to get anything through.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I think there was a slight amount of good nature, not ignorance, naivete, but just the sense that if this is right, everyone will recognize it.
10
SPEAKER_00
If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door, as the expression goes.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s completely untrue.
10
SPEAKER_00
That doesn t even happen with mousetraps.
10
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you know how many frickin  mousetrap types there are?
10
SPEAKER_00
It s like, no, they don t beat a path to your door.
10
SPEAKER_00
You have to sell that frickin  thing.
10
SPEAKER_00
You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or Elon.
10
SPEAKER_00
I have never, I ve had one paper, I have 200 papers I ve published in peer-reviewed journals.
10
SPEAKER_00
I ve only had one, half a percent, published with no referees  comments.
10
SPEAKER_00
In other words, published like a dream, submitted it, and it happened to be in a prestigious journal.
10
SPEAKER_00
I thought I was pretty psyched about that.
10
SPEAKER_00
But you almost have to crave the response, getting it back from a journal.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I think he doesn t, first of all, he doesn t subscribe to the peer-review process.
10
SPEAKER_00
He thinks that is anathema to the way science is, it vests interest in journals, et cetera, et cetera.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think you can have elements of peer review that are substantive and valuable.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think you have to learn from your critics.
10
SPEAKER_00
One of my conversations with John Mather, he talks about loving your critics in this book, but not being so open to their criticism that their criticism goes to your heart, and not being so open to their compliments that their compliments go to your head.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s a very tough Scylla and Charybdis to walk.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, there s something, I mean, I wanna be careful here because I d like to talk to Eric about this directly, but I ll just, from a perspective of a friend, wanna ask about the drug of fame.
10
SPEAKER_01
So there s also the public,
10
SPEAKER_01
perception of the battles of physics.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so there s a very narrow community, but then there s the way that s perceived, the exploration of ideas as perceived by the public.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so there is a certain drug to the excitement that the public can show when they sense that you have something big.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that in itself,
10
SPEAKER_01
might become the thing that gives you pleasure.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I think that with theories of everything, or with any kind of super, super ambitious projects, and this is taking us back to when you were ambitious about trying to understand the origins of the universe, if you convince yourself that you have an intuition about the origins of the universe,
10
SPEAKER_01
And you have a platform, like you do now, where you start to communicate your intuition.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s hazy, like all the science.
10
SPEAKER_01
You re still unsure, but you have a sense.
10
SPEAKER_01
I mean, perhaps you don t have that as much as an experimentalist, because you always kind of start going, okay, how can I build a device to see through the fog?
10
SPEAKER_01
But if you re more like a theoretician who kind of works in the realm of ideas, in the realm of intuitions,
10
SPEAKER_01
It is also a source of pleasure, you mentioned dopamine.
10
SPEAKER_01
A source of dopamine that you can communicate to others.
10
SPEAKER_01
that you re really excited by the possibility of solving the deepest mysteries of the universe.
10
SPEAKER_01
So there s some aspect to which you want to be a Grigori Grisha Perlman and go into the hole and get the work done and shut the hell up about the, I m speaking about myself, about, you know,
10
SPEAKER_01
Talking about the dream and planning and exploring how great it will be if my intuition turns out to be correct.
10
SPEAKER_01
If the sketches I have turn out to actually build the bridge that takes us to a whole new place.
10
SPEAKER_01
As a friend of Eric s, or a friend of, or my friend, what kind of,
10
SPEAKER_01
Advice do you give what is your role?
10
SPEAKER_01
Is it to be a supporter?
10
SPEAKER_01
Given that he has many critics or is it to be in private?
10
SPEAKER_01
A critic like a lot of my friends will say hey shut the hell up.
10
SPEAKER_00
Just get it done Well, first of all, I want to ask you a question.
10
SPEAKER_00
I ve asked him and it comes from Animal Farm by my probably my favorite book.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so you remember Benjamin the donkey?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and he s talking to the pig.
10
SPEAKER_00
I forget the pigs name you probably know
10
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, the pig says to him, you ve got this long, lustrous, beautiful tail.
10
SPEAKER_00
You re so lucky.
10
SPEAKER_00
I got this short, curly, little squiggly thing that does jack squat.
10
SPEAKER_00
Tell me, how does it feel to have such a lustrous tail?
10
SPEAKER_00
And Benjamin says, well, the good Lord, he gave me a tail to swat away the flies.
10
SPEAKER_00
But you know what?
10
SPEAKER_00
I d rather not have the tail if I didn t have the flies.
10
SPEAKER_00
So I want to ask you, as I ve asked Eric, is it worth it?
10
SPEAKER_00
You ve got these beautiful tail, but there are flies.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m not saying in a negative way.
10
SPEAKER_00
I m just saying you get unwanted distractions, dopamine.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s kind of the highlight, the spotlight effect.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s obviously allowing you to do things that you could never do alone, and I think
10
SPEAKER_00
First of all, I d love to know how you answer that, because that s something I don t feel I can relate to myself.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, this has to do with more like platform stuff.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, scale.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, that has very little effect on me.
10
SPEAKER_01
I enjoy it.
10
SPEAKER_01
I enjoy meeting new people, but that has nothing to do with platform.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, that has no effect on me.
10
SPEAKER_01
I want somebody that enjoys the act itself.
10
SPEAKER_01
So this conversation, the reason I m doing this podcast with you today is because that allows me to trick you into talking to me for a long period of time.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t care about platform.
10
SPEAKER_01
I assume nobody listens.
10
SPEAKER_01
It really doesn t matter.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I forgot it, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
My whole test of it was a good podcaster, because how do you know?
10
SPEAKER_00
Podcasts have been around, what, 12 years?
10
SPEAKER_00
How do we know as podcasters we re doing a good job?
10
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes someone will say, that was the best interview I ever had, but that doesn t happen that often, at least for me.
10
SPEAKER_00
But if you realize that you forgot to put the SD card in that little guy and the Zoom didn t work, would you do it again?
10
SPEAKER_00
And I think if you say yes to that, that was a good podcast.
10
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, that s exactly it.
10
SPEAKER_01
So in that space, yeah, all of it is worth it.
10
SPEAKER_01
But the dream, I m more referring to the psychological effects.
10
SPEAKER_01
Forget the platform, forget all of that.
10
SPEAKER_01
Maybe you shouldn t even brought up the platform, because it really has to do, even in your own private mind, which is what I m struggling with,
10
SPEAKER_01
I enjoy the planning, the dreaming, the early stages so much that I often don t take projects to completion.
10
SPEAKER_01
This is a psychological effect that I m sure basically everybody, every engineer, everybody that does anything goes through.
10
SPEAKER_01
I just, in this case particular, I think it also applies.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I wonder, as a friend, what is the role?
10
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, I mean, that effect has been documented, everything from planning telescopes to dieting.
10
SPEAKER_00
So there s a tiny bit of dopamine that you get visualizing how you re gonna feel.
10
SPEAKER_00
You don t need to know this, but you don t deal, but losing five pounds.
10
SPEAKER_00
I say, oh, I m gonna lose five pounds, and I m gonna be able to run a minute faster.
10
SPEAKER_00
So there s a part of me when I m planning the diet and the meals and the exercise that I get a little bit of that thrill, and that actually saps a little bit of my willpower to actually complete the task that will take me to that goal.
10
SPEAKER_00
So that s a documented effect.
10
SPEAKER_00
And that happens in project planning and project management.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s a very, very important thing to guard against as a manager of a big project.
10
SPEAKER_00
With Eric, it s interesting because with him, first of all, we relate extremely well on a friendship level and very close.
10
SPEAKER_00
He does remind me a lot of my father.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I ve told him that, you know, just as a mathematician, as a big thinker, as, you know, in his case, as a father, you know, the father kind of figure that I didn t have in a sense.
10
SPEAKER_00
But that he is he is a true lover of life.
10
SPEAKER_00
He knows he s got a huge platform.
10
SPEAKER_00
He knows he gets a lot of attention for what he does.
10
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, I jokingly say, well, it s one thing.
10
SPEAKER_00
Like, how do you know, Lex, that someone s an expert?
10
SPEAKER_00
Experts say.
10
SPEAKER_00
There s a good rule Ray Dalio writes about in principles.
10
SPEAKER_00
He says, an expert is someone who s done something three times successfully.
10
SPEAKER_00
Like, you can do something correctly once, you could do something correctly, it s very hard to pull off like three projects, three telescopes, three whatever, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
So look for, ah, it s arbitrary, it could be four, it could be two, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
But the point is, look at Eric.
10
SPEAKER_00
So how many things has he contributed to and made pretty substantive kind of paradigm shifts for different people?
10
SPEAKER_00
I would say he s been right many times.
10
SPEAKER_00
Does that mean he s infallible, that he s ineffable?
10
SPEAKER_00
No, of course not.
10
SPEAKER_00
For me, so what I m saying is I get a little bit of the joy of kind of learning something purely as a scientist, something completely outside of what I do, mathematics.
10
SPEAKER_00
gauge theory, the kind of very advanced geometry topology that he s interested in.
10
SPEAKER_00
But every now and then, I will sneak in that I want, you know, I ve told him, I m going to turn your son into an experimentalist despite you.
10
SPEAKER_00
You know, like,
10
SPEAKER_00
He is not going to be a theorist.
10
SPEAKER_00
Zev is not going to be a theorist.
10
SPEAKER_00
He is working with me.
10
SPEAKER_00
He is learning from me.
10
SPEAKER_00
We re trying to get him into—he wants to bypass all of the kind of nonsense of undergraduate and go straight to graduate school.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I ve tried to encourage him that maybe he could do it, maybe he can t, but there s no other way than to try.
10
SPEAKER_00
And so I ve prepared a whole curriculum for Zev to basically bypass all of undergraduate.
10
SPEAKER_00
And to his credit—he earns all the credit—he s learned it to a level that matches many of my graduates.
10
SPEAKER_01
Okay, hold on a second.
10
SPEAKER_01
I have to push back, and this is me saying it, and I m sure I ll talk to Eric about this.
10
SPEAKER_01
But to say, you said Eric s done, was right on multiple things.
10
SPEAKER_01
I think Eric has a great, deep insight about human nature and how societies work, and he says a lot of wise words on that world.
10
SPEAKER_01
But I think if we re talking about experts, you kind of have to prove, you know, it s like Michael Jordan playing baseball.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like he s proved it many times that he can play basketball, but he s also got to prove that he can play baseball.
10
SPEAKER_01
And I would say the whole point of, I mean, of radical ideas is you re not, I mean, it s very hard to be sitting on a track record of, I mean, when you re swinging for the fences always, there s not a track record to sit on
10
SPEAKER_01
And like Max Tegmark is an example of somebody who has a huge track record of more like acceptable stuff, but he also keeps swinging for the fences in every other world.
10
SPEAKER_01
So he has that track record.
10
SPEAKER_01
With Eric, if you look at just the number of publications, all this stuff, he really, he chose not to travel the academic route, so there s no proof of expertise except sort of an obvious,
10
SPEAKER_01
linguistic demonstration of brilliance.
10
SPEAKER_01
But that s not how physics works, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
So there s a polite way to damn somebody as a scientist and say, he or she, they really know the history of physics very well.
10
SPEAKER_00
Like, physicists are always lovely, like Sean Carroll always jokes about, physicists should never talk about history of physics.
10
SPEAKER_00
But it s more than that.
10
SPEAKER_00
Eric has certainly contributed in finance specifically and gauge theory and economics and inflation dynamics and non-cosmological.
10
SPEAKER_01
Hold on a second.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s yet to be proven.
10
SPEAKER_01
He has a lot of powerful interests.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, gauge theory is calculus proven.
10
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he has a gauge model for currency exchanges between different nations that is explanatory.
10
SPEAKER_00
Is this something, in other words, it s a model, and it s used for pedagogical purposes.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s unique to him, I mean, him and Pia.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yes, you re right.
10
SPEAKER_01
It might be a powerful model.
10
SPEAKER_01
It might be one that actually deserves a huge amount of applause and celebration, but does not yet receive that.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that s one of the things that Eric talks about, it has not received the attention it deserves.
10
SPEAKER_01
But it has not yet received the attention it deserves.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so the proven explanation
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there s a lot of people that go to their grave without the recognition they deserve, and it s a tragedy.
11
SPEAKER_00
But the fact is, like,
11
SPEAKER_00
you have to fight for that recognition.
11
SPEAKER_00
The tragedy happens for a reason.
11
SPEAKER_00
You can t just say this person is obviously brilliant and therefore they deserve the credit in every single domain.
11
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t like transfer immediately.
11
SPEAKER_00
There s nobody that s, well at least I wouldn t argue, Eric is one of the special minds in our generation.
11
SPEAKER_00
But you still have to fight the fight of physics.
11
SPEAKER_00
and prove it within the community.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I think the same applies in economics.
11
SPEAKER_00
You can t, I mean, as somebody that, you know, I ve gone through the academic journey, just like you said, the peer review, all of those things, flawed as they are, that s the part of the process.
11
SPEAKER_00
You have to convince your peers.
11
SPEAKER_00
the people that are as obsessed for whatever the hell reason about that particular thing that you re working on.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes, there s egos.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes, there s politics.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s a giant mess, but I think it s a beautiful mess through which you have to go through in order to reveal the power of your idea to yourself and to the world.
11
SPEAKER_01
Let me use an example.
11
SPEAKER_01
So you know of James Clerk Maxwell, and he invented the laws of electromagnetism, which is the first example of a unification principle ever displayed by the human mind in history.
11
SPEAKER_01
Purely mathematics, unifying completely disparate phenomena.
11
SPEAKER_01
In one case, electricity, charges, static electricity, lightning, and the other magnets, bar magnets, currents, et cetera.
11
SPEAKER_01
You know what he did?
11
SPEAKER_01
I like to do a thought experiment.
11
SPEAKER_01
Imagine Twitter exists 1864.
11
SPEAKER_01
Maxwell s working away.
11
SPEAKER_01
And he goes, I have this wonderful idea with fluxions and inductive virtue and blah, blah, blah.
11
SPEAKER_01
And it revolves on this thing called an ether.
11
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, there are these little vortices and gears.
11
SPEAKER_01
And the gears have these planetary things.
11
SPEAKER_01
And they suck up vortices.
11
SPEAKER_01
And the vortices determine the density of the electromagnetic potential.
11
SPEAKER_01
be like, this guy s a freaking moron.
11
SPEAKER_01
And what would you do?
11
SPEAKER_01
Come on.
11
SPEAKER_01
Honestly, you would say everything this guy does is wrong.
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, he s got this idiotic idea.
11
SPEAKER_01
And it would be falsified a couple of decades later by Markilson and Morley.
11
SPEAKER_01
And in so doing, you would have thrown out a very beautiful baby with bathwater.
11
SPEAKER_01
Imagine Twitter.
11
SPEAKER_01
Imagine the twitstorm, you know, at ClerkMaxwell1 would get.
11
SPEAKER_01
It would be brutal, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
And to the detriment.
11
SPEAKER_01
And that might even set back history.
11
SPEAKER_01
Imagine Yang Mills doing the same thing.
11
SPEAKER_01
Cher and Simons.
11
SPEAKER_01
A lot of these things are very fantastic.
11
SPEAKER_01
But why, Lex?
11
SPEAKER_01
Why does Ed Witten?
11
SPEAKER_01
Why does Juan Maldacena?
11
SPEAKER_01
Let me give a good example.
11
SPEAKER_01
Juan Gaston, brilliant guy.
11
SPEAKER_01
I love him.
11
SPEAKER_01
He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded his black hole information paradox loss issue.
11
SPEAKER_01
What did he concede?
11
SPEAKER_01
Conceded based upon mild the same as calculation in ADS CFT and five dimensional wormholes.
11
SPEAKER_01
Is any of that—first of all, we don t live in an ADS universe.
11
SPEAKER_01
Second of all, we don t know if wormholes are traversable, if they exist even.
11
SPEAKER_01
You know, these are devices—you know, Kip Thorne was popularized for movies.
11
SPEAKER_01
Like, to say that this is something on which I will concede a bet—now, obviously Hawking was doing that for publicity.
11
SPEAKER_01
Why does Maldacena—and he s got a pretty high H-index, pretty well-respected guy, IAS, love talking to him, brilliant guy—by the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia s work on gauge theory and economics originally and won, I believe, the Breakthrough Prize, I can t remember exactly what, but partially, you know, credit some of the work that he did, which appears there s a footnote to Pia Malani s thesis and some conversations with Eric, I think, in it.
11
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, getting back to that, why is there not the same skeptic?
11
SPEAKER_01
Is it because Maldacena, who s an eminent physicist obviously, has published realistic work and done—what about Witten?
11
SPEAKER_01
You know, Witten gets a pass.
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, if you, Witten just appeared.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, Witten gets a pass on which aspect, the string theory?
11
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, that M-theory is correct.
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, here s, well, let me just say Hawking.
11
SPEAKER_01
Hawking gets the ultimate pass.
11
SPEAKER_01
Hawking would say things like M-theory.
11
SPEAKER_01
There s zero evidence for it.
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s the famous meme that went around this weekend, like, what is string theory predicted?
11
SPEAKER_01
And it s nothing.
11
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, that s actually wrong.
11
SPEAKER_01
I talked to Cumrun.
11
SPEAKER_01
I know you talked to Cumrun.
11
SPEAKER_01
Cumrun says that string theory does make predictions.
11
SPEAKER_01
It predicts the mass of the electron lies between 10 to the minus one Planck mass and 10 to the minus 30 Planck mass.
11
SPEAKER_01
Okay, whatever, you know, our electron.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s a big range.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s a huge range.
11
SPEAKER_01
Imagine Kumron comes up, and again, he s just some nobody, but he actually, you know, he doesn t have a profile, he s not at Harvard, has zero H index, or whatever Eric s is.
11
SPEAKER_01
Why do we not like, in other words, why are we more harsh on people that are trying?
11
SPEAKER_00
You know the answer to that.
11
SPEAKER_00
So I get a million emails just like you said, yourself, where they provenize, in my world, it s artificial intelligence, the equivalence of that.
11
SPEAKER_00
I figured out how to build consciousness, how to engineer intelligence, how to, and sometimes- You should send your emails to me, and I ll send my emails to you.
11
SPEAKER_00
And we ll reply to you.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, and I don t want to sort of mock this- No, I m not either.
11
SPEAKER_00
Because I think it s very possible that there is,
11
SPEAKER_00
either kernels of interesting ideas or in whole, there is geniuses out there that are unheard, but because there s so much noise, you do have to weigh higher the Ed Wittens of the world when they make statements, and that s why you build up a track record.
11
SPEAKER_00
As you said with Ray Dalio, you have to show
11
SPEAKER_00
that you can, like, if you re Pollock and you show us a painting of a bunch of chaos, you have to, and this is a bad example, probably, because he probably never showed this proof.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s much more comforting to see that they can paint a good, accurate picture.
11
SPEAKER_00
Of still life, of an apple on the table.
11
SPEAKER_00
Because then, I mean,
11
SPEAKER_00
because then there s something about the scientific community that they have perhaps an oversensitive bullshit sensor to where they re not going to give the full effort of their attention if you don t have the track record.
11
SPEAKER_00
Now you could say that s a kind of club that only you have to like, you have to have 10, you have to have this, yes, that exists, but there s some aspect in which you have to play the game a little bit
11
SPEAKER_00
to get the machine of science going.
11
SPEAKER_00
Otherwise, if you re always saying, well, I have my ball, and I don t wanna play your game, your game sucks, then nobody s gonna wanna play with you.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s true, and look, inherent in all of this is an underlying grandiosity.
11
SPEAKER_01
Look, how could you talk about doing what Kafka said on here and elsewhere?
11
SPEAKER_01
We re looking for the umbilical cord that connects our universe to another universe that will then reveal in a one-inch equation that we ll surely win a Nobel Prize, the mind of God,
11
SPEAKER_00
That s like a prerequisite, I guess, to tackle these questions.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think it s detrimental.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think doing that, first of all, I think there s an element of almost snarkiness, because none of these scientists are believing Gnostics.
11
SPEAKER_01
They re not theists, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
So they re using it as kind of a stand-in.
11
SPEAKER_01
And they always talk about Einstein, and he was like a Spinozan, and he wasn t a theist.
11
SPEAKER_00
God doesn t play dice, but yeah, Einstein s mentions of God, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and then Stephen Hawking says if when we get M-theory understood, we ll know the mind of God.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s the title of Kaku s book, The God Particle, The God Equation.
11
SPEAKER_01
Do any of them really believe in God?
11
SPEAKER_01
Is that a prerequisite?
11
SPEAKER_01
No, I m not saying that.
11
SPEAKER_01
But the point being, you re talking about something that has to do with God, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, where else do you go from there?
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I think God for now enjoys a little bit more kind of PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
So God s got a pretty good H-index himself.
11
SPEAKER_00
He has, by the way, a Twitter account, just so you know.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s pretty good.
11
SPEAKER_01
The tweets of God.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
So if you look at that, you have to go in there, again, you have to go in with some swagger.
11
SPEAKER_01
You have to have a little bit of arrogance, but you should, I agree, mix with a little bit of humility.
11
SPEAKER_01
So he s doing something, he comes from outside of academia.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now if he rails against, I m talking about Eric now.
11
SPEAKER_01
If he s just railing, oh, the system, and I m not going to publish because F that, and that s only created by greedy journals, I don t think he s doing himself any favors.
11
SPEAKER_01
On the other hand, if he s shopping it, if he s talking it, if he s willing to expose it to criticism and to even embrace people who may not have the purest intentions, perhaps, but in the sense of like they re not arguing solely to get to the truth with a capital T, what they re trying to do is take down, hopefully those people aren t out there,
11
SPEAKER_01
But on the other hand, looking at what Eric does for other people, looking at the fact that he has courtesy, he will look at Wolfram, he will look at Lisey, who s one of his closest friends.
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, he calls him his, not his aunt.
11
SPEAKER_01
Nemesis.
11
SPEAKER_01
Nemesis, right, right.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s interesting that they re loving friends.
11
SPEAKER_00
I really enjoyed that portal conversation between Gary Lisey.
11
SPEAKER_00
Eric is torn about that conversation because, I guess,
11
SPEAKER_00
because of the nemesis of the beautiful dance of minds playing with these ideas and theories of everything.
11
SPEAKER_01
And some of these things, you know, look, so fundamentally, now I may disagree with him, Eric, on a different aspect, which is the only one I m capable of, but let me say one thing, which is experimental, but let me say one thing.
11
SPEAKER_01
I understand probably a third of what Eric s talking about with GU.
11
SPEAKER_01
I understand, you know, GR, I understand mathematics, I understand some group theory, fiber bone.
11
SPEAKER_01
I can get a little of it, the age theory.
11
SPEAKER_01
But I also understand what I don t understand.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I understand that there are people like Witten, Maldacena, Nima, other people that can understand it.
11
SPEAKER_01
And they re not trying to understand.
11
SPEAKER_01
Sabina, she can understand.
11
SPEAKER_01
She makes all these, you know, oh, I don t understand it, I don t want to understand it, I don t have time.
11
SPEAKER_01
And then she makes a video, a music video, you know, kind of mocking Eric and Steven and Garrett.
11
SPEAKER_01
I m like, oh, you have a time to do, and I love Sabina, and I ve actually promoted my show on her, and I love her, and she s doing a wonderful job.
11
SPEAKER_01
You have a video that you said yourself takes eight weeks to produce from start to finish, and you couldn t have spent, you know, 30 minutes, two hours.
11
SPEAKER_01
I, Brian Keating, have done it as an experimental cosmologist, and I have enough to say, like, this is interesting, it s part of the Assayer Project, and it actually, I shouldn t say that there are no people, there are very few.
11
SPEAKER_01
Louis Alvarez-Gomez at SUNY Stony Brook, the Simon Center for Geometrical Physics.
11
SPEAKER_01
So he and I are running this seminar, hopefully this summer, we re gonna reenact the famous Shelter Island Conferences of the 1900s.
11
SPEAKER_01
where Feynman got together and they calculated the Lamb shift and all that.
11
SPEAKER_01
But what did that feature?
11
SPEAKER_01
The harmony, the resonant minds behind the best experimentalists in cosmology, particle physics, condensed matter physics is now teaching us tremendous things about lower dimensional systems that can be applied.
11
SPEAKER_01
Theorists and experimentalists, observers, cosmologists, astronomers, we all get together
11
SPEAKER_01
and we re just gonna do it out of a spirit of love.
11
SPEAKER_01
But if it s just like, oh, this guy s like a loud mouth, I don t have time for that.
11
SPEAKER_01
I really don t.
11
SPEAKER_01
I don t think it s an interesting way to spend my time.
11
SPEAKER_00
There is a aspect that I hope to see, and it goes back to our sort of discussion about Joe Rogan.
11
SPEAKER_00
I do hope to see sort of love and humility in the presentation, like let go of this kind of,
11
SPEAKER_00
fear of your ideas being stolen and the ego that s inherent to the scientific pursuit.
11
SPEAKER_00
Now that everybody is established and known entities, let go of that a little bit so we can explore and celebrate ideas.
11
SPEAKER_00
I would love to see more of that, just because you re saying, especially with these big ideas of theories of everything.
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, this isn t talking tails out of school, but I mean, he has made claims that I fundamentally disagree with, you know, in terms of like, you know, he s had this Twitter baiting, you know, loving trolling of Elon, you know, why are you spending all this money to get to Mars?
11
SPEAKER_01
You know, we should be spending money on interdimensional travel and we can unlock it if we – and I said to him like – and he makes the point, you know, that all the atomic theory
11
SPEAKER_01
you know, that unleashed the nuclear age and that, you know, could lead to planetary destruction.
11
SPEAKER_01
But I make the point, pushing back with love on him, and I say, look, nobody looked into the equations, you know, like Fermi didn t like look into all these equations of the unification, which still doesn t exist, by the way.
11
SPEAKER_01
We spend all this time, Lex, and I don t know why it is, it s a phenomenon purely in theoretical physics.
11
SPEAKER_01
People are looking for the toe
11
SPEAKER_01
and they re overlooking the gut.
11
SPEAKER_01
In other words, they re spending all this time in a theory of everything, the God, and there s this gut that unifies the three stronger forces.
11
SPEAKER_01
We don t have a single theory for that, and people like Lashon, they ve tried and failed at it.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, for people who don t know, there s four forces, gut, grant, unification theories that unifies the three forces, stuff, and Donald trying to get a shortcut to the theory of everything, which unifies the four, and then there s this whole thing that maybe quantum gravity s not even a thing, so.
11
SPEAKER_00
Right.
11
SPEAKER_00
So we re trying to solve the puzzle of everything at the physics level, and then already before solving it, already saying, once we solve it, here s going to be all the beautiful time machines.
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I suppose you need that kind of ego, that confidence.
11
SPEAKER_00
that ambition in order to even have a chance at some of these places.
11
SPEAKER_01
The only two people in this book of nine Nobel laureates who told me they don t have the imposter syndrome were two theorists, Frank Wilczek and Sheldon Glashow.
11
SPEAKER_01
And you know, Frank is a pretty interesting, and I know eventually we re gonna talk about the meaning of life, but you talk about Frank.
11
SPEAKER_01
Frank invented this theory along with his advisor and another, a third person, in the early 1970s, which from 1974, three when he was at Princeton, all the way up until 2004 when he won the Nobel Prize.
11
SPEAKER_01
Every day of his life, imagine this, Lex.
11
SPEAKER_01
You re gonna have this startup.
11
SPEAKER_01
Actually, someone tells you you re gonna win the lottery.
11
SPEAKER_01
You don t win a lottery in 40 years.
11
SPEAKER_01
What becomes your singular focus in your life from now until the next 40 years?
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, I m not sure.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, would it be winning the lottery?
11
SPEAKER_01
Or if I m so confident- I m saying you re guaranteed to win a lottery.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
There s this, here s this wallet, Bitcoin wallet.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s going to guarantee to have this much money.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s stable coin, whatever.
11
SPEAKER_01
You re going to win it 40, but you have to wait 40 years.
11
SPEAKER_01
To me, it would be surviving for the next 40 years.
11
SPEAKER_01
You wouldn t leave your house.
11
SPEAKER_01
You would cover, go out in a bubble wrap hat.
11
SPEAKER_01
You wouldn t go out with that 20 mask
11
SPEAKER_01
on, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
Your whole life would be consumed.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now, imagine everyone s telling you you re going to win the Nobel Prize, which is bigger than the lottery.
11
SPEAKER_01
I mean, many prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize.
11
SPEAKER_01
And every person who wins a prize that s worth three times the money, like Maldacena, he would trade that breakthrough prize for a Nobel Prize in a heartbeat.
11
SPEAKER_01
So,
11
SPEAKER_01
These guys had to wait 40 years.
11
SPEAKER_01
Imagine the excruciating pain.
11
SPEAKER_01
What got him through it?
11
SPEAKER_01
He didn t feel like he didn t deserve it.
11
SPEAKER_01
He felt like, hell yeah, I earned it.
11
SPEAKER_01
He has that swagger.
11
SPEAKER_01
And what I m looking for in this essay is to try to find ways that we can test stuff now, because I don t know if I m going to be here in 40 years.
11
SPEAKER_01
I hope I am.
11
SPEAKER_01
But can we bypass, can we get shortcuts to what s called the low energy regime?
11
SPEAKER_01
And to me, that s what s interesting.
11
SPEAKER_01
What can we do now?
11
SPEAKER_01
I don t care.
11
SPEAKER_01
Isaac Newton came up with color theory, and he did something really interesting.
11
SPEAKER_01
Next time I come, I ll bring you some prisms.
11
SPEAKER_01
What did he do?
11
SPEAKER_01
He took a white light.
11
SPEAKER_01
He took a prism from the sun, actually.
11
SPEAKER_01
He put it through a slit, put it through a prism, and it made a beautiful rainbow, like you ve seen.
11
SPEAKER_01
And then he took another prism and he put it upside down, like dark side of the moon or whatever, and the light went through the first prism, turned into a rainbow, and then the rainbow went into a prism and came out a white light.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s pretty cool.
11
SPEAKER_01
Then he took a popsicle stick or whatever, pipe tobacco, and he put it in the beam, blocked out the orange, and it didn t make white light come out.
11
SPEAKER_01
He showed colors of synthesis.
11
SPEAKER_01
He didn t use the Large Hadron Collider to do that.
11
SPEAKER_01
He used a very low energy experiment to prove a unification in this color physics and different kind of color physics than in quantum chromodynamics.
11
SPEAKER_01
But nevertheless, can we find things like that?
11
SPEAKER_01
Are we spending way too much time and energy thinking about the future circular collider, which even if it gets built will cost $30 billion just to build?
11
SPEAKER_01
By the way, from now on, if I leave you with anything, anytime an experimental physicist tells you a number, always double it, maybe triple it.
11
SPEAKER_00
How much is it gonna cost?
11
SPEAKER_01
To operate it.
11
SPEAKER_01
So, like, do we build an aircraft carrier to build an aircraft carrier?
11
SPEAKER_01
Do we build a nuclear reactor, a semiconductor facility?
11
SPEAKER_01
And the rule of thumb that works pretty well in project management is it costs about 10% per year to operate a given object of sufficient complexity.
11
SPEAKER_01
And in this case, so in 10 years, it ll cost double the cost.
11
SPEAKER_01
So never believe a number, whether it s from our mutual friend Harry or whoever, don t believe the number, double it, and then say, is it worth it?
11
SPEAKER_01
And so building a solar system size accelerator, even if it were possible, do we have to do that?
11
SPEAKER_01
Or can we use these two 30 solar mass objects colliding together to test the number of large extra spatial dimensions?
11
SPEAKER_01
Can we do that?
11
SPEAKER_01
People are working on it.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think it s fascinating.
11
SPEAKER_00
So focus on building detectors.
11
SPEAKER_00
Experiments.
11
SPEAKER_00
That, like, where the cosmos is part of the experiment, I suppose.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s doing the hard work.
11
SPEAKER_00
Because when you re saying low energy regime, because for some of these, especially big questions like theories of everything, you need
12
SPEAKER_00
some high energy events, and so somehow figure out how the high energy events that are already happening out there, how to leverage them here on Earth.
12
SPEAKER_01
So one of the alternative theories of cosmology that is not singular quantum gravitational requiring as the Big Bang and inflation are,
12
SPEAKER_01
are these bouncing models.
12
SPEAKER_01
Some of them feature a similar kind of entity called a quantum field.
12
SPEAKER_01
And that quantum field in the initial stages of the universe of our current after the bounce, which is not a singularity, it compresses to a classical kind of rebound, and the universe starts expanding.
12
SPEAKER_01
During that process, the expansion is governed by what s called a scalar field, of which we only know one that exists that s called the Higgs boson.
12
SPEAKER_01
Higgs is a scalar fundamental particle, fundamental field.
12
SPEAKER_01
That field then later does double duty, and it becomes dark energy.
12
SPEAKER_01
So it solves two problems.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I m not saying it s correct, we don t know yet.
12
SPEAKER_01
But are there observations of, and so dark energy is manifest today.
12
SPEAKER_01
It s manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions, et cetera, et cetera.
12
SPEAKER_01
We see the effects of accelerating universe caused by presumably dark energy.
12
SPEAKER_01
Is dark energy a constant or does it vary?
12
SPEAKER_01
That has to vary in order for this theory to be true because that eventually has to decay so that the universe can not support itself and collapse again, again classically.
12
SPEAKER_01
So we could use low energy phenomena, it s hard to think of supernovas being a low energy phenomenon, but we use that as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field and see, does it change or is it a constant?
12
SPEAKER_01
That s an example of a low energy limit to prove a high energy phenomenon like this collapsing universe in the cyclic model.
12
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of things that cost a lot but are super exciting,
12
SPEAKER_01
Is that page two?
12
SPEAKER_00
No, we ll wrap it up.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s more than page two.
12
SPEAKER_00
What do you think this is?
12
SPEAKER_00
This is my thesis.
12
SPEAKER_01
Actually, Louis de Broglie s thesis was three pages long and he won the Nobel Prize for the wave-particle duality.
12
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, size matters in different dimensions in life.
12
SPEAKER_00
I think the lessons I ve learned about life is the shorter the paper, or the shorter the thesis.
12
SPEAKER_00
Actually, the shorter the paper, some of the greatest papers ever written are short.
12
SPEAKER_00
I feel like...
12
SPEAKER_00
some of the best ideas in this world, not to sound like a contradiction of Feynman, a contradiction on top of a contradiction, but it could be written on a napkin, honestly, which just kind of tells you something about ideas.
12
SPEAKER_00
What are your thoughts about the James Webb Space Telescope?
12
SPEAKER_00
Is this, as somebody who likes telescopes, and this is one of the, I think it says, took 20 years to build, $9.7 billion.
12
SPEAKER_00
Is that way too much, too little?
12
SPEAKER_00
Are you excited about this thing?
12
SPEAKER_01
It s sufficiently different from what I do in my field that it s incredibly interesting to me, because I have no horse in that race.
12
SPEAKER_01
And so I m not competing with them for time or money or resources or people or whatever.
12
SPEAKER_01
So I can purely be an advocate and an aficionado of science.
12
SPEAKER_01
It is, in some sense, the successor to Hubble.
12
SPEAKER_01
It will do things that Hubble can t do.
12
SPEAKER_01
It will also may or may not have the impact on a visceral
12
SPEAKER_01
kind of artistic level that Hubble had.
12
SPEAKER_01
What are some of the most iconic things that Hubble did?
12
SPEAKER_01
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the Pillars of Creation, you know, storms and imaging of these twisted deep sky galaxies.
12
SPEAKER_01
Those resonated with the public.
12
SPEAKER_00
Just visually, they re beautiful.
12
SPEAKER_01
Visually, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
When you look at these images, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, you ll maybe put that in, you ll show every speck of light except for one, 4,000 blobs of light.
12
SPEAKER_01
There s one star in our galaxy, the rest are galaxies.
12
SPEAKER_01
Now, that image is less than one-tenth of your fingernail held out at arm s length.
12
SPEAKER_01
It contains 4,000 galaxies.
12
SPEAKER_01
So now you can figure out how many galaxies there are in the whole sky just by seeing how long does it take you to move your fingernail over the whole sky.
12
SPEAKER_01
So we have another couple hours.
12
SPEAKER_01
No, so it comes out to be that s how we get 500 billion or more galaxies.
12
SPEAKER_01
Now, it s not exact to the galaxy, but it s a good order of magnitude estimate, maybe even better.
12
SPEAKER_01
Hubble produced that, and it was basically serendipitous.
12
SPEAKER_01
They pointed to some dark, blank piece of sky, what they thought was blank, and they saw it.
12
SPEAKER_01
Same thing that happened with the CMB.
12
SPEAKER_01
They were looking for something they didn t find.
12
SPEAKER_01
Same thing they found when they were looking for the deceleration of the universe and found it was accelerating.
12
SPEAKER_01
So, what I sometimes hear is that we don t know what we re going to discover.
12
SPEAKER_01
I never think that s a good idea to spend billions of dollars on something.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, you should have some guaranteed low-hanging fruit and then there should be swinging for the fences.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I think in this case, it was really everything is swinging for the fences because it s either – it s kind of a single point failure.
12
SPEAKER_01
which is this origami construction of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly, and then orient themselves a million miles from Earth, beyond the Earth-moon distance by a factor of four, and still transmit telecommunication back to the Earth, get solar energy, keep it away from the sun, you don t wanna look through the telescope of the sun with your remaining good eye, and you do that, and you cover, it s gonna be phenomenal for science, for sure, if it works.
12
SPEAKER_01
There are a lot of people think, you know, it s so risky, NASA sunk so much of their budget, it ate up, you know, and what if it does fail?
12
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s no guarantee.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yes, it s insured, but so what?
12
SPEAKER_01
You re not gonna get back those 20 years of people, well, let s start building it again.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, they didn t build two copies of it.
12
SPEAKER_01
So.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then if it fails, it kinda has a dampening effect on the prospects and the inspiration of the public for what science can do, what science engineering can do is out in space.
12
SPEAKER_01
It will make a huge impact scientifically.
12
SPEAKER_01
Let s hope for the best.
12
SPEAKER_01
Let s assume it does succeed.
12
SPEAKER_01
It s launched in a couple of weeks.
12
SPEAKER_01
And when it does, it will transform our understanding of, you know, we just discovered not only like extrasolar planets that have moons on them and asteroid belt, we discovered an extrasolar planet in another galaxy.
12
SPEAKER_01
This ll be able to see crazy stuff like that, spectroscopy, imaging, but it ll be able to go back farther in time such that we will be doing cosmology.
12
SPEAKER_01
Hubble did some cosmology and measured the Hubble constant.
12
SPEAKER_01
That was its key project when it was designed and launched.
12
SPEAKER_01
But because it is an optical telescope, it s sensitive to more close-in redshifts, so it s shorter distances.
12
SPEAKER_01
Now, James Webb is much, much higher redshift.
12
SPEAKER_01
It can probe the darker, deeper, distant universe.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, let s talk about not the distant universe, but our neighboring planets.
12
SPEAKER_00
First, I gotta ask you about the moon.
12
SPEAKER_00
So there s a piece of the moon on this table that you ve given me that we didn t have to pick up that arrived here.
12
SPEAKER_00
So how did a piece of the moon arrive here on Earth?
12
SPEAKER_01
So this chunk of the Moon, if it were delivered by the Apollo and NASA missions, you and I would be guilty of a felony right now because it s illegal to own pieces of the Moon collected by the Apollo astronauts.
12
SPEAKER_01
So don t even joke about that when you go over to Houston.
12
SPEAKER_01
This piece of moon rock was delivered via the old-fashioned way by gravity.
12
SPEAKER_01
So this was a chunk of the moon, which is blasted off because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids and meteoroids.
12
SPEAKER_01
Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon into space, and it will then orbit the common moon-Earth system.
12
SPEAKER_01
And it will then eventually enter our atmosphere.
12
SPEAKER_01
And if the piece is large enough and the trajectory is proper, it can land intact.
12
SPEAKER_01
And this one landed with a few hundred grams worth, and they sliced it up.
12
SPEAKER_01
And then it was delivered via U.S.
12
SPEAKER_01
Postal Service to my house.
12
SPEAKER_01
So you can buy these pieces.
12
SPEAKER_01
And actually, you can buy a piece of Mars.
12
SPEAKER_01
You can buy a piece of Mars delivered by the same route.
12
SPEAKER_01
Now, what s so interesting about that?
12
SPEAKER_01
Well, if a piece of Mars can get here, a piece of Earth can get there.
12
SPEAKER_01
If some piece of Earth has some life forms on it, it could get there.
12
SPEAKER_01
And if that can happen in our solar system, it could happen throughout the galaxy.
12
SPEAKER_01
So I m actually not of the opinion that there is life elsewhere in the universe, at least technological life that we can—I see this look of horror on your face.
12
SPEAKER_01
I view it.
12
SPEAKER_00
I am personally extremely pessimistic would be extremely surprised I m just I m curious by the transition because you just said that life is
12
SPEAKER_00
could have arrived from Mars or from planet to planet because of the meteorite striking it and so on.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then you went to, you don t think there might be life out there in the universe.
12
SPEAKER_01
Technological life.
12
SPEAKER_00
Technological life.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, advanced intelligence civilizations.
12
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so go on.
12
SPEAKER_01
So that s the generalization of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called, I know this is a PG-13, it s called panspermia.
12
SPEAKER_01
Panspermia.
12
SPEAKER_00
Beep that out, please.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, please.
12
SPEAKER_01
And that s the exchange of genetic life-form material from other reaches on Earth, which explains the origin of life on Earth, but not the origin of life itself, which I think is a much grander mystery and much more interesting.
12
SPEAKER_01
How did life get here?
12
SPEAKER_01
And you ve talked with many eminent people about that.
12
SPEAKER_01
I m not going to add that much, but just thinking about the reverse process.
12
SPEAKER_01
Let s say life started on the Earth somehow and then made its way out into the universe.
12
SPEAKER_01
Is there enough time for whatever material went from Earth via panspermic direction, spraying the love gun out into the universe, did that then have enough time to incubate and go onto a planet that could support it?
12
SPEAKER_01
certainly not within our solar system, which traveling at the meteorite speeds would require, you know, hundreds of millions of years, then looking at the evolutionary history from bacteria to Bach, from, you know, rocks to Rachmaninoff, I don t know, I can do this all day.
12
SPEAKER_01
How do you get from those very simple inanimate objects to life?
12
SPEAKER_01
I just simply think there s not enough time for Earth to seed life, technological life throughout the galaxy.
12
SPEAKER_01
I don t think there s any evidence for that.
12
SPEAKER_00
But so you really think that the origin of life on Earth,
12
SPEAKER_00
is a really special event.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
If it did originate on earth, my question for those that search for life outside the earth is what if you had a letter from God and the letter said, um, life didn t originate on earth.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like would you choose a different profession?
12
SPEAKER_01
Like it would seem hopeless.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like in other words, we only have a sample of one.
12
SPEAKER_01
In fact, we only know of one conscious life form, let alone one planet that has life on it.
12
SPEAKER_01
Right.
12
SPEAKER_01
What if you knew for sure it didn t start here?
12
SPEAKER_01
That means that like there s almost nothing about Earth that is originated.
12
SPEAKER_01
It didn t originate the life process.
12
SPEAKER_01
So to study purely the origin of life, not life itself, I think that s still fascinating.
12
SPEAKER_01
But how could we learn about, you know, the origin of – remember, you have to go from inanimate object to a living object.
12
SPEAKER_01
whatever that definition of life is, and I m not an expert in many definitions, Max, Sarah, you know, many different definitions.
12
SPEAKER_01
But how do you actually go from inanimate to animate?
12
SPEAKER_01
It s a huge question.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but then you don t have to be the place where life originated to replicate the origin.
12
SPEAKER_00
Like, yeah, that s one way to understand something is to build it, but another way is to just observe it.
12
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to truly re-engineer from scratch.
12
SPEAKER_00
So, you know,
12
SPEAKER_00
But then yes, if it didn t originate on Earth, then your intuitions about the basic prerequisites of life are off.
12
SPEAKER_01
What s the governing principle, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
And then you could have just almost an arbitrary number of possible, like if life didn t start on Earth.
12
SPEAKER_00
To me that s exciting because it s like we know even less than we thought.
12
SPEAKER_00
The thing is it can prosper on Earth though.
12
SPEAKER_00
So maybe the origin of life is fundamentally different from the maintenance of life.
12
SPEAKER_01
And maybe the existence of the Earth-life symbiosis is critical.
12
SPEAKER_01
I think Sarah, you talked about Sarah Walker, that it s a planetary phenomenon, et cetera, et cetera.
12
SPEAKER_01
So doesn t that make it less like, in other words, not only do you need special life conditions to create life, but then sustenance of life, as you say, that also has to be,
12
SPEAKER_01
maintained under very specific circumstances by very specific planets and with very specific tectonic activity and moon.
12
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, you need a Jupiter nearby, you need an Earth and a moon system so that you don t get bombarded too early.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I always think like this, like technological life, I haven t said this before, really, so I m just speaking, I usually like to write down before I say these different things.
12
SPEAKER_00
But one of the things I thought about is- Somebody host a podcast.
12
SPEAKER_00
You should probably accept the fact that you re going to say stupid things every once in a while.
12
SPEAKER_01
Not every once in a while, every while.
12
SPEAKER_01
I claim that, you know, to get to sending, you know, people to the moon, you know, our planet needed whales.
12
SPEAKER_01
dinosaurs, right?
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, you don t make a solar panel from another solar panel.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, you made a solar panel from a factory that melted down glass, silica, you know, aluminum, extruded that using fossil fuels.
12
SPEAKER_01
Where do those fossil fuels come from?
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, so, any civilization that s gonna be a Dyson, you know, a Kardashev, did they have dinosaurs?
12
SPEAKER_01
Like, did they have, like, prebiotic life?
12
SPEAKER_01
Did they have a great oxygenation event?
12
SPEAKER_01
Did they have a dimorphism between prokaryotic, eukaryotic?
12
SPEAKER_01
All those hurdles, let s say you give each one, let s say there s eight hurdles.
12
SPEAKER_01
And each one of those has a probability of one in 1,000 to go from, you know, eukaryotic, prokaryotic, whatever.
12
SPEAKER_01
Let s say there s a one in 1,000 chance.
12
SPEAKER_01
I think it s like one in 10 to the 40th or whatever, if you really do it.
12
SPEAKER_01
But let s say for generous nature, one in 10 to the three.
12
SPEAKER_01
Let s say there s eight of those hurdles.
12
SPEAKER_01
That means you have, you know, 10 to the 24th power, different possibility, and that s just with eight.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like the moon has to be there, Jupiter has to be there, dinosaurs have to be there, all the different things that we have to get to technological life.
12
SPEAKER_01
There s only 10 to the, only, there s 10 to the 22nd, we think, Earth, not Earth, planets in the observable universe, not the galaxy.
12
SPEAKER_01
So that s 100 times fewer than the probability to get 100% clearing these eight very low hurdles of one in 1,000.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s fascinating, because now I really need to listen to your conversation with Lee Cronin, who I believe you had, because he believes the opposite.
12
SPEAKER_00
He believes that the way biology evolved on Earth could have evolved almost an infinite number of other ways.
12
SPEAKER_00
So if you ran Earth over and over and over, you would keep getting life, and it would be very different.
12
SPEAKER_00
So the fact that our,
12
SPEAKER_00
particular life seems unique, it s just like, well, because every freaking life is going to seem unique, but it ll be very different.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s not like we shouldn t be asking the question of what s the likelihood of getting a human-like thing?
12
SPEAKER_00
because that seems to be super special.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s more like, how easy is it to make anything that has the skills of a human, and I don t mean like something with thumbs, but achieving basically a technological civilization.
12
SPEAKER_00
And according to Lee, at least, it s like, it s trivial.
12
SPEAKER_01
I know, we fought, I fought a little bit.
12
SPEAKER_01
I d love to debate him, I think it d be a lot of fun, because we debate with love.
12
SPEAKER_01
When I talk with Lee, I love him and he loves me, I think, I hope.
12
SPEAKER_01
But let me ask you a question.
12
SPEAKER_01
I asked this of him and Sarah on our Clubhouse ones.
12
SPEAKER_01
I said, what do you think would happen the next day?
12
SPEAKER_01
I said, we discover life.
12
SPEAKER_01
It s Proxima Centauri B. It looks just like slime mold, like you get on your brie cheese or whatever.
12
SPEAKER_01
We discover it.
12
SPEAKER_01
What would happen the next day?
12
SPEAKER_01
And they were like, oh, this would be transformative.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I m not trying to be like total Cassandra about this.
12
SPEAKER_01
But I said, I don t think anything would happen.
12
SPEAKER_01
What are you talking about?
12
SPEAKER_01
It would be transformational.
12
SPEAKER_01
I m like, I stipulate that life exists.
12
SPEAKER_01
Go down to like the river, you know, I m in San Diego, go down to the Pacific Ocean, scoop up a glass, you know, you re gonna find life in there.
12
SPEAKER_01
And what are we doing?
12
SPEAKER_01
What are we doing to our earth?
12
SPEAKER_01
We re destroying it callously.
12
SPEAKER_01
We re like pumping crap into there.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like we have this toxic waste spill a couple months ago in San Diego, I couldn t go to the beach.
12
SPEAKER_01
Let me take it a step further.
12
SPEAKER_01
You know how many people, I m sorry that you do know, but how many people died in the 20th century?
12
SPEAKER_01
Killed.
12
SPEAKER_01
These are advanced civils.
12
SPEAKER_01
This isn t slime mold.
12
SPEAKER_01
We kill, we maim, we harm, we hurt, we hate.
12
SPEAKER_01
I don t think anything would happen the next day.
12
SPEAKER_01
Then we go back to what we had.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I said, if that weren t proof enough, life has been discovered at least two or three times just in my professional career.
12
SPEAKER_01
Once in 1996, these Allen Land Hills meteorites in Antarctica, microbial respiration processes.
12
SPEAKER_01
Still, we don t know.
12
SPEAKER_01
It was a press conference held by Bill Clinton on the White House lawn that s featured in the movie Contact, repurpose for that movie.
12
SPEAKER_01
And then there s this phosphorus life, this toxic life in the pools of Mono Lake.
12
SPEAKER_01
Many, you know, extremophile.
12
SPEAKER_01
We don t give a crap.
12
SPEAKER_01
We continue to—so why are we thinking
13
SPEAKER_00
that from whence will our salvation come, as the Bible says.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s not gonna change how we are, it s not gonna magnify how I treat you or you treat me, and we re pretty knowledgeable people, you and I, compared to lay people.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay, that s interesting, that s a really interesting argument.
13
SPEAKER_01
I wonder if you re right, but my intuition is,
13
SPEAKER_01
I can maybe present a different argument that you can think about in the realm of things you care about even deeper, which is like what happens once we figure out the origins of the universe.
13
SPEAKER_01
Like how would that change your life?
13
SPEAKER_01
I would say there are certain discoveries that even in their very idea will change the fabric of society.
13
SPEAKER_01
I tend to see if there s definitive proof that there s life, and the more complex, the more powerful that idea is elsewhere.
13
SPEAKER_01
I m not exactly sure how it will change society because it s such a slap in the face.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s such a humbling force, or maybe not.
13
SPEAKER_01
Or maybe it s a motivator to say, yeah, I don t know which force would take over.
13
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it would be governments with military start to think like, well, how do we kill it?
13
SPEAKER_01
If there s a lot of life out there, how do we create the defenses?
13
SPEAKER_01
How do we extract it?
13
SPEAKER_01
Or yeah, or mine it for benefits.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I just see like there s a hundred million literal counter examples of that.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean right now there s like 700 million kids in poverty and like we just – how do we go about our life and just not deal with that?
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean look, I put it aside.
13
SPEAKER_00
I eat hamburgers and in 100 years, I will be cancelled for being a carnivore or whatever.
13
SPEAKER_00
But so obviously to get through life, you have to make certain compromise.
13
SPEAKER_00
You re not going to think about certain things.
13
SPEAKER_00
But I just think there is a sort of wish fulfillment.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, every time there s water, why are we going to Mars and digging and flying this cool-ass helicopter?
13
SPEAKER_00
We re looking for water.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, stipulate that water was there.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, I believe there was water.
13
SPEAKER_00
I think we should investigate and see what the geology was like.
13
SPEAKER_01
But don t you think, so you re saying- I don t think you re gonna get meaning from it.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s all I m saying.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m not saying it s not worth doing.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m just saying there s a wish fulfillment aspect that people will find meaning for life from science.
13
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
13
SPEAKER_01
there s a complicated line here.
13
SPEAKER_01
What if it s this intelligent civilization living, obviously probably not on Mars, but somewhere like in a neighboring galaxy that we, sorry, in a neighboring star system that we discover, don t you think that had profound change in meaning?
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I guess, again, I assume that because of this pan-subaramic process or whatever, that the probability is much, much greater than zero.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s not one, 100%, but it s much likelier than not that at least some living material from Earth has ejaculated itself into the solar system, into the universe, right, into our galaxy.
13
SPEAKER_00
as well.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
13
SPEAKER_00
So the fact that that could happen and that you re holding a piece from a planetary body, one that couldn t support life as far as we know, but I could get next time if you play nice and you come on my podcast someday, I will give you a tiny chunk of Mars.
13
SPEAKER_00
So Mars theoretically could support stuff, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
Moving on up.
13
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, so I believe that there could be remnants of Earth in this.
13
SPEAKER_00
So that means there could be evolution.
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t think there s any chance that there s like, you know,
13
SPEAKER_00
people using iPhones and having podcasts and stuff in proximate and term.
13
SPEAKER_01
There s some chance though, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
Again, I think the, well, obviously the simple statement to say it s much, much, much higher probability that life exists than technological life exists.
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t think we can argue that.
13
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t mean it s forbidden.
13
SPEAKER_00
Again, I m not saying any of this is forbidden, not worth studying, not interesting.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s a likelihood thing.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and to answer your, I think you re wise to push back and like, what does it matter what I m doing?
13
SPEAKER_00
And I like to think about that, because it s like, what is the value of what you re doing?
13
SPEAKER_00
You have to answer that question, or else at the end of your life, you ll have these existential crises.
13
SPEAKER_00
So when I think about who I am, part of my identity is answering and asking scientific questions.
13
SPEAKER_00
For me, though, there is a religious undercurrent that does undergird, in some sense, this quest.
13
SPEAKER_00
Again, I m not a practicing, I m not wearing a yarmulke, I m not full on into my birth religion, Judaism.
13
SPEAKER_00
But at the same token, I think one of the things Einstein did say is that religion without science is lame, and science without religion is lame.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s blind and lame.
13
SPEAKER_00
Anyway, the point is that you can t get meaning
13
SPEAKER_00
from just knowing facts.
13
SPEAKER_00
Wikipedia knows more than all of us will ever know, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
It has no wisdom.
13
SPEAKER_00
Wisdom, it means sapien.
13
SPEAKER_00
The word wisdom in Latin is sapien.
13
SPEAKER_00
We are wise.
13
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, do you know what we re, our real name is Homo sapiens sapien.
13
SPEAKER_00
So it s man who knows that he knows.
13
SPEAKER_00
Do you know what he knows?
13
SPEAKER_00
Do you know what the knowing is?
13
SPEAKER_00
It s that he s gonna die.
13
SPEAKER_00
We re the only creatures that know that we are gonna die.
13
SPEAKER_00
We don t know when we re gonna die.
13
SPEAKER_00
But like, you know, I have a cat, a fierce attack cat.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s beautiful.
13
SPEAKER_00
She doesn t know when she s gonna die.
13
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t mean I m more valuable than I think I am.
13
SPEAKER_01
The survival instinct is fundamentally different from like the knowledge of death.
13
SPEAKER_01
And that s where Ernest Becker comes in with the terror of death.
13
SPEAKER_01
And that s a creative force that seems to be more feature than bug about the human condition is that,
13
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s a gift of knowing our own mortality.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, to me, I mean, that s why I agree with you in some sense in terms of the aliens not being a thing that solves all mysteries.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s why my love has always been the human mind, so understanding
13
SPEAKER_01
who we are, what the hell are we?
13
SPEAKER_01
And I think your love has been an echo of that, which is, where do we come from?
13
SPEAKER_01
Or basically, as cheesy as it sounds, Michio Kaku has a way with words.
13
SPEAKER_01
If you can just enjoy the, you know.
13
SPEAKER_00
Oh, he speaks in complete, he s like Sam Harris of cosmology.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he speaks in complete paragraphs.
13
SPEAKER_01
But also unapologetically, he says, we will know God, or we will know the mind of God, or whatever the quotes, those kinds of things.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s exciting that physics might be able to find equations that unlock our origins at the very core, and the fabric of it all, too, and not just our origins.
13
SPEAKER_01
you know, what s at the beginning.
13
SPEAKER_01
Something tells me we re too dumb to truly understand what s at the beginning, but.
13
SPEAKER_00
I think we should be humble in that way.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, again, another thing is, you know.
13
SPEAKER_00
ever hear the saying, like, we share 99% of our DNA with chimps or bonobos or whatever?
13
SPEAKER_00
I share, like, probably more than that.
13
SPEAKER_00
You know, sometimes I wish we shared, like, 100%.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, that would be so much more interesting.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, oh, there s 50% of a fruit fly or a banana.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, we... No, no, no.
13
SPEAKER_00
There s something... But that should make us feel more precious.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I almost feel like discovering life on another
13
SPEAKER_00
planet, whatever solar system, would cause a diminution of humanity.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, the one thing I do hold fast to from religion, I don t know where I am with God.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, do I believe in God?
13
SPEAKER_00
I think that s an unanswerable question, but I have some thoughts about it.
13
SPEAKER_00
But by the same token, I think the one thing I do get from religion is that every human has infinite worth, because we are, in a religious capacity, considered to be equal to God.
13
SPEAKER_00
In other words, we are gods, not to be like,
13
SPEAKER_00
But we can contemplate what God did.
13
SPEAKER_00
We have aspects of God.
13
SPEAKER_00
We have free will.
13
SPEAKER_00
God had free will if he exists.
13
SPEAKER_00
Again, I can t prove that God exists, otherwise you wouldn t have any credit for believing in God.
13
SPEAKER_01
This is interesting.
13
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s like I m talking to Einstein here, but let me ask anyway.
13
SPEAKER_01
Can you clip that for my clips, John?
13
SPEAKER_01
For somebody who s looking at the young universe, at the early universe,
13
SPEAKER_01
and are talking about God and are agnostic, who do you think is God?
13
SPEAKER_00
So I thought you had just like one of the best podcasts with Sam Harris this past summer.
13
SPEAKER_00
And one of the things I liked about that conversation is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation.
13
SPEAKER_00
And he said something that s really resonated with me, and I ve been working it around and trying to work on it my own way.
13
SPEAKER_00
But he said, like, you can never be happy, you can only become happy.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I try to take it a little bit further than that, because I think it s interesting.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, meditation is like, you re not like, oh, I m happy, and now, like, oh, my kid came in, and now I m not happy.
13
SPEAKER_00
No, like, you can be satisfied.
13
SPEAKER_00
Kurt Vonnegut said, like, you ever catch this?
13
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes, Lex, you re like, walking around, and you re like, life is freaking amazing.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, I m happy.
13
SPEAKER_00
And Kurt Vonnegut said, you should say to yourself every time that happens, like a little mantra, like, if this isn t goodness, if this isn t happiness, nothing is.
13
SPEAKER_00
Just remind yourself how awesome it is, every breath, everything that you do, when you make an impact.
13
SPEAKER_00
Even some of the bad stuff that happens, good.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s good.
13
SPEAKER_00
So Sam said that, and it made me think, because I was like, well,
13
SPEAKER_00
What does it really mean to be happy?
13
SPEAKER_00
Because I can think of about two or three ways that right now I could double my happiness.
13
SPEAKER_00
you know, like win the lottery or whatever, like double my happiness.
13
SPEAKER_00
There s only a few ways though, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, you know, I had this kind of thought, like, how many boats can you water ski behind?
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, you had twice as many followers.
13
SPEAKER_00
Now you ve got 2 million followers, 5 million, whatever.
13
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t do anything.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s called the hedonic treadmill.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like, once you get to a certain level, it takes a lot more, you know, change in followers, money, impact, women, whatever you want, to make you have one more quanta of happiness, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
On the other hand, this is a concept from entropy, I can make your life miserable in an infinite number of ways.
13
SPEAKER_00
In other words, there s more space to make your life unhappy than happy.
13
SPEAKER_00
And so I thought about that in the context of what Sam said about happiness.
13
SPEAKER_00
So it s sort of like, yeah, it s an expression of entropy.
13
SPEAKER_00
And that what you should be doing in life
13
SPEAKER_00
is doing that which will cause you devastation if it goes away.
13
SPEAKER_00
Because those are the things that are where you re reducing entropy, like a kid.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like anyone who s a parent knows instantly what I m talking about.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like how to make your life a billion times worse.
13
SPEAKER_00
But there s no way to make your life a billion times better.
13
SPEAKER_00
And so thinking about that, now turning it to the question of God s existence,
13
SPEAKER_00
I feel like there s no way that you can believe in God, to misquote Sam, but there s ways that you can become a believer in God.
13
SPEAKER_00
In other words, you could increase the Bayesian confidence level that there is some, and let s not call it God because that s a freighted term, let s just call it some infinite source of goodness or our beautiful power in the universe, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
Simple things can do that.
13
SPEAKER_00
You can increase your credulity in the goodness of life.
13
SPEAKER_00
And we have this bias as humans towards negativity, negativity bias, well-known fact.
13
SPEAKER_00
So what I want to do is, let s call God good, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
That s where it comes from.
13
SPEAKER_00
God good, same words in German.
13
SPEAKER_00
And when we think about what is good, let s do those things that would devastate us.
13
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of that could be relationships.
13
SPEAKER_00
And there s a powerful concept from network theory, which is that the number of connections in a network, I m just saying it for your own, it grows as the square of the elements in the matrix, in the number, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
So you think of a matrix with N people, you know person one, two, three, four, and then there s four other people.
13
SPEAKER_00
There s 16 different pairs, but half of them overlap.
13
SPEAKER_00
The diagonal is where you know yourself.
13
SPEAKER_00
But that still grows as N squared.
13
SPEAKER_00
So those connections increase and decrease, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
You ever have two friends that are fighting, and you re kind of upset, even though you re not fighting with either one of them?
13
SPEAKER_00
So a network grows like that.
13
SPEAKER_00
So you want to increase your network as much as possible, but only the kind of high-quality interstices between them.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I think in doing so, you make yourself fragile, not anti-fragile.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I think that is where purpose and maybe approaching some notion of God can come from.
13
SPEAKER_01
So that is a source of meaning, maximizing the goodness in life, and the way you know it s good is if it s taken away, it would devastate you.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s one way.
13
SPEAKER_00
Think about it, your brand, your business, your spouse, your kids.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, parents can t, I ve known parents that have lost, Jim Simons, here s a perfect example.
13
SPEAKER_00
He s one of my oldest friends and mentors.
13
SPEAKER_00
He is one of the richest people on earth.
13
SPEAKER_00
Gulf stream, mega yacht.
13
SPEAKER_00
This is all documented books about him.
13
SPEAKER_00
He lost two sons as adults.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I hear people say, Oh, I m so jealous of Jim Simons.
13
SPEAKER_00
Would you take everything?
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t know where he has that strength and his wife, Marilyn and his first wife, Barbara.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m not, I m not like that.
13
SPEAKER_00
Some people are, there are angels that walk among us.
13
SPEAKER_00
And there s this famous prayer, it s like, God, there s an old saying, one of the hardest tests there are in life is to be given a lot of money.
13
SPEAKER_00
And you see it happens with people that win the lottery or whatever, or NFL football players after their career s over, they re broke, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
And I always joke, like, God, please test me with money, that d be great.
13
SPEAKER_00
But in reality, you should never say, I want what X person has, unless you re willing to take everything.
13
SPEAKER_00
And you ll find you won t wanna take everything.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think a lot about the altering effects of fame, of money, of power on people.
13
SPEAKER_01
It blinds people.
13
SPEAKER_01
And I wonder about that for myself because it seems like in themselves these are definitely not the goals I m pretty much afraid.
13
SPEAKER_01
I m not desirous and I m definitely afraid of each of those things.
13
SPEAKER_01
Money, fame, and power.
13
SPEAKER_01
But it seems the dreams I have as consequences can often have these things.
13
SPEAKER_01
And I m really afraid of becoming something that would disappoint me when I was younger, that I wouldn t recognize.
13
SPEAKER_01
You know, because change happens gradually.
13
SPEAKER_00
but are you using yourself as the touchstone to use the assay or not?
13
SPEAKER_00
What is your rubric to apprise if you have lived up to that 12-year-old, whatever-year-old Lex?
13
SPEAKER_00
How will you know or not know if you ve let yourself down?
13
SPEAKER_00
I always think live to impress yourself.
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t care if I have followers.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s nice or whatever, but it s hedonic, and it s just never-ending, because you ll always see the next level.
13
SPEAKER_00
But I think it s pretty damn cool that I ve gotten to go to these places, the South Pole, and I ve done these things, and I ve made a family, and I m able to teleport my values into the future through my children, and I ve had ideological children.
13
SPEAKER_00
So by what metric have you not already A, impressed yourself, and B, could you let yourself down?
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t wanna turn this into therapy.
13
SPEAKER_01
I think some of it is psychology.
13
SPEAKER_01
For me, I m very much just never, I m highly self-critical.
13
SPEAKER_01
I m never happy, never happy with what I ve done, but I m always happy in the way that you describe, which is that the Vonnegut thing, where you just, often during the day, I will feel, I don t know, I just remember just eating beef jerky and being truly happy.
13
SPEAKER_01
That was just last night, and I have that all the time, and that, to me,
13
SPEAKER_01
is why, I mean, that feels to me like a healthy way to live life, and at least for me, it s the one I really enjoy.
13
SPEAKER_01
A lot of people tell me that maybe being so self-critical, so hard on yourself is not a good way to go, but more and more as I get older, I realize it s just who I am.
13
SPEAKER_01
You have to a certain point,
13
SPEAKER_01
except this is how I m always going to be this self-critical.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s like the Oracle of Delphi, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
You know thyself.
13
SPEAKER_00
But I wanna leave you with one last thing, which is to say, just on this topic,
13
SPEAKER_00
You know, it could be different, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
We could go down to the ocean and get some krill instead of the 7-Eleven.
13
SPEAKER_00
You know, it could be that we have no other taste buds.
13
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, Eric s talked, the four dimensions of, you know, the vibration of your tongue, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
It could be like, there s one, and it s just like, not, you know, Memphis barbecue or whatever you like in your Slim Jim.
13
SPEAKER_00
It could be something, it could be very boring, similarly.
13
SPEAKER_00
What if that s a clue?
13
SPEAKER_00
What if that s giving us evidence?
14
SPEAKER_01
Here s another clue.
14
SPEAKER_01
There are many animals, most animals have single monocolor vision.
14
SPEAKER_01
They only see in black and white intensity.
14
SPEAKER_01
They only have rods and no cones.
14
SPEAKER_01
We could be like that, but we re not.
14
SPEAKER_01
Why is that not a clue?
14
SPEAKER_01
God s not gonna like hit you over the head and say like, here I am, because then everybody would believe in him.
14
SPEAKER_01
And there s very simplistic, I ve had debates even with like famous atheists like Lawrence Krauss.
14
SPEAKER_01
He s like self-declared militant atheist.
14
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, well, I don t believe in the same God you don t believe in.
14
SPEAKER_01
Like some guy in a white beard and a chair, like that s infantile.
14
SPEAKER_01
Like I gave that away a long time ago.
14
SPEAKER_01
But what if there are clues?
14
SPEAKER_01
What if Yang-Mills theory, you know, Maxwell s equation, like what, those are beautiful.
14
SPEAKER_01
If you ve ever seen like, you know, expressed in tensor notation, Einstein s equations or Maxwell s equations, and then Maxwell s equations riding on Einstein s, it s unbelievably beautiful.
14
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t have to be that way.
14
SPEAKER_01
That we can comprehend it, that s a crack.
14
SPEAKER_01
Maybe that s where the light gets in.
14
SPEAKER_01
And the light is what reveals what s beautiful.
14
SPEAKER_01
So I don t believe in God.
14
SPEAKER_01
I think that s a stupid notion.
14
SPEAKER_01
Like, do I believe in God?
14
SPEAKER_01
Like, sometimes I wonder if God believes in me, you know, like more than if I believe in, like, he needs Brian Keating.
14
SPEAKER_01
Like, you know, what would, you know, it s like one of my friends is a rapper.
14
SPEAKER_01
He s like, what would I be doing if I were God?
14
SPEAKER_01
exactly what God s doing right now.
14
SPEAKER_01
You think I know more than God?
14
SPEAKER_01
Give me a break.
14
SPEAKER_00
Leaving clues of beauty for these hairless apes.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_00
and to see what they do with this and then marvel at both the tragedy of what those apes do to each other and the rare moments of when they understand, understand deeply about how the world works.
14
SPEAKER_00
Brian, you re an incredible human being.
14
SPEAKER_00
I m a big fan and I m really honored that you was,
14
SPEAKER_00
First of all, shower me with rocks from the moon.
14
SPEAKER_00
From space.
14
SPEAKER_02
From space.
14
SPEAKER_02
Space dust.
14
SPEAKER_02
Space dust.
14
SPEAKER_02
Crystals, magical crystals, healing crystals.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
14
SPEAKER_02
That you can use for good.
14
SPEAKER_00
And tell me your story and spend your really valuable time with me today.
14
SPEAKER_00
This was amazing.
14
SPEAKER_01
That was a great pleasure for me, Lex.
14
SPEAKER_01
Thank you so much.
14
SPEAKER_00
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Keating.
14
SPEAKER_00
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
14
SPEAKER_00
And now, let me leave you with some words from Galileo Galilei.
14
SPEAKER_00
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
14
SPEAKER_00
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.