On this episode of Skeptico, a show about arguing. And then you guys quiz each other. Mr. Winger, is that really the best use of our time? It seems like the value of having you here is to... I think my value as a teacher is to teach you how to learn. I think you're telling us we should teach ourselves. I don't think you're going to learn if I tell you how to think. I think if you tell us what you think, then we'll learn that. I thought you should break into groups, but you failed to learn that so your theory is invalid. Even arguing with people you like. Use the term cranky. You said he was cranky. In my experience... Yeah, you can put it in cranky. Probably. I'd say high probability of cranky. Really? You need to read it. And you need to... I do. I do. I do. I do need to read it. I wouldn't call somebody cranky if I'd not read the word. That first up was from Jill McHale and Community. And the second one was from today's guest, Anthony Peake, who I genuinely like and respect. Even though I think he stretches the metaphor a little bit too far, he always brings a lot of good research to the table. And I certainly like that. Stick around for the interview. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore consciousness, science, and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares. And today we welcome Anthony Peake back to Skeptico. Tony has a new book. A new book is an old book that is a new book, but it's just interesting. I'm looking forward to diving into this with him. The book is Cheating the Ferryman, the Revolutionary Science of Life After Death. The sequel to the bestselling is their life after death. So that's the new book. I got to figure out how you got so much in that title on Amazon. They let you do that. That's great, man. Good for you. Tony, welcome back. Thanks for being here. Yeah, always enjoy Alex our discussions. I always find them the most stimulating I do, basically, because you do your research and you really do know your stuff. And what I always admire about you is that you don't toe the line. If somebody says something you don't agree with, you'll tell them. And I think that's profoundly important, you know. But funnily enough, in terms of the actual title in there, it's extraordinary, isn't it? I don't do this. This is my publishers. I didn't even know they'd done this. So clearly it's quite a mouthful, isn't it really? It's good. It's good. It kind of brings it. Brings us around because that's what the book does is it brings us around to the idea that here's a guy who's had this theory. He's been working on this theory for a relatively long time, has synthesized a lot of different sources. He has, let me pull up on the screen for anyone who's watching, written a bunch of other books. And those are just some of them on the website, anthonypeak.com. You can also find them on Amazon. You know, the last time you were on Skeptico, it was 447, really enjoyed the chat. And it was kind of centered around this book, The Hidden Universe, and investigation into non-human intelligences. Really, another great book. You know, I mentioned this the last time we spoke, and I want to mention it again, because what you do is really quite unique, and what you've been able to kind of muster and just kind of plow your way through is this non-ordained kind of researcher of consciousness, which I think is part of this thing. Like, they have, like, I got to say this, this is going to be a true Socratic Skeptico kind of thing. I don't agree with all your theories, but I really admire, and I think if it was a more just world, academically, intellectually, we would think about you in a much different way. You would have multiple PhDs. You'd be kind of much more sought after in terms of the way you're synthesizing this information. But that's never going to happen, because from Jump Street, you are counter, very counter fundamentally, to the whole consciousness, biological, robot, meaningless universe.  You're not afraid to say, hey, that's just obviously bullshit, so we can kind of dismiss with that. And now, let's explore this, let's explore that. And, you know, the fact that you've been able to gain any traction at all is amazing. Let alone write these really fantastically interesting books that are packed with solid research, solid, you know, peer-reviewed stuff that's coming onto the scene and you are then synthesizing into your theory. So that's what you do, and I'm so glad you're out there doing it. Thanks, Alex. I mean, one of the things that I find is that, and I've used this argument many, many times, I mean, I have been offered places to do PhDs on the back of my research, and indeed, over the years, I've been offered the opportunity to do PhDs in various different subjects. I mean, initially when I started off, I was planning to do a PhD in Italian Renaissance art, and particularly the paintings of a guy called Piero della Francesca, which developed my interest in esotericism because I was interested in the esoteric aspects of a lot of the Renaissance painters and the symbolism within the paintings. And of course, at that period, you had people like Piccambi di Merendola, you had various other philosophers and everything else as well in Florence and various other cities. Then I had the opportunity to do a PhD in business management after I did my postgraduate course at London School of Economics. But I'd always argued that it's not possible to do a PhD in the areas I'm interested in because it's too diverse, it's too wide. In order to write the kind of stuff I write about, you'd need to have a PhD in neurology, astrophysics, quantum physics, neurochemistry. So what I do is I try to synthesize all these things and bring them together in a way that people can understand and appreciate because I think there's too much going on here that we know that quantum physics is telling us that the universe is a far, far stranger place than anything we can possibly understand. And in this case, particularly I quote somebody like, I don't know, Richard Feynman, one of the world's leading quantum physicists. And he said to his students, and he said, you know, when you first do your courses on quantum physics, don't try to understand it.  We don't know what is going on, but we know it works. And this is the thing, of course, quantum physics is the most accurate form of science we've ever had in history. You know, it's accurate to, I think somebody said, one hair's length in terms of statistics, one hair's length across the Atlantic in terms of distance, that's how accurate it is. But nobody understands fully what it means. Now, I think the only way you can ever appreciate fully what quantum mechanics really means is to start applying the cosmology to it, applying the philosophy behind it. And in the book, this is what I try to do. I have whole sections on Vedanta. I have sections on Kashmiri Shavism. I have sections on the great philosophers in historical times who argued that the relationship between consciousness and external reality is not what it seems. You know, there's a term that people use. It's called naive realism. The idea that there is a one-to-one relationship between what my brain tells me is out there and what is physically out there. You know, there's all these things. You know, when you first come across the discovery that everything that seems to be physical is 99.99999999999996 empty space and the only things that are physically solid are point particles such as electrons and quarks, both of which are point particles, which means they have no extension in space. So where does reality disappear to? I came across a quotation recently that I really loved when I think it was Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom at Manchester University when he discovered that the vast part of the atom was empty space. The next morning when he woke up, he was terrified to step out of bed in case he fell through the floor. Now, this shows exactly how strange reality is. And that's all I write about. Do I believe my hypothesis? I don't know. I don't know whether I believe it. All I know is that the science points me in that direction. So great. That's kind of a good segue into the theory because since this book is kind of a, I don't know what you'd call it, a reboot recap of this body of work. Tell us about the basics. Tell us about the ferryman. Who is the ferryman and tell us about the daemon? Who's the daemon?  I think that's important.  Take us back even further, if you will. Just how did you even develop as a person into, you know, in thinking weird creature I am now? No, the amazing creature into the bold creature who says, I'm going to take a year off of my profession. I'm going to risk not having any money being broke because I ought to write a book. I mean, and then write it. And I didn't even know what I was going to write it about. That was the extraordinary thing. I mean, I, you know, I have a very understanding wife and she said, look, you really want to write this book. Okay, you know, write the book, take a year out, just take it out. And the first day when I was sitting in front of the screen, you know, there's writers say this blank screen or the white page crisis. And you go, right, I've now got to start.  I find all things to do with the thing I'm supposed to be doing. You know, I'll listen to music. I'll do all kinds of things.  And as I was doing so, I started the end of my thing started to go dead and my lips started to tingle. And I realized I was having a migraine aura. Now I've experienced all my life, what's technically called classic migraine, which is you don't necessarily get a headache. But what you do get is you get the aura state, this kind of weird disembodied, weird hallucinatory transitory state that you end up in. And you know, you're going to have a full blown migraine soon afterwards. And mine starts in that way where I get tingling in my fingers. And then my eyesight starts to go. I start going blind. I get white out. It's called a scatoma. And it moves across from the center of my vision right across since literally I cannot see. And this started. But what was uncanny was that at the time I also had the most incredible sensation of deja vu that I was that I had at some time in my past sat in front of that computer screen in my home in Horsham in West Sussex down in here in the UK. And when I came out of the aura state, I realized what I wanted to write about. I wanted to understand exactly what deja vu was. And that was the abiding driving force. Now, just a little bit of background story. I'm from a very working class background. I'm a regular guy, but I was gifted, I suppose, with peculiar memory. I've always had this peculiar, virtually adetic memory where virtually sometimes, you know, I can I can remember something. And I don't even have to go through the recall facility. It just comes into my mind or I'll be able to read it. I mean, I've read the Encyclopedia Britannica from end to end. And sometimes I will think of something and a concept. And I'll see the page in front of me from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And I can read down it. I can look at it, which means I've never been beaten in trivial pursuit ever. I've never been beaten in trivial pursuit.   I used to actually earn a living on quizzes. When I was a period of unemployed, I used to be in quiz teams. I used to drain the quiz machines in the pubs and things because it's just a peculiar thing I can do. But it meant that over the years, I've always been interested in unusual phenomena. Ever since I first read John Keele way back in the late 1960s. And I then read a British part work called man myth and magic when I was about 10 or 11. And this made me decide that I went when and if I got to university. And at that stage, it wasn't looking that promising because I'd failed my 11 plus. I was at the secondary modern school. But I managed to get to the local grammar school when I was 15. And I flew at the grammar school because it was it was it was my kind of environment. I was very sporty. So they like sporty kids. I was an athlete. So they love that. But on top of that, I had this way with words. And I could write and everything else as well. And I did phenomenally well. And I did very well at my A levels.  I was I was I got a place at one of Britain's top universities, the university Warwick and also to read sociology and history, which again was stretching myself because I was doing two degrees in parallel. And I chose sociology and history because the sociology I was interested in because it gave me the opportunity to study religion. It gave me the opportunity to study cults and religious cults and belief systems. So I was able to dive into the sociology of what it means when people are Jehovah's Witnesses and when people suffer from cognitive dissonance when Jesus doesn't come when they expect him to this kind of thing. So I very much focused in on that. And in terms of my history, I again focused in on the history of esoteric belief systems. And I was particularly interested in the crazy strange religious movements that came out of the 30 years war in the 17th century in Germany. And there were some very peculiar religious groups coming up then because, of course, it was the breakout from the rule of Catholicism and everybody was reading the Bible and interpreting it in their own way. And of course, it was then in the vernacular and the Vulgate so people could read the Bible and they came up with their own interpretations. So this fascinated me. But of course, there was no real opportunities. And when I got my degree and I wanted to do postgrad, the only really opportunity for me to do postgraduate was in business. So I went to the London School of Economics to do a postgraduate course in industrial relations and labour law, which I then did. And then I started a career within human resources management and compensation and benefits specializing in compensation and benefits. But all the time I was continually reading all the time I was reading books on the subject and you see from the books behind me. People turn around to me and say you haven't read all those books. I actually have, you know, and it meant that when I had the opportunity to write a book, it was already in there. But I didn't know my daemon and we'll come into the daemon in a minute. My daemon had led me from my very earliest age. My own higher self had led me to read the right things in order for when I sat in that room in 1999 in Horsham, I was ready to go. And what happened was it was like, you know, young, there's the young young concept of the library angel. I found this was happening. I was finding the books I needed were just coming into my world view. I'd go into a library and a book would be there. I mean, I'll give you a really weird story about this. My wife was talking but getting really hacked off with me about the way in which I felt I was being guided to write this book. And we were staying with my brother-in-law in Cheltenham. And we went into this bookshop and the bookshop books were piled hives, secondhand bookshop and Penny turns around to me and she goes, you know the way you think you're being guided? And I said, yes. And she said, okay, what kind of book do you need now? Because this is a chaos of a bookshop. What kind of book do you need? Let's see if it really works. So I said, funnily enough, I need a biography on William Blake.   And she picked it out and she threw it across the room in frustration and stormed out. And that was exactly the book I needed. And there were quotations in there I needed. I know you can add to this in a million different ways. The phenomenon that you experienced is kind of retold dozens and dozens of time throughout history, both with reading and literature. But in science, you know, I needed the formula. I needed the whatever, you know, right? Well, it was like, like Kekul, Kekul, you know, needed to to understand the structure of Benzene. And he was sitting in front of a roaring log fire, has a hypnagogic image and sees a snake eating from its own tail. And he realized that the ring, it was a ring structure. And Benzene was a ring structure. Max Planck, when Max Planck in 1900, Max Planck stood up in December 1900 and changed science forever at a meeting in Berlin when he pointed out that energy came in small units or packages or quanta from the Latin. And he said that that actual work he did was an act of desperation. It was a piece of inspiration that he just threw the idea out like a crazy idea. And it was right. Not only that, but he come up with this number called the Planck constant, which is now found the universe everywhere in the universe. The Planck constant is there. And yet it was an arbitrary thing. He just grubbed out the air. So it seems that there's a relationship between us and the universe. In other words, when we think about the idea that everything is, there's distance between things. We know from quantum physics that everything is entangled. There's a quantum physics thing called entanglement, where if you put two quantum, you put two quantum particles like electrons or photons into the same quantum state, then you send them apart. If you do one thing to one, the other one reacts instantaneously. Now the world's most, the world should have stopped in 1981 when a guy called Alain Aspey, but the the Institute of Optics in Paris did an experiment which proved non-locality. He proved something that a guy called John Bell had come across, come across in 1964, a Northern Irish guy that was working at CERN. And this proved something called the Einstein-Pedolski Rosen paradox, which was written in the mid 1930s by Einstein and a few associates. And it proved, breaking it down, that there is no distance between things. That we think that there's distance, but there isn't. Everything is a single unity. Now, if sub-particles, when they're put in close proximity to each other, become entangled, extrapolate from that the idea that at the first point of the Big Bang, with the singularity of the Big Bang, every single subatomic particle that is now in the universe was entangled in a point particle 13.8, 13.7 billion years ago. Right, but Tony, we've got to be a little careful because that's where people kind of lose the idea. But it's kind of a bridge too far in some ways in terms of filling it in, because what I would really bring it back to, and again in compliments to you and what you do in the book, is you kind of show where the theory is meeting reality, like the example you gave with Bell, the other one that I had gone just the other day, and Quantum Doug, Dr. Doug Minsky is super smart about quantum mechanics and AI and stuff like that. And we're chatting about, you know, there's a quantum modem now, right? And the Chinese have actually done this and they've demonstrated it, and that always grabs people's attention is when it's, oh, they've engineered it. So they've taken quantum entanglement and they've said, but if you just take the idea that you're saying, and like I love when you said, you know, the world should have stopped, you know, there's so many times that there's so many points in the research that you talk about when you say the world should have stopped. The world should have stopped when Max Planck said, consciousness is fundamental, I'm, you know, the world should have stopped finding it. Anyways, the point about the entanglement modem that I just want to bring it up so people can make this as a touchstone. If you can entangle things and you can manipulate one thing and then have the other thing change, think of what that means for a modem, because that's what communication is about. Now they're just doing it with the keys, the security keys, but it's really the same thing to do with the data. It's just the precursor. But we will maybe talk about that in a minute, but the fact that we've taken that and now engineered that brings us to a different level. And I think you're knocking on that door a lot and saying, hey, look at this research, you can't just end this stuff is in the abstract anymore. But I want to, if we can, return to something you said just a minute ago, because it's important. I guess when you said it, I was kind of jiggled my memory a little bit. I'm not quite as photographically memorable to have the photographic memory that you do. But the Jungian angel of the library kind of thing. And then what you're saying in terms of your experience and the experience of many other famous, famous scientists throughout time and I always think, didn't Francis Crick have something with the see the swirling snakes? I mean, over and over again, that angel of the library is coming into play. But Tony, tie us down here. You're calling that. You're calling that out and you're saying, well, okay, that's how you've understood it. And here's the demonstrated instances where that happened. But you're attaching that to this idea of the daemon, aren't you? I am. And of course, when we talk about Jung, Jung had his own daemon. He called it Philemon. And Philemon was an entity that was with Jung for most of his life. And I would argue that the daemon is our own higher self and that we all have a daemon, all of us.  And to the extent they are open is the extent in which the daemon can communicate. Because the daemon is the part of you that's lived your life before. And this is profoundly important. The daemon knows how to guide you because it's already done it. So when people turn around and say, I had a precognitive dream. Or I had a precognitive deja vu. That's not you remembering that. It's the daemon facilitating that because the daemon remembers it. In my book on Philip K. Dick, I use the term with Philip K. Dick, the man who remembered the future. Because I argue that we live this life more than once. And it's a simulation or an instantiation which I think is a more, more accurate term because simulation gives the impression that it's a simulation of something else. Whereas it's not. It's an instantiation of itself. And I'm quoting here a guy called Dr. Andrew Gallimore who is an associate of mine who lives in Okinawa in Japan. Who is an Oxford educated cybernetic engineer. Very interesting guy. You must get him on your show. His book on DMT and altered states of consciousness is to die for it's brilliant. But going back to it, so the idea is that I use the analogy and it's much easier as an analogy these days because people know it. Can you imagine that you were existing in a virtual reality? Three dimensional first person viewpoint computer game of your life. And in that game it is pro the program contains the outcome of every decision that you can possibly make. Okay. What you do is you switch on the game and literally I use the analogy in one of my books and say it's as if you've put on a super duper feedback suit that feeds back your movements in the game. So you know, rather like with with the new Oculus you actually see a pair of hands on the screen when you're in virtual reality which are mimicking the movements of your own hands. It's quite uncanny when you do this. But the idea is that you are placed in this game and the first life you live you don't have a daemon.  And at the end of that first life a bifurcation takes place at the point of death the daemon and the Adalon split off. The Adalon dies but the daemon continues and finds itself being the gameplayer of another reboot of the game from the moment of birth. And it literally is in a position where it sees or perceives the life of its Adalon on screen. Now you can imagine a scenario here that initially the daemon can't really influence the on-screen sprite because it's independence because it's to do with the way the brain structures to do with the dominant and non-dominant hemisphere is the brain. But the idea is that the on-screen sprite say we'll use Lara Croft which is a good example of this. So you switch on the second game you've played the game once before so you know the layout of the tomb that she's supposed to be wandering around. She starts running off and she goes into a room and she gets eaten by a monster.  The daemon it's now the third game but this time the daemon knows to not go in that room because there's a monster in there. The skill the daemon has is how it communicates with its Adalon to not have the Adalon go into that room. And this is when in life we have hunches when we have feelings meet somebody and you think ooh not too sure about this person I believe this is what really is happening is that there's part of you that's recognising the situation and is trying to warn you now if your doors of perception are vaguely open you'll have pre-cognitive dreams or you'll have inklings or feelings but if your doors of perception are wider open and I argue for instance people who experience temporal lobe epilepsy the daemon can communicate much more effectively it can speak to them sometimes and indeed there is a friend of mine Myron Dial whose daemon manifested when he was four years old and they'd been together for the whole of his life he's now in his late seventies and his daemon is called Charon which is interesting because it's the ferryman which again is fascinating and he tells me all the time about how Charon guides him how Charon gives him visions and there was one example he gave me where Charon gave him a vision when he was about 25 years old and he saw in this vision an elderly man sitting in a studio with a pile of books notebooks red notebooks and he was surrounded by these incredible paintings and sculptures it was only when he was in his sixties he's sitting there in his room and he senses a presence behind him and he thinks oh my god looked and there were the red books in front of him and all his art was all around him and he realized that he'd been seeing his own future his daemon had given him some of his own future Philip K. Dick had the same things happen to him so the idea is that the daemon guides you through multiple lives and he it changes these these what I call I suppose it's like an evolutionary thing that you play the game over and over again and you follow different routes and I argue that all of this information is digitally encoded within the universe itself within the zero-point field within the quantum vacuum it's an information field and all this information is held and it's all to do with black holes believe it or not and it's all to do with the way in which information is processed within black holes and this is why in the work in my book I cite the work of people like Stephen Hawking because Hawking's point of Hawking radiation coming out of a black hole and the idea is that this is a huge hologram we are existing within a huge hologram reality is not what it seems at its basis everything is information an information that is processed by a consciousness because we know in quantum mechanics and quantum physics from the twin-slit experiment there's a direct relationship between the act of observation and whether a subatomic particle is a point particle or a wave the act of observation or the act of measurement which is the same thing creates from a wave which of course is something that is smeared out and has no physical presence to a point particle which is a point particle in three-dimensional space right but hold on hold on hold on right because again I'm going to circle back and say the same thing over and over again I love where you're going and I love the launching off point which is hard science kind of irrefutable scientific truths that we found like what you're talking about the double-slit experiment which I always say is misnamed it's the consciousness experiment that's what it is it's like does consciousness exist answer over and over and over again is yes but we don't want to talk about consciousness so let's talk about slits and photons and the rest of that and that's a good way to kind of change the dialogue which is part of the social engineering project you know I won't go off on that rant that I do a million times but what I do want to do in the process of doing that you've really done a great job of summing up the the Ferryman theory if you will and you're hanging a bunch of things off it which are tremendous and that's why we want people to go check out the book cheating the Ferryman get it, read it it'll kind of put you right into the middle of this conversation what I want to launch into and it goes hand in hand we've already been doing this it's kind of like I said the ghost skeptico but you're a Greco file so you get the full Socratic Socrates was all about getting people together and kind of hashing stuff out and letting the best ideas kind of rise to the top follow the data kind of thing and it's such a beautiful thing I don't believe how it's so lost in our culture and I get it all the time because people are offended when you go you want to say oh what about this, what about that it's like oh you're challenging my beliefs everyone's opinion about a flat earth matters well no, we don't really think that everyone's opinion matters why do we even want to play that game so we're not going to play that game here and what I want to do is kind of pose a couple of questions to you and a lot of them kind of came up last time but because there's so much to what you're doing and you're exploring so many areas that we can't always nail these things to the ground so let me pick out a couple of them and then we'll see how far they go and we'll see if it takes us so right off the bat one of the things that seems to me maybe a bridge too far is the literal idea that you had an original life in a real universe in a real body, whatever that means I think the rest of what you're saying stretches the definition of that original what that original physical reality would be but then the second thing I'd point you to is the reincarnation science, you know Jim Tucker, Ian Stevenson before that and in particular the research they did with the birthmarks that correlate to violent deaths that people had in a previous life because again, in case people didn't pick up on this in cheating the ferryman it would be a Groundhog Day situation, you're coming back in the same, you know you're playing the same game over and over again, you're not switching to a different body so Jim Tucker, Ian Stevenson go out and they go, oh no this is how it looks and you go to a different body and by the way if you die a violent death then statistically you're more likely to bring along these birthmarks as a physical manifestation of what you need to resolve this time around, how do you process that science? Well I suppose I don't need to because there's no science, there is no science that supports the idea of the transmigration of souls, there is no science on that, there's no science no, there are stories and there are anecdotes and there are people turning around and saying well we've got the evidence for this but I know no science that can explain how a consciousness can leave the body okay let me finish here, it's quite important, okay if you look at reincarnation and you look in reincarnation as it's described by the various religions around the world you start to have problems, okay the first one is, do you reincarnate in your social group some belief you do, some religious groups do do you reincarnate in different parts of the world do you reincarnate straight away do you reincarnate after 5 years after 10 years they're all different, every one of them is different from the Tlingit Indians in Seattle and in the northwestern states of the United States have a completely different model of what reincarnation is from the Hindus okay so there is no standardization here of reincarnation because there isn't, so we can't pretend that there is, that's the first point the second point is more important is how does a physical body a consciousness leave one body and then come into another does it come in randomly is it chosen, who's doing the choosing who decides which body that person is going to come into now I've read extensively in Stevenson work it's very very good, he's very very good but things that he doesn't point out is pecuniary advantage in India the vast majority of cases of reincarnation are normally individuals from a lower caste who are claiming that a previous life was a higher caste you very rarely if ever get somebody from an upper caste claiming to be from a lower caste and I find that significant so that's that point let's go back then to the argument of scars well A I don't understand the process of why because you get scarred in one life and you leave one physical body behind and another body is recreated randomly from the DNA of somebody else how that scar transfers from one to the other that makes no sense to me, I don't know what the process is there but more importantly if we have had multiple multiple multiple lives over thousands of years we'd be covered in scars all of us would be covered in scars why aren't we why is there only certain individuals have scars and I'd say that's because it's coincidence or the scar has been noticed by somebody and they know that down the road somebody was killed and what was a similarity between it but the scars aren't the same scars the scars in the same part of the body but statistically that's going to happen anyway we have moles on our bodies you know presumably in my myriad of previous lives that I'd have had I'd have been killed a million dozens of times in different ways where are my scars why do some people have scars and not others more importantly why do some people remember past lives and others don't what is the process why is it some people do and some people don't and indeed why is it even more important that when you do hypnotic regression to people the vast majority of people are regressed to being or believe themselves to be Egyptian princes or or you know Egypt they love being Egypt is Egypt's the big thing isn't it so we've got to look at this really more carefully I work with recession regression hypnotists I work with two or three of them all of them without exception when we've had discussions agree with me what is taking place here is this the Jungian collective unconscious which I call the the uber daemon which is the collective unconscious of all humanity all humanities experiences and under certain circumstances and every Aedalonic consciousness can access that broader consciousness now we know from hypnotism that the kind of people that are hypnotized are the kind of people who want to come across well we know this there's a hypnotic type so that person is going to try and draw up memories to keep the hypnotist happy so in which case they're going to draw up memories that may either be nonsense and a lot of them are nonsense you know even my friends who do this that the vast majority is complete drivel you only ever hear of the cases when they can prove them you never hear the thousands of cases that are nonsense and cannot hold on hold on let me get a chance here because you're kind of playing a lot on the table and I'm going to try and respond and it's going to be hard for people to go back and hear the whole thing so a couple things I mean the first point that I'd make is that I think you're being a little bit unfair to the various ways that we do science science is about observation and it is about collecting human accounts we accept that people experience depression we accept that people experience grief our reporting on that is almost exclusively anecdotal right are you grieving okay let's do this do you feel better are you depressed do you feel better and we have some neurological means of doing that but for the most part it is what we would call anecdotal until we start applying the metrics that we have in the social sciences which at this point are pretty well established I mean people can go in and do good science about how people are self reporting about how they feel so that I guess is point one I'm with you on some of what you're saying you know I just did an interview with another guy you wouldn't like but he's in I like everybody I have no I like debate I'm being facetious because I think you are incredibly incredibly open you know we're having this conversation and I knew it would not be you know any issue to just dive into this this is what it's all about I got a feeling I got a feeling that you do this in your head like 24 7 so I don't worry about it but like I just interviewed again Dr. Gregory Shushan I think is phenomenal Greg's great friend of mine Greg I adore Greg he's been on my show a couple of times a great guy so shared near-death experiences across culture across time and the reason I bring him up in context of this is he's with you on the fact that these things are not going to align up perfectly the way that some people would like them to do light and love it's always Jesus it's always this some other important ways that are the most important that to contradict the kind of mainstream materialist paradigm yes we can make some conclusions about what they are experiencing in the afterlife and that there is an afterlife so the first thing that I point out is once we cross that bridge and say okay there is some data there then we have to recognize the fact that the data doesn't exactly align what you're saying as a matter of fact we do not have any accounts that directly report what you're saying because I think the other thing that what Shushan's work does is it connects us to contemporary near-death experience science done in hospital and there we have a lot more accounts and the accounts we could maybe in some cases fit them back into you know retrofit them back into the Ferryman but I don't think they come that way naturally that would be my take on it we can explore that further but let me because I kind of cut you off but I don't want you to cut me off until I get to this main point that I was going to make about Jim Tucker in the reincarnation science to me that was I guess my main pushback in what you're saying hell yes it's science it is 100% science you as that guy who read sociology understand that the tech that the means that they're going about to collect and organize this from an anthropological sociological standpoint is a well-worn path here's how you interview people here's how you control for this here's how you control for that and as you mentioned you read that research it is rock solid in terms of them following that protocol then in terms of the the scars and stuff like that I mean that really is pretty pretty easy in a lot of respects to say that that becomes more of a straight statistics kind of thing you know what are the what number of people have this kind of birthmark at this kind of age in this kind of group and then what are the chances that someone would experience all these other memories and would be what what number of people are killed by a gunshot wound and you know this and that you can run some stats and they're not going to be like 100% accurate but you can get pretty damn close and they have I think in terms of saying these show some meaningful patterns and then the final point and then I'll shut up but I think again this is kind of you're making a criticism that I think anyone would turn around and make on the ferryman and I don't think it's fair in either case and that's to say that observation is in science only putting forth a concrete causal effect for it is the only way is the only data that matters you know what I mean unless you can tell me how reincarnation works and the mechanics of it and how the soul transfers and this and that then I'm not open to listen to it and what I'd say is everything that you've built on in terms of consciousness would put us outside of that to begin with everything in science has been falsified with mox plank consciousness is fundamental there is no there is no real reality here like we talked about in the last interview like you just talked about in a minute ago so I think we have to be really careful and saying well this is real and this isn't real and realize we're kind of always going to be in this kind of liminal kind of in-between kind of thing okay so you are good enough to let me put a lot on the table I think the reason I take the approach I do is because I want to engage with the skeptics I want to be in a position that the skeptics cannot whip my feet from under me because skeptics very rarely engage with me they run away they don't engage with me because I'm not an easy person to to diss and to make look stupid and idiotic because the science I deal with is based upon absolute as you say it's research and it's science now if I start making statements that you know there's that famous cartoon that really affected me many many years ago you know there's a chalkboard and the scientists and they've got something here and then they've got something there and in the middle they've got a miracle happens to get around some of the issues in science I don't do the god of the gaps I don't do that I try to make sure that if I present something and I present a hypothesis I don't call it a theory it's not a theory it's a hypothesis it may not even be a hypothesis it's possibly speculation but what I do is I say well look this is this bit of information this is this bit of information from this research field in quantum mechanics from this research field in neurology from this research field in cosmology if you take the facts as they stand from the research what conclusions can you come to and that's what I try to do I come from the science and I say well what conclusions can you draw from the fact that people when the brain is stimulated in certain ways by people by external forces when like for instance Wilder Penfield in the 1930s the 1970s exposed the human brain of epileptics and put an electrode on particular points of the temple lobes and when he did that he was able to evoke past life memories these past life memories were three-dimensional and vivid he concluded towards the end of his life that the human brain records every single experience and event from the moment of the birth to the moment of death the question has to be why now on my own podcast I interviewed a few months ago a young lady by the name of Rebecca Sharick Rebecca Sharick has superior autobiographical memory she remembers every single thing in her life she also remembers her dreams she remembers being in the womb but I don't accept these things at face value so what we did was during the interview I didn't tell her I was going to do it I didn't tell my assistant I was going to do this but I know that Rebecca really likes the Harry Potter books now you know there's a number of Harry Potter volumes now Sarah my assistant her daughter reads Harry Potter so Sarah has all the volumes of Harry Potter and I said to Sarah can you pick up at random one of the volumes of Harry Potter's books can you open a page at random and can you pick a paragraph at random and start reading it she started doing this believe it or not Sarah read three words and Rebecca repeated the whole paragraph word by word absolutely word perfect now the question here has to be what is the function of this if the brain is working along certain routes why what's the point of remembering everything in our lives if we can't recall it it's like you've got the mystery you've got a million dollars locked inside locked inside of safe with the key inside it makes no sense unless it fulfills a purpose I have evidence in my books of people who have towards the end of their life they when they're coming down without Simon's they start to recall their past life in detail they start back in time they start to relive earlier parts of their lives as if their brain is functioning them to get back to reliving their life again now that's tangible proof that's not so in other words I'm not turning around saying I believe or I'd like to believe that we live our lives again through memories I have the evidence for it now there's can I just finish can I just finish it on the final point the definition of science there's a science of social sciences and a social scientist I can say this the social science we deal with statistics we deal with norms we deal with means we deal with you know what is the statistical chance of this happening in a particular way that's that's scientific to an extent but if you're going to convince a physicist or you're going to convince a biologist of your point of view there's no point in turning around and saying that 90% of the population claim they've had past lives that's anecdote and they will just throw back at you the plural of anecdote is not proof and that's what I don't do what I do is I try to say well let's fight them at their own battle let's take their science and use their science and put it back at them with a model that they cannot dispute do I deny out of the body experiences no I don't do I deny past lives no I don't do I deny you know the near-death experience and the typologies of the near-death experience no I don't none of these things I deny because there's too many reports of them clearly and self-evidently right well I didn't hold on I didn't say that you denied any of it I said and this is the part where I kind of think I do have to kind of hone in on this I mean don't you think just in the story that you just told you get to a point where you're making that same leap that everyone else is making in terms of interpreting what's the data that you have in a particular way and you're finding it compatible with your theory and I'm saying you know I don't but it's not like you're not doing the same thing that everyone else is doing and I think it's valid to do that I disagree I disagree if somebody is saying reincarnation they're not using any science they're not using Tony Tony that's not I just think let's let's put it in this way in the court of public opinion I don't think most people would agree with you if you look at Jim Tucker and you look at where's the science where's the science in what science is Jim Tucker applying well first of all first of all okay physics this is where you're this is where I think you're you're kind of not being totally fair because physics wouldn't apply to your story of Rebecca and her recalling Harry Potter yes it does because no it's your no no it would be your it would be your interpretation I'm interpreting that Rebecca remembered everything I'm interpreting that's interpretation okay well here's the point then again I think I don't want to get into a semantic battle but I interpretation you're suggesting that I'll show you by I will show you by example so you take Jim Tucker Jim Tucker University of Virginia Perceptual Sciences picks up Ian Stevens work they also do a lot of near-death experience science there published in a lot of peer-reviewed journals highly regarded university not a slouchy scientist so he's he within the academy is considered doing good science and again he's not a meat puppet materialist skeptic he's not any of that if you look at the cases that he brings forward that gain a lot of traction with people like me again because he's a careful scientist and he does one of his cases one of his cases the Leninger case is that Jim Tucker yes yeah Jim Leninger case do you know the work that some Michael Lee Suddeth has written on that well I don't you should when you should because he destroys it I I don't think it also destroys it I don't I don't think he does because the case you don't okay why how doesn't how does how does Lee sort of not destroy the Leninger case well first of all so here I am speaking when I say like I just told you I don't know his work but I know a lot of cranky people that try and trash people like Jim Tucker who seem from my experience to be carefully doing work and following their critics to the full extent that if I had to place my bet here without knowing the cranky guy who kind of pushed against it I would bet why is he cranky let me finish hold on Tony Tony Tony Tony I am happy to I'm happy to follow up once I know the guys once I go know the guys what would you use the term cranky you said he was cranky in my experience yeah you can put it in cranky probably I'd say high probability of crazy you need to read it and you need to I do I do I do I do need to read it I wouldn't call somebody cranky if I've not read their work you're kind of trying to make like points of like argumentative points rather than let me use the term cranky over somebody who is a professor of philosophy at another university philosophy that's a Lenninger case and it is full of holes well I will I should have looked up this I tell you what you know and he hasn't look look why don't why don't you what's his name again Lee Suddeth Michael Lee Suddeth how do you spell that S U D D I H let's get him on skeptical get I think I just suggested that so I don't know I need to is an appropriate response to that and we can do we do a full blown kind of thing because if need be I can talk to Jim Tucker either that would be really interesting if you've got Jim Tucker and Mike on together because they talk to each other regularly they know each other very very well so Jim Tucker has raved wave the white flag and said I'm sorry that my case is wrong Suddeth is right from my readings of it he's not actually run away but he's not actually contested it I need to check with Mike about that Mike has written an academic paper on it I don't think Jim Tucker has backed off of that would that make any difference since you seem to have some respect for Tucker would it make any difference I have respect for both of them I have respect for both of them I think both of them my concern is that when you never did you never did let me finish because I'm sorry when I want to make my apology sorry here's the point I want to make is that and I don't think you're being fair in this regard is that you're countering that this isn't evidence right and whether you know your guy Suddeth has kind of shattered the evidence or not we're now in the same we're talking about the same thing now we're talking about specific instances that happened in some physical reality like the case that I was going to talk about is Ryan in the Hollywood case you know where he was a former film star in Hollywood in the previous life and they go back and they trace this and Jim Tucker says there's 52 points of congruence that I found it's like whether you agree with his conclusions or whether you agree point by point with what he's saying matches up we now have a science if you will that people acknowledge is a valid way to look at the statistical probability that this kid would have knowledge of these past events so in that way I think that there's a direct parallel to what you're doing both are have scientific merit to some degree and then it's just a matter of hammering out which one's better whether all the facts line up whether you know this guy or that guy has crushed this or that but it seems to me like you kind of dismiss this out of hand it's really the same it's really the same thing just set a different way in terms of how you would go about how you would go about quote-unquote proving it and it's not about this isn't about physics and your thing isn't about physics Jim's Tucker's belief that Ryan is has this ability to recall things from the past isn't he doesn't need to apply an explanation regarding the mechanics of how he does it in order to offer us a good observation about something that's happening your observation is profoundly important in the social sciences it's extremely important but you then have to go back to say well what is then the mechanism that's at work and again I would suggest that the mechanism at work here could just as easily be collective unconscious memory you know as I said earlier on this young lad could be focusing in on the information field I know that the new ages call it the akashic field I'd call it the zero point field whereby you can pick up information from other people we don't know that I mean well I tend to agree with that but we don't know that on some kind of physics base we don't have a mechanism for a description of what it would be like to have an akashic field how information would flow from we don't have any of that so that's where I'm saying you're a no we don't we are in the same ballpark as everyone else I'm not I'm not that's the difference there's been recent research shown to prove that for instance information has mass okay it's also been that also the latest research in terms of cosmology in the relationship of the holographic universe is incredibly well researched science using known science to explain how the holographic principle could work there's a guy called Lee Horgan at the perimeter institutes in Canada who's doing work on trying to work out the pixelation of the program this is science there was a front page of Scientific American a few years ago is reality a hologram there's actually a science called the holographic principle but they haven't I'll give you an example of science when we talk about science what we're really talking about I think in the way that most people think about it is not scientific theory we're talking about engineering so that's when we talk about entanglement okay show me the quantum modem and now you got my attention I'm not a big fan of Dr. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona and I shouldn't say that I'm a huge fan of Dr. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona I think his project with the soul phone I wish him the best of luck and I certainly hope it works out but I don't release to me it seems a little bit the way that they're going about that but I don't want to bury I don't want to bury the lead the point is they are trying to engineer this in a way that would answer these questions and if you will that to me would offer some kind of proof of what they're talking about in terms of after death communication it would be but you would still be in the same boat Tony I don't know you could then take their data and interpret it as Damon, Ferryman Higher Self, whatever and another guy could interpret it as demonic, Akashic record with a spirit in between and no one would have a better standing on that than the other one it all becomes speculative at a point so we're trying to merge it but I mean there's always going to be these huge gaps where we need constructive theories that don't necessarily line up with each other I'll shut up but take Julie Beichel who I've always been a big fan of and been on this show in after death communication she's got a PhD in pharmacology she knows how to do that shit she's not making mistakes in her research and she's validating after death communication and that after death communication does not conform with the Ferryman theory so what do you do with that you just step over it and say that isn't science and we figure out you know whether a drug is good to use I think one of the things you're missing here and it's a very important point cheating the Ferryman works in a brain that hasn't died there might be after death there could be after death within you know the idea isn't this people misunderstand this they think that and it's because my publishers use the term life after death and everything and it's always quite irritated me over this next placing the final seconds of your life and then in micro seconds of your life okay so at the end of all of that just like Connors in Groundhog Day moves on to the next day I'd argue that within cheating the Ferryman you eventually move on and you move on to wherever you move on to because in terms of time it's all happened in a constricted part of time at the end of life now again using parallels and I know that it's not fair of me to use the parallel here but because it's a religious parallel but you read up the Bardo state in Tibetan what takes place there is that it's the kind of transitory point between moving on to your next incarnation as it were because for instance I don't understand if there's after life communication with dead people how does that squawk reincarnation if everybody's reincarnated they're re-creantated as different people it doesn't have to square right that's what we're saying well they're both the same so both happen reincarnation and people going to heaven and communicating through mediums happens so look as we head around the curve and head towards towards home here I want to say like I want to point out one thing that you just mentioned that is like back to the beginning of back what I love about your work I was like the point you just made is something that really sent me in a whole different direction paradigm change I was like drop the mic this guy is really it's great here's the point that you just made is that if you accept there is uh non-space non-time non-locality outside of space outside of time then you have to be open to the possibility that everything can happen in a nanosecond everything that you're talking about and this is you this is Tony Peake talking about an explanation for near-death experience an explanation I don't quite agree with in 100% but I think it's undeniable where you've taken us there and where you've kind of propelled us into just like your work in understanding extended consciousness realm so I just want to bring it back because I want to know where else you're going and what else you're doing and I want to wrap this and we'll have to have another one but I want people to know how I balance these two things and saying hey I don't agree with this guy on everything but this guy is so cutting edge he's got so many great ideas and is synthesizing so much great research that we really really have to listen to him do you know what do you know what I like about you you're the only person that interviews me that challenges me properly that really makes me think puts me on the spot and this is what I do with my friends and this is what you normally do when you're down the pub arguing ideas and this is what I love about your work and this is what I love about what you do you really know your stuff and it's great because great things happen when minds like you and I and various other people around the subject we come round and we appreciate each other's position and we discuss each other's position it's profoundly important and indeed that's the root where I'm going to be going with my work now I feel that I've probably completed my book cycle I don't think I've got anything really more to say I'm thinking probably writing maybe some more biographies possibly I'm also debating with a friend of mine who's got a PhD in William Shakespeare of doing a book on Shakespeare and the occult maybe and also I'm working with a couple of associates where we're working on maybe a recreation of the Philip experiment took place in Toronto in 1970 Wow that would be that's scary isn't it does that pushing with the aggregorials again and also I'm working very closely with the associate of mine again somebody you need to get on your show and Samantha Lee Treasurer is doing some fascinating work with her new book which will be out next year on non-standard ghosts and I'm really interested in this idea of ghosts that are like cartoon ghosts or physical objects that you see as ghosts and also I'm also keen on actually taking the idea of the daemon further and trying to do some experiments really to really get into the idea of how we can develop it as well so a lot of exciting things going on we ought to we ought to do some of these shows together we do what a great idea Alex that would be brilliant because it's kind of point to counterpoint and it works you know the way the old Socratic dialogues you know it's thesis antithesis synthesis exactly that's what we're doing that's what we were just doing there and I think I foam in dialogue exactly and I think I'm hoping that you know if we hash it out we can kind of model for people that it isn't the debate as much as it is you know sharing of information that pulls something down so that it can be replaced by something else not to just you know do that so yeah we should see we could even we could even think of some ways to to reinforce that that is the principle of it so we should do that I'd love to do it I absolutely love that idea we should absolutely do it on skeptico and you know what it makes me think of and I wanted to touch on this before we before I let you go the last time we talked this is such a cool thing I don't know if you're able to do it because the whole pandemic thing happened but you're going to do the plateaus cave thing in Greece did that ever that ever come about still working on it we're still planning it I've just come back from Athens I was in Athens a few weeks ago and we're still very keen to do it yeah we feel we can do something extraordinary there and maybe do it as a film as well you know because we're thinking using drones and everything else as well so yeah we really really want to do that and we need to convince the Greek government that it's something we want to do but my Greek publisher there's now I've now got two books out in Greek he's very keen on trying to help us out with this as well so if anybody's interested or anything else please let us know because this this is going to be really cool really really cool I'm interested I might come over fix it with it to the land of your fathers you know why not why not absolutely Alex it's always wonderful to talk to you I really really really buzz when we finish showing our chats I just really buzz and I go oh I should have said that or I should have said that and that's the mark of a good dynamic absolutely Tony you're fantastic we will do it again we will we will create the new egregals we'll create okay my friend you take okay okay Alex take a okay bye thanks again to Anthony peak for joining me today on skeptico by the way if you're wondering and I hope you are wondering what's the point if you're not wondering yeah Sutteth is just the cranky skeptic and Jim Tucker destroys him in his response anyways that'll be something we can if you like hash out in the forum question who do you think is right Tucker versus Sutteth and then why is Anthony Tony peak taking sides with Sutteth there's no way that Sutteth would ever support his ferryman theory there's just no way because he's a cranky skeptic so why is he championing the guy it's it's the I was going to answer my own question but I won't come to the forum answer it for me until next time take care bye for now


Hi, yw Ynw'r Ardys Halffol, mae hwn yn ymweld i'r 3rdd yng nghymru ar y sgolol Southampton, ac mae'n ein sgolol yng Nghymru 2017 yw'r Institute deallu Ffwrdd Sfasurau. Felly, rwy'n gweithio i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud. Felly, ymweld i'r ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud. Felly, in my research I model explosions in space. Or, if you want a more technical title, it's the effects of including general relativity in models of type I X-ray bursts in neutron star oceans, that basically explosions in space. So, a bit more detailed. So, I'm looking at modelling these explosions which happen on neutron stars. If you look at the top left here, that's kind of an artist impression of a neutron star. Dyma'r rhaid â bod ystod oes yr oedol o'r ystyried yn ymgyrch yn fyrdd amser. Felly y gallwch ar 10 km o raddau, ac yn ymgyrch ar yr oedol y penderfyniadau. Felly mae'r penderfyniadau yw'r gwaith yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Felly mae'r penderfyniadau yn perthyni ar y penderfyniadau. Mae yna ymgyrch ar ddim yn ymgyrch yn y penderfyniadau, ac mae'n gwybod yma'r cyfrifyniadau o'r ymgyrch ac mae'n gyd-ynghyrch yn gyfathio'r cyfrifyniadau Until eventually you get an explosion. And these explosions, they actually happen every few hours. And we have about 50 known sources of these. So, we have lots and lots of observations, unlike the most astrophysical phenomena. But unfortunately neutron stars are really... We don't really know much about them. So, it's really hard to try and understand what is causing these explosions and all the different phenomena we see within these explosions. I'm trying to look at including general relativity in our models to try and understand them further. So I said I started my PhD about three years ago. I did a physics undergraduate degree so in this I actually learned about experiments and stuff. I kind of found it a bit crazy when I started my PhD and started reading all these different papers about really exciting codes. I looked them up and I found lots of them aren't open source so I can't find them anywhere to download them and run them myself. They have next to no documentation so there's a really big code in my field and I went on the website and all the instructions for this supercomputer in Germany. I had no idea how to install on my own computer and I had to find a postdoc to sit down next to me and tell me how to get it to install. There's also kind of some questionable approaches to testing so it's very common in my area to have kind of standard results and people will show that their codes can replicate these standard results but there's no real unit testing or integration tests or anything like that. And personally I don't think this is very good science. I mean it kind of goes against the scientific methods so yeah. I got a bit fed up with this. Fortunately my supervisor, he's quite close to these things and he pointed me in the direction of the Software Sustainability Institute. So this is an institute that was set up to really promote better research software so I'm kind of helping to spread their message today hopefully. Okay so here's an overview of what I'm going to talk about for the rest of my talk. So first I'm going to talk about what is software sustainability and why you should care about it. And I'm going to go over why scientific software is different from other types of software. And then I'm going to present a kind of suggested scientific software development workflow. So kind of a load of different steps you can take to really make sure that your code is sustainable. Okay so what is scientific software sustainability? So I was speaking to one of my colleagues about this. I don't do any coding and he was like oh is this just like printing your code on recycled paper. Software sustainability to me is will your code still work in 5, 10, 20 years time? So if you publish a paper with results from a code chances are people are going to look up your paper in a few years time and they're going to want to try and run your code and get your results again. So kind of there's two main issues here like can you still find your code? So if you post something on the internet websites are often rearranged so you need to really make sure that someone's still going to be able to click on a link or type a URL into the browser and they'll still be able to find your code. There's also the issue of can they still run your code? So if you write your code and it depends on a library will the library still be there in 10 years time? And kind of things like this. And I feel like if someone can't find your code or run it in 10 years time then that harms scientific progress because people are going to have to kind of, yeah people are not going to be able to base their research on previous results they're going to have to kind of recreate the wheel every time. And I don't think this is very good. Okay so what makes scientific software different? So with lots of software it's made to solve a problem where you know what the solution is going to be. You kind of have a good idea of what you're trying to create when you write your code. But with scientific software you don't necessarily know what the result is. You're probably writing the software because you can't solve this problem analytically. You can't do it using normal mathematical techniques. There are scientific codes that are often developed over long periods of time. So there's a big code in my field again, I'll mention it. And it's been developed since the early 2000s. There's codes which go back to the 70s. Hence why there's still a lot of Fortran 77 floating around. And they can involve a lot of collaborations so it could be with hundreds of people across the world. And finally they're built by scientists not software engineers. So lots of people writing research software don't have any formal coding trainings. These are people who are self-taught so they're kind of maybe are not aware of proper coding practices. And I think this is one of the main reasons why you get kind of issues with software sustainability in science. Okay, so the scientific method. This is something that is used in the experimental science community. And it's the principle that you don't trust a result unless there is full testing of the apparatus that you've used in the experiment. And there's full documentation of the method that you have used in your experiment. And you do this to show that your results are accurate, they're reproducible and they're reliable. If someone is reading your paper you've done everything you can possibly do to convince them that they can trust the results that you have gained are accurate and probably true. In computational science you're essentially doing experiments but the computer is your apparatus. So to me I think that it means you should still follow the scientific method. And we really shouldn't be trusting codes unless they've been properly tested and properly documented. So this is a nice picture of an experimental in experimental sciences. So this is quite a well laid out lab. I expect she's probably following proper scientific principles to make sure that her experiment is as reproducible and reliable as possible. If we go to something that's more common in computational science from this webcomic from PhD comics. We've got like a million of different versions of a file. It's probably very disorganised. I doubt this person is using version control. So yeah, this is not great. Okay, so now I'm going to try and suggest a developer workflow that you can use when building research software to try and make it as easy as possible to implement some good software sustainability practices. So fortunately there are lots of tools out there that will help us automate things to really make it as easy as possible for us to do this stuff. Okay, so first version control. I expect almost everyone, if not everyone here, uses version control. But from a scientist's perspective I like to think of this as kind of a computational science version of a lab book. Because it kind of is a way to keep a log of all changes to your code. So kind of all the things you've tried out, maybe if they worked, maybe if they didn't work. So this is what lab books used to look like. Nice picture from Wikipedia I found here. And I think this is one of my repos. So this is kind of what I think lab books look like now. If we look at kind of commits, these are maybe not the best commit messages, but they kind of at least show different things. So they kind of show the changes of the code and how it's developed over time. Okay. So another thing about version control is it really aids collaboration. So you're not going to overwrite your collaborators changes. And it helps you hack without fear. So you can develop everything on a branch and there's no danger that you're going to irreversibly break everything. Which I definitely did many times before I was implementing proper version control practices. Okay, so testing. I've said that we shouldn't be trusting our results unless we've got proper testing. So we need to show that our apparatus and our method have really been demonstrated to work properly. And we need to make sure that we understand any limitations of our experiments. So in experimental science, we'll always measure the systematic errors and random errors and all these sorts of things. And we'll try and understand all the possible errors that could occur in an experiment. In computational science, kind of the equivalent of this is understanding where we could get numerical errors due to floating point computations. Or because we're using a low order algorithm in our simulations. So, well, this is a bit cut off here. But I expect most of you have probably heard about the LIGA experiment. So this was the gravitational wave detection experiment that you might have heard about last year. And when they published the results from this experiment, they published a whole series of papers giving really detailed information about this discovery. And one of the papers that they published was characterisation of transient noise and advanced LIGO relevant gravitational wave signal GW 151014. But in this paper, they really go through and they characterise all the possible sources of noise. So all the possible limitations there were in their experiment. And it's so careful. It's like there are so many pages in this and they have lovely plots really detailing all the possible sources of noise and error in our experiment. And this is just one out of like 10 papers they have on this. So we really should be doing something similar in computational science to understand our errors like that. So unfortunately, scientific codes can be quite hard to test because they're often very complex. We're solving some really difficult equations and they're investigating unknowns. We don't really have a benchmark quite often to test them against because we don't know what the solution looks like. But this does not mean that we can really excuse ourselves and give up and be like, ah, it's hard, can't test it. Okay, so there's a series of steps that we can go through to kind of do our testing. So first thing, we can break our code down into unit tests. So you can't really trust that your entire code works unless you know the individual parts work. It also makes testing your complex codes a lot more manageable. When you're building these tests, it's really important that you cover your entire parameter space and you also check that your code breaks when it does. So have a little example here. So I've got a very simple function here. So I'm just taking in some inputs and I'm squaring them. And then I'm using unit tests just to build a simple set of tests here. So my first test is just a very simple one. So this is maybe a common normal value that we all get when we pass, when we use this function. I've then got an edge case. So I put up a really large number in there to check that my code is still working. And then I'm checking that it breaks when it does. So if I pass in a string that it breaks properly. So if I run this, it tells me, ah, I've got an error. So what was my error? So if we look here, we can see on this line, the square of minus 2 is not 25. So change that, run it again. It works. Hooray. I can do maths. OK. So, sorry. If we go back. OK. So next step. So once you've checked the individual parts work, you then need to check that they all work together. So an example I like to think of is if someone had got all the parts for a car and they assured you that they tested them properly, they all work individually. And then they hand them to you and ask you to build a car. I expect most people in this room have never built a car from scratch. So if they try to put all the pieces together, the car is probably not going to work properly. So just because you've got unit tests does not mean that your code will actually work when all these parts are interacting together. Unfortunately, testing is a lot more difficult here because your code is a lot more complex. But this is a really important step. And then finally, you need to monitor the development of your code with regression tests. So regression tests are where you get individual versions of your code and you compare the results against each other. So ideally, the performance of your code should always be improving of time or at least not getting worse. If it is getting worse, then this is a really good indication that a bug has developed. This is a good way to catch bugs where they don't completely break your code but they kind of introduce some more subtle errors. A good bonus here is if you have lots of people using your code while you're developing it, then this can help you enforce backwards compatibility for your users, which is always a nice plus. Okay, so some science-specific issues with testing. So I said that you can have unknown behaviours. You don't know what your results are going to look like. So a good thing that we can do here, again with inspiration from experimental science, is we can use controls. So a control is where you put in really simple input data into your code and you check that it's still producing the correct solution. So if you think a really simple example that we can do is if we have a balance of scales and you want to check that your scales read zero when you have nothing put on them. If they don't read zero, then you have some kind of systematic error. So you have kind of some offset in your scales. So we can do this with code as well. So I quite often build simulations where systems evolve with time and there's quite often a solution where the systems just stay static and nothing should change. And if I put in the input data and it does start changing, then that's a really good indication I've got some errors there. So for lots of simulations in particular, this is something that we can do. Another big problem that we can get in science codes is there can be some randomness. So we could be processing some data with some random noise in it. We could be looking at something where it's going to be a chaotic system. So stuff that we can do here is we can try and isolate the random parts. So we can use unit tests to check all the other parts work and then isolate and check the random parts individually. Also we can do things kind of by looking back at the equations we're solving themselves. We can use this to test averages and we can check the limits and in particular in physics we can check conservation of physical quantities. So another example for this. Okay, so here I'm just going to define an array of some random numbers and I'm then going to apply a function to it. So I'm squaring it and then multiplying it by the sign. So if we plot that, then we can see we get some random stuff out. If I run it again, it changes. So we've got some random data. So if we look at this function, we can put some constraints on what we think the answer is. The answer is going to change every time. So we can't check that all the numbers in this array are equal to another array. But we can check. So we know that the input is between zero and one. So we can check that the output is between zero and sign of one. We can also check that the mean value here is equal to around 0.223. So if we run this, then hooray, it works. So I've just tested that we've got the limits we expect and I've checked that the average is what we expect. So that's the way we can deal with randomness, well, a way that we can deal with randomness in our code. So for simulations, what we often do is we take something that's continuous and we discretise it. So we solve it instead of solving it at infinitesimally small points, we solve it on a grid. But this leads to errors in our solution. But it means if you make the grid finer and finer, you should be getting a more and more accurate solution. And the accuracy of this solution should improve the order of the algorithm that you've used to solve those equations. And if it's not, then it's a good indication that your algorithm has not been implemented correctly. So if we look at another example of this, so I'm going to use something called the Trapezium Rule to solve this integral. So you might remember from secondary school maths, Trapezium Rule is where you divide up the area under an integral into a load of Trapeziums and then you sum their areas together. So I'm going to solve this integral here on an array of different resolutions. So I'm just going to iterate over that, and then I'm going to calculate the error compared to my known solution. So I'll run that. And then by then, here I'm now going to plot the errors and see what they look like. So here, so the errors are the blue points here. And what I've plotted in this red line here is I've plotted the resolution squared. So I know that the Trapezium Rule is an algorithm which is order H squared accurate. So because my errors have the same slope as H squared, this is a really good indication that my algorithm has been implemented correctly. So yes, we can also have issues with numerical error. So because we're doing floating point computations, because we're trying to approximate some exact maths using non-exact maths, it's likely that we'll get errors building up. And so if we use simple equalities in our testing, then it's probably not going to work very well. So we can do things here by kind of doing approximate equalities. So functions like non-ply is close and non-ply all close for arrays.  And we can do this by using tools such as TraverseCI and CircleCI. And there are many others out there. These are just a couple that I quite like for Python. And so these continuous integration tools will regularly run your tests for you and they'll report back your results, which is really great. So here's a little example for my code. So just very simply, I wrote a little script telling it what I wanted to run. I said I wanted to run these Python versions. And then it's run on a virtual machine for me. And it's told me right at the very end that all my tests passed. So really great. I can set up these tests and pretty much forget about them. And every time I push changes to GitHub, these will be executed. So that's really great. So continuous integration is really good because we can find out when bugs occur much sooner. And therefore we can fix them when they occur rather than waiting months down the line when the bugs are likely to be much more entrenched in our code. So this is important because, oh yeah, so there's a danger here. So I said we can pretty much set up the continuous integration and then forget about it. But if you're developing your code, you're probably going to add new functionality to your code all the time. And outdated tests are pretty much as useless as no tests because they're telling you whether your code is correct compared to an old benchmark. And so this is not great. And yeah, so if your test only covered 20% of your code, there is no guarantee the other 80% is going to work. And so a tool that we can use to really check that we are testing all of our code and not just a small fraction of it is code coverage tools. So one that I quite like is CodeCov.io. So here is what CodeCov.io looks like for my code here. So if we look into one of my functions, we can see it highlights all the lines that have been executed during the tests. And it shows me here that there's a little branch in my tri-except block here, which has not been executed in testing. So this is important because this exception was probably written for an edge case. And edge cases tend to be where your code breaks most often. So this is a really good way for me to find out what tests I should write and how I should make sure that all of my code is being tested properly. OK. OK. So documentation. So we need to make sure that someone else in our field can set up our code and run it without us having to physically sit down next to them and explain it for them. Because this is a massive barrier if you have new people entering the field. Because it means they're not going to be able to run, like, get started. And it's from experience, I can say, it's like quite alienating. So we really need to make sure we include comprehensive installation instructions. Not just instructions for a couple of supercomputer systems, but instructions that will run on standard Linux systems. So anyone with the right hardware can run your code. We need to make sure... So the code itself should be documented. So we use sensible function names, variable names, comments. So we have self-documenting code. So this means that if you've got a really complex code, people can look at the code itself and understand without having to read through pages and pages of documentation. A really good thing in science codes is having user guides with examples which demonstrate usage. So something that I found for my Python codes that's really great for this is having Jupyter notebooks. So something that I did when I wrote my code I've been using as a demonstration here. We wrote Jupyter notebooks which kind of explain what the physics behind the code is. And then we then run the code and we show what results should look like from our code. And then you can then actually use these in read-the-docs documentations. You can use MB Sphinx to convert this into Markdown and then you can then render it in read-the-docs. And so yeah, this is a really great way to kind of build up user guides with example cases for your users. Okay. So finally, distribution. So I said that at the beginning you might remember that we need to make sure that our code is still, we can still find our code in 5, 10, 20 years time. So first step to making your code findable is making it open source in the first place. So there's a little caveat here. I understand if you're working in a sensitive environment, so maybe if you're working in the medicine industry or something like that, then you might have proprietary information that you can't share.  So it doesn't really make much sense to me for this code not to be open source. You then need to make sure that it will always be able to be found. So having a DOI, so digital object identifier, to provide a permanent link to your code which won't disappear with time. We also need to make sure that we can reproduce the runtime environment for our code. So this is some stuff like making sure that when people run your code they have the right libraries installed and the right versions of the library. So if your code only runs in 2.7 you need to make sure that people are aware of that. So an easy way that we can do this for our users is by packaging our code. So packaging it in things like docker containers, producing condor environments and things like this. Basically your installation should be as painless as possible. So it shouldn't be that people have to write lines and lines in the command line. They should just be able to write make and everything builds. And also it's really great to try and limit reliance on open source libraries and material because this again creates a barrier for your users. So it's not really very good practice. And also you have no idea that this non-open source material is still going to be there in five years' time. So to conclude we need to make sure that our software is future proof because if it's not future proof then this is going to harm scientific progress. We need to apply the scientific method to software development and computational science is the science so we should really treat it like it is. Codes should only be entrusted if they've been demonstrated to be reproducible so anyone in your field can go online download your code, install it run it themselves and reproduce your results. They need to test it to prove to you that any new results they get are actually to be trusted and you should document your code so that people will actually understand what it's doing and can potentially hack on it and develop it themselves. So if anything I've said here today is interesting to you then I really recommend checking out the software sustainability institute website because they have loads of guides up there which really cover all of this stuff in a lot more detail. So thank you for listening. Thank you Alice. So we have time for a few questions if they are interested in asking something. Thank you for the talk. It was very interesting. I'm worried how do you convince people to adopt this especially older generations because for example my advisor doesn't care of sharing the code or doesn't even care of reading my github logs so how have you been you say you were lucky that your advisor somehow pushed you here but how has been your experience with other people? Yeah that is like a really challenging thing so I think just nagging them and really just trying to put pressure on them I mean it's very hard definitely as a less senior person to try and encourage the more senior people that these practices are good but putting pressure maybe on things like journals to make sure they have higher standards so that they only accept codes that maybe open source which have proper testing to actually show that the codes are working properly but I think awareness as well because I think a lot of these people because they're self taught and they've always done it this way they're just not aware that such things are really bad practice but yeah it's definitely challenging to convince maybe more senior people that they should change their ways. Any other questions? Hi, thank you for the talk. How much overhead do you think it will add to your project this approach? I mean in terms of time? I mean for me I feel like actually doing this sort of thing saves me time because by having tests I can catch the bugs early on and so I mean in my master's project for example I hadn't heard a version control or anything like this and I was working on a code and for months and months it didn't work and two weeks before I had to hand in my thesis I found that I had hard coded a single value when testing and if I had some kind of testing or version control in there I would have caught that and I would have saved so many months so I think there's an initial outlay of time definitely but I feel in the long run this will save time. What would be your advice for sharing code or things like that on articles on research articles? For research articles when you write a paper how would you share code or would you put a link to the project or share snippets or what would be your advice? Definitely having a DOI to make sure that your codes it will always be able to be found in the future. I think that's definitely because having a GitHub repository is great but we shouldn't really rely on the fact that GitHub is still going to be there in 20 years time. One last question. Congratulations very good presentation and I would like to know about sometimes when I read the same papers the computer scientist don't share the code and the data but the paper using a good previous for example but it's not possible to reproduce the code and the paper and have any place to put the data and the authority and the source code is in GitHub but about the data do you know anything about this? Sorry what was the question? Do you know where it's possible to put the data and the results about the paper because sometimes don't read in the paper and it's not possible to reproduce the research on the paper for example? Of the top of my head I can't remember I'm afraid I don't really produce vast quantities of data I know there are definitely I can definitely look it up if you ask me and there are definitely websites out there for scientists to dump their data on and make it open source I know that ACM is starting an effort to try to reproduce the code for the papers so you can get a batch if you submit the code in a working style but it's not generally used yet so hopefully that will I think it's definitely starting to improve so thank you again Alice