Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Brian Keating,
00:00:02 experimental physicist at USCSD
00:00:05 and author of Losing the Nobel Prize
00:00:07 and Into the Impossible.
00:00:10 Plus, he’s a host of the amazing podcast of the same name
00:00:13 called Into the Impossible.
00:00:16 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:00:18 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:00:21 in the description.
00:00:22 And now, here’s my conversation with Brian Keating.
00:00:27 As an experimental physicist,
00:00:29 what do you think is the most amazing
00:00:31 or maybe the coolest measurement device
00:00:34 you’ve ever worked with or humans have ever built?
00:00:37 Maybe for now, let’s exclude the background imaging
00:00:41 of cosmic extragalactic polarization instruments.
00:00:45 Yeah, I’m slightly biased
00:00:46 towards that particular instrument.
00:00:48 Talk about that in a little bit.
00:00:49 But certainly the telescope, to me,
00:00:51 is a lever that has literally moved the Earth
00:00:55 throughout history.
00:00:56 So the OG telescope?
00:00:58 The OG telescope, yeah.
00:00:59 The one invented not by Galileo, as most people think,
00:01:02 but by this guy Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands.
00:01:05 And it was kind of interesting
00:01:07 because in the 1600s, 14, 1500, 1600s,
00:01:12 there was the beginning of movable type.
00:01:14 And so people, for the first time in history,
00:01:17 had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight.
00:01:21 So looking at a printed word now,
00:01:22 we just take it for granted, 12 point font, whatever,
00:01:24 and that’s what the eye charts are based on.
00:01:26 They’re just fixed height.
00:01:27 But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight
00:01:30 if you didn’t have perfect vision.
00:01:32 And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision
00:01:35 or not until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type.
00:01:39 And at that time, people realized,
00:01:40 hey, wait, I can’t read this.
00:01:41 My priest or my friend over here, he can read it,
00:01:43 she can read it.
00:01:44 I can’t read it.
00:01:45 What’s going on?
00:01:46 And that’s when these people in Venice and in the Netherlands
00:01:50 saw that they could take this kind of glass material
00:01:53 and hold it up and maybe put another piece
00:01:55 of glass material and it would make it clearer.
00:01:57 And what was so interesting is that nobody thought
00:01:59 to take that exact same device, two lenses,
00:02:02 and go like, hmm, let me go like this
00:02:04 and look at that bright thing in the sky over there,
00:02:07 until Galileo.
00:02:08 So Galileo didn’t invent it,
00:02:10 but he did something kind of amazing.
00:02:12 He improved on it by a factor of 10.
00:02:14 So he 10X’d it, which is almost as good
00:02:17 as going from zero to one, as going from one to 10.
00:02:20 And when he did that, he really transformed
00:02:24 both how we look at the universe and think about it,
00:02:28 but also who we are as a species,
00:02:30 because we’re using tools not to get food faster
00:02:34 or to preserve our legacy for future generations,
00:02:39 but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.
00:02:43 Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans
00:02:46 weren’t able to see the stars,
00:02:47 maybe there was some kind of makeup of the atmosphere,
00:02:52 which for the early humans made it impossible
00:02:54 to see the stars, that we would never develop
00:02:56 human civilization, or at least raising the question
00:02:59 of how important is it to look up to the sky
00:03:02 and wonder what’s out there, as opposed to,
00:03:05 maybe this is an over romanticized notion,
00:03:07 but like looking at the ground,
00:03:09 it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival,
00:03:12 not being eaten by a bear slash lion.
00:03:15 If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder
00:03:17 what is my place in the universe?
00:03:18 You think that’s modern humans romanticizing?
00:03:21 It’s a little romantic, because they also took the same.
00:03:25 They took the same two lenses and they looked inward.
00:03:28 They looked at bacteria, they looked at hairs,
00:03:30 and in other words, they made the microscope,
00:03:32 and we’re still doing that.
00:03:33 And so to have a telescope, it serves a dual purpose.
00:03:37 It’s not only a way of looking out, it’s looking in,
00:03:41 but it’s also looking back in time.
00:03:43 In other words, you didn’t see a microscope,
00:03:44 you don’t think, oh, I’m seeing this thing
00:03:46 as it was one nanosecond ago,
00:03:47 light travels one foot per nanosecond.
00:03:49 I’m seeing it, no, you don’t think about it like that.
00:03:51 But when you see something that’s happening on Jupiter,
00:03:54 the moon, Andromeda galaxy, you’re seeing things
00:03:56 back when Lucy was walking around the Serengeti Plains.
00:04:00 And for that, I think that took then the knowledge
00:04:03 of relativity and time travel and so forth.
00:04:06 It took that before we could really say,
00:04:08 oh, we really unlocked some cheat codes in the human brain.
00:04:12 So I think that might be a little too much,
00:04:14 but nevertheless, I mean,
00:04:15 what’s better than having a time machine?
00:04:18 We can look back in time,
00:04:19 we see things as they were, not as they are.
00:04:21 And that allows us to do many things,
00:04:23 including speculate about that.
00:04:24 But one of the coolest things,
00:04:25 I don’t know if you’re familiar with,
00:04:26 so I’m a radio astronomer.
00:04:27 I don’t actually look through telescopes very often,
00:04:30 except on rare occasions when I take one out
00:04:33 to show the kids, but a radio telescope
00:04:37 is even more sort of visceral.
00:04:39 I mean, it’s much less cool because you look at it,
00:04:41 you’re like, all right, it looks cool,
00:04:42 it’s kind of weird shaped thing,
00:04:43 looks like it belongs in sci fi,
00:04:45 it’s gonna blast the Death Star or whatever.
00:04:48 But when you realize that when you point a radio telescope
00:04:52 at a distant object,
00:04:53 if that object fills up what’s called the beam,
00:04:55 which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope,
00:04:59 it’s called its beam.
00:05:00 If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor,
00:05:03 just a simple absorbing piece of material
00:05:05 at the focus of the radio telescope,
00:05:07 that resistor will come to the exact same temperature
00:05:11 as the object that’s looking at, which is pretty amazing.
00:05:13 It means you’re actually remotely measuring,
00:05:16 you’re taking the temperature of Jupiter
00:05:17 or whatever in effect.
00:05:20 And so it’s allowing you to basically teleport
00:05:23 and there’s no other science
00:05:24 that you can really do that, right?
00:05:26 If you’re an archeologist, you can’t,
00:05:27 let me get into my time machine
00:05:29 and go back and see what was Lucy really like,
00:05:32 it’s not possible.
00:05:33 So the same thing happens,
00:05:34 this is where I’ve learned about this
00:05:36 from March of the Penguins,
00:05:37 when the penguins huddled together,
00:05:40 the body temperature arrives to the same place.
00:05:43 So you’re doing this remotely,
00:05:45 the March of the Penguins, but remote.
00:05:46 We do it from Antarctica too,
00:05:48 so there are some penguins around when we do it.
00:05:50 Okay, excellent.
00:05:51 You mentioned time machine,
00:05:53 I think in your book, Losing the Nobel Prize,
00:05:57 you talk about time machines.
00:05:59 So let me ask you the question of,
00:06:03 take us back in time,
00:06:04 what happened at the beginning of our universe?
00:06:07 Ah, okay, usually people preface this
00:06:09 by saying I have a simple question.
00:06:11 So what happened before the universe began, what happened?
00:06:15 Brian Keating teaching me about comedy.
00:06:18 I have a simple question for you, let’s take two.
00:06:20 I have a simple question,
00:06:22 what happened at the beginning of our universe?
00:06:23 There you go.
00:06:24 All right, good.
00:06:25 So when we think about what happened,
00:06:28 it’s more correct, it’s more logical,
00:06:30 it’s more practical to go back in time starting from today.
00:06:34 So if you go back 13.874 billion years from today,
00:06:40 that’s some day, right?
00:06:41 I mean, you could translate into some day, right?
00:06:43 So on that day, something happened.
00:06:45 Earlier than the moment exactly now,
00:06:49 let’s say we’re talking around one o clock.
00:06:52 So at some point during that day,
00:06:54 the universe started to become a fusion reactor.
00:06:57 It started to fuse light elements and isotopes
00:07:00 into heavier elements and isotopes
00:07:01 of those heavier elements.
00:07:03 After that period of time,
00:07:05 going forward back closer to today,
00:07:06 less 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier,
00:07:09 or later rather coming towards us today,
00:07:11 we know more and more about what the universe was like.
00:07:14 And in fact, all the hydrogen,
00:07:16 it’s a very good approximation in the water molecules
00:07:19 in this bottle, almost all of them were produced
00:07:21 during that first 20 minute period.
00:07:23 So I would say, the actual fusion and production
00:07:27 of the lightest elements on the periodic table
00:07:30 occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show,
00:07:33 The Big Bang Theory.
00:07:34 Well done, sir.
00:07:35 You know, most of those light elements besides hydrogen
00:07:39 aren’t really used in your encounter, right?
00:07:41 You don’t encounter helium that often,
00:07:43 unless you go to a lot of birthday parties
00:07:45 or pilot a blimp.
00:07:47 You don’t need lithium, hopefully, you know,
00:07:49 but other than that,
00:07:50 those are the kinds of things
00:07:51 that were produced during that moment.
00:07:52 The question became, how did the heavier things
00:07:54 like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later.
00:07:56 And I brought some samples for us to discuss
00:07:59 and how those came from a very different type of process
00:08:02 called a different type of fusion reactor
00:08:04 and a different type of process explosion as well
00:08:07 called a supernova.
00:08:08 However, if you go back beyond those first three minutes,
00:08:11 we really have to say almost nothing
00:08:13 because we are not capable.
00:08:15 In other words, going backwards
00:08:17 from the first three minutes,
00:08:18 as famous Steven Weinberg titled his book,
00:08:21 we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over.
00:08:25 In other words, we can’t speculate on what happened
00:08:28 three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen
00:08:30 was formed in our universe.
00:08:32 We just don’t know enough about that epoch.
00:08:34 There are many people, most people,
00:08:36 most practicing card carrying cosmologists
00:08:38 believe the universe began in what’s called the singularity.
00:08:41 And we can certainly talk about that.
00:08:44 However, singularity is so far removed
00:08:46 from anything we can ever hope to prove,
00:08:49 hope to confront or hope to observe with evidence.
00:08:51 And really only occurs in two instantiations,
00:08:54 the big bang and the core of a black hole,
00:08:57 neither of which is observable.
00:08:58 And so for that reason,
00:09:00 there are now flourishing alternatives that say,
00:09:02 you can actually for the first time ask the question
00:09:05 that day, Tuesday in the first moments of our universe,
00:09:10 there was a Tuesday a week before that,
00:09:12 24 hours times seven days before that.
00:09:15 That has a perfectly well understood meaning
00:09:19 in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent
00:09:23 of cosmologists working today.
00:09:25 When I was in grad school over 25 years ago,
00:09:28 no one really considered anything besides that big bang
00:09:30 that there was a singularity.
00:09:32 And people would have to say, as I said, we just don’t know.
00:09:36 But they would say some future incarnation
00:09:38 of some experiment will tell us the answer.
00:09:40 But now there are people that are saying
00:09:42 there is an alternative to the big bang.
00:09:45 And it’s not really fringe science
00:09:46 as it once was 50, 80 years ago when these models…
00:09:50 By the way, the first cosmology in history
00:09:53 was not a singular universe.
00:09:55 The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten Ra
00:09:59 and the temples of Egypt in the third millennium BC.
00:10:03 And in that, they talked about cyclical universes.
00:10:06 So I always joke, that guy Akhenaten’s court,
00:10:09 he’d have a pretty high H index right about now
00:10:11 because people have been using that cyclical model
00:10:14 from Penrose to Paul Steinhardt and Aegis
00:10:17 and right up until this very moment.
00:10:20 Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives
00:10:25 to the big bang theory?
00:10:27 So there are many alternatives starting with…
00:10:29 So the singularity quantum cosmologically demanding
00:10:33 singular origin of the universe, that stands in contrast
00:10:37 to these other models in which time does not have
00:10:40 a beginning and many of them feature cycles,
00:10:44 at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles,
00:10:47 called by Sir Roger Penrose.
00:10:48 And they all have things in common, these alternatives,
00:10:51 as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis,
00:10:55 which is inflation.
00:10:56 Inflation can be thought of as this spark
00:11:00 that ignites the hot big bang that I said we understood.
00:11:03 So it’s an earlier condition,
00:11:04 but it’s still not an initial condition.
00:11:06 In physics, imagine I show you a grandfather clock
00:11:09 or a pendulum swinging back and forth.
00:11:11 You look away for a second, you come into the room,
00:11:14 pendulum swinging back and forth.
00:11:15 Alex, tell me, where did it start?
00:11:17 How many cycles is it gonna make before the era?
00:11:19 You can’t answer that question
00:11:20 without knowing the initial conditions.
00:11:22 In a very simple system, like a one dimensional,
00:11:25 simple harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum,
00:11:27 think about understanding the whole universe
00:11:29 without understanding the initial conditions.
00:11:31 It’s a tremendous lacuna, a gap that we have as scientists
00:11:34 that we may not be able to, in the inflationary cosmology,
00:11:39 determine the quantitative physical properties
00:11:42 of the universe prior to what’s called
00:11:43 the inflationary epoch.
00:11:45 So you’re saying for the pendulum in that epoch,
00:11:47 we can’t, because you can infer things about the pendulum
00:11:50 before you show up to the room in our current epoch,
00:11:54 correct? Right.
00:11:55 Yeah, so if you look at it right now,
00:11:56 but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating?
00:11:58 So that depends on how much energy it got initially.
00:12:00 And you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance,
00:12:03 you had infrared camera,
00:12:03 you could see it’s getting hotter maybe,
00:12:05 and you could do some calculations.
00:12:07 But to know the two things in physics
00:12:09 to solve a partial differential equation
00:12:10 are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions.
00:12:12 Boundary conditions, we’re here on earth,
00:12:14 it has gravitational field, it’s not gonna excurs,
00:12:16 or make excursions wildly beyond the length of the pendulum.
00:12:19 It’s not, it has simple properties.
00:12:22 So, but this is like, in other words,
00:12:25 you can’t tell me when did the solar system start orbiting
00:12:28 in the way that it does now.
00:12:29 In other words, when did the moon acquire
00:12:31 the exact angular momentum that it has now?
00:12:34 Now, that’s a pretty pedestrian example.
00:12:36 But what I’m telling you is that the inflationary epoch
00:12:40 purports and is successful at providing
00:12:43 a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved
00:12:46 after inflation took place and ended,
00:12:48 but it says nothing about how it itself took place.
00:12:52 And that’s really what you’re asking me.
00:12:53 I mean, you don’t really, look,
00:12:55 what you care about like big bang nucleosynthesis
00:12:57 and the elements got made and these fusion reactors
00:13:00 and the whole universe was a fusion reactor,
00:13:02 but like, don’t you really care about what happened
00:13:04 at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time?
00:13:08 And the problem is we can’t really answer that
00:13:11 in the context of the big bang.
00:13:12 We can answer that in the context of these alternatives.
00:13:15 So you asked me about some of the alternatives.
00:13:16 So one is Aon theory,
00:13:18 the conformal cyclic cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose.
00:13:21 Another one that was really popular in the 60s and 70s
00:13:25 until the discovery of the primary component
00:13:28 of my research field,
00:13:29 the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB,
00:13:31 the three Kelvin all pervasive signal
00:13:33 that astronomers detected in 1965.
00:13:36 That kind of spelled the death knell in some sense
00:13:39 to what was called the quasi steady state universe.
00:13:43 And then there was another model
00:13:47 that kind of came out of that.
00:13:49 You hear the word quasi, so it’s not steady state.
00:13:51 Steady state means always existed.
00:13:53 That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble
00:13:55 showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe.
00:13:58 And most scientists believed in that for millennia basically.
00:14:02 The universe was eternal, static, unchanging.
00:14:05 They couldn’t believe that after Hubble.
00:14:07 So they had to append onto it,
00:14:09 concatenate this new feature that it wasn’t steady,
00:14:12 it was quasi steady.
00:14:14 So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen
00:14:16 every century in a given volume of space.
00:14:19 And that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant.
00:14:22 But because it was producing more and more every century,
00:14:25 as centuries pile up and the volume piles up,
00:14:27 the universe could expand.
00:14:28 And so that’s how they developed it.
00:14:29 That’s slowly.
00:14:30 Very slowly.
00:14:31 And it doesn’t match observational evidence.
00:14:33 But that is an alternative.
00:14:35 By the way, did Einstein think
00:14:36 the steady state universe is infinite or finite?
00:14:39 Do you know?
00:14:41 I would assume that he thought it was infinite
00:14:43 because there was really,
00:14:45 if something had a no beginning in time,
00:14:48 then it would be very unlikely we’re in the center of it
00:14:50 or it’s bounded or it has, in that case, a finite edge to it.
00:14:54 I wonder what he thought about infinity
00:14:56 because that’s such an uncomfortable.
00:14:57 Yeah, it’s a silly joke.
00:14:58 I’m sure you’re familiar with this silly joke, right?
00:15:00 The silly joke was that there are only two things
00:15:02 that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
00:15:06 and I’m not sure about the universe.
00:15:08 Well, me saying I’m not aware of the joke
00:15:10 is a good example of the joke.
00:15:12 It’s very meta.
00:15:14 Okay, so, all right, sorry.
00:15:16 You were saying about quasi.
00:15:17 All the alternatives.
00:15:18 All the alternatives in the quasi steady state.
00:15:20 And the most kind of promising,
00:15:22 although I hate to say that,
00:15:24 people say, well, that’s your favorite alternative, right?
00:15:27 This is not investment advice.
00:15:29 Inflation is not transitory.
00:15:31 It is quasi permanent.
00:15:34 So, a very prominent.
00:15:35 Sorry to interrupt.
00:15:36 We’re talking about cosmic inflation,
00:15:38 so calm down, cryptocurrency folks.
00:15:40 That’s right.
00:15:41 Although the first Nobel Prize,
00:15:43 and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics
00:15:45 was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind.
00:15:48 So, most people don’t know
00:15:49 that inflation has already won a Nobel Prize.
00:15:50 It’s a good topic to work on if you won a Nobel Prize.
00:15:54 Doesn’t matter the field.
00:15:55 Exactly, it’s time translation invariant.
00:15:57 So, when we look at the alternative
00:15:59 that’s called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies,
00:16:03 these have serious virtues, according to some.
00:16:07 One of the virtues to me, just as a human,
00:16:10 I’m just speaking as a human,
00:16:12 one of the founders of the new version
00:16:15 of the cyclic cosmology called the bouncing cosmology
00:16:21 is Paul Steinhardt.
00:16:22 He’s the Einstein Professor of Natural Sciences
00:16:24 at Princeton University.
00:16:25 You may have heard of it.
00:16:27 And he was one of the originators
00:16:29 of what was called new inflation.
00:16:32 In other words, he was one of the founding fathers
00:16:34 of inflation, who now not only has no belief
00:16:38 or support for inflation,
00:16:40 he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious,
00:16:45 dangerous, malevolent, not to science,
00:16:48 not just to cosmology, but to society.
00:16:50 So, here’s a man who created a theory
00:16:53 that’s captivated the world or universe of cosmologists,
00:16:56 such as it is.
00:16:57 It’s not a huge universe,
00:16:57 but there are more podcasters than cosmologists.
00:17:00 Some do both.
00:17:01 But this man created this theory with collaborators.
00:17:06 And now he’s like, I’m like, Paul, you’re denying paternity.
00:17:10 You’re like a deadbeat dad.
00:17:11 Now you’re saying like, inflation is bogus.
00:17:14 But he doesn’t just attack.
00:17:17 See, this is what’s very important
00:17:18 about approaching things as an experimentalist.
00:17:21 You got a lot of theorists on, and that’s wonderful.
00:17:23 And I think that’s a huge service.
00:17:25 An experimentalist has to say no.
00:17:27 He or she has to be confident to say like,
00:17:30 I don’t care if I prove you right
00:17:32 or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever.
00:17:35 We have to be like exterminators.
00:17:37 And nobody likes the exterminator
00:17:38 until they need one, right?
00:17:39 Or the garbage collectors, right?
00:17:41 But it’s vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded
00:17:45 by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry
00:17:48 and the simplicity of some idea.
00:17:50 Like inflation is a beautiful idea,
00:17:52 but it also has consequences.
00:17:54 And what Paul claims,
00:17:55 I don’t agree with him fully on this point,
00:17:57 is that those consequences are dangerous
00:17:59 because they lead to things like the multiverse,
00:18:01 which is outside the purview of science.
00:18:03 And in that sense, I can see support for what he does,
00:18:07 but none of that detracts from my respect for a man.
00:18:09 You know, imagine like, you know,
00:18:11 Elon comes up with this like really great idea,
00:18:14 you know, space, and then he’s like,
00:18:15 oh, actually it’s not gonna work.
00:18:18 But like, here’s this better idea.
00:18:19 And he’s like, SpaceX is not gonna work,
00:18:21 but he’s now creating an alternative to it.
00:18:23 It’s extremely hard to do what Paul has done.
00:18:25 Doesn’t mean he’s right.
00:18:27 Doesn’t mean I’m gonna like have more
00:18:29 and more attention paid to it because he’s my friend
00:18:32 or because I respect the idea
00:18:33 or I respect the man and his colleague,
00:18:35 Anna Aegis, who works really hard with him.
00:18:38 But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it.
00:18:41 And what it does most foremost is that it removes
00:18:45 the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology.
00:18:49 So it takes away 50% of the motivation
00:18:52 for a theory of quantum gravity.
00:18:54 You’ve talked a lot about quantum gravity.
00:18:56 You talk to people, eminent people on the show.
00:18:58 Always latent in those conversations
00:19:00 is sort of the teleological expectation
00:19:03 that there is a theory of everything.
00:19:06 There is a theory of quantum gravity.
00:19:08 But there’s no law that says
00:19:10 we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.
00:19:12 So that kind of implicit expectation
00:19:16 has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory.
00:19:19 So in cosmic inflation, so is that at the core?
00:19:23 So okay, maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts
00:19:28 on society from believing in cosmic inflation.
00:19:33 So one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation,
00:19:37 according to its other two patriarchs,
00:19:39 considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Guth at MIT
00:19:41 and Andrei Linde at Stanford,
00:19:44 although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas,
00:19:48 along with Paul Steinhardt, was that the universe
00:19:51 has to eventually get into a quantum state,
00:19:55 has to exist in this Hilbert space,
00:19:57 and the Hilbert space has certain features,
00:19:58 and those features are quantum mechanical,
00:20:00 endowed with quantum mechanical properties.
00:20:02 And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off.
00:20:07 So inflation can get started,
00:20:09 but then it’s like one of, you know, SpaceX rockets.
00:20:11 It’s hard to turn off a solid rocket booster, right?
00:20:14 It continues the thrusting.
00:20:16 You need another mechanism to douse the flames
00:20:19 of the inflationary expansion,
00:20:21 which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere,
00:20:24 it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times,
00:20:27 including now, spawning an ever increasing set of universes.
00:20:32 Some will die stillborn, some will continue and flourish,
00:20:35 and this is known as the multiverse paradigm.
00:20:38 It’s a robust, seemingly robust consequence,
00:20:41 not only of inflationary cosmology,
00:20:43 but more and more, we’re seeing it
00:20:44 in string theory as well.
00:20:45 So that, you know, sometimes two, you know,
00:20:48 branches coming to the same conclusion
00:20:49 is, you know, taken as evidence for its reality.
00:20:52 So one of the negative consequences
00:20:54 is it creates phenomena that we can’t,
00:20:57 that are outside the reach of experimental science,
00:21:01 or is it that the multiverse somehow
00:21:04 has a philosophical negative effect on humanity?
00:21:07 Like it makes us,
00:21:10 maybe it makes life seem more meaningless?
00:21:13 Is that where he’s getting at a little bit,
00:21:15 or is it not reaching that far?
00:21:18 Well, no, I think those are both kind of perceptive.
00:21:21 The answer is a little of both,
00:21:23 because in one sense, it’s meant kind of to explain
00:21:26 this fine tuning problem,
00:21:28 that we find ourselves in a universe
00:21:29 that’s particularly facund, that has features,
00:21:32 you know, consistent with our existence,
00:21:34 and how could we be otherwise?
00:21:36 You know, this sort of weak anthropic principle.
00:21:39 On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything,
00:21:42 literally everything, can be said to predict nothing.
00:21:46 Like if I say, Lex, you know, you’ve been working out,
00:21:48 you look like, you know, yeah, you haven’t,
00:21:50 yeah, that’s great.
00:21:51 You look like you’re, you know,
00:21:52 about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms.
00:21:54 Like, all right, yeah, you’re right,
00:21:56 but that’s horribly imprecise.
00:21:57 So what good is that?
00:21:58 That’s meaningless.
00:21:59 You don’t contribute any what’s called surprise,
00:22:01 or reduction in entropy,
00:22:03 or reduction of your ignorance about the system,
00:22:06 or you know exactly how much you weigh.
00:22:08 So me telling you that tells you nothing.
00:22:10 In this case, it’s basically saying
00:22:11 that we’re living in a universe
00:22:13 because the overwhelming odds of our existence
00:22:17 dictate that we would exist.
00:22:18 There has to be at least one place that we exist.
00:22:20 But the problem is it’s a manifestation of infinity.
00:22:24 So humans, and I’m sure you know this
00:22:26 from your work with AI and ML and everything else,
00:22:30 that humans, as far as we know,
00:22:33 really are the only entities capable
00:22:36 of contemplating infinity,
00:22:38 but we do so very imperfectly, right?
00:22:40 So if I say to you, like, what’s bigger,
00:22:42 the number of, you know, water molecules in this thing,
00:22:45 or the number of real numbers?
00:22:46 Or if I say, what’s bigger,
00:22:47 the number of real numbers or rational numbers?
00:22:49 They’re all different classifications
00:22:50 of the amount of infinities that there could be.
00:22:53 Infinity to the infinity power.
00:22:54 You know, when you have kids someday,
00:22:55 they’ll tell you, I love you, infinity.
00:22:56 You have to come back, I love you, infinity plus one, right?
00:22:59 So, but the human brain can’t really contemplate infinity.
00:23:03 Let me illustrate that.
00:23:05 They say in the singularity,
00:23:06 the universe had an infinite temperature, right?
00:23:10 So let me ask you a question.
00:23:12 Is there anything that you can contemplate
00:23:14 in the, you know, Einstein’s little quip aside,
00:23:17 that’s infinite, like a physical property,
00:23:20 density, pressure, temperature, energy, that’s infinite.
00:23:24 And if you can think of such thing, I’d like to know it.
00:23:27 But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one?
00:23:30 You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids.
00:23:32 How does it go from like to half of infinity?
00:23:34 Because that’s still infinity.
00:23:35 How did it cool down?
00:23:36 How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied?
00:23:39 So now it’s only infinity over two,
00:23:41 in terms of pascals.
00:23:42 Less infinite to more infinite.
00:23:44 Yeah, I mean, it’s,
00:23:46 that’s one of the biggest troubling things to me
00:23:49 about infinity is you can’t truly hold it inside our minds.
00:23:53 It’s a mathematical construct that doesn’t,
00:23:55 it feels like intuition fails.
00:23:57 But nevertheless, we use it nonchalantly
00:23:59 and then use, like physicists,
00:24:02 they’re incredible intuition machines.
00:24:05 And then they’ll play with this infinity
00:24:06 as if they can play with it on the level of intuition
00:24:10 as opposed to on the level of math.
00:24:12 You know, yeah, maybe it’s something cyclical
00:24:14 you can imagine in infinity,
00:24:15 just going around the same,
00:24:18 kind of like a Mobius strip situation.
00:24:20 But then the question then arises,
00:24:23 how do you make it more or less infinite?
00:24:26 Yeah, all of that intuition fails completely.
00:24:28 And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right?
00:24:31 It’s either some placeholder for infinity
00:24:33 or it’s one divided by a very,
00:24:34 the smallest possible real number
00:24:38 that you can represent in the memory.
00:24:39 Well, that’s basically my undergraduate study
00:24:42 in computer science is how to represent
00:24:44 a floating point in a computer.
00:24:45 I think I took 17 courses on this topic.
00:24:47 It was very useful.
00:24:49 I came to the right place.
00:24:49 But in terms of what a physicist will mean,
00:24:53 and you’re right, I mean, physicists will blithely,
00:24:55 nonchalantly subtract infinity, renormalization,
00:24:58 and do things to get finite answers.
00:25:01 And it’s miraculous.
00:25:03 But at a certain point, you have to ask,
00:25:05 well, what are the consequences for the real world?
00:25:07 So one of them, you ask, what’s the problem?
00:25:10 Does it make us more meaningless?
00:25:11 They purport, many of the people that support it,
00:25:14 like Andrei Linde.
00:25:15 In fact, Andrei Linde says, you have a bias.
00:25:18 You, Lex, me, Brian.
00:25:19 You have a bias that you believe in a universe.
00:25:22 But shouldn’t you believe in a multiverse?
00:25:25 What evidence do you have that there’s not a multiverse?
00:25:28 So he turns it around.
00:25:30 Whereas Paul Steinhardt will say, no, if anything can happen,
00:25:33 then there’s no predictive power within the theory.
00:25:35 Because you can always say, well,
00:25:37 this value of the inflationary field
00:25:39 did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy
00:25:43 for us to detect it with BICEP or Simon’s Observatory
00:25:45 or whatever.
00:25:46 But that doesn’t mean that inflation didn’t happen.
00:25:48 It’s logically 100% correct.
00:25:50 But it’s like kind of chewing Wonder Bread.
00:25:55 Apologize if they’re one of your sponsors, but you know.
00:25:59 Wonderbread slash lex.com.
00:26:01 Type in code Klebb, right?
00:26:03 Klebb.
00:26:04 That’s my favorite Russian word is like,
00:26:06 would you like a piece of Klebb?
00:26:07 By the way, even that word, Klebb,
00:26:10 which means bread in Russian, as you say it,
00:26:13 like you’re jokingly saying it now,
00:26:15 it made me hungry because it made
00:26:17 me remember how much I loved bread
00:26:19 when I was in the Soviet Union.
00:26:20 When you were hungry, that was the things you dreamed about.
00:26:24 I don’t know.
00:26:24 You know, what’s amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists
00:26:28 contributed to so much of what we understand today.
00:26:31 And they were completely in hiding.
00:26:33 There was no Google.
00:26:34 They couldn’t look up on Scholar.
00:26:35 They had nothing.
00:26:36 They had to wait for journals to get
00:26:37 approved by the Communist Party to get approved.
00:26:40 And only then, if they weren’t a member of some class,
00:26:43 I’m sure you know, like Jewish scientists,
00:26:44 you had a passport that said Jew on your passport.
00:26:48 And Zeldovich, the famous Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich,
00:26:52 he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnareff.
00:26:56 And he had to, only because he was like at a Nobel level
00:27:00 and was one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb program,
00:27:03 could he even get his Jewish student, he was Jewish too,
00:27:06 but only by virtue of his standing
00:27:09 of his intellectual accomplishments,
00:27:11 would they give him the dispensation
00:27:12 to let his student travel to Georgia or something.
00:27:16 And it makes what we complain about,
00:27:17 and I complain about academia.
00:27:19 And it’s like, oh, well, what can I talk about?
00:27:21 We have no idea of how good it is
00:27:24 and that they were able to create things like inflation,
00:27:26 completely isolated from the West.
00:27:28 I mean, some of these people didn’t
00:27:29 meet people like Stephen Hawking until he was almost dead.
00:27:33 And they just learned this thing through smuggled in.
00:27:36 It’s a work of heroism, especially in cosmology.
00:27:39 There’s so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard,
00:27:41 probably because they were working the,
00:27:43 they could pass off as, well, we’re doing stuff
00:27:45 for the atomic bomb program as well, which they were.
00:27:47 At the same time, there is interesting incentives
00:27:52 in the Soviet system that,
00:27:54 maybe we can take this tangent for a brief moment,
00:27:57 that because there’s a dictatorship, authoritarian regime
00:28:01 throughout the history of the 20th century
00:28:03 for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized.
00:28:07 And because the state prioritized it
00:28:10 through the propaganda machines and the news and so on,
00:28:13 it actually was really cool to be a scientist.
00:28:16 Like you were highly valued in society.
00:28:18 Maybe that’s a better way to say it.
00:28:19 And I would say, you’re saying like, we have it easy now.
00:28:23 In that sense, it was kind of beneficial
00:28:27 to be a scientist in that society
00:28:29 because you were seen as a hero, as there’s famous.
00:28:31 Yes, the most famous hero of the Soviet Republic.
00:28:34 And that, you know, there’s positives to that.
00:28:37 I mean, I’m not saying I would take the negatives
00:28:40 or the positives, but it is interesting to see a world
00:28:43 in which science was highly prized.
00:28:46 In the capitalist system, or maybe not capitalist,
00:28:49 let’s just say the American system,
00:28:51 the celebrities are the athletes, the actors and actresses,
00:28:57 maybe business leaders, musicians.
00:29:02 And, you know, the people we elect are sort of lawyers
00:29:05 and lawyers, so it’s interesting to think of a world
00:29:12 where science was highly prized,
00:29:13 but they had to do that science within the constraints
00:29:18 of always having big brother watching.
00:29:21 Yeah, the same in Germany.
00:29:22 Germany had, you know, highly prized science.
00:29:24 I mean, one of the most famous tragic to me cases
00:29:26 is Fritz Haber who invented the Haber Bosch process
00:29:29 that allowed us to, I don’t know, have you eaten yet?
00:29:31 You look, I mean, I know you fast, intermittent fast
00:29:34 every day and you do that.
00:29:36 You know, I said chleb and you got, it’s a little drool,
00:29:38 but he says I’m lifting and I look slim.
00:29:41 This is amazing.
00:29:42 I’m gonna clip this out and put it on Tinder.
00:29:44 I think that’s a website.
00:29:45 You gotta swipe left or right for that, I don’t know.
00:29:48 But when you think about like, you know, what he did
00:29:51 and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy
00:29:53 and we eat from every day, he was a German nationalist,
00:29:58 first and foremost, even though he was a Jew.
00:30:00 And he personally went to witness the application
00:30:02 of ammonia, chlorine gas applied during trench warfare
00:30:05 in 1916 in battles in Brussels and whatever.
00:30:08 And he was, they had a whole conjure of Nobel laureates
00:30:10 in chemistry and physics, you know,
00:30:12 that would go and witness these atrocities.
00:30:14 But that was also, they were almost putting science
00:30:17 above, I don’t wanna say human dignity,
00:30:19 but of like the fact that he would later be suppressed.
00:30:23 And actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz
00:30:27 because of the chemical that he invented also
00:30:30 called Zyklon B.
00:30:31 And so it’s just unbelievable.
00:30:33 So I feel like that does have resonance today
00:30:36 in this worship of science, you know,
00:30:38 and listen to science and follow the science,
00:30:41 which is more like scientism.
00:30:43 And there is still a danger.
00:30:45 You know, I always say, just cause you’re an atheist
00:30:47 doesn’t mean you don’t have a religion.
00:30:49 You know, just because you, you know,
00:30:51 in my case, in my books, I talk a lot about the Nobel prize.
00:30:54 It’s kind of like a kosher idol.
00:30:56 It’s something that you can worship, you know,
00:30:58 it doesn’t do any harm.
00:30:59 And we want those people that are so significant
00:31:02 in their intellectual accomplishments.
00:31:03 Cause there is a core of America
00:31:06 and the Western world in general
00:31:07 that does worship and really look at science predominantly
00:31:10 cause it gives us technology,
00:31:13 but there’s something really cool about that.
00:31:14 And so for me, it’s hard to find that balance point
00:31:17 between looking to science for wisdom,
00:31:20 which I don’t think it has, they’re two different words,
00:31:23 but also recognizing how much good and transformative power
00:31:27 maybe our only hope comes from science.
00:31:30 You opened so many doors
00:31:32 cause you also bring up our Ernest Becker in that book.
00:31:38 So there’s a lot of elements of religiosity to science
00:31:43 and to the Nobel prize.
00:31:44 It’s fascinating to explore and we will.
00:31:48 And we still haven’t finished the discussion
00:31:50 of the beginning of the universe, which we’ll return to.
00:31:54 But now since you opened the book, wow,
00:31:57 pun unintended of losing the Nobel prize,
00:32:01 can you tell me the story of BICEP,
00:32:04 the background imaging
00:32:05 of cosmic extragalactic polarization experiment,
00:32:09 BICEP one and BICEP two,
00:32:11 and then maybe you can talk about BICEP three,
00:32:13 but the thing that you cover in your book,
00:32:16 the human story of it, what happened?
00:32:18 Yeah, that book is in contradistinction of the second book.
00:32:21 That’s like a memoir.
00:32:22 It’s really a description of what it’s like to feel,
00:32:26 what it feels like to be a scientist
00:32:28 and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty,
00:32:32 imposter syndrome, which I cover in the later book
00:32:35 in more detail, but to really feel like
00:32:38 you’re doing something and it’s all you think about.
00:32:41 It is all consuming.
00:32:43 And it’s something I couldn’t have done now
00:32:45 cause I have too many other,
00:32:47 wonderful, delightful demands of my time.
00:32:50 But to go back to that moment
00:32:51 when I was first captivated by the night sky
00:32:53 who has a 12 year old, 13 year old,
00:32:56 and really mixed together throughout my scientific story
00:32:59 has always been wanting to approach
00:33:01 the greatest mystery of all,
00:33:02 which I think is the existence or non existence of God.
00:33:05 So I call myself a practicing agnostic.
00:33:08 In other words, I do things that religious people do
00:33:12 and I don’t do things that atheist people do.
00:33:16 And I once had this conversation,
00:33:18 with my first podcast guest actually,
00:33:19 I shouldn’t say, oh, I was just having a conversation
00:33:21 with Freeman Dyson, but he was actually my first guest.
00:33:24 And I miss him.
00:33:25 Name drop.
00:33:25 Name drop, yes.
00:33:27 I’m sure there’s gonna be plenty of comments about that.
00:33:30 In case people don’t know, Brian Keating is the host
00:33:33 of Into the Impossible podcast,
00:33:34 where he’s talked to some of the greatest scientists
00:33:38 in history of science, physicists,
00:33:41 especially in the history of science.
00:33:43 So when I talked to Freeman, I said,
00:33:45 Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic too.
00:33:47 Can you tell me something like what do you do on Saturday,
00:33:50 on Sundays, do you go to church?
00:33:51 He’s like, no, I don’t go to church.
00:33:53 And I’m like, well, imagine there was
00:33:55 like an intelligent alien and he was looking down
00:33:58 or she, I don’t know, thing was looking down
00:34:01 and it saw Freeman and on Sundays,
00:34:03 like a group of people go to church,
00:34:05 but Freeman doesn’t go to church.
00:34:06 And then there’s another group of people
00:34:07 that don’t go to church and those are called atheists,
00:34:10 but Freeman calls himself an agnostic,
00:34:12 but he does the things that the Richard Dawkins,
00:34:14 he doesn’t go to the same church
00:34:15 that Richard Dawkins doesn’t go to, right?
00:34:18 So I said, how would you distinguish yourself
00:34:19 if not practice?
00:34:20 So I’m a behaviorist.
00:34:22 I believe you can change your mentality.
00:34:23 You can influence your mind,
00:34:26 view your bodily physical actions.
00:34:28 So when I was a 12 year old, I got my first telescope.
00:34:30 I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic church,
00:34:32 which is kind of strange for a Jewish kid
00:34:34 who grew up in New York.
00:34:35 Maybe we’ll get into that, maybe not.
00:34:36 But I was just fascinated by these, these.
00:34:41 Can we get into it for a second?
00:34:42 Okay, yeah, all right, let’s go.
00:34:45 All right, let’s go there.
00:34:46 All right.
00:34:47 Let’s go to a baby Brian or young.
00:34:49 Young Brian.
00:34:51 The new sitcom on CBS.
00:34:53 Young Brian, born to two Jewish parents.
00:34:55 My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook.
00:34:58 He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician.
00:35:00 And my mother was an eminent mom
00:35:02 and a brilliant English major, et cetera.
00:35:06 And they raised it, but they were secular.
00:35:08 They, you know, we’d go to, I always joke,
00:35:09 we’d go to synagogue, you know, two times a year,
00:35:12 on Christmas and Easter.
00:35:14 No, no, we would go, yeah, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah,
00:35:16 right, that’s the typical two day a year Jews.
00:35:19 And you know, we’d have, we’d have matzahs
00:35:21 once a year on Palm Passover.
00:35:23 And that was about it.
00:35:24 And for years, I was like that
00:35:26 until my parents got divorced.
00:35:28 My mother remarried and she married an Irish Catholic man
00:35:31 by the name of Ray Keating.
00:35:32 My father’s name is James X.
00:35:34 So when she remarried Ray Keating,
00:35:37 I was immediately adopted.
00:35:39 I’m actually adopted into the Keating family.
00:35:42 And he had nine brothers and sisters
00:35:44 and just warm and gregarious.
00:35:46 They, you know, did Christmas and Easter.
00:35:49 It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had.
00:35:51 And I do things with great gusto.
00:35:53 Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way.
00:35:55 So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity,
00:35:59 in this case, Catholicism.
00:36:00 So I was baptized, confirmed,
00:36:02 and I said, I want to go all the way.
00:36:04 I became an altar boy in the Catholic church.
00:36:07 And you’re going to be the best altar boy there ever was.
00:36:10 I had like serious skills.
00:36:11 You passed that collection basket.
00:36:13 I could push people and get them to 2x their contributions.
00:36:17 But in this case, I was 13.
00:36:20 I don’t know if you remember when you were 13.
00:36:23 But if you extrapolate the next level up,
00:36:25 it’s like you go graduate student, postdoc, professor.
00:36:28 The next level up from confirmation, altar boy,
00:36:31 is priest.
00:36:32 And I don’t know if you’re aware of this,
00:36:33 but priests are not entitled to have relations with women.
00:36:37 And as a 13 year old boy, kind of like future casting
00:36:40 what life’s going to be like for myself
00:36:42 if I continue on my path, I found that maybe I…
00:36:46 The math is not up.
00:36:48 That’s right.
00:36:49 There was a serious gap in that future.
00:36:54 And instead, when I should have been preparing
00:36:56 for my Bar Mitzvah, as most Jewish boys would be,
00:36:58 a 12, 13 year old boy, I actually got a telescope
00:37:01 and became infatuated with all the things
00:37:04 you could see with it.
00:37:05 It wasn’t bigger than that one over there
00:37:06 that your hedgehog’s looking through.
00:37:08 Is that a hedgehog?
00:37:10 It’s a hedgehog in the fog.
00:37:13 I should mention, and we’ll go one by one, these things,
00:37:16 you’ve given me some incredible gifts.
00:37:18 Maybe this is a good place to ask about the telescope
00:37:21 that puts some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look.
00:37:24 And using…
00:37:25 Now you’re officially an experimental astrophysicist.
00:37:27 Why experimentalist versus an engineer?
00:37:30 Because you assembled this telescope,
00:37:31 you gave it a mount, and you connected it to a very powerful…
00:37:35 Yeah, but there’s no experiment going on.
00:37:36 It’s just engineering for show.
00:37:38 It’s very shallow.
00:37:39 Experiment is taking it to the next level
00:37:41 and actually achieving something.
00:37:42 Here, I just built a thing for show.
00:37:44 Well, that’s always a joke.
00:37:45 People say, oh, you’re an experimental cosmologist.
00:37:47 I’m like, yeah, I build a lot of universes.
00:37:49 Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things,
00:37:52 soldering things.
00:37:53 It’s not actually doing the stroking
00:37:55 of my non existent beard, contemplating the cyclic
00:37:57 versus the bouncing cosmological monitor.
00:38:00 Just like most of robotics is just using Velcro for things.
00:38:04 Right, yeah, it’s not like having dancing dogs
00:38:06 and whatever, right?
00:38:07 So telescope.
00:38:08 Yes, this telescope.
00:38:09 What’s the story of this little telescope?
00:38:11 This telescope’s a very precious thing in some ways,
00:38:14 a symbol of what got me into…
00:38:18 What brought me all the blessings I have in my life
00:38:21 came from a telescope.
00:38:22 And I always advise parents or even people for themselves.
00:38:26 You right here, wherever we are,
00:38:28 a biggest city on earth, Manhattan,
00:38:30 where I was growing up as a 12 year old
00:38:31 outside of Manhattan.
00:38:33 You can see the exact same craters on the moon,
00:38:35 the same rings of Saturn, the same moons of Jupiter,
00:38:38 the same phases of the…
00:38:40 You can see the Andromeda galaxy,
00:38:42 Lex, two and a half million light years away from earth.
00:38:45 You can do that with that little thing over there.
00:38:47 One that’s a little more expensive.
00:38:48 Get one that has a mount and you could attach now
00:38:51 your smartphone.
00:38:52 What the hell is that?
00:38:53 I wouldn’t have known what that was in 1994.
00:38:55 And with that, you can do something that no other science
00:38:58 to my knowledge can really replicate,
00:39:00 maybe biology in some sense,
00:39:02 but you can experience the physical sensation
00:39:06 that Galileo experienced when he turned a telescope
00:39:10 like that to Jupiter and saw these four dots around it.
00:39:12 Or that Saturn had ears as he called it.
00:39:15 Or that the moon was not crystalline polished smooth
00:39:18 and made of this heavenly substance,
00:39:20 the quintessence substance, right?
00:39:22 So where else can you be viscerally connected
00:39:26 with the first person to ever make that discovery?
00:39:27 Try doing that with the Higgs boson.
00:39:29 Get yourself an LHC and smash together high luminosity,
00:39:33 call up Harry Cliffe and say, I want to replicate.
00:39:36 How did you feel?
00:39:36 He didn’t feel anything.
00:39:38 None of them felt anything.
00:39:39 It took years to go, you can’t do it.
00:39:42 But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.
00:39:44 That’s fascinating.
00:39:45 It’s almost like maybe there’s another one like that
00:39:49 is fire.
00:39:50 Like when you build a bonfire, can you actually get it?
00:39:53 See, if you use a lighter, I think if you actually
00:39:56 by rubbing sticks together or however you do it
00:39:58 without any of the modern tools,
00:40:00 that’s probably what that’s like.
00:40:02 And then you get to experience the magic of it,
00:40:04 of what like early humans homo sapiens felt.
00:40:07 You feel what Aug felt when he did it that first time.
00:40:10 By the way, is this a gift?
00:40:11 This is a gift, of course.
00:40:13 You need a little bit of a swag upgrade,
00:40:15 so I got you some gifts.
00:40:16 Yeah, this is a, I’m pulling a Putin,
00:40:18 like ask if this is a gift,
00:40:21 making it very uncomfortable for you to say.
00:40:24 Not really.
00:40:25 This is actually my childhood telescope here, you know.
00:40:28 But now I’m keeping it.
00:40:29 That’s right.
00:40:30 So looking through this telescope.
00:40:32 Was when your love for science was first born.
00:40:34 Changed my life.
00:40:35 Because not only was I doing that,
00:40:37 I was replicating what Galileo did,
00:40:39 but I was, and I’m 100% not comparing myself
00:40:42 to Galileo, Galileo, okay,
00:40:43 if there’s any confusion out there.
00:40:45 But I did replicate exactly what he did,
00:40:47 and I was like, holy crap, this is weird.
00:40:48 Let me write it down.
00:40:50 So it had another effect, which all good scientists,
00:40:52 budding scientists should do, and all parents should do,
00:40:55 get your kid a book, a little notebook,
00:40:57 tape a pencil to it.
00:40:58 Write down what you see, what you hypothesize,
00:41:00 what you think it’s gonna be.
00:41:01 Not like in the high school, you know,
00:41:03 like hypothesis, thesis, but just like,
00:41:06 wow, how did I feel?
00:41:07 Better yet, astronomy is a visual science.
00:41:10 Sketch what you see.
00:41:11 The Lagoon Nebula, the Pleiades Seven Sisters.
00:41:14 You can see them anywhere on Earth.
00:41:16 And when you do that, again,
00:41:18 you’re connecting two different hemispheres of your brain,
00:41:20 as I understand it,
00:41:22 and you’re connecting them through your fingertips.
00:41:24 You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips.
00:41:27 In your connection between what you see,
00:41:30 what you observe, and what you write down.
00:41:31 Then you do research, right?
00:41:34 The goal of science is not to just replicate
00:41:36 what other people did, is do something new.
00:41:38 And that’s why we call it research,
00:41:40 and not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia.
00:41:42 And in so doing, you start to train a kid
00:41:45 at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks.
00:41:48 It’s unbelievable.
00:41:49 And now we can do even better,
00:41:50 because you can share it on Instagram or whatever,
00:41:53 and you can, by doing so, have an entree
00:41:56 into the world of what does it really mean
00:41:57 to be a scientist, and do so viscerally.
00:41:59 You know, I often say, I was taught this
00:42:02 by my English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins, in ninth grade,
00:42:05 that the word educate, it doesn’t mean to pour into.
00:42:09 Let me pour in some facts and intellects,
00:42:11 and you know, it’s not like machine learning
00:42:12 that you’re just showing like billions of cats,
00:42:14 or you know, you’re not like forcing it in,
00:42:16 you’re bringing it out.
00:42:17 It means to pour out of, in Latin, educare.
00:42:20 And what more could a teacher want
00:42:22 than to have something, the kid is just like gushing.
00:42:25 No, you’re not gonna see like.
00:42:26 To inspire the kid.
00:42:26 Yes.
00:42:27 Inspire.
00:42:28 Shout out to Mrs. Tompkins.
00:42:29 Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins, she’s watching, yeah.
00:42:31 She’s a big fan.
00:42:33 Me, she doesn’t care for it, but you.
00:42:35 Yeah, excellent.
00:42:36 We take those we love for granted.
00:42:39 This is in Manhattan.
00:42:40 This is in Westchester County, New York.
00:42:42 Okay, got it.
00:42:43 So okay, but then that’s where the dream is born.
00:42:47 But then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist.
00:42:51 So going to university, graduate school,
00:42:55 postdoc, all the way to where you are today.
00:42:58 What’s that, what are some notable moments in that journey?
00:43:03 So I call that the academic hunger games.
00:43:05 Because it’s like you’re competing against
00:43:07 like these people who are just getting smarter all the time
00:43:11 as you’re getting smarter all the time.
00:43:13 They wanna get into a fewer and fewer number of slots.
00:43:16 Like there’s fewer slots to get into college
00:43:18 than in high school.
00:43:19 There’s fewer slots in graduate school.
00:43:20 There’s fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc.
00:43:23 And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number.
00:43:26 We just did a faculty search at UC San Diego,
00:43:29 400 applicants for one position.
00:43:31 It’s almost getting impossible.
00:43:32 Like I almost can’t conceive of doing
00:43:34 what these new brilliant young people applying
00:43:37 to become an assistant professor at a state university
00:43:39 that they’re doing.
00:43:40 It takes so much courage to do that.
00:43:42 So I went from this kid in New York,
00:43:45 thinking I would never be a professional astronomer.
00:43:48 A, because I didn’t know any, I’d never seen any.
00:43:50 I didn’t even know that they existed.
00:43:52 And I thought, who the hell’s gonna pay me
00:43:53 to look at the stars?
00:43:54 Like, won’t they pay me to be like an ice cream taster?
00:43:57 Like, it’s just not something I could conceive
00:43:59 of getting paid to do.
00:44:00 Even if I had the brilliance to do it,
00:44:01 which I didn’t feel I did.
00:44:03 And then I went to graduate school.
00:44:05 And during graduate school, I had this kind of
00:44:10 on again, off again relationship with my father.
00:44:12 And I knew that he was a mathematician.
00:44:14 He had left and gotten remarried himself
00:44:16 and moved across the country.
00:44:17 I didn’t see him for 15 years.
00:44:19 And in that time, I learned a lot about him.
00:44:22 And I learned that he had gotten very interested
00:44:23 not in pure mathematics,
00:44:25 which he had been a number theorist
00:44:26 and contributed seminal work on the offending equations,
00:44:30 which play a role in Turing’s work that you may have seen.
00:44:33 But anyway, he had become interested,
00:44:35 turned completely away from that into the foundations
00:44:37 of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics.
00:44:40 And by that time I was at Brown University
00:44:42 and I was thinking, oh, maybe I’ll be condensed matter
00:44:44 physicist or experimentalist.
00:44:46 I never thought I’d be a theorist and I’m not a theorist.
00:44:48 So it was pretty prescient.
00:44:51 But it always appealed to me,
00:44:53 why not do what made me happy as a 12 year old?
00:44:56 We often forget about those primitive things about us
00:45:00 are probably the most sustainable, durable
00:45:01 and resilient attributes of our character.
00:45:04 So with my own kids,
00:45:05 what are they interested in now when they’re young?
00:45:07 And it doesn’t mean that’s what they’re gonna do.
00:45:09 Some of them wanna play Fortnite,
00:45:10 like professional Fortnite play, which there are,
00:45:13 but the odds of that is less
00:45:14 than the odds of being a professor.
00:45:16 Can I ask you, is your father still with us?
00:45:19 No.
00:45:21 Just in a small tangent.
00:45:23 Yeah.
00:45:24 Do you miss him?
00:45:25 Do you think about him?
00:45:27 Does his mathematical journey reverberate
00:45:30 through who you are?
00:45:32 Oh yeah, absolutely.
00:45:33 I mean, it did in very many ways
00:45:36 and he’s been gone for a long time now.
00:45:37 Thinking back to that time with him,
00:45:40 he must’ve instilled some capacity for me
00:45:43 to only wanna spend my time,
00:45:45 which is a limited quantity.
00:45:46 I don’t think it’s the most limited quantity.
00:45:48 Maybe we’ll talk about that later,
00:45:49 but to go into only the most challenging,
00:45:53 interesting things with the limited time that we have
00:45:56 while we’re alive.
00:45:57 And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics.
00:45:59 For me, it was the foundations of the universe
00:46:02 and how did it come to be?
00:46:03 And I felt like, well, people have been trying
00:46:05 since Einstein to outdo Einstein,
00:46:07 really have made great progress
00:46:08 in the foundations of quantum mechanics,
00:46:10 but this is an exciting time.
00:46:12 The COBE satellite had just released its data
00:46:15 that the universe had this anisotropy pattern.
00:46:17 Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God
00:46:20 and so forth.
00:46:21 And so it seemed like this is a good golden age
00:46:23 for what I’m gonna do and what I’m most interested in.
00:46:26 But always throughout that, I wanted to understand,
00:46:29 I didn’t wanna be a wrench monkey,
00:46:30 no offense to people that just do experiment.
00:46:33 And no offense to monkeys.
00:46:34 No offense to monkeys, that’s right.
00:46:35 This little guy, sorry, man.
00:46:37 But thinking back to what animates me,
00:46:40 it’s not doing the engineering
00:46:41 as much as it is getting the data,
00:46:44 but there’s a lot of steps.
00:46:45 I wanna be the guy understanding
00:46:48 what made the universe produce the signal that we saw.
00:46:51 So I always joke with my theorist friends,
00:46:54 call me a closeted theorist.
00:46:56 Like I wanna be, you know what they call
00:46:58 a guy who hangs out with musicians, a drummer.
00:47:01 So I wanna be like that for physics,
00:47:04 for theoretical physics.
00:47:04 I wanna be like the guy doesn’t do new theory,
00:47:07 but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing.
00:47:09 I love that formulation of a theorist
00:47:12 is understanding the source of the signal you’re getting.
00:47:17 Like signal is primary.
00:47:19 Like the thing you measure is primary
00:47:22 and theory is just the search of explaining
00:47:28 how that signal originated, but it’s all about the signal.
00:47:31 I mean, I see the same search for the human mind
00:47:34 and like neuroscience in that same kind of way.
00:47:37 It’s ultimately about the signal,
00:47:39 but you kind of hope to understand
00:47:42 how that signal originated.
00:47:43 That’s fascinating.
00:47:45 That’s such a beautiful way to explain experimental physics
00:47:52 because it ultimately at the end of the day
00:47:54 is all about the signal.
00:47:57 Yeah.
00:47:58 Yeah, and maybe those two things,
00:48:00 the neuroscience and the cosmos,
00:48:02 not getting too romantic, but yeah,
00:48:04 maybe they’re linked in some fundamental way,
00:48:07 some fundamental cosmic consciousness,
00:48:09 but.
00:48:10 We’re gonna get to that.
00:48:11 Yeah, yeah.
00:48:12 No, we definitely have to get back to that.
00:48:14 But getting back to, yeah, so my origins.
00:48:16 So I always say like, and I wanna try this on you.
00:48:18 You said you wouldn’t answer any of my questions,
00:48:20 but I’m gonna ask you some questions.
00:48:21 What’s the most important day on the calendar?
00:48:23 Don’t tell me the date, but to you,
00:48:24 what’s the most important day to you every year?
00:48:27 Do I have to answer or do I have to think about it?
00:48:29 No, no, answer.
00:48:30 Like, you don’t have to tell me the exact date
00:48:31 of the calendar.
00:48:32 It could be like your mistress’s birthday or whatever, but.
00:48:35 I have so many I lose track, even though I’m single.
00:48:39 How does that even make sense?
00:48:40 I know.
00:48:41 Okay, I’m sorry.
00:48:42 So a day, like a month and a day, yeah.
00:48:46 I mean, for me, it would be December 31st.
00:48:49 Yeah, so I was gonna say New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day.
00:48:52 Some people say birthday, anniversary, kid’s birth.
00:48:54 They’re usually signifying beginnings and ends, right?
00:48:58 January means the portal between,
00:49:00 the God was the portal between the beginning and the end.
00:49:02 So you’re looking back, maybe because you’re Russian,
00:49:05 like the death side, the light side,
00:49:06 looking forward into January, the beginning, right?
00:49:10 So everybody’s most important day is usually some beginning
00:49:15 or something significant.
00:49:17 For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all.
00:49:19 It’s like, when did the universe get born,
00:49:20 as I said before?
00:49:21 And I didn’t think there, again, I didn’t,
00:49:24 I just, there was some mental obstruction
00:49:27 that I didn’t realize that I could get past
00:49:30 because I didn’t think like anybody does it.
00:49:32 Like I knew astronomers knew these answers,
00:49:34 like the universe at that time, between 10 and 20 billion
00:49:37 years old.
00:49:38 Now we know it’s 13.872 billion years old.
00:49:41 It’s incredible the five digit, you know,
00:49:43 per significant five.
00:49:44 What is it again? 13.872 billion years.
00:49:48 872 million.
00:49:50 So is there a lot of plus or minus on that?
00:49:52 Is it, what are the error bars on that?
00:49:53 So for me, I’m 50.
00:49:55 So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me
00:49:57 and telling me within 12 hours how old I am.
00:49:59 Yeah.
00:50:00 It’s a half a percent, percent level accuracy.
00:50:02 There’s a confidence behind that?
00:50:04 Oh yeah. I mean, there’s a significance.
00:50:05 Yeah. No, it’s extremely well measured.
00:50:07 I mean, it’s one of the most precise things that we have.
00:50:09 In contrast to, again, 25 years ago,
00:50:12 we didn’t know if the universe was 10 billion
00:50:14 or 20 billion years old,
00:50:16 but there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be
00:50:18 as they are about 12 billion years old
00:50:21 or in the universe that were 12 billion.
00:50:22 So that would be like you being older than your father.
00:50:26 It was embarrassing.
00:50:27 Can we actually take a tangent on a tangent,
00:50:30 on a tangent, on a tangent?
00:50:31 How old is the universe?
00:50:33 Can you dig in onto this number?
00:50:35 How do we know currently with those,
00:50:38 I guess you said four or five significant digits?
00:50:42 So we can come about it from two different ways.
00:50:44 One, basically they rely on the most important number
00:50:47 in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant.
00:50:50 The Hubble constant is this weird number
00:50:52 that has the following units.
00:50:54 It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec.
00:50:58 So it’s a speed per distance,
00:51:00 which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed.
00:51:02 And what is the speed you’re measuring?
00:51:04 Well, you’re measuring the speed of a distant galaxy
00:51:06 at many megaparsecs away.
00:51:07 So a galaxy at one megaparsec away,
00:51:09 this isn’t actually strictly true
00:51:10 because of local gravitational effects.
00:51:12 But if you go out, say one megaparsec away,
00:51:15 I would say that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers
00:51:17 per second away from you.
00:51:19 And every galaxy, except for the local,
00:51:21 very most local group surrounding us,
00:51:23 maybe a half a dozen galaxies,
00:51:25 out of 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies.
00:51:30 So 12 out of that number are moving towards us,
00:51:33 the rest are moving away from us.
00:51:35 So that number, if you invert it,
00:51:38 if you say, well, when did those things last touch each other,
00:51:40 all those galaxies, now they’re really far apart,
00:51:43 we know how fast they’re moving away.
00:51:44 It’s a very simple algebra problem to solve.
00:51:46 When were they touching?
00:51:47 That’s where you get that number from.
00:51:49 So there’s the local 12 and then the rest.
00:51:51 Ignore the 12, yeah.
00:51:52 And then ignore the 12 and then look at the others
00:51:54 and yeah, then solve the algebra problem.
00:51:57 How does the stuff in the beginning,
00:52:03 the mystery of that beginning epoch
00:52:05 change this calculation of?
00:52:07 Very little, because actually we understand
00:52:10 how there’s some other ingredients that go into it,
00:52:12 namely how much dark energy there is in the universe,
00:52:14 how much dark matter there is in the universe,
00:52:16 how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera there are,
00:52:19 and how much ordinary matter,
00:52:21 like we’re made up of neutrons, protons, croutons.
00:52:24 Okay, so let me, morons.
00:52:31 It appears that the universe is bigger than it is older.
00:52:37 How does that make sense?
00:52:38 Oh, oh, yeah, so you’re talking about the fact
00:52:40 that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe
00:52:43 that’s located at a distance that is farther
00:52:46 than the speed of light times the age of the universe.
00:52:49 Naively you would say that,
00:52:51 so you’re right, if the universe were static,
00:52:54 if the universe came into existence,
00:52:56 and you can conceive of this,
00:52:57 the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe,
00:53:00 so the universe just started off,
00:53:02 those galaxies were, they could be moving
00:53:05 towards us, away from us, who knows,
00:53:07 that you could say I can see a galaxy
00:53:09 that’s at a distance of only 13.8 billion years
00:53:13 times the speed of light, that would be true.
00:53:15 But the fact that the light is expanding
00:53:18 along with the expansion of the universe,
00:53:20 so imagine there was some very distant past,
00:53:23 we were near a galaxy, it’s gonna produce some light,
00:53:25 and that galaxy’s going to be moving away from us,
00:53:28 the light’s gonna be getting more and more red shifted
00:53:30 as it’s called, and it’s gonna be moving
00:53:31 farther and farther away from us as time goes on,
00:53:34 there’ll be some acceleration
00:53:35 as we get into the era of dark energy.
00:53:38 The light signals, there’ll be some cone of acceptance,
00:53:41 if you will, from which, which represents all the events
00:53:45 that we could have received information from.
00:53:47 We can’t currently communicate with that galaxy.
00:53:50 It sent us some light, and now it’s moving away,
00:53:53 and it sent us some light, and because the space
00:53:55 is also dragging the photons with it, if you like,
00:53:57 the photons are participating
00:53:59 in the expansion of the universe,
00:54:01 that’s why they’re red shifting,
00:54:02 that we can see things out to where the universe
00:54:05 first began expanding, not just when it began existing.
00:54:09 And because the universe has been expanding
00:54:10 for 13.8 billion years, with no sign of slowing down yet,
00:54:14 which is a huge surprise, serendipitous surprise,
00:54:18 that we can see things approximately three times
00:54:20 the age of the universe away from us.
00:54:22 So we can see, it’s called the age of the universe,
00:54:24 15 billion years, just to make the math simple.
00:54:26 We see things at 45 billion light years distance
00:54:29 in that direction, and we see things at 45 billion
00:54:32 light years in that direction,
00:54:34 just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away.
00:54:36 So that means we see things that themselves
00:54:39 are 90 billion light years away from each other.
00:54:42 That’s sort of the diameter of the observable universe.
00:54:45 Is there another universe beyond that?
00:54:47 We don’t know.
00:54:47 So in conjecture, there’s not only one,
00:54:49 there’s an infinite number of them.
00:54:51 How are you emotionally okay with the fact
00:54:54 that our universe is expanding?
00:54:55 So like…
00:54:56 It’s gonna be like Annie Hall, like with Alvy Singer.
00:55:00 I grew up in the Soviet Union.
00:55:02 We watched propaganda films.
00:55:03 I realized that you did, yes.
00:55:05 So there’s a famous… Annie Hall, is that some kind of…
00:55:07 What is the…
00:55:08 It’s a comedy, it’s a propaganda movie with Woody Allen.
00:55:12 Certainly canceled, but nevertheless,
00:55:14 back when he was not canceled yet,
00:55:17 he made a movie called Annie Hall,
00:55:19 in which as a self depiction, he’s like a Larry David
00:55:21 before Larry David was Larry David,
00:55:23 neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew.
00:55:26 He’s in Brooklyn and he all of a sudden tells his mother
00:55:28 he’s not doing his homework anymore.
00:55:29 He refuses to do his homework.
00:55:31 Mother says, why?
00:55:32 Goes, because the universe is expanding
00:55:34 and it keeps on expanding.
00:55:36 Everything will rip apart
00:55:37 and then we’ll never have anything in contact
00:55:38 and everything is meaningless.
00:55:40 I assume these are some of the topics we’re gonna get to.
00:55:43 And she goes, what are you talking about?
00:55:45 We’re in Brooklyn.
00:55:46 Brooklyn is not expanding.
00:55:49 And that’s true, Brooklyn is not expanding.
00:55:50 The solar system is not expanding.
00:55:52 Often times they get asked,
00:55:53 what is the universe expanding into?
00:55:55 That’s one of my favorite questions.
00:55:57 What is it expanding into?
00:55:59 And I say, it’s actually an easy question
00:56:00 if you think about it.
00:56:02 You’ve seen your friend Elon, he goes out into space,
00:56:04 he’s got a rocket, right?
00:56:05 What’s outside of the rocket?
00:56:07 If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle,
00:56:10 take the cap off it, go outside the rocket,
00:56:13 sip in some Tang, screw on the cover of it,
00:56:16 what’s in there?
00:56:18 Is it empty?
00:56:20 That’s just semantics, I guess, yeah.
00:56:24 No, it’s definitely not empty.
00:56:26 So you step outside the rocket.
00:56:27 Yeah, you’re in the vacuum of space,
00:56:29 the quote unquote vacuum of space.
00:56:30 And there’s no more liquid in it.
00:56:31 There’s no more liquid in it.
00:56:32 No, it’s just a container.
00:56:33 One cubic centimeter, let’s make it simple.
00:56:35 One cubic centimeter of a box
00:56:38 and you take it out into space,
00:56:39 outside of a Falcon, whatever, right?
00:56:42 What’s inside that box?
00:56:44 It’s not empty.
00:56:45 There’s actually, I’m gonna say,
00:56:47 this is gonna set your friends up.
00:56:48 There’s 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements
00:56:53 that we call the cosmic microwave background
00:56:54 inside that box at any second.
00:56:56 Okay, all right, hold on a second.
00:56:58 What, 420, I’ve heard of that number before.
00:57:03 All right, let’s.
00:57:04 It used to be 69, but then they changed it.
00:57:06 Wow, physics works in mysterious ways.
00:57:09 In a millimeter box, it’s 69.
00:57:10 What are we talking about here?
00:57:12 What’s inside, what’s in the box?
00:57:16 I’m gonna get, that’s right.
00:57:18 Let’s think outside the box.
00:57:19 No, we’re thinking inside the box.
00:57:20 So if you have, every cubic centimeter
00:57:22 of our observable universe is suffused with heat
00:57:25 left over from the Big Bang, dark matter particles.
00:57:28 There’s a little ordinary matter in the universe.
00:57:31 And every cubic centimeter,
00:57:33 there’s some probability to find a proton,
00:57:34 a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera.
00:57:37 There’s actually an awful lot of neutrinos
00:57:39 inside of that cubic centimeter.
00:57:41 Now just imagine how many cubic centimeters
00:57:43 are in the universe, it’s enormous.
00:57:44 That’s why there’s enormous numbers of particles
00:57:46 in our universe, it’s a very rich universe.
00:57:48 But now let’s zoom in on that box.
00:57:51 So now inside that box, there might be one,
00:57:54 let’s say there might be one ordinary matter,
00:57:56 like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton.
00:58:00 There might be a couple hundred neutrinos
00:58:03 and there’ll be a couple hundred photons, as I said, 420.
00:58:07 What’s between those guys?
00:58:08 What’s between the protons and the neutrinos
00:58:13 and the photons?
00:58:14 Like just zoom into a cubic micron now.
00:58:16 Like imagine 420 things inside a box this big.
00:58:19 It’s actually pretty empty.
00:58:20 Like they’re just zipping around in there, right?
00:58:22 So between them, there’s a lot of empty space.
00:58:24 And this is outside the kind of physics based models
00:58:27 of fields and all those kinds of things,
00:58:29 just like asking the question of like,
00:58:32 what is this emptiness?
00:58:33 What’s the particle content in the universe
00:58:35 in every cubic centimeter of the universe?
00:58:38 Outside of the 420.
00:58:39 So you have the 420, they have some mass.
00:58:44 Well, they have energy, they don’t have mass.
00:58:45 Photons don’t have mass.
00:58:47 That’s why they don’t bring suitcases.
00:58:48 You know, that’s true, right?
00:58:50 Photons never bring suitcases with them
00:58:53 because they’re traveling light.
00:58:55 See, I don’t even get to laugh at you.
00:58:56 That’s corny dad jokes.
00:58:58 Okay, you’ll appreciate some.
00:58:59 No, this is pretty good.
00:59:01 I’m laughing on the insides.
00:59:02 What’s in the box?
00:59:03 What’s the 420?
00:59:04 What’s between the photons?
00:59:07 That’s what space is.
00:59:08 That’s what the universe is expanding into.
00:59:10 Okay, so that’s the notebook
00:59:13 on which the photons are written.
00:59:16 That’s beautiful.
00:59:17 But still, thank you.
00:59:19 Still, I understand this, but it’s still uncomfortable
00:59:24 that if the universe is expanding,
00:59:27 that this thing is expanding, the canvas is expanding.
00:59:31 It’s very strange.
00:59:33 Because like if we were just sitting there still,
00:59:35 I guess if we’re in Brooklyn, nothing’s expanding.
00:59:37 So our cognition, our intuition about the world
00:59:41 is based on this local fact
00:59:44 that we don’t get to experience this kind of expansion.
00:59:49 Yeah, and that intuition leads us astray.
00:59:52 But you know that gravity is the weakest
00:59:54 of the so called four fundamental forces.
00:59:57 And yet it has the longest range pervasiveness.
01:00:00 Gravity is, you know, we’re being pulled
01:00:01 towards the Andromeda galaxy at some enormous rate of speed
01:00:05 because of its massive counter gravitational force
01:00:07 to the force we exert on it.
01:00:09 So gravity is enormously long range, but incredibly weak.
01:00:13 And because of that, we can think about these effects
01:00:17 of expansion as the relationship between the,
01:00:21 as you said, the grid lines on the notebook, right?
01:00:25 Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship
01:00:29 between those points, how far they are from each other.
01:00:33 And those can change, those point distances can change
01:00:36 over time because of the force of gravity.
01:00:39 So it’s weak and what we experience as gravity
01:00:43 is the changing of those trajectories
01:00:46 from being rectilinear to curvilinear.
01:00:48 That’s what we experience as gravity.
01:00:51 You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish
01:00:53 about bowling ball and a trampoline.
01:00:55 That’s almost right because it’s actually,
01:00:57 you have to visualize that now in four dimensions,
01:01:00 like wrapping a trampoline at every point
01:01:02 around the object, including on the sides,
01:01:04 and it becomes very hard to visualize.
01:01:06 So a lot of people use that.
01:01:08 It’s also a fraught analogy because you’re using gravity,
01:01:11 like the notion of gravity pulling something down
01:01:13 to explain the notion of gravity.
01:01:15 So it’s a little overburdening, the analogy.
01:01:18 But okay, so you mentioned Barry Barish
01:01:20 wrote the forward to your book.
01:01:22 How do gravitational waves fit into all of this?
01:01:24 How do they, on the emotional level,
01:01:26 how do they make you feel that they’re just
01:01:28 moving space time?
01:01:30 Yeah, so gravitational waves were,
01:01:33 the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery
01:01:35 the first time, it was discovered twice,
01:01:39 indirectly by two men named Halcyon Taylor,
01:01:43 and that was given my first year of graduate school.
01:01:45 The day I entered graduate school almost,
01:01:47 they announced these two guys won it,
01:01:49 and the guy who won it did the work
01:01:51 that would later win him the Nobel Prize
01:01:52 when he was my age.
01:01:53 Is this in the 40s?
01:01:55 This was, no, this is 19.
01:01:56 That was a joke.
01:01:57 Yeah, that was good, that was good.
01:01:59 I got it, I got it.
01:01:59 You know, to a cosmologist, age means nothing.
01:02:02 And to a tennis player.
01:02:03 Not on Tinder.
01:02:05 That’s right.
01:02:06 All right, sorry.
01:02:07 Gravitational waves do fit in
01:02:09 because what we’re trying to do now
01:02:12 is use the properties of gravitational waves,
01:02:15 the analogous properties that they have to photons,
01:02:18 that they travel at the speed of light,
01:02:20 that they go through everything,
01:02:21 they can go through everything,
01:02:22 and that they’re directly detectable.
01:02:24 We’re using them to try to confirm
01:02:28 if or if not inflation occurred.
01:02:32 So did inflation, the spark that ignited
01:02:34 the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe
01:02:37 and the initial expansion of the universe,
01:02:39 did that take place?
01:02:40 There’s only one way that cosmologists believe
01:02:43 we could ever see that.
01:02:44 Through the imprint
01:02:46 of these primordial gravitational waves,
01:02:48 not these old newcomers that Barry studies,
01:02:51 the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us,
01:02:55 a billion years ago,
01:02:56 but we’re seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago
01:02:59 during the inflationary epoch.
01:03:02 However, those, we cannot build a LIGO
01:03:05 and put it at the Big Bang.
01:03:07 So if you want to measure,
01:03:09 let’s say you have the old time firecracker,
01:03:12 let’s say there’s a firecracker,
01:03:13 and you want to see if it went off
01:03:15 in the building next door to you,
01:03:16 you can’t see it.
01:03:18 So you can’t see the imprint of it, but you can hear it.
01:03:21 And what we’re trying to do is hear
01:03:22 the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang,
01:03:25 not by using a camera or even an interferometer
01:03:29 like Barry used and his colleagues,
01:03:31 but instead using the CMB, the light,
01:03:35 the primordial ancient fossils of the universe,
01:03:37 the oldest light in the universe.
01:03:39 We’re gonna use that as a film, quote unquote,
01:03:43 onto which gravitational waves get exposed.
01:03:46 And hope you can, so what are the challenges there
01:03:48 to get enough accuracy for the exposure?
01:03:51 So the signal, as I said,
01:03:53 so there’s 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter,
01:03:56 and there’s a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe.
01:03:59 However, what we’re looking for
01:04:00 is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is.
01:04:04 We’re not looking for its color, what wavelength it is.
01:04:07 We’re looking for what its polarization is.
01:04:10 And we’ll go, let me just ask,
01:04:11 are you serious about the per cubic millimeter,
01:04:13 420 is the number?
01:04:15 Centimeter.
01:04:15 Yes, cubic centimeter, 420 is the number.
01:04:20 I wonder if Elon knows this,
01:04:21 and if he doesn’t, he will truly enjoy this.
01:04:23 Okay, yeah, that’s true.
01:04:26 Oh, okay, funding security, excellent.
01:04:30 So I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak,
01:04:34 of triumph that you described in losing the Nobel Prize.
01:04:38 So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.
01:04:42 Can you describe what bicep one and bicep two are,
01:04:46 bicep three, perhaps, the instruments
01:04:48 that can detect this kind of polarization?
01:04:51 What are the challenges, the origin story, the whole thing?
01:04:54 Yeah, so well, the origin story goes back again
01:04:57 to like a father son rivalry, it really does.
01:05:00 My father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera,
01:05:02 but he never won a Nobel Prize.
01:05:04 And some parents in America, they compete with their kids.
01:05:08 Oh, I was a football player in high school, I’ll show you.
01:05:10 And whatever, wrestling, whatever.
01:05:11 And some of us could be healthy too.
01:05:13 But with me and my dad, it wasn’t super healthy.
01:05:17 Like we would compete and he was much more
01:05:20 of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist.
01:05:23 So we had both different ideas
01:05:25 in what was worth prioritizing our time.
01:05:27 But I knew for sure he didn’t win the Nobel Prize.
01:05:30 And I knew I could kind of outdo him.
01:05:32 So I feel pretty venal and kind of minuscule
01:05:35 kind of character wise saying that.
01:05:37 The only reason you could outdo him
01:05:38 is because the Fields Medal is given every four years.
01:05:41 And only if you’re under 40, which he was.
01:05:43 So he’s working under much more limited conditions.
01:05:47 That’s right, so even if I had, which spoiler alert,
01:05:50 the book’s called Losing the Nobel Prize, so I didn’t do it.
01:05:53 But I wanted to do something big
01:05:54 and I wanted to do something that would really
01:05:58 just unequivocally be realized as in a discovery
01:06:01 for the ages, as in fact it was
01:06:02 when we made the premature announcement
01:06:04 that we had been successful.
01:06:05 So you were from the beginning reaching for the big questions.
01:06:10 That’s all I cared about.
01:06:11 As an experimenter you were swinging for the fences.
01:06:14 That’s all I wanted to do.
01:06:15 I felt like if it’s not, if it’s worth spending
01:06:20 perhaps the rest of my life on as a scientist,
01:06:24 it better be damn well better be interesting to me
01:06:26 to carry me through, to give me the,
01:06:29 I always say passion is great when people say,
01:06:31 oh, follow your passion, but it’s not enough.
01:06:33 Passion’s like the spark that ignites the rocket,
01:06:35 but that’s not enough to get the rocket into space.
01:06:38 So then you swung for the fences with Bicep One.
01:06:41 What is this?
01:06:42 So Bicep One was born out of
01:06:45 kind of interesting circumstances.
01:06:46 So I had gone to Stanford University for a postdoc,
01:06:49 so an academic hunger games.
01:06:51 Stanford? Stanford University.
01:06:54 Yeah, it’s this small little school.
01:06:56 It’s not like that technical college in Massachusetts
01:06:59 that you’re affiliated with.
01:07:00 But as I went there, I was working
01:07:04 for a new assistant professor.
01:07:05 She had gotten there only a year before I got there,
01:07:08 and she had her own priorities,
01:07:10 the things that she wanted to do.
01:07:12 But I kept thinking in my spare time
01:07:14 that I wanted to do something completely different.
01:07:16 She was studying galaxies at high redshift,
01:07:17 and I wanted to study the origin of the universe
01:07:19 using this type of technology.
01:07:22 And I realized, courtesy of a good friend of mine
01:07:25 who’s now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Haminkowski,
01:07:28 that we didn’t need this enormous Hubble telescope.
01:07:30 We didn’t need a 30 meter diameter telescope.
01:07:33 We needed a tiny refracting telescope,
01:07:35 no bigger than my head, less than a foot across.
01:07:38 And that telescope would have the same power
01:07:40 as a Hubble telescope, size telescope could have,
01:07:43 because the signals that we’re looking for
01:07:44 are enormous in wavelength on the sky.
01:07:46 They’re enormously long, large area signals on the sky.
01:07:50 And if we could measure that,
01:07:52 it would be proof, effectively,
01:07:53 as close as you get to proof,
01:07:54 there could be things that mimic it,
01:07:55 but that we discovered the inflationary epoch.
01:07:58 Inflation being the signal originally conceived
01:08:01 by Alan Guth to explain why the universe
01:08:04 had the large scale features that it does,
01:08:06 namely that it has so called flat geometry.
01:08:09 So there’s no way to make a triangle in space
01:08:12 in our universe that has three interior angles
01:08:15 that do not sum to 180 degrees.
01:08:18 You can do that with spacecraft,
01:08:19 you can do that with stars,
01:08:20 you can do that with laser beams,
01:08:21 you can do that with three different galaxies.
01:08:23 All those galaxies, no matter how far you go,
01:08:25 have this geometry, it’s remarkable.
01:08:27 But it’s also unstable, it’s very unlikely,
01:08:30 it’s very seemingly finely tuned.
01:08:32 And that was one of the motivations that Guth had
01:08:34 to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation 1979
01:08:39 when he was a postdoc also at Stanford, Slack.
01:08:42 And he was trying to get a permanent job,
01:08:44 I was trying to like make my name for myself.
01:08:46 And so I realized I could do this,
01:08:48 but I was also being paid by this professor at Stanford
01:08:51 to do a job for her.
01:08:53 And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you.
01:08:56 And then one day she couldn’t take it anymore
01:08:58 because I was like sketching notebooks
01:09:00 and planning these experiments.
01:09:01 And I just, I wasn’t, no, I actually.
01:09:03 Big ideas in your mind, you’re planning big experiments.
01:09:06 And that was difficult to work with on a small scale
01:09:10 for like a postdoc type of situation
01:09:12 where you have to publish basic papers,
01:09:15 deliver on some basic deadlines for a project,
01:09:17 all those kinds of things.
01:09:18 And support your advisors, paying, she was paying me.
01:09:21 And so one day I came in and it actually involved
01:09:26 another friend of mine, an astronomer named Jill Tarter,
01:09:28 one of the pioneers in the SETI science business
01:09:31 of detecting extraterrestrials,
01:09:33 which I assume you’d never like to talk about aliens,
01:09:35 so I’m sure we won’t get into aliens.
01:09:37 But Jill was visiting Stanford and I was like,
01:09:40 I really wanna meet her, can you introduce me?
01:09:41 And she said, no, in fact, you’re fired, my boss.
01:09:45 So I was like, this is possibly the best thing
01:09:48 that could ever happen to me.
01:09:50 I didn’t know where it would lead or what would happen to it,
01:09:52 but getting fired from this ultra prestigious university
01:09:56 turned out to be the path, I mean, literally,
01:09:58 that brings me here today, in that because of that,
01:10:02 I ended up working for another person in Caltech,
01:10:05 which is in Pasadena, and she, my original boss,
01:10:10 Sarah Church, she got me the job with her former advisor,
01:10:12 a man by the name of Andrew Lang.
01:10:14 And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don’t know,
01:10:17 like he’s like Steve Jobs or Elon, charismatic,
01:10:23 handsome, persuasive, idea man,
01:10:27 not the guy always in the lobby and doing everything,
01:10:29 but understood where things are going decades from now.
01:10:33 And he had been involved in an experiment
01:10:35 that actually measured the universe was flat,
01:10:37 very close to flat, along with a preceding experiment
01:10:41 done at Princeton by Lyman Page and other collaborators.
01:10:43 So the shape of the universe is flat.
01:10:45 The geometry of the universe is flat.
01:10:47 How did he do that experiment?
01:10:49 So he used the cosmic microwave background.
01:10:51 And so what I said is you have to look for triangles
01:10:54 in the universe.
01:10:55 So you can measure triangles on earth.
01:10:56 You can actually, it’s hard to show that the earth is curved,
01:10:59 but you can show the earth is curved using triangles,
01:11:02 mountain tops, et cetera,
01:11:03 if you have an accurate enough protractor.
01:11:04 Allegedly, yeah.
01:11:05 Yeah.
01:11:07 God, you’re like auto canceling.
01:11:09 This is great.
01:11:11 My ratings are gonna go up, man.
01:11:12 This is gonna be great.
01:11:13 Take out the cake.
01:11:14 If you want actual science, go listen to Brian.
01:11:17 If you want all of these conspiracy theories
01:11:19 or AKA the truth about flat earth, listen to him.
01:11:23 So what he used was the following triangle.
01:11:27 There are proto galaxy sized objects in the CMB.
01:11:32 The cosmic microwave background has these patches.
01:11:34 And so you can make a triangle out of the diameter
01:11:37 of one of these blobs of primordial plasma,
01:11:41 the soup that constitutes the early universe,
01:11:43 which is hydrogen.
01:11:44 It’s very simple material.
01:11:46 Understand hydrogen electrons and radiation, very simple.
01:11:48 Plasma physicists, son, understand it.
01:11:51 The diameter is one base of the triangle.
01:11:54 And then the distance to the earth is the other two legs.
01:11:57 So he measured along with his colleagues at Caltech
01:12:00 and then University of Rome and that’s other group
01:12:02 at Princeton, measured the angle,
01:12:05 interior angle effectively very, very accurately
01:12:08 and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.
01:12:11 Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB?
01:12:15 Can you know where they could trace them back location wise?
01:12:19 You can know where they are, but more than that,
01:12:21 there’s so many of these patches.
01:12:22 They’re about one square degree on the sky.
01:12:25 The sky, you may know, a sphere has about 44,000
01:12:28 square degrees in a sphere.
01:12:30 So there’s literally 44,000 of these size patches
01:12:33 over which he could do these kinds of measurements
01:12:36 to build up very good statistics.
01:12:37 That’s not exactly how they do it
01:12:39 or how they did it in this experiment called Boomerang,
01:12:41 but they did measure very accurately
01:12:43 the what was called the first Doppler peak
01:12:46 or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.
01:12:49 So the sphere has 44, approximately 44,000 square degrees.
01:12:56 So to cover a sphere, that’s a very kind of important
01:12:59 data collection thing when you’re sitting on a sphere
01:13:01 and you’re looking out into the observable universe.
01:13:04 So there’s a lot of patches to work with.
01:13:07 Yeah, and in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic
01:13:11 decomposition of spheres and machine learning
01:13:13 in the early 2000s still used today
01:13:16 was created out of this field by data analysts
01:13:18 using this thing called hierarchical equal area triangles
01:13:21 called heel picks is what it’s called.
01:13:24 And so just stitch all this stuff together
01:13:26 and stitch it together very accurately.
01:13:29 Yeah, get high statistical significance
01:13:32 in order to reduce the statistical errors,
01:13:34 very clean signal and a measurement device
01:13:37 to reduce the systematic errors.
01:13:39 Those are the two predominant sources of error
01:13:41 in any measurement.
01:13:42 Those that can be improved by more and more measurement,
01:13:44 you take more and more measurements to this table,
01:13:46 you’ll get slightly better each time,
01:13:48 but you only win as the number of the one
01:13:51 over the square root of the number of measurements,
01:13:53 but the square root of 44,000 is pretty big.
01:13:55 So they were able to get a very accurate measurement.
01:13:57 Again, it’s not exactly how they did it.
01:13:58 They also have to do a Fourier analysis,
01:14:00 decompose that, do a power spectrum, filtration windows.
01:14:04 There’s a lot of work that goes into it, image analysis,
01:14:06 and then comparing that with cosmological parameters,
01:14:09 very simple model, just six different numbers
01:14:12 that go into a model that made a prediction.
01:14:14 And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out.
01:14:16 And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature,
01:14:19 and that was called boomerang.
01:14:20 So he had just come off of this.
01:14:22 Now, let me remind you, who was the first person
01:14:25 to measure the curvature of the earth?
01:14:27 It’s a guy named Aristophanes in the whatever,
01:14:29 lived around Aristotle’s time.
01:14:31 His name is in the history books.
01:14:33 So this guy, Andrew Lang, I was like,
01:14:35 he’s like the next Aristophanes.
01:14:38 I just wanted to work for this guy.
01:14:39 He clearly had this brand.
01:14:41 He was about 40 at the time, California
01:14:43 Scientist of the Year.
01:14:45 I was sure he was going to win a Nobel Prize for that.
01:14:48 And I knew that he, so I went down to Caltech
01:14:51 to give my job talk.
01:14:53 And he said, I love it.
01:14:54 You got a job.
01:14:56 And before I could even, before he finished the sentence,
01:14:58 I said, I’ll take it.
01:15:00 It was too good to be true.
01:15:01 And I started working there at Caltech,
01:15:03 and slowly but surely, because Caltech’s
01:15:05 a rich private university, at that time
01:15:08 run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore,
01:15:11 he just wrote us a check.
01:15:12 Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started on this idea.
01:15:15 And so we started coming up with the idea for what I later
01:15:18 named BICEP, background imaging cosmic extragalactic
01:15:21 polarization, which is kind of ironic,
01:15:23 because we ended up measuring galactic polarization.
01:15:26 We’ll get to that in a minute.
01:15:27 But along the way, the idea was very simple.
01:15:30 We’re going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly
01:15:32 make, which is a refracting telescope.
01:15:35 Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes
01:15:37 in your head.
01:15:38 Only way forward is making things more complex, right?
01:15:41 And when you make things complex in science,
01:15:43 you introduce the possibility for systematic errors.
01:15:46 And so we wanted to build the cleanest instrument.
01:15:48 Turns out the cleanest instrument
01:15:49 you can build in astronomy is a refracting telescope.
01:15:52 We also had to, unlike that telescope or Galileo’s,
01:15:55 we had to use very sensitive detectors that
01:15:58 were cooled less than 1 20th of the temperature
01:16:02 of the cosmic background itself, which
01:16:04 is the coolest temperature in the whole universe.
01:16:07 So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees
01:16:10 Kelvin above absolute zero.
01:16:12 To do that, we needed to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber
01:16:14 and suck out all the air molecules and water molecules
01:16:17 and take it to a very, very special place called the South
01:16:21 Pole Antarctica, from which I retrieved for you a patch.
01:16:24 There it is over there.
01:16:27 So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.
01:16:30 Bright.
01:16:30 Oh, yeah.
01:16:31 As somebody who was born in the Soviet Union,
01:16:34 we obviously like to call it red.
01:16:35 United States Antarctic Program, the National Science
01:16:40 Foundation.
01:16:41 And the base is called the Amundsen Scott South Polar
01:16:44 Station.
01:16:45 So it’s a little known fact of geopolitics
01:16:47 that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it.
01:16:51 Now, there is a treaty in Antarctica.
01:16:53 You can’t use it for military purposes, for mining,
01:16:56 et cetera, et cetera.
01:16:57 But I don’t know if you know, but about 12 years ago,
01:16:59 Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole.
01:17:01 Now, there’s no land at the North Pole, right?
01:17:04 So what did he do?
01:17:05 He stuck it in the ocean underneath.
01:17:07 But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica,
01:17:10 which was first reached about 110 years ago,
01:17:13 the first time in human history.
01:17:15 Antarctica means the opposite of the bear.
01:17:18 It means no bears there, basically opposite
01:17:20 of where polar bears are.
01:17:21 Arctic means polar bear.
01:17:23 That’s where in the Greek.
01:17:24 I did not know that.
01:17:25 Fascinating.
01:17:25 So Antarctica means the opposite place of that.
01:17:27 Humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole,
01:17:30 which is kind of in the middle of the continent.
01:17:33 We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry.
01:17:37 It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego, Texas,
01:17:40 and there’s no place like the South Pole or Chile.
01:17:43 Those are the two premier places on Earth.
01:17:46 Of course, you’d like to go into space.
01:17:47 There’s no water in space.
01:17:48 So it’s not about cold.
01:17:51 It’s about dry.
01:17:52 Exactly.
01:17:52 So that’s why, for example, you can take this vodka,
01:17:57 and you could put it in this cup.
01:17:59 And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere
01:18:01 and heat it up.
01:18:03 After two minutes, three minutes, the water’s boiling.
01:18:05 You can’t touch it.
01:18:06 Take it from me.
01:18:07 Don’t touch it.
01:18:08 But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to.
01:18:10 Why?
01:18:10 Because the mug is totally bone dry.
01:18:13 But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules
01:18:15 because water molecules resonate exactly
01:18:17 at these microwave frequencies.
01:18:19 So we don’t want these precious photons, 420 of them,
01:18:22 traveling per cubic centimeter from the Big Bang itself
01:18:26 to get absorbed in some water molecule in the Earth’s
01:18:28 atmosphere.
01:18:28 So you take it to a place with the fewest number
01:18:30 of water molecules per square centimeter of surface area.
01:18:34 And that happens to be either Chile
01:18:35 or my other project, the Simons Observatory, is located.
01:18:38 Or you take it to the South Pole.
01:18:40 We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months
01:18:44 of my life down there.
01:18:46 And it’s like being on Hoth.
01:18:49 It’s a completely otherworldly environment.
01:18:52 Ice, planar, flat as a pancake.
01:18:55 And the buildings are built up on stilts.
01:18:59 They’re built because the snow will otherwise cover them over.
01:19:03 The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away.
01:19:06 If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth,
01:19:08 they yank them before you go down there.
01:19:11 If you have any issues with your appendix,
01:19:12 they’ll cut it out of you before you go down there.
01:19:15 The Russians at Vostok base, not too far away,
01:19:17 about 600 miles away.
01:19:18 The doctors there, there’s a famous picture of one
01:19:20 of them operating on himself, taking out his own appendix
01:19:24 in the middle of winter by himself.
01:19:26 So harsh conditions.
01:19:27 Science in the harshest of conditions.
01:19:29 On Earth, at least.
01:19:31 And we go to those great lengths because it’s
01:19:33 a pristine environment to observe these precious photons.
01:19:36 And we built this telescope.
01:19:38 And it weighs tens of thousands of pounds.
01:19:40 And it had to scan the sky almost like it’s a robot.
01:19:44 I mean, it’s scanning the sky almost unattended.
01:19:48 We have a guy who spends a year of his life down there,
01:19:50 a girl who spends a year of their life down there.
01:19:53 They’re called winter overs.
01:19:54 They arrive in sometimes as early as November.
01:19:56 And they don’t leave until the following December.
01:19:59 And we always joke, we’ll pay you $75,000.
01:20:02 You just have to work for one night of your life.
01:20:04 That’s all.
01:20:05 But it’s a long night.
01:20:08 And what BICEP is, and I couldn’t
01:20:10 bring my polarized sunglasses here,
01:20:12 so I brought these actual polarizers here.
01:20:14 So if you take this and put it in front of your telescope
01:20:17 there, you have now made a polarimeter.
01:20:21 You have made a polarization sensitive telescope.
01:20:24 Now, you may not be able to immediately know
01:20:26 how you would use such a thing.
01:20:27 But one way to think about it, now take this guy
01:20:30 and look at a light, look at a light source.
01:20:33 Put one up to your eye.
01:20:34 And now put the other one in front of it anywhere.
01:20:37 And now rotate them.
01:20:40 What happens to the light source?
01:20:42 Becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.
01:20:45 Yeah, so it’s called a quadrupolar pattern, right?
01:20:48 So it’s repeating.
01:20:49 It goes bright, dim, bright, dim.
01:20:51 It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical
01:20:55 rotation.
01:20:56 And that’s because of the property of the photon.
01:20:58 The photon is a spin one field.
01:21:00 But the polarization of light is the axis
01:21:04 at which its electric field is oscillating.
01:21:07 Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down.
01:21:10 And so therefore, vertical polarization
01:21:12 is the same as negative vertical polarization.
01:21:15 And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times
01:21:17 for every one physical rotation.
01:21:19 This is like a spin two object.
01:21:22 So now if you put that in front of the telescope,
01:21:26 you can do one of two things.
01:21:27 Now you’re polarizing all the light that’s
01:21:29 going in because you have one of the polarizers.
01:21:31 And then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one.
01:21:34 You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization.
01:21:37 Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here.
01:21:40 There’s a crystal.
01:21:40 It’s called calcite.
01:21:42 This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman.
01:21:44 This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes
01:21:47 there and tell me what does it look like?
01:21:50 There’s a, like I could see everything twice.
01:21:56 It’s a double image.
01:21:57 It’s a double image.
01:21:58 That is a special crystal that has two different indices
01:22:01 of refraction.
01:22:02 So light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink,
01:22:06 comes out.
01:22:07 And it splits into two different directions.
01:22:09 And it could split even more if I made the crystal give you
01:22:12 my more expensive crystal.
01:22:13 But that’s all I have.
01:22:14 What is the crystal with this kind of property called?
01:22:16 It’s called calcite.
01:22:17 This is crystal.
01:22:18 It’s called birefringent crystal.
01:22:20 Bi means two.
01:22:21 Refringent means refracting.
01:22:23 So this is a special type of material
01:22:25 that separates light based on its polarization.
01:22:28 It’s a pretty clean bi signal.
01:22:31 It’s cleanly two.
01:22:35 I’m seeing two very cleanly.
01:22:36 It’s very crisp, right.
01:22:37 So that’s yours to keep with every time you host me.
01:22:40 Now, take the polarizer underneath your left hand.
01:22:43 Put it on top of the crystal, and kind of move it back
01:22:47 and forth.
01:22:48 What’s happening?
01:22:49 This is incredible.
01:22:50 You can switch.
01:22:51 As you rotate, you switch from one signal to the other.
01:22:55 So it’s one of the refractions to the other.
01:22:58 Whoa.
01:22:59 So that is now you are analyzing the polarization.
01:23:02 You’re confirming the light comes out of the crystal.
01:23:05 Two different types of polarization.
01:23:07 And effectively, what we do is we have those two things,
01:23:11 if you like.
01:23:12 But working in the microwave, so that’s
01:23:14 where the cosmic photons are brightest,
01:23:16 in the microwave regime in the electromagnetic spectrum.
01:23:19 And we’re coupling that to a refracting telescope.
01:23:22 But your eyes are refracting telescopes.
01:23:23 So you are a polarimeter right now.
01:23:25 The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization.
01:23:29 But otherwise, it mainly detects its intensity of light
01:23:31 and the color.
01:23:32 That’s what we call color and intensity, brightness.
01:23:34 So you’re devising an instrument that’s
01:23:37 very precisely measuring that polarization.
01:23:38 Exactly.
01:23:39 And doing so in the microwave region with detectors
01:23:42 not made of biological human retina cells,
01:23:46 but of superconductors and things called bolometers.
01:23:49 And this has to be done at temperatures
01:23:52 close to absolute zero under vacuum conditions
01:23:55 one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.
01:23:58 So why is it that this kind of device
01:24:01 could win a Nobel Prize?
01:24:03 So when the CMB was discovered, it
01:24:05 was discovered serendipitously.
01:24:07 There were two radio astronomers working at the time
01:24:11 at Bell Laboratories.
01:24:13 Now, why would Bell Laboratories be
01:24:14 employing radio astronomers?
01:24:16 Bell Laboratories was kind of like Apple,
01:24:19 or it was like a think tank, or it was Google.
01:24:21 Let’s say it was like Google.
01:24:23 Google has Google X. It has this thing and that thing, right?
01:24:26 So they were working there.
01:24:28 But imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers.
01:24:31 They were actively recruiting them.
01:24:32 Why would they do that?
01:24:33 Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s,
01:24:36 was the first commercial satellite
01:24:39 launch for communication.
01:24:41 And so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone
01:24:44 part of AT&T, the early telephone company,
01:24:47 later invent the first cell phone the year I was born.
01:24:50 And they would take that, 1946, and they
01:24:53 would take that telescope technology
01:24:56 that radio astronomers had developed,
01:24:58 and they would use that to see if they
01:25:00 could improve the signal to noise of the satellites
01:25:02 that they were seeing.
01:25:03 And they found they couldn’t.
01:25:05 They found that they could not improve the signal to noise
01:25:07 ratio of the first telecommunication satellite.
01:25:10 It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem.
01:25:13 They were bouncing signals from the West Coast
01:25:16 up to the satellite, bouncing it down,
01:25:18 landing it in New Jersey, of all places,
01:25:21 in northern New Jersey, Holmdell, New Jersey.
01:25:25 And these radio astronomers couldn’t get rid of the signal.
01:25:27 So they said, well, New Jersey’s not far from New York.
01:25:30 Let’s see if the signal’s coming from New York.
01:25:31 No, not coming from New York.
01:25:33 Let’s see if it changes with the year.
01:25:34 Maybe it’s coming from the galaxy,
01:25:35 which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930 something.
01:25:38 So in not being able to reduce the signal
01:25:41 or increase the signal to noise ratio, the noise was not good.
01:25:45 They knew the signal was right.
01:25:46 They couldn’t get rid of the noise.
01:25:48 And there was excess noise over the model that
01:25:50 had not only been predicted by them,
01:25:52 but had been measured by a previous guy, a guy
01:25:54 by the name of Edward Ohm.
01:25:55 He measured the same signal, found
01:25:57 that there was this hiss of static, of radio static
01:26:00 that he could not get rid of, that had
01:26:02 a value of about 3 Kelvin.
01:26:04 So you can translate.
01:26:04 Remember I said, if you take a radio telescope
01:26:07 and you point it at an object that’s hot,
01:26:10 the radio telescope’s detector will
01:26:12 get to the same temperature as the object.
01:26:14 It’s a principle of radio thermodynamics.
01:26:16 So it’s a really interesting thing.
01:26:17 It’s a thermometer.
01:26:18 You can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth.
01:26:20 It’s amazing.
01:26:21 And so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal
01:26:24 not by its intensity, but by its temperature.
01:26:27 So he found, this guy Edward Ohm, oh, there’s
01:26:29 this 3 Kelvin signal.
01:26:31 I can’t get rid of it.
01:26:32 It must be I did my error analysis wrong.
01:26:35 And I would give him an F if he was one of my first year
01:26:37 students.
01:26:38 But he’s just attributed to lack of understanding.
01:26:41 These other guys, Penzias and Wilson,
01:26:43 who are also radio astronomers, they said, no,
01:26:46 let’s build another experiment, put that inside
01:26:49 of our telescope, and do what’s called calibration.
01:26:53 Inject a known source of signal every second that
01:26:56 has a temperature of about 4 Kelvin,
01:26:58 because the signal they’re trying to get rid of
01:27:00 is about 3 Kelvin.
01:27:01 And you want to have it as close as possible
01:27:02 to the pernicious signal as possible.
01:27:04 They did that once a second.
01:27:06 So they got billions of measurements,
01:27:07 millions of measurements over the course
01:27:08 of several months, years, and even,
01:27:11 by the end of, you know, millions of measurements
01:27:13 for sure.
01:27:14 And they found they couldn’t get rid of it either,
01:27:16 but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 degrees Kelvin.
01:27:20 So how does having a 4 Kelvin source,
01:27:24 how does the calibration work, just out of curiosity?
01:27:26 It could be larger.
01:27:27 Imagine like you’re trying to calibrate the microphone.
01:27:29 Like you could do it with like a really loud sound,
01:27:31 but the gain would start to compress.
01:27:33 So there are amplifiers downstream from the detector
01:27:36 in every experiment that I’ve ever worked on.
01:27:38 And they only have a linear region over a very small region.
01:27:41 And you want to keep it as linear as possible.
01:27:43 That means you want, if you’re trying to get rid of it,
01:27:45 you’re trying to compare like a voice,
01:27:47 and you’re trying to compare that to a jet engine,
01:27:49 it’s not going to be as easy on the amplifiers
01:27:52 as getting a slightly loud gong or something, you know.
01:27:55 So the idea of the noise is present in both?
01:27:59 There’s noise present in both.
01:28:00 And you measure, what they did is
01:28:02 they made a separate measurement just
01:28:03 of the calibration system, which they measured
01:28:06 exactly very well.
01:28:07 4 Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium.
01:28:09 That’s a temperature that’s not going to change.
01:28:11 And it’s certainly not going to change
01:28:12 over a time scale of one second.
01:28:14 And so they could compare unknown signal,
01:28:16 known signal, unknown signal, known signal,
01:28:17 like a scale, like a balance.
01:28:18 So another way to think about it is like this.
01:28:20 You’ve seen these Libra kind of balances,
01:28:22 where you put two weights in a pan, right?
01:28:24 What happens if you put like a one ounce weight on one side
01:28:27 and a 20 kilogram weight in the other?
01:28:28 You don’t get any measurement, right?
01:28:30 You do get kind of a measurement if they’re close in weight.
01:28:32 That’s why they use 4 Kelvin.
01:28:33 Got it, but just to linger on the fact
01:28:36 that there’s a romantic element to the fact
01:28:38 that you’re arriving at the same temperature.
01:28:41 That’s kind of fascinating.
01:28:42 And you measuring stuff in terms of,
01:28:43 you’re measuring signal in terms of temperature
01:28:45 at the source.
01:28:46 Yeah.
01:28:47 So you get to, I mean, there’s something
01:28:49 about temperature that’s intimate.
01:28:51 Yeah.
01:28:52 It’s cool.
01:28:52 Yeah, especially since, you know, all life
01:28:55 is basically, you know, conversion of energy
01:28:57 and trying to control entropy,
01:28:58 which is then related to thermodynamics
01:29:01 exactly in that way.
01:29:02 And this is very crucial kind of thing to do in science
01:29:06 because they weren’t looking for the signal.
01:29:08 They found it accidentally,
01:29:10 these two scientists, Penzias and Wilson.
01:29:12 And I like to think that those kinds of discoveries
01:29:15 are the purest in science.
01:29:16 Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said,
01:29:19 like the most important reaction as a scientist is not,
01:29:22 Eureka, which means in Greek, as you know, I have found it.
01:29:26 No, he said, no, he said like, that’s weird.
01:29:29 Like that’s a much better reaction
01:29:30 or that’s freaking cool.
01:29:31 Like that’s a scientist, not like, oh, I found one.
01:29:34 Because.
01:29:35 Surprise.
01:29:36 Yeah.
01:29:37 Yeah.
01:29:38 Because if you find what you’re gonna find,
01:29:38 that’s what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias,
01:29:43 which is deadly inside, you know,
01:29:44 as close to deadly as possible.
01:29:46 So how does that take us to something
01:29:47 that’s potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize?
01:29:51 So Penzias and Wilson weren’t looking for a signal.
01:29:54 They ended up discovering the heat leftover
01:29:56 from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, et cetera.
01:30:01 And that was a serendipitous discovery.
01:30:03 They won the Nobel Prize in 1978.
01:30:04 It was the first one ever awarded in cosmology.
01:30:07 My reasoning is, what if you could explain
01:30:09 not only how the elements got formed,
01:30:11 but how the whole universe got formed
01:30:13 and kill off every other model of science.
01:30:16 So if that weren’t enough, every scientist, you know,
01:30:19 worth his or her salt had told me and Andrew Lang
01:30:23 and our colleagues, this is a slam dunk Nobel Prize,
01:30:26 if you could do it.
01:30:27 Because it was really explaining, again,
01:30:29 the stakes of this science is different
01:30:31 than like super fluidity, plasma physics.
01:30:33 When you talk about the origin of the universe,
01:30:36 it ties into everything.
01:30:37 It ties into philosophy, theology.
01:30:41 You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct,
01:30:45 that the Bible can’t be correct.
01:30:47 In other words, where the Bible is correct now
01:30:49 isn’t falsified, if you like, if you believe it.
01:30:52 I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously.
01:30:54 But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning.
01:30:57 What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular?
01:31:00 It would be more like the cosmology of Akhenaten
01:31:03 and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament,
01:31:07 if you will, narrative.
01:31:08 So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher.
01:31:11 And again, it’s not an offense, because we need plasma physics.
01:31:14 We need every type of physics except maybe biophysics.
01:31:17 We literally use every branch of physics, thermodynamics,
01:31:20 superconductivity, quantum mechanics,
01:31:22 all that goes into our understanding
01:31:24 of the instrument.
01:31:25 And even further, if you want to understand the theory that
01:31:27 predicts the signal that we purport to measure.
01:31:29 So I rationalize that if Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel
01:31:34 Prize for this, if Hulse and Taylor won the Nobel
01:31:37 Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves,
01:31:39 this is decades before LIGO, by me detecting
01:31:43 gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe
01:31:46 began, detecting the origin of the initial conditions
01:31:50 for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which
01:31:52 won the Nobel Prize in 1983.
01:31:55 These are like five Nobel Prizes potentially.
01:31:57 For that reason, it seemed as close
01:32:00 as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk,
01:32:02 to outdo what my father did, to do really this impossible.
01:32:06 And at that time, Lex, again, it sounds weird.
01:32:10 Because people are like, oh, you still want the Nobel Prize.
01:32:15 You’re still like greedy.
01:32:16 And look, you wrote another book about it.
01:32:19 And I always joke.
01:32:19 I’m like, well, if you want to see if I’m a hypocrite,
01:32:21 just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature.
01:32:23 And if I accept it, then I’m a hypocrite.
01:32:26 Oh, wait, well, we’ll get to your current feelings
01:32:29 on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrite and so on.
01:32:33 So there’s this ambition.
01:32:35 Let’s say this device, this kind of signal
01:32:38 could unlock many of the mysteries
01:32:40 about the early universe.
01:32:42 And so there’s excitement there.
01:32:44 So let’s take it then further.
01:32:47 I mean, there’s a human story here of a bit of heartbreak.
01:32:50 Not only was this possibly worth a Nobel Prize,
01:32:54 if the Nobel Prize was given,
01:32:57 you were excluded from the list of three
01:32:59 that would get the Nobel Prize.
01:33:01 So why were you excluded?
01:33:04 Maybe that’s a place to tell the story of Bicep 2.
01:33:07 Yeah, so Bicep 2, like iPhones,
01:33:10 or I know you’re an Android fanboy,
01:33:12 but every year, they get a little bit better.
01:33:14 They get more megapixels.
01:33:15 They get more optics, triple X zoom, whatever, OK?
01:33:19 We upgraded our detectors as well.
01:33:21 The initial detectors were based on what
01:33:23 are called semiconductors.
01:33:24 They have certain properties that
01:33:26 make them very difficult to replicate at scale.
01:33:29 And we wanted to make them into superconductors, which
01:33:32 had a virtue that you could then mass produce them.
01:33:35 Why superconductors?
01:33:36 Well, again, we’re measuring heat.
01:33:38 So one thing about a superconductor
01:33:40 is that it transitions from some finite resistance
01:33:43 to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature
01:33:47 range.
01:33:48 That means you can use that very short span dependency
01:33:51 as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer.
01:33:54 And so my brilliant colleagues around the world,
01:33:56 in this case, Jamie Bok, and nowadays, Suzanne Staggs
01:33:59 at Princeton, they are just exquisitely
01:34:02 making these sensors, tens of thousands of them.
01:34:05 The initial Bicep 1 instrument, of course,
01:34:07 we just call the Bicep, that only had 98 detectors.
01:34:12 Simon’s Observatory is going to have 100 times more just
01:34:15 in one of our four telescopes.
01:34:17 We’re going to have 60,000 detectors operating
01:34:20 full time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero
01:34:24 in the Atacama Desert.
01:34:25 We’ll get there.
01:34:26 But in the case of getting back to what Bicep did,
01:34:30 we upgraded and made Bicep 2.
01:34:32 In January 2010, we had just installed
01:34:37 in the exact same location at the South Pole,
01:34:42 in the same building, which is ominously called the Dark
01:34:45 Sector Laboratory, DSL, still operating to this very day,
01:34:49 we installed a new receiver on the same platform as before.
01:34:54 It had very similar identical optics, cryogenics, vacuum,
01:34:57 everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors.
01:35:02 So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade.
01:35:05 And it had certain other features
01:35:06 that made it even more powerful than just a naive factor of 5.
01:35:11 And then we started observing with that.
01:35:12 And we knew we’d have years to go,
01:35:14 and maybe we’d never see anything.
01:35:15 Again, we’re looking for these tiny little reverberations
01:35:17 in the fabric of space time produced
01:35:19 close to the origin of the universe as we could ever
01:35:21 get to.
01:35:23 So I was playing a role in that.
01:35:24 Obviously, it had upgraded my version of the original idea
01:35:28 that I had had for BICEP along with Andrew Lang.
01:35:32 And in January of 2010, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley,
01:35:37 and I got a call from Andrew Lang’s,
01:35:39 or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang’s thesis advisor,
01:35:41 Paul Richards at UC Berkeley.
01:35:43 And he said that Andrew was dead.
01:35:45 He had taken his life by suicide.
01:35:48 And this is a man, and I had already lost my father
01:35:51 at this point in 2010, but he was like a father figure
01:35:54 to me, Andrew.
01:35:55 He would give me advice on marriage,
01:35:58 on how I should be with my kids, and what
01:36:02 was the most important way to move
01:36:03 through the academic ladder.
01:36:04 Again, he was predinaturally suited to win the Nobel Prize.
01:36:08 Everyone always thought he would win it.
01:36:10 If he were alive, he still could win it.
01:36:12 In fact, his wife, or his ex wife,
01:36:14 won it, Frances Arnold, in 2018.
01:36:17 And it was this power couple, and it destroyed me
01:36:22 for a long time, because he was just this magical person.
01:36:27 I mean, I couldn’t conceive of my career, my life,
01:36:31 even these aspects of raising kids and being married
01:36:35 without him.
01:36:37 And to do it in that way, it felt like, again,
01:36:40 he’s got kids, and I feel terrible for them, obviously.
01:36:44 But it did feel like a betrayal.
01:36:45 I mean, I’m just being honest with you.
01:36:47 It felt like, why the f did you not reach out?
01:36:50 I thought we were close, and I couldn’t.
01:36:52 I told him everything, and I felt
01:36:54 like he had told me everything.
01:36:56 And now he was gone.
01:36:57 And then, inevitably, we had to keep running the instrument.
01:36:59 I mean, there’s millions of dollars invested,
01:37:01 careers at stake, young people working tremendously hard.
01:37:05 And then here we were.
01:37:06 And who’s going to take over the lead?
01:37:08 He was the lead of the project at Caltech.
01:37:10 And then it turned out that the other collaborators,
01:37:14 with whom I had been working for years and shared a lot of ups
01:37:16 and downs with as well, they had decided
01:37:19 to form a collaboration in which I was no longer
01:37:21 the principal investigator.
01:37:23 I was no longer one of the co principal investigators,
01:37:25 as I was on Bicep 1.
01:37:26 So I continued on Bicep 1 as the co leader of it,
01:37:29 but not on Bicep 2.
01:37:31 And obviously, that was pretty painful.
01:37:34 This is all happening at the same time
01:37:36 as you lose this father figure.
01:37:40 Now there’s this one betrayal in a way,
01:37:45 and then there’s another, or something
01:37:47 that feels like a betrayal.
01:37:48 Yeah, and he had been the only one
01:37:51 looking out for my interest in the new experiment.
01:37:54 I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego,
01:37:57 and there were other postdocs in the mix,
01:37:59 all of whom had come there to work with him
01:38:01 to get the approbation that would then lead
01:38:03 to their careers taking off, as it did for mine.
01:38:06 And so there was a competition.
01:38:09 Science is not free from egos and competition
01:38:13 and desires, rightfully or wrongfully,
01:38:15 for credit and attribution.
01:38:17 Was he the source of strength and confidence
01:38:20 for you as a scientist, as a man?
01:38:22 I mean, we’re kind of alone in this world.
01:38:26 When you take on difficult things,
01:38:28 we often kind of grasp at a few folks
01:38:31 that give us strength.
01:38:33 Yeah.
01:38:34 Was he basically your only source of strength
01:38:37 in this whole journey, like primarily
01:38:39 in terms of this close knit?
01:38:41 As a scientist, there were really two.
01:38:43 There was one, this Russian cosmologist,
01:38:46 Alexander Polnareff, who thankfully is very much alive.
01:38:48 He was at Queen Mary University.
01:38:51 Now he’s retired.
01:38:52 He was kind of a theoretical, cosmological father to me.
01:38:56 And then Andrew was this counterpoint
01:38:58 that was teaching me, you need to have a brand as a scientist.
01:39:02 Every scientist has a brand.
01:39:04 And some of them don’t protect it.
01:39:05 Some of them don’t burnish it.
01:39:07 But some of the skills about being a scientist
01:39:10 we don’t teach our students involve,
01:39:12 how do you cultivate a scientific persona?
01:39:16 And he was the exemplar for that,
01:39:18 in addition to being the avuncular father figure type
01:39:22 character that really was the person I would talk to.
01:39:26 I had issues with when I had issues with my own students.
01:39:29 And he would tell me how those were.
01:39:30 And he would tell me his misgivings about people
01:39:34 that he worked with or things in his personal life.
01:39:36 And it was devastating.
01:39:39 But again, who the hell am I?
01:39:40 I’m not his kid.
01:39:42 His kid’s lost father.
01:39:44 So I feel guilty talking about it in that sense,
01:39:46 but it’s just a reality.
01:39:48 Well, there is something that’s not often talked about
01:39:50 is people who collaborate on scientific efforts.
01:39:55 I mean, that’s, I don’t, again, don’t wanna compare,
01:39:58 but sometimes when the collaborations are truly great,
01:40:03 it sounds similar as when veterans talk about
01:40:09 their time serving together.
01:40:11 There’s a bond that’s formed.
01:40:12 So like comparing family and this kind of thing is,
01:40:15 you know, it’s not productive,
01:40:19 but the depth of the bond is nevertheless real
01:40:25 because you’re taking on something,
01:40:28 you’re taking on the impossible.
01:40:30 You’re trying to achieve something,
01:40:32 sort of like there’s this darkness,
01:40:33 this fog of mystery that we’re all surrounded by,
01:40:37 which is what the human condition is.
01:40:40 And you are like grasping at hope
01:40:42 through the tools of science.
01:40:44 And you’re doing that together
01:40:46 with like a confidence you probably should not have,
01:40:50 but you’re boldly pushing through.
01:40:51 And then for him to take his own life,
01:40:57 can I ask you about this kind of moment that combined,
01:41:02 I don’t wanna say betrayal,
01:41:03 but perhaps the feeling of betrayal
01:41:05 that Bicep 2 kind of goes on without you,
01:41:09 even though you’re part of it,
01:41:11 you’re not part of the leadership group.
01:41:15 Can you describe those low points?
01:41:18 Was there a depression?
01:41:19 Or was there a crumbling of confidence?
01:41:23 Yeah, I mean, it was so wrapped up
01:41:26 with my identity as a person.
01:41:28 You know, like there’s only a few different ways
01:41:31 to have identity unless you’re unhealthy psychologically.
01:41:34 One of them for scientists is often that they’re a scientist
01:41:37 and that sometimes is their primary identity.
01:41:39 Now I’ve got other husband and father,
01:41:41 but at that time that was my identity.
01:41:44 So to have that kind of taken away,
01:41:48 you know what, it reminded me of being kind of adopted
01:41:52 in a sense like the one who created me
01:41:55 or that I had played a role in my life,
01:41:58 that he abandoned me in the sense,
01:42:00 it felt like these people are abandoning me.
01:42:02 And the only thing I’d correct about the analogy
01:42:04 that you use is like in the war,
01:42:07 they’re all working for common good.
01:42:08 It’s not like I want to get the most kills.
01:42:11 I compare it more to like a band,
01:42:13 like think about the Beatles and what they did.
01:42:16 And then they ripped apart because of egos, credit,
01:42:20 they had solo careers,
01:42:21 they had relations with their intimates and so forth.
01:42:25 And there it’s not only for the common good,
01:42:27 there is more of a zero sum aspect.
01:42:30 Like I would say, science is an infinite game.
01:42:33 You can’t win science.
01:42:35 You never get to the, oh, we won science.
01:42:37 And even the Nobel prize, they don’t feel like,
01:42:38 oh, we’re done.
01:42:39 They feel like a lot of times they’re imposters
01:42:41 even to that day.
01:42:43 However, science is made up of a lot of finite games
01:42:47 where there is only one winner for tenure.
01:42:50 There is only three winners
01:42:51 or only three winners for the Nobel prize.
01:42:53 And because of that, I think it’s heterodox
01:42:56 and it’s very confusing, especially there’s no guide.
01:42:59 I never got a guide how to be a professor,
01:43:00 how to teach, how to lead a research group,
01:43:02 how to deal with the death of an advisor,
01:43:05 how to deal with an unruly graduate student or two.
01:43:08 So we’re all like reinventing it,
01:43:09 which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it.
01:43:12 Cause the academic system that I am a part of
01:43:14 and you are a part of is a thousand years old.
01:43:16 Dates back to Bologna, Northern Italy, 1088 or so.
01:43:21 First universities were established.
01:43:24 And very little has changed.
01:43:26 There’s some guy or gal scratching a rock
01:43:28 on another piece of rock and lecturing in front.
01:43:31 And there’s only one better aspect nowadays
01:43:33 is that back then the students could go on strike
01:43:36 if they didn’t like the professor
01:43:38 and then he or she wouldn’t get paid.
01:43:39 Probably mostly it was he’s back then.
01:43:42 Nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced
01:43:44 by tenure, so okay.
01:43:47 But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug
01:43:50 getting pulled out from underneath me
01:43:52 because he was like my consigliore.
01:43:55 He was a guy I sought counsel and counseled me
01:43:59 and he’s dead.
01:44:00 And I felt like there is no one
01:44:02 who’s gonna honor the agreements that we had.
01:44:05 And he was a very soulful person.
01:44:07 He was so much better at being a scientist
01:44:09 than I could ever be.
01:44:11 And just a loss for the cosmos, it just really hurt.
01:44:14 And I thought, oh, it’s so sad
01:44:17 cause he could have won the Nobel Prize.
01:44:19 I don’t think like that anymore.
01:44:21 First I think about his kids.
01:44:23 Felt at first now there goes my chance
01:44:25 at winning a Nobel Prize.
01:44:26 And hence the title of the book was like,
01:44:28 I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize.
01:44:31 It also means that there’s parts of the Nobel Prize
01:44:33 that have to be done away with.
01:44:34 It’s a double entendre.
01:44:35 Like we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize
01:44:37 to help science out.
01:44:38 We can talk about that a different time.
01:44:40 But in the context of like now thinking back on it,
01:44:44 that was such a minuscule part of it.
01:44:46 Because let’s say he did win the Nobel Prize
01:44:49 or I did win the, or any of us did.
01:44:52 Would that have changed anything?
01:44:53 Would that have brought anything back?
01:44:55 It’s so, we say it’s like vanity, it’s futility.
01:44:58 And I just, for me, the Nobel Prize is like,
01:45:04 I don’t wanna say it’s like insignificant,
01:45:06 because obviously it has a lot of power
01:45:07 and it has influence.
01:45:08 And I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show.
01:45:11 I’m gonna name drop, okay?
01:45:13 And he prepares.
01:45:14 He prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery
01:45:19 when he goes on a talk show.
01:45:20 So you see him going on Colbert Report.
01:45:22 You think, oh, they just have a banter.
01:45:24 He’s just naturally gifted.
01:45:25 No, he said, no, no, no.
01:45:27 You say that, you’re undermining what he does.
01:45:29 What he does is he goes back.
01:45:31 He watches the last month of Colbert Reports
01:45:33 or whatever it’s called, late show.
01:45:35 And he says, how long does Steven pause between questions?
01:45:38 How long in the news cycle does he go back?
01:45:41 What topics has he talked about with people similar to me?
01:45:44 So I took Neil and I did that for you.
01:45:46 And I look back, how many times has Lex
01:45:48 mentioned the words Nobel and prize?
01:45:50 And I put it into Google Ngram and out came
01:45:53 exactly the same number of times as show episodes
01:45:58 as of this moment.
01:45:58 So you’ve said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.
01:46:01 Yeah, I mean, it is so strange as a symbol
01:46:05 that kind of unites this whole scientific journey, right?
01:46:10 It’s so, it’s both sad and beautiful
01:46:14 that a little prize, a little award, a medal,
01:46:19 a little plaque, they’ll be most likely forgotten
01:46:21 by history completely, some silly list.
01:46:27 It’s somehow a catalyst for greatness.
01:46:31 It resulted in you doing your life’s work, the dream of it.
01:46:37 Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize?
01:46:39 I can’t necessarily counterfactually state
01:46:42 that that would have happened.
01:46:43 So no, it definitely has a place.
01:46:47 And for me, it is valuable to think about it.
01:46:50 But the level of obsession that academics have about it
01:46:54 is really, I think it is almost on balance
01:46:58 becoming unhealthy.
01:47:00 And again, I have no, I make no truck
01:47:03 with the winners of the Nobel Prize.
01:47:04 Obviously, now I’ve had 11 on the show.
01:47:08 And to think about the one rule,
01:47:10 so by the way, right after the denouement of the story,
01:47:13 which I’ll get to in a bit,
01:47:15 how our dreams went down to dust and ashes,
01:47:18 I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
01:47:21 to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.
01:47:25 So like the one that I theoretically
01:47:27 could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually,
01:47:31 they asked me to nominate.
01:47:32 Now imagine if I ask you, Lex,
01:47:33 you say, Brian, instead of me inviting myself on the show,
01:47:37 if you say, Brian, would you like to come
01:47:38 on the Lex Friedman podcast?
01:47:40 I say, you know what, Lex?
01:47:42 You know that guy Rogan?
01:47:42 I think you might know him.
01:47:44 Can you introduce him to me?
01:47:46 Like, do you imagine how that would feel?
01:47:47 Like you’d be like, ah, you know.
01:47:50 So I was asked to nominate the winners.
01:47:51 And the one rule that they say,
01:47:53 of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated,
01:47:55 there’s only one rule that they maintained.
01:47:57 In other words, he said one person can win it
01:47:59 for something they discovered in the preceding year
01:48:02 that had the greatest benefit to mankind,
01:48:06 made the world better, right?
01:48:07 None of that was mentioned in the letter.
01:48:09 It said many people can win it, worked on long ago.
01:48:12 They didn’t mention anything in the letter to me,
01:48:14 signed by the Secretary General.
01:48:15 Nothing about benefiting mankind.
01:48:16 They said, just one thing, can’t nominate yourself.
01:48:20 So none of these guys nominated themselves.
01:48:22 Actually, little known fact,
01:48:23 they sent that exact letter just to you.
01:48:28 That rule was created just for you.
01:48:29 That’s called the Keating Correlate, yes, exactly.
01:48:32 Just to like. Good for them.
01:48:36 Rub it in.
01:48:37 I mean, in this particular case, of course,
01:48:39 there’s some weird technicality or whatever,
01:48:42 but in this particular case,
01:48:43 it’s kind of a powerful reminder.
01:48:47 Yeah.
01:48:48 That the Nobel Prize leaves a lot of people behind
01:48:51 in their stories behind all of that.
01:48:54 Yeah, I mean, here’s a good example.
01:48:55 Again, this is my friend, Barry Barash.
01:48:57 He’s become like a mentor and a friend.
01:49:00 He wrote the foreword to my book, Into the Impossible.
01:49:03 He won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died,
01:49:07 and he admits it, and he said it.
01:49:09 And actually, it’s funny with him
01:49:10 because I’ve heard you talk very rhapsodically
01:49:13 and lovingly and romantically about,
01:49:15 with Harry Kliff and a wonderful podcast with him,
01:49:17 by the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is
01:49:21 and how in that we were about to build
01:49:23 the superconducting supercollider right here in Texas,
01:49:27 and it didn’t get built and it got canceled by Congress.
01:49:30 And I say to Barry,
01:49:31 that was the best thing that ever happened to you.
01:49:33 And he’s like, what the hell are you talking about?
01:49:34 I’m like, if that didn’t get canceled,
01:49:35 first of all, even though it did get canceled,
01:49:39 the Europeans went on to build it themselves,
01:49:41 saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars,
01:49:44 and we wouldn’t have learned anything
01:49:46 really substantially new as proven by the fact
01:49:48 that as you and Harry talked about,
01:49:50 nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note
01:49:52 has come out, and actually, he’s had a recent paper,
01:49:55 but it’s been an upper limit along with his collaborators
01:49:57 on LHCb experiment that I’m gonna be talking with him about.
01:50:00 But the bottom line is it was really built
01:50:02 to detect the Higgs.
01:50:03 So the SSC, for twice as much money,
01:50:06 would have sucked up Barry’s career.
01:50:07 He would have been working on that, maybe not.
01:50:09 And then he would never have worked on LIGO,
01:50:11 and then he wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize, right?
01:50:14 So you look at counterfactual history.
01:50:15 That’s not actually a big stretch, right?
01:50:17 If the SSC had still gone on, he would have worked on it,
01:50:19 because he was one of the primary leaders
01:50:20 of that experiment.
01:50:21 Second thing, imagine the following thing had happened.
01:50:26 They won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015,
01:50:30 they detected unequivocal evidence
01:50:32 for the in spiral collision of two massive black holes,
01:50:35 each about 30 times the mass of the sun,
01:50:38 leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar
01:50:42 masses behind.
01:50:43 So one solar mass worth of matter
01:50:45 got massed, got converted to pure gravitational energy.
01:50:49 No light was seen by them.
01:50:51 This particular date, September 14, 2015,
01:50:57 that explosion, because of the miracle of time travel
01:50:59 that telescopes afford us, that actually took place
01:51:03 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away.
01:51:07 They actually don’t know which galaxy it took place in.
01:51:08 Still, then they never will.
01:51:10 OK?
01:51:11 If that collision between these two things, which
01:51:13 have probably been orbiting each other for maybe a million
01:51:16 years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier,
01:51:20 Barry wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize.
01:51:22 Because it’s hilarious to think that there’s one
01:51:25 human that won the Nobel Prize because two giant things
01:51:29 collided.
01:51:31 A billion, 200 million years ago.
01:51:34 And if it had happened 18 days, 20 days, 30 days,
01:51:37 because that was the deadline for the Nobel Prize
01:51:40 to be announced, they announced the findings in February.
01:51:43 But you have to nominate the winners in January.
01:51:45 So I could have nominated them up until January 30.
01:51:48 But they didn’t announce anything,
01:51:49 and there were just rumors.
01:51:53 But the reason that he wouldn’t have won it,
01:51:54 because there was another guy who was still alive,
01:51:56 considered to be the founder and father of the three fathers,
01:52:00 Ray Weiss, who did win it, Kip Thorne, who did win it,
01:52:02 and this third gentleman at Caltech named Ron Drever,
01:52:05 who passed away again.
01:52:07 He was alive in 2016.
01:52:08 He died in the middle of 2017.
01:52:10 And then he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
01:52:12 And here we are, several billion of hairless apes
01:52:16 that strangely wear clothing, celebrated three other clothed
01:52:23 hairless apes with a medal, with one particular element.
01:52:30 And then they made speeches in a particular language
01:52:33 that evolved in a…
01:52:35 Bend down to get those medals in front of another guy
01:52:38 who wears even fancier clothes, who is the king of Sweden.
01:52:43 And then they got some free food afterwards.
01:52:44 They get some reindeer meat, that’s right.
01:52:47 Okay, excellent.
01:52:49 Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example,
01:52:53 what happened to you in terms of BICEP2?
01:52:57 I want to kind of speak at a high level
01:53:00 about a particular thing I observed.
01:53:02 So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast.
01:53:05 I just listened to the podcast.
01:53:07 I’m a huge fan of podcasts in general.
01:53:09 And it also coincided with my entry into grad school
01:53:15 and this whole journey of academia.
01:53:17 So grad school, getting my PhD, then going to MIT,
01:53:20 and then Google, and then just looking at this whole world
01:53:23 of research.
01:53:26 What I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world
01:53:33 is that he celebrates others, like he promotes them.
01:53:37 He gets like genuinely, and I now know this
01:53:39 from just being a friend privately,
01:53:42 he genuinely gets excited by the success of others.
01:53:47 And the contrast of that to how folks in academia
01:53:53 often behave was always really disappointing to me
01:53:56 because the natural, just on a basic human level,
01:54:00 there is an excitement, but the nature of that excitement
01:54:04 is more like I’m happy for my friend,
01:54:08 but I’m really jealous and I want to even outdo them.
01:54:11 I want to celebrate them, but I want to do even better.
01:54:13 So that’s even for friends.
01:54:15 So there’s not a genuine, pure excitement for others.
01:54:21 And then to couple that with just you now
01:54:24 as a host of a popular podcast and all this feeling,
01:54:28 which is like there’s not even a willingness
01:54:31 to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others.
01:54:35 People in academia are often best equipped technically
01:54:40 in terms of language to celebrate others.
01:54:43 They understand the beauty, like the full richness
01:54:48 of why the cool idea is as cool as it is.
01:54:50 And they’re in the best position to celebrate it.
01:54:53 And yet there’s a feeling that if I celebrate others,
01:54:57 they might end up on the cover of Nature or whatever,
01:54:59 and not me.
01:55:01 They turn it into zero sum game.
01:55:03 The reason why I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me
01:55:08 and many others is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
01:55:12 And forget money and all those kinds of things.
01:55:15 I think there’s a narrative told that academics are this way
01:55:20 because there’s a limited amount of money.
01:55:23 And so they’re fighting for this.
01:55:24 I don’t think that’s the reason it’s happening this way.
01:55:28 I think you can have a limited amount of money.
01:55:32 The battle for money happens in the space of proposal.
01:55:36 There’s networking, there’s private stuff.
01:55:39 Public celebration of others and just actually
01:55:42 just how you feel in the privacy of your own heart
01:55:46 is not have to do anything with money.
01:55:48 It has to do with you having a big ego
01:55:51 and not humbling yourself to the beauty of the journey
01:55:55 that we’re all on.
01:55:56 And there’s folks like Joe Rogan who in a comedian circles
01:56:00 is also rare, but he inspired all these other comedians
01:56:03 to realize, you know what?
01:56:05 It’s great to celebrate each other.
01:56:07 We’re promoting each other and therefore the pie grows.
01:56:10 Cause everybody else gets excited about this whole thing
01:56:12 and the pie grows.
01:56:14 Right now the scientists by fighting,
01:56:16 like by not celebrating each other,
01:56:18 are not growing the pie.
01:56:19 And now because of that sort of science becomes
01:56:23 less and less popular.
01:56:24 It’s a flywheel and exactly.
01:56:25 No, and I want to point out two things.
01:56:26 One is that I remember you went on Joe’s show
01:56:29 maybe a couple of years ago and then he gave you a watch.
01:56:34 He gave you like a Rolex, right?
01:56:36 And I tweeted to you and I think it’s Omega, sorry.
01:56:38 Okay, fine.
01:56:40 The watch that went to the moon,
01:56:42 which we will get to in a bit.
01:56:44 I don’t think he could give you what I gave you though,
01:56:46 by the way.
01:56:47 And we’ll get to what that final gift package is for you.
01:56:50 And by the way, I also wanted to mention,
01:56:52 because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset.
01:56:55 And you should definitely go on Joe Rogan.
01:56:57 And we had this conversation with him.
01:56:59 Cause I was like, when I was moving to Austin
01:57:05 and had a conversation like, don’t you think it’s weird?
01:57:07 Like if we have the same guests at the same time
01:57:09 or whatever, he’s like, fuck that.
01:57:12 I want you to be more successful than me.
01:57:14 I want, he truly wants everybody like,
01:57:18 especially people close to him to be more successful.
01:57:21 Like there’s not even a thought like.
01:57:23 But you know why he does.
01:57:24 And this is what I tweeted to you.
01:57:25 And one of the few things I think you have retweeted
01:57:27 that I sent you.
01:57:28 I said, someday you’re going to give that to somebody.
01:57:31 And today I wanted that to be me.
01:57:32 No, no.
01:57:35 Joe’s Omega.
01:57:36 No, but the point is he sees in you that same,
01:57:40 grandiosity, that same genuine spirit graciousness.
01:57:42 And I think that’s true.
01:57:43 And you do do something very rare.
01:57:45 I don’t want to turn this into too much of a love fest,
01:57:47 but I do want to say even back to Andrew,
01:57:49 who I’ve almost been hagiographic about,
01:57:52 just treating him like a saint.
01:57:54 He said to me the same thing.
01:57:55 And in a moment of peak said like,
01:57:57 God damn it.
01:57:58 Like I have to train these guys and women that work for me
01:58:02 so that they can be better than me,
01:58:04 so that they can go out and compete with me
01:58:06 for the same limited amount of funding from the Fing NSL.
01:58:09 That wasn’t his, that wasn’t who he was.
01:58:12 That was just an expression,
01:58:14 like I’m doing something which is fundamentally,
01:58:16 but you know what, when you have kids,
01:58:18 hopefully, you know, please God, you will someday.
01:58:20 Cause I think, and I hope we can get to talk
01:58:22 about that later, but part of investment
01:58:26 and part of doing something when you have a kid,
01:58:28 like you can get married.
01:58:30 You can marry someone cause she’s rich or he’s rich,
01:58:33 or you can marry someone cause they’re good looking
01:58:35 or he’s good looking.
01:58:36 You can marry for all these different reasons
01:58:37 that are ultimately selfish.
01:58:39 There’s no way you can have a kid and be selfish.
01:58:41 Nobody says like, oh, you know what?
01:58:43 I really want this thing that’s three feet tall,
01:58:44 that doesn’t speak English, that craps on my floor,
01:58:47 that wakes me up all hours of the night,
01:58:48 that interferes with my love life.
01:58:50 Nobody says that cause it doesn’t benefit you
01:58:52 for months and months.
01:58:53 A friend of mine who actually does the videos for me
01:58:55 and does a lot of my solo videos,
01:58:57 he’s having his first kid, he’s like, what do I do?
01:58:59 Cause it always gets stupid, I’ll catch up on sleep now.
01:59:01 Like, yeah, I’m gonna store sleep in my sleep bank.
01:59:04 Like I don’t think Huberman and you talked about that, right?
01:59:06 You can’t do that, that’s stupid.
01:59:08 What you can do, give the kid a bath, feed the baby,
01:59:10 let the mother relax.
01:59:11 Like, in other words, do the things,
01:59:14 and this really relates back to what Aristotle once said.
01:59:16 Aristotle once said, why do parents love kids
01:59:18 more than kids love parents?
01:59:20 As much as you love your dad and your mom,
01:59:22 they still love you more.
01:59:24 And because you love that what you sacrifice for.
01:59:27 Here’s a proof.
01:59:28 I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs.
01:59:31 Some with severe, one of my uncles on the Keating side
01:59:35 had a severe, what they called mental retardation,
01:59:37 now it’s probably has a different name.
01:59:39 That, out of the nine other brothers and sisters,
01:59:41 he was their favorite.
01:59:43 Because they had to sacrifice so much for him.
01:59:46 And I think of that, you know, in the small case,
01:59:48 like Joe is kind of mentoring you or whatever,
01:59:50 you’re gonna mentor someone else.
01:59:51 You love that what you sacrifice for.
01:59:53 Sacrifice is reduction of entropy,
01:59:55 it’s storing and investing, and you wanna protect that.
01:59:58 And you know, that to me really speaks to this.
02:00:01 So yeah, I don’t hold it against.
02:00:02 But it is true, like scientists are, you know,
02:00:05 when they’re described again, they’re often said
02:00:07 to be like children, right?
02:00:08 You’ve heard this description.
02:00:09 They’re inquisitive, they’re curious, they’re passionate.
02:00:11 They love that.
02:00:12 And I’m like, yeah, and they don’t play well with others.
02:00:13 They’re jealous, they’re petty, they’re selfish,
02:00:14 they won’t share their ball and they’ll go home.
02:00:17 There’s no such thing as a single edge sword.
02:00:19 I wish there were, you know,
02:00:20 because we need some more of that
02:00:22 because you gotta dull it up.
02:00:23 But in this case, he, you know,
02:00:26 I think when you have this kind of investment in science,
02:00:31 it’s gonna be natural.
02:00:32 But that doesn’t mean we have to like, you know,
02:00:34 feed the flames of competition.
02:00:36 You know, I’m like really venerate.
02:00:38 If you go to the homepage of the NSF
02:00:40 or the Department of Energy
02:00:41 or the recently released National Academy of Sciences
02:00:44 future of science for the astronomical sciences
02:00:47 for the next 25 years or more,
02:00:50 they talk about how many Nobel prizes
02:00:51 these different science things could win.
02:00:53 Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB,
02:00:56 B mode polarization, the nice, you know,
02:00:58 that’s figure two in this thing.
02:01:01 And I’m like, what message is that sent to kids,
02:01:03 like to young people?
02:01:04 Like that’s what you should be doing
02:01:06 so that you win this small, as you said,
02:01:07 this prize given out by one hairless ape
02:01:09 to another wearing a fancier costume using reindeer.
02:01:11 Especially in the case of Nobel prize,
02:01:12 it’s only currently given to three people.
02:01:14 At most, which was never one of his stipulate.
02:01:16 He actually said one, he could only give it to one person.
02:01:19 So they change it.
02:01:20 Why did they change it?
02:01:20 I talk about, I speculate.
02:01:22 By the way, the book’s only three chapters out of 11
02:01:24 about the Nobel prize and it’s a fact.
02:01:26 But you know, one of the things that’s been so interesting,
02:01:28 like I’m speaking, actually this coming up in December
02:01:32 is that the Nobel prize is given out
02:01:34 on the day of Alfred Nobel’s death.
02:01:37 There’s a lot of, and they bring in flowers,
02:01:39 not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum,
02:01:42 which is in San Romino in Italy.
02:01:46 It’s a lot of like death fascination.
02:01:48 Denial of death features heavily in the Nobel prize
02:01:51 because it’s like, what outlives a person?
02:01:53 Well, science can outlive a person.
02:01:55 My father has a theorem named after him.
02:01:56 It’s still engraved in many places around the world.
02:02:00 You or I, we can go to different places around the world.
02:02:02 People know who we are based on our publications.
02:02:05 We engrave things, we want to store things,
02:02:06 we want to compress things.
02:02:08 And I think there’s something beautiful about that,
02:02:10 but there is a notion of denial of death.
02:02:12 Like there is a notion of what will outlast me,
02:02:14 especially if you’re among the many 90 something percent
02:02:17 of members of the National Academy
02:02:19 don’t believe in an active faith and a creator and a God.
02:02:24 And science can substitute for that,
02:02:27 but it’s not ultimately as fulfilling.
02:02:30 I just, I don’t believe it can fulfill a person the way
02:02:34 even practicing, but not believing in a religion
02:02:37 can fulfill a person.
02:02:39 So, which is interesting
02:02:40 because you do bring up Ernest Becker
02:02:42 and the denial of death in losing the Nobel prize book.
02:02:46 And there is a sense in which that’s probably in part
02:02:50 at the core of this, especially later dream
02:02:54 of the Nobel prize or a prize of recognition.
02:02:57 I’ve interacted with a few or a large number of scientists
02:03:02 that are getting up in age.
02:03:04 And there is the feeling of real pride of happiness in them
02:03:10 from winning awards and getting certain recognitions.
02:03:15 And I probably at the core of that is a kind of a mortality
02:03:18 or a kind of desire for mortality.
02:03:23 And that was always off putting to me as opposed to,
02:03:28 I mean, I know it sounds weird to say it’s off putting,
02:03:32 but it just, rather than celebrating the pure joy
02:03:38 of solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us,
02:03:43 just the actual exploration of the mysterious for its own sake.
02:03:52 Well, that’s what I said, it’s like a scientist should,
02:03:55 okay, you have to be careful and not have any physical,
02:03:58 it has to be platonic,
02:03:59 but you can think of scientists and mentor.
02:04:03 I have a chart in the book and in my plaque
02:04:05 made by one of my graduate students, former graduate students.
02:04:07 She’s now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Barron.
02:04:10 And she made this plaque and it has 17 generations.
02:04:13 So here I am, 17 levels down, there’s a guy,
02:04:17 Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz, different Leibniz,
02:04:19 1596 he was born and I’m in this chain.
02:04:23 And I don’t know if you know this,
02:04:24 but in the Russian language,
02:04:26 the word scientist means someone who was taught.
02:04:28 I’ll say it very simply, one who was taught, right?
02:04:31 Uchony.
02:04:32 Uchony.
02:04:32 So it probably means a guy was taught, right?
02:04:35 No, uchony, no, no, no, it’s a person.
02:04:39 Uchony, no, no, no, it’s literally someone who was taught.
02:04:42 Someone who was taught, right.
02:04:43 So what does that mean?
02:04:44 To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning.
02:04:47 One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist
02:04:50 because you have to learn from somebody else.
02:04:52 Two, you have to be a teacher, you have to pay it forward.
02:04:55 If you don’t, I claim you’re really not a scientist
02:04:58 in the truest sense.
02:05:00 And I feel like with the work that I do in outreach
02:05:02 and stuff like that, I’m doing it at scale.
02:05:04 I’m influencing more than 24 kids I might have
02:05:07 in my graduate class or undergraduate class,
02:05:09 and potentially could reach thousands of people
02:05:11 around the world and make them into scientists themselves.
02:05:15 Because that’s the flywheel that is only beneficial.
02:05:19 There is no competition.
02:05:20 There is no zero sum fixed mindset versus growth mindset
02:05:24 because it is an infinite game.
02:05:26 Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings
02:05:29 of the negativity of the Soviet Union
02:05:30 or pre World War I Germany or Imperial Japan.
02:05:35 Science celebrated.
02:05:37 And we’re just making a nation of scientists.
02:05:40 And we’re not doing it to become multi billionaires
02:05:42 or necessarily for any military purpose whatsoever.
02:05:47 But if we have that, sometimes I’m flying home at night.
02:05:50 When you fly into LA, you literally, it’s very rare,
02:05:53 you can see the number 10 million.
02:05:55 It’s very hard to visualize things.
02:05:56 You see a brick wall, you ask how many bricks are there?
02:05:58 It might be 1,000, 2,000.
02:06:00 10 million lights.
02:06:01 There’s 10 million souls.
02:06:03 And you can see they’re discrete.
02:06:04 They’re not like the Milky Way all blending together.
02:06:07 Each lost in their own busy lives, excited, fall in love,
02:06:11 afraid of losing their job, all that.
02:06:13 By the way, people should know that you’re a pilot.
02:06:16 So you literally mean fly.
02:06:17 Yeah, sometimes I get to do it.
02:06:19 You get to look at the eye of God perspective
02:06:22 on these 10 million, on these millions of helpless apes.
02:06:26 And I don’t think they’re like constellations,
02:06:28 but upside down, like the city.
02:06:29 This is like a constellation.
02:06:30 Hopefully I’ll stay and keep the plane the right way up.
02:06:32 But when you think about that,
02:06:34 imagine they’re all working together.
02:06:36 And imagine you always talk about love.
02:06:38 But you don’t know that they’re not worthy of love.
02:06:42 So you’re looking down on them.
02:06:43 And it’s just amazing.
02:06:44 Because you think, what amazing creation has man and humans?
02:06:48 And what can we do?
02:06:49 It’s phenomenal.
02:06:50 It’s so exciting.
02:06:52 And then I get to do it.
02:06:53 It’s a job I say, don’t tell Gavin Newsom,
02:06:55 but I do it for free.
02:06:56 I love what I do.
02:06:58 But to think about, oh, if my student succeeds, then I’m not.
02:07:01 No, it is unfortunate that you have experience.
02:07:05 I’ve certainly experienced it.
02:07:06 And I think there are ways around it.
02:07:08 I think it is a vexing problem.
02:07:11 Because people want to, it’s very tempting
02:07:14 to keep your own garden fertilized.
02:07:18 One thing that’s interesting is people are like,
02:07:20 why are you doing this thing?
02:07:21 And podcasts, and you’re supposed
02:07:22 to be a serious scientist leading this huge project,
02:07:25 and collaborators.
02:07:27 And I’m like, well, most of what I do, as I said before,
02:07:30 for you it’s Velcro.
02:07:31 For me it’s like, what is the deal with the safety standards
02:07:36 on the truck that we’re driving up to deliver the diesel fuel
02:07:38 that will power the generator that
02:07:39 will allow the concrete truck to move?
02:07:40 It has nothing to do with the Big Bang
02:07:42 inflation, the multiverse, God’s existence.
02:07:45 It has nothing to do with that.
02:07:45 So those are people I say I have to talk to.
02:07:48 The people that come on the show, those
02:07:49 are people I want to talk to.
02:07:51 And that’s super fun.
02:07:52 I mean, it’s a real honor that I get to do it.
02:07:55 I have some unfair advantages.
02:07:57 I’m at a top university.
02:07:58 We have people that’s affiliated with the Arthur C. Clark
02:08:01 Foundation, brilliant scientists coming through.
02:08:04 But I felt like it would be kind of a shame
02:08:06 if I didn’t allow them to teach at scale,
02:08:09 because they’re better teachers than I am.
02:08:11 Let me ask you an interesting, maybe difficult question.
02:08:16 Have you ever considered talking on your podcast
02:08:21 with the people who would get the Nobel Prize for BICEP2
02:08:24 if it turned out to be detecting what it is?
02:08:28 Yeah, I mean, I’m still friends with them.
02:08:30 And they have still gone on to.
02:08:32 So we should say why we didn’t win the Nobel Prize,
02:08:34 and then what happened with the group that
02:08:37 is now leading it that I’m completely divorced
02:08:41 from in a secular sense.
02:08:43 We’re friends.
02:08:44 We see each other.
02:08:45 We send each other emails and stuff like that.
02:08:48 I would love to get their sense of what
02:08:50 the natural heartbreak built into the whole process
02:08:54 of the Nobel Prize, what their sense is.
02:08:56 I would love to hear an honest, real conversation.
02:08:58 I understand you’re friends, but there’s some hard truth
02:09:01 that even friends don’t talk about until you put a mic.
02:09:03 They weren’t happy I wrote the book.
02:09:04 I mean, I remember one of them was like, well,
02:09:06 what’s this I hear about a book?
02:09:07 And I mean, a lot of people told me not to write the book.
02:09:10 They said it’s going to give too much attention
02:09:12 to the Nobel Prize.
02:09:13 It’s going to look like sour grapes.
02:09:15 Again, I say you can prove I have sour grapes or not.
02:09:17 Just give me the next prize.
02:09:19 So if you get a Nobel Prize for literature,
02:09:21 you would turn it down?
02:09:23 I don’t know.
02:09:24 It’s funny, because Sabina Hassenfelder,
02:09:26 who is a fellow YouTube sensation,
02:09:30 and she’s so gracious and so good.
02:09:35 She has that German, just gentle and genteelness.
02:09:40 She’s a little too nice for my taste, I would say.
02:09:43 I wish she could really say what she thinks and be
02:09:45 snarky on occasion.
02:09:46 So she wrote a review of my book when it came out
02:09:48 three or four years ago.
02:09:49 And she said, well, you know, Brian Keating,
02:09:53 she said, well, it’s interesting.
02:09:55 He talks a lot about cosmology.
02:09:57 But they can do whatever the hell they want.
02:10:00 And he presumably has these problems with it,
02:10:02 but it’s none of his business, basically.
02:10:05 And at the end, she said, but if you want one good thing,
02:10:08 he’s a really good writer.
02:10:09 And who knows?
02:10:10 He could win the Nobel Prize in literature someday.
02:10:12 And then she allowed me to publish a rebuttal
02:10:14 on her blog, which was kind of funny.
02:10:16 But anyway, no.
02:10:17 So getting back to the guys that we were kind of collaboratimies
02:10:21 or frenemies, we’re still, look, we
02:10:24 don’t wish each other active ill.
02:10:26 I’ve visited them.
02:10:27 They’re welcome to visit me.
02:10:28 They have visited me.
02:10:29 The thing I have to say is that I just
02:10:31 wonder about introspection.
02:10:33 For me, literally, I don’t care about the Nobel Prize
02:10:38 other than what it can do to benefit science.
02:10:42 But I no longer, I did, but by the way,
02:10:43 I did seriously care about how it would benefit Brian Keating
02:10:46 early on in my career.
02:10:47 I’m just totally honest.
02:10:48 I’m not proud of it.
02:10:50 It’s kind of embarrassing.
02:10:51 But now I would hope that people would say, like, OK,
02:10:53 the guy is like, you know, he’s obsessed with it.
02:10:56 My next book is not about this.
02:10:58 It’s about something completely different.
02:11:00 And I do feel like people lack introspection a lot of times
02:11:05 in science.
02:11:06 We don’t think about why we’re doing what we’re doing.
02:11:08 And I think it comes down to curiosity.
02:11:11 One thing about Joe, and again, I’ve only listened to,
02:11:14 like, I have to confess.
02:11:16 You know, you’re like, my father.
02:11:17 Now I’m confessing my sins to you, Father Lex.
02:11:19 Father Friedman.
02:11:21 I haven’t listened to, like, that many of your episodes
02:11:24 start to finish, OK?
02:11:25 I’m with our friend, mutual friend, Eric.
02:11:27 I’ve listened to a bunch of recent ones.
02:11:30 Einstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, that’s what it is.
02:11:35 I get them confused with the brother.
02:11:38 The brothers care about stuff, the brother’s wives.
02:11:40 And a few others.
02:11:40 I haven’t ever listened to a full Joe Rogan episode.
02:11:43 But from what I’ve seen with him,
02:11:45 he has a preternatural curiosity.
02:11:48 He doesn’t have passion.
02:11:49 There are a lot of podcasts that have passion.
02:11:50 Like, I’ve been on their show.
02:11:52 He has curiosity.
02:11:53 Like, he’s not going to stop talking about something
02:11:55 until he hops it, until he understands it,
02:11:57 until he gets it viscerally.
02:11:59 And I respect that.
02:12:00 Because as I say in this more recent book,
02:12:02 passion’s kind of like the dopamine hit
02:12:05 that gets you started, like, oh, I’m going to be great.
02:12:07 Maybe I can win a Nobel Prize.
02:12:08 Like, that’s not going to sustain you.
02:12:10 The sustenance comes from the passion
02:12:13 converting to curiosity.
02:12:15 And what I want to do is convert as many things as possible
02:12:18 to things that I can then.
02:12:20 Because actually, I’ve had people that discuss addiction.
02:12:24 And there is an addictive quality to doing podcasts
02:12:27 or whatever.
02:12:28 But there’s an addictive quality being a scientist.
02:12:30 And you get to do things that are very specialized
02:12:33 in specialized locations with special people,
02:12:36 paid for by other people who have no freaking idea what
02:12:38 you do.
02:12:39 I mean, imagine you worked in some job.
02:12:41 And Feynman said all these contradictory things.
02:12:44 Like, he said, if you can’t explain it to your grandmother,
02:12:49 you don’t understand it yourself.
02:12:50 Then the day you won the Nobel Prize,
02:12:52 a reporter asked him, what did you win it for?
02:12:53 He said, if I could explain it to you, bud,
02:12:55 it wouldn’t be worth a Nobel Prize.
02:12:56 So let’s leave aside his inherent contradictions.
02:12:58 But in reality, there is a kind of like dopamine rush
02:13:02 that you get from it.
02:13:03 But what is ultimately going to be the sustenance of it?
02:13:07 So yeah, I do feel like we have to find a way to nucleate that.
02:13:12 I don’t know, actually, I don’t know if it’s like,
02:13:14 can you turn someone into a scientist?
02:13:16 I used to ask this question all the time.
02:13:18 Can you make someone creative?
02:13:21 Can you teach someone to be creative?
02:13:23 I don’t know.
02:13:23 Can you teach someone to be curious?
02:13:26 I don’t know.
02:13:26 I do know that kids are naturally curious.
02:13:29 As they get older, they get less curious.
02:13:31 Just like I heard from the other forward author, James
02:13:34 Altucher, he said, once they did a study,
02:13:37 kids smile 300 times a day, or smile or laugh.
02:13:40 Adults, five or six.
02:13:42 Five or six.
02:13:43 No, I’m trying to get you to laugh, but you’re not going to laugh.
02:13:45 But anyway, no, it’s true.
02:13:46 Somewhere you lose 30% to 50%.
02:13:49 I’m not entertained.
02:13:50 But that’s because I’m an adult.
02:13:52 And then I do remember there’s some distribution
02:13:54 in those studies with happier adults smile a little more,
02:13:57 but still the kids blow them out of the water.
02:13:59 Just crush it.
02:14:02 In other words, should we invest our energy
02:14:04 in getting the half life decay constant,
02:14:07 stretched out more for curiosity for kids?
02:14:09 Or should we try to reset the dopamine hit?
02:14:12 And then I don’t know.
02:14:13 It’s an open question.
02:14:14 Well, I think it goes to David Foster Wallace,
02:14:17 the key to life is to be unboreable.
02:14:19 I think you could train this kind of thing, which
02:14:22 is in every single situation, which I think is at the core,
02:14:28 at least this correlated with curiosity,
02:14:30 is in every situation, try to find the exciting,
02:14:36 the fascinating.
02:14:37 Like in every situation.
02:14:38 You sitting at the, I don’t know,
02:14:40 waiting for something at a DMV or something like that.
02:14:43 Find something that excites you, like a thought.
02:14:47 Like watch people or start to think about, well,
02:14:51 I wonder how many people have to go to the DMV every day.
02:14:55 And then try to go into the pothead mode of thinking like,
02:14:59 wow, isn’t this weird that there’s a bunch of people
02:15:02 that are having to get a stamp of approval
02:15:05 from the government to drive their cars,
02:15:07 and then there’s millions of cars driving every day.
02:15:09 Or like, how can I do this better?
02:15:10 Maybe there’s some blockchain and they could like VIN transfer.
02:15:13 Yeah, exactly.
02:15:13 Yeah.
02:15:14 No, that is a good thing.
02:15:15 And then every situation, I think
02:15:18 if you rigorously just practice that at a young age,
02:15:21 I think you can learn to do that.
02:15:22 Because sometimes people ask me for advice
02:15:26 and to do this thing or that thing.
02:15:29 I think you, at the core, really have
02:15:31 to have this muscle of finding the awesomeness in everything.
02:15:36 Because if you’re able to find the awesomeness
02:15:38 in everything, like whatever journey you take,
02:15:40 whatever weird meandering path that you take through life
02:15:47 is going to be productive, is going to end up in a great place.
02:15:50 So that muscle is at the core of it.
02:15:52 And I guess curiosity is central to that.
02:15:58 But you didn’t win the Nobel Prize.
02:16:02 The team of Bicep that led the Bicep 2
02:16:05 didn’t win the Nobel Prize because of some space dust.
02:16:10 That’s right.
02:16:11 It’s like schmutz.
02:16:13 Which one is the moon?
02:16:15 Which one is?
02:16:16 That one’s dust.
02:16:17 Space dust, yeah.
02:16:20 What are we looking at?
02:16:21 So why is space dust the villain of this whole story?
02:16:25 Well, it’s funny.
02:16:26 I wrote these books.
02:16:27 And I don’t know about you, but when you get all these books,
02:16:29 I’m sure you get books, people sending books.
02:16:31 They always come in these dust jackets, right?
02:16:33 I was always like, what the hell is a dust jacket?
02:16:35 How much dust is raining down at any moment?
02:16:38 I mean, this is immaculate.
02:16:39 This room is Russian tidiness galore.
02:16:41 But in a normal household, how much dust is raining down?
02:16:44 It’s not really pretty until I wrote a book.
02:16:47 And I realized I’m writing a story about the origin
02:16:50 of the universe, the prologue to the cosmos.
02:16:54 And dust is going to cover this story.
02:16:58 It’s actually more a story about astrophysics and cosmology
02:17:01 than dust.
02:17:02 And this is the link between the cosmological and the
02:17:05 astrophysical.
02:17:06 So what does that mean?
02:17:07 So astrophysics is, broadly speaking,
02:17:09 the study of physical phenomena manifest in the heavens,
02:17:13 astronomical phenomena.
02:17:14 Cosmology is concerned with the origin, evolution,
02:17:17 composition of the universe as a whole.
02:17:18 But it’s not really concerned with stars, galaxies,
02:17:21 and planets per se, other than how they might help us measure
02:17:24 the Hubble constant, the density of the universe,
02:17:26 the neutrino content, et cetera, et cetera.
02:17:29 So we have a tendency to kind of look a little bit,
02:17:31 you know, they’re like, not all astronomers
02:17:34 and astrophysicists are equal.
02:17:35 They’re all equal, but some are more equal than others.
02:17:37 So we have kind of a prejudice, a little swagger, right?
02:17:40 And cosmologists are studying, you know, we’re using Einstein.
02:17:42 We’re not using, like, you know, Boltzmann.
02:17:44 We’re thinking of the biggest possible pictures.
02:17:46 In so doing, you can actually become
02:17:49 blinded to otherwise obvious effects
02:17:52 that people would have not overlooked.
02:17:55 In our case, when we sought out the signal,
02:17:58 we were using the photons that make up this primordial heat
02:18:02 bath that surrounds the universe,
02:18:03 luckily only at three degrees Kelvin approximately.
02:18:06 We’re using those as a type of film
02:18:08 onto which gravitational waves will reverberate it,
02:18:11 make them oscillate preferentially
02:18:12 in a polarized way.
02:18:14 And then we can use our polarized sunglasses,
02:18:16 but in a microwave format, to detect
02:18:18 the characteristic twofold symmetry
02:18:20 pattern of underrotation.
02:18:22 That’s the technical way that we undergo it.
02:18:24 I mean, there’s a lot more to it.
02:18:26 But there are more than one thing
02:18:27 that can mimic exactly that signal.
02:18:29 First of all, when you look at the signal,
02:18:31 the signal if inflation took place, big if,
02:18:34 but if it took place, the signal would
02:18:36 be about one or two parts per billion of the CMB temperature
02:18:41 itself.
02:18:43 So a few nanokelvin.
02:18:45 The CMB is a few kelvin.
02:18:47 The signal from these B modes would be a few nanokelvin.
02:18:50 It’s astonishing to think.
02:18:52 Penzias and Wilson, 1965, measured
02:18:54 something that’s a billion times brighter.
02:18:58 And that was what, 60 years ago?
02:18:59 Let’s call it 60 years ago, since they discovered it.
02:19:02 Moore’s law, you’re more expert now.
02:19:04 Let’s call it every two years.
02:19:05 So you’re talking about like 2 to the 30th power doubling
02:19:09 or something like that at that.
02:19:10 Let’s call it 2 to the 20th, something like that.
02:19:12 So that’s like only 2 to the 10th is 1,000.
02:19:17 Correct my math, I’m wrong.
02:19:18 2 to the 20th is a million.
02:19:20 2 to the 30th is a billion.
02:19:22 So we’re outpacing Moore’s law in terms
02:19:25 of the sensitivity of our instruments
02:19:27 to detect these feeble signals from the cosmos.
02:19:30 And they don’t have to deal with,
02:19:31 in the semiconductor factory in Santa Clara, California,
02:19:35 they don’t have to deal with meteorites and things
02:19:38 like coming into the laboratory.
02:19:39 It’s a clean room.
02:19:40 It’s pristine.
02:19:41 They can control everything about it.
02:19:42 We can’t control the cosmos.
02:19:44 And the cosmos is literally littered
02:19:46 with particles of schmutz, of failed planets, asteroids,
02:19:50 meteoroids, things that didn’t coalesce
02:19:52 to make either the Earth, the moon, the planet Jupiter,
02:19:56 or its moons, or get sucked into them
02:19:58 and make craters on them, et cetera, et cetera.
02:20:00 The rest of it is falling, and it comes in a power spectrum.
02:20:04 There’s very few, thank god, Chicxulub sized impact
02:20:07 or progenitors that will take out all life on Earth.
02:20:11 But there’s extremely large number
02:20:13 of tiny dust particles and microscopic grains.
02:20:16 And then there’s a fair number of intermediate sized
02:20:18 particles.
02:20:19 And it turns out this little guy here
02:20:21 is the end product of a collapsing star that
02:20:26 explodes in what’s called a supernova, type II supernova.
02:20:30 So stars spend most of their life
02:20:31 using helium nuclei protons and neutrons into helium nuclei.
02:20:39 And then from there, it can make other things like beryllium
02:20:41 and briefly make beryllium and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen,
02:20:45 all the way up until it tries to make iron and nickel.
02:20:48 And iron and nickel are endothermic.
02:20:50 It takes more energy than gets liberated
02:20:52 to make an atom of iron.
02:20:55 When that happens, there’s no longer enough heat supplying
02:20:58 pressure to resist the gravitational collapse
02:21:01 of the material that was produced earlier.
02:21:03 So the star forms and goes inside out.
02:21:04 That’s how scientists discovered helium
02:21:07 was discovered on the sun.
02:21:08 I don’t know.
02:21:08 Did you know?
02:21:09 That’s why it’s called helium.
02:21:10 Yeah, they went there at night.
02:21:12 And they went there at night.
02:21:14 No, helium means Helios is the god of the sun.
02:21:16 It was discovered in its spectrum from observations
02:21:19 of the telescope like 150 years ago.
02:21:20 It wasn’t discovered like when oxygen and iron was discovered.
02:21:25 So it’s only a relatively recent comer to the pure activity.
02:21:28 So helium came after oxygen.
02:21:31 Oh, no, first hydrogen forms into helium.
02:21:33 So that’s the first thing that formed.
02:21:34 No, in terms of discoveries.
02:21:36 Oh, yeah, after oxygen.
02:21:37 Yeah, I think Priestley and others, Dalton,
02:21:41 discovered it in the 1700s.
02:21:42 No, helium was really only discovered
02:21:44 from the spectrum of looking at the sun
02:21:45 and seeing the weird atomic absorption called Fraunhofer
02:21:49 lines in the solar spectrum.
02:21:51 But when it tries to make iron, there’s
02:21:54 no longer any leftover heat.
02:21:55 In other words, there’s heat left over from fusing,
02:21:57 as you know, the son of a plasma physicist.
02:21:59 You fuse to a hydrogen nuclei, you get excess energy,
02:22:03 plus you get helium.
02:22:04 So that’s why fusion energy could
02:22:05 be the energy source of the future and always will be.
02:22:08 No, no, I don’t know.
02:22:09 Hopefully, it’ll come much sooner than that.
02:22:11 In so doing, trying to make iron, it takes more energy,
02:22:13 doesn’t give off enough energy, star collapses, explodes.
02:22:16 And what does it spray out into the cosmic interstellar medium?
02:22:20 It sprays out the last thing it made, which is that stuff.
02:22:22 Luckily for us, because some of that
02:22:24 coalesced and made the core of the Earth,
02:22:26 onto which the lighter, like silica and carbon and the dirt
02:22:30 and the crust of the Earth were formed.
02:22:31 And some of that made its way to the crust.
02:22:33 The iron made its way to the crust.
02:22:35 Some of that your mother ate and synthesized
02:22:38 hemoglobin molecules.
02:22:39 And hemoglobin has iron particles in it.
02:22:41 It’s a quite amazing substance.
02:22:43 Without it, we wouldn’t have our red blood.
02:22:44 We wouldn’t exist as we are.
02:22:47 Is this a very long, complicated mom joke?
02:22:51 I’ve done enough dad jokes.
02:22:52 My quota’s up.
02:22:53 So taking this object seriously, not all of it
02:22:58 gets bound up in a planet.
02:22:59 In fact, forming planets is very inefficient.
02:23:01 And so there’s a lot of schmutz left over,
02:23:03 some of which gets in the way of our telescopes looking back
02:23:07 to the beginning of time.
02:23:08 And some of those molecules, like iron,
02:23:10 is used in compass needles.
02:23:12 They’re magnetized.
02:23:13 And magnetic fields in our galaxy
02:23:15 can align them and make the exact polarization pattern
02:23:18 that we’re looking for, as if the compass needles get
02:23:21 all aligned.
02:23:21 That’s like the polarization of the dust grain.
02:23:24 It’s like that polarizing filter.
02:23:26 That means light polarized like this will get absorbed.
02:23:29 And light polarized like this will go through.
02:23:30 So it’s absorbing.
02:23:31 It’s making 100% polarized light out
02:23:33 of an initially unpolarized light source.
02:23:35 And that’s what happened.
02:23:36 And what we ended up claiming on March 17, and I’m sure
02:23:43 if you were there, you might remember this.
02:23:45 At the Harvard Center for Astrophysics,
02:23:47 there was an announcement.
02:23:48 There were like three or four Nobel Prize winners
02:23:50 in the audience.
02:23:50 And the BICEP2 team, which I was no longer leading,
02:23:53 I was still a member of it.
02:23:55 In fact, in the announcement, the first person they mentioned,
02:23:57 besides thank you all for being here,
02:24:00 is me and my team at UC San Diego.
02:24:02 Although I wasn’t invited to go to the press conference
02:24:05 because that was very complicated.
02:24:07 Yes, exactly.
02:24:09 It’s a little school up there in the Cambridge area.
02:24:12 And so they ended up making this announcement
02:24:15 that we had discovered the aftershocks of inflation.
02:24:18 We detected the gravitational waves shaking up the CMB.
02:24:21 And on that day, past Lex Friedman’s podcast
02:24:24 back when it was called Artificial Intelligence,
02:24:26 Max Tegmark said, goodbye, universe.
02:24:29 Hello, multiverse.
02:24:30 And hello, Nobel Prize.
02:24:32 He saw that as confirmatory evidence, not only of inflation,
02:24:36 not only of gravitational waves, but of the multiverse.
02:24:39 Goodbye, universe.
02:24:40 Hello, multiverse.
02:24:41 Multiverse is a natural consequence.
02:24:44 Consequence of inflation, yes.
02:24:46 According to its prominent supporters, yeah.
02:24:49 Yeah, and of course, leave the poetry to Max,
02:24:51 which he does masterfully.
02:24:54 OK, so the excitement was there.
02:24:58 I mean, maybe the initial heartbreak for you
02:25:01 was there, too.
02:25:02 That’s some of the darker moments you’re going through.
02:25:04 But broadly, for the space of science,
02:25:07 there’s excitement there.
02:25:09 Huge excitement.
02:25:09 And I often note that this is a problem in what I call
02:25:13 the science media complex.
02:25:15 Because oftentimes, you’ll see things like past guess
02:25:17 Sarah Seager, Venus life exist.
02:25:21 And that will be really, I mean, it’s fascinating, right,
02:25:23 with the work that she’s doing or her colleagues are doing,
02:25:26 Clara, who’s on your show as well.
02:25:28 And that will be on front page, New York Times, Boston
02:25:31 Globe, San Diego Union Tribune.
02:25:34 It’ll be above the fold.
02:25:35 Make headlines around the world.
02:25:37 And then six months, 12 months later, as is the case for us,
02:25:40 retraction.
02:25:41 Page C17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads
02:25:45 and underneath the personal.
02:25:47 So we have a problem in science, that if it explodes, it leads.
02:25:52 And we get this huge fanfare.
02:25:54 And this is not unique to my experiment.
02:25:56 This happened with the earlier discovery
02:25:58 of so called Martian life discovered
02:26:02 in Antarctica, which was announced after peer review.
02:26:06 We weren’t peer reviewed at the point
02:26:07 when we made the announcement.
02:26:08 We had a press conference.
02:26:09 And there are other reasons that the team leaders felt
02:26:12 it was important to do that so that we don’t get scooped
02:26:14 by a referee who’s unethical.
02:26:15 We thought we had done everything right,
02:26:17 but that’s confirmation bias.
02:26:18 So there’s levels to this.
02:26:20 Yeah, there were many levels.
02:26:21 And there were people, me warning
02:26:23 about how it would be interpreted
02:26:25 and wanting to also make sure that we put all the data out,
02:26:28 including the maps, which we still haven’t released.
02:26:30 And so there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical.
02:26:33 But the public never knows this.
02:26:37 So I’ve made a rule that if I am ever
02:26:39 in charge of doling out large amounts of science funding,
02:26:43 that you should keep kind of an option.
02:26:45 In other words, you should have money for publicity.
02:26:47 It’s fine.
02:26:48 Have money for your press conference.
02:26:50 But hold in reserve in a bond to be used, hopefully never,
02:26:54 but if it’s to be used, an equal fund for the retraction,
02:26:58 if it should occur.
02:26:59 So you would like to see,
02:27:01 because that’s a big part of transparency, is the…
02:27:06 To me, in the space of science at least,
02:27:08 that’s as beautiful, because it reveals the…
02:27:13 It tells a great story.
02:27:15 There’s an excitement, there’s a…
02:27:18 Humanity.
02:27:20 So there’s a climax to the triumph,
02:27:21 but there’s also a climax to the disappointment at the end.
02:27:25 Because that also eventually leads to triumph again.
02:27:29 That sets up, that’s the drama that sets up the triumph.
02:27:32 Like with Andrew Wiles performing Fermat’s theorem,
02:27:37 I guess it’s not the last thing, whatever.
02:27:41 Like the ups and downs of that, the rollercoaster,
02:27:43 the whole thing should be documented.
02:27:44 That is science.
02:27:45 That is science.
02:27:46 And when we don’t do that, then we cultivate this aura
02:27:49 that excludes other scientists.
02:27:51 Often from minorities or women,
02:27:53 that you have to be Einstein.
02:27:54 Like Einstein came out of the womb,
02:27:55 and he was just like this guy with like curly…
02:27:57 No, he wasn’t.
02:27:58 He wasn’t bad at math.
02:28:00 That’s all nonsense.
02:28:01 But he said that he…
02:28:02 You know what he said he attributed his success to, Lex?
02:28:05 He said, I never asked my dad what happened
02:28:08 when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid.
02:28:11 And thank God I didn’t.
02:28:12 Because had I?
02:28:13 He would have told me the best answer of the day,
02:28:15 which by the way, he would create 20 years later
02:28:18 as a 26 year old in the patent office,
02:28:21 obviously in Switzerland.
02:28:22 And in so doing, by delaying when he asked these questions,
02:28:26 he said, I approached it with the intellect
02:28:28 of a mature scientist, not a little kid.
02:28:31 And I wouldn’t have accepted the same explanation.
02:28:34 So sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible,
02:28:37 inevitable, omniscient being,
02:28:40 I think that really does a disservice.
02:28:41 And Jim Gates said, he’s like,
02:28:42 Einstein wasn’t always Einstein.
02:28:45 And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril
02:28:47 because we’re humans until we have artificial Einstein,
02:28:51 which I don’t think will ever exist.
02:28:54 You’ve launched the assay or project
02:28:58 where you hope to assess theories
02:28:59 of everything with experiments.
02:29:01 You have a YouTube video where you were announcing that.
02:29:03 That looks super cool.
02:29:06 Can you describe this project?
02:29:07 And you also mentioned kind of,
02:29:09 you give a shout out to a little known fellow
02:29:11 by the name of Galileo Galilei
02:29:14 as an inspiration to this project.
02:29:17 Yeah, so Galileo is kind of my avatar,
02:29:20 my hero, the kind of all around scientist
02:29:23 that I would love to approach the logarithm of Galileo.
02:29:27 He was not only a phenomenal scientist,
02:29:31 he was an incredible artist, a writer, a poet,
02:29:35 a philosopher, and back then they didn’t have distinctions
02:29:38 between a scientist and a physician,
02:29:40 was like a physicist.
02:29:42 And he would indulge kind of these really
02:29:46 intellectual flights of fancy,
02:29:48 thinking about phenomena such as the Earth’s tides
02:29:52 or the composition of the Milky Way.
02:29:55 And what’s interesting about Galileo
02:29:57 is that he was almost as wrong often as he was right.
02:30:00 And Galileo was not alone like this.
02:30:03 I always say like Einstein had at least seven Nobel prizes
02:30:07 that he could have won for discoveries
02:30:09 that later became true,
02:30:10 but he also had seven huge impossible to believe blunders
02:30:15 in some sense.
02:30:16 That’s too bad,
02:30:17 because he could have had a good career as I would say.
02:30:19 And Galileo was like that too.
02:30:21 In other words, he would fall victim
02:30:23 to I think this confirmation bias
02:30:25 that all scientists have to guard their lives against,
02:30:29 their careers, their brands, their reputations against,
02:30:32 which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn’t conform
02:30:34 to what you’re trying to prove for one reason or another,
02:30:38 or the radical acceptance of things
02:30:40 that do comport with it in order to bolster your confidence.
02:30:43 And both are equally intoxicating.
02:30:45 It’s a confirmation bias is a hell of a drug
02:30:49 because it really reinforces this notion,
02:30:53 which is partially sunk cost.
02:30:54 You put so much time, effort, money, reputation into it.
02:30:57 You don’t wanna be wrong and go back on it.
02:30:59 And with Galileo, he would be incredibly perceptive
02:31:04 about things such as the Earth being not located
02:31:09 at the center of the solar system
02:31:11 and the sun being the center,
02:31:12 the so called Copernican hypothesis.
02:31:15 And he would use as evidence very, very interesting ideas
02:31:19 that all of which were wrong, basically.
02:31:21 And in fact, we weren’t able to prove
02:31:22 that the Earth orbited around the sun.
02:31:25 And I ask you, can you prove the Earth is not flat?
02:31:28 No, well, you’re a flat earther anyway.
02:31:30 But I ask my practice.
02:31:31 Proud Flat Earth Society member,
02:31:34 T shirts coming out soon.
02:31:36 Let’s stream it.com.
02:31:38 Merch.
02:31:39 Last merch.
02:31:40 But it’s actually not trivial to do that.
02:31:42 But most of my students, graduate students
02:31:43 can prove that the Earth is round
02:31:45 or explain how the Earth.
02:31:46 It is actually not trivial to do though.
02:31:48 It’s not.
02:31:48 Yeah.
02:31:49 And much harder is to prove
02:31:50 that the Earth goes around the sun.
02:31:51 In fact, that’s extremely hard to prove.
02:31:53 And almost none of my students,
02:31:54 even after they get their PhD and the final exam,
02:31:57 I kinda like to just give them a little bit of humility.
02:31:59 Cause I think to be a good scientist,
02:32:01 you need to be humble.
02:32:02 You need to have a little humility
02:32:03 and you need to have swagger.
02:32:05 You need to feel like a little cocky.
02:32:06 Like I could do this.
02:32:07 I can do this thing that Einstein by definition couldn’t do.
02:32:10 I’m gonna attempt it.
02:32:11 I’m gonna attempt to do what was impossible
02:32:13 just a generation ago.
02:32:15 How do you prove that the Earth goes around the sun?
02:32:18 Do you have to, is it by the motion of other planets?
02:32:22 So there are many ways to do it.
02:32:23 I mean, obviously you could take a spaceship,
02:32:24 park it at the North celestial pole of our solar system
02:32:28 and just watch what happens.
02:32:30 But obviously that wasn’t how it was discovered
02:32:31 in the late 1700s.
02:32:32 So it was called aberration.
02:32:34 So if you look at stars,
02:32:36 as the Earth orbits around the sun,
02:32:39 the position of the stars will shift slightly
02:32:41 because of the tilt of the Earth
02:32:43 and because the Earth is in motion around the Earth
02:32:45 and around the sun.
02:32:46 And because the Earth has a non trivial amount of velocity
02:32:50 compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the sun,
02:32:53 the stars will trace out little tiny ellipses
02:32:55 and those will correspond to the fact
02:32:57 that we’re moving around.
02:32:59 If they’re infinite distance,
02:33:00 which we assume that they are, they’re not really,
02:33:02 but for all intents and purposes
02:33:03 in the scale of the solar system, they’re infinitely far away.
02:33:06 So that’s called stellar aberration.
02:33:08 And that was the first way it was discovered.
02:33:10 And actually we still use that.
02:33:11 We have to correct for that effect
02:33:13 when we measure the cosmic microwave background.
02:33:16 Because imagine you’re inside of an oven,
02:33:18 it has some temperature three Kelvin
02:33:19 and a thousand Kelvin whenever.
02:33:21 If you’re moving towards you,
02:33:22 the photons that are coming to me in that direction
02:33:24 will be blue shifted hotter
02:33:26 and the ones behind me will be red shifted.
02:33:27 I’ll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount
02:33:30 of matter or energy where you are
02:33:32 and it’s an extension of the Doppler effect.
02:33:34 So we actually make use of that
02:33:36 and construct what’s called like a local standard of rest.
02:33:39 Anyway, so you can do it.
02:33:41 But Galileo said, no, no, no,
02:33:42 I’m not gonna wait for that.
02:33:43 I have other proofs for it.
02:33:45 One of which is that the earth has tides
02:33:47 and the tides come in and out twice a day,
02:33:50 high tide and low tide.
02:33:51 And he made the analogy,
02:33:53 because the earth is moving around the sun,
02:33:56 say this is the sun here,
02:33:57 and it’s moving around the sun,
02:33:58 but it’s also rotating on its axis.
02:34:00 See how the water is sloshing up and down
02:34:02 inside the vodka bottle?
02:34:04 As that happens, he said,
02:34:05 that’s what the tides are caused by.
02:34:06 Totally wrong.
02:34:07 Most people listen to this podcast.
02:34:09 Just so you know, if you’re listening to this,
02:34:12 he actually has a bottle of vodka in his hand.
02:34:14 Half drunk.
02:34:15 And we’re both drunk and whatever else is possible.
02:34:20 So as it sloshed around,
02:34:22 he claimed that was what,
02:34:23 no, it has nothing to do with that.
02:34:23 The moon, over there,
02:34:26 the moon pulls differentially
02:34:28 on the earth and the earth’s ocean.
02:34:30 That causes the oceans to bulge slightly
02:34:33 towards and away from where the moon is.
02:34:35 And the moon is actually the source of the earth’s tides.
02:34:37 It has nothing to do with Copernicus,
02:34:39 the orbit of the sun.
02:34:40 So he was totally wrong about that.
02:34:42 He also thought that the Milky Way
02:34:44 was comprised only of stars,
02:34:46 when we know it’s made of gas, dust,
02:34:47 nebulae, and things like that.
02:34:49 So he had his fair share of blunders.
02:34:51 Now, one thing I always kind of make note of,
02:34:53 and I’m actually producing along with Jim Gates,
02:34:57 Fabiola Gianatti, Frank Wilczek,
02:35:00 and Carlo Ravelli,
02:35:02 and my friend Lucio Piccirillo,
02:35:03 the first ever audio book of Galileo’s dialogue,
02:35:07 the one where he claimed to find evidence
02:35:08 for the orbit of the earth around the sun,
02:35:11 but it was an error.
02:35:12 So you’re reading parts of this text.
02:35:14 Yeah, it’s a brilliant book.
02:35:16 So this book was written in 1632.
02:35:19 It was written, and it was the one
02:35:20 that caused him to go into house arrest
02:35:22 and almost threatened to be tortured.
02:35:24 And that book laid out his arguments
02:35:27 for what was called the Copernican
02:35:29 or the nonparapathetic Aristotelian, et cetera,
02:35:33 notion of the planetary dynamic.
02:35:37 And eventually he was forced to recant
02:35:39 that he believed in it,
02:35:40 and allegedly he said he still believes the earth moves.
02:35:43 Anyway, so we’re making,
02:35:44 it’s written in the form of a trilogue.
02:35:46 It’s actually called the dialogue with his three people.
02:35:48 There’s one named Salviati,
02:35:50 who was espousing Galileo’s notions
02:35:53 about how the heavens were orchestrated.
02:35:54 And Salviati means like the salvation, the savior.
02:35:58 Then there’s a middleman, Segredo.
02:35:59 So Carlo Rovelli is playing Salviati, brilliant one.
02:36:04 I am playing Segredo,
02:36:05 who’s like an intelligent interlocutor.
02:36:07 I’m kind of just, I can appreciate Aristotle,
02:36:10 I can appreciate Copernicus.
02:36:12 Then there’s this guy, Simplicio, the simpleton,
02:36:15 and he espouses the words of the Pope.
02:36:18 So you can imagine like,
02:36:19 you’re working in Putin’s government
02:36:21 or you’re working in whatever,
02:36:23 and all of a sudden you’re kind of putting the words
02:36:27 of like the fool, literally calling the fool,
02:36:29 but you’re using the words
02:36:30 of the all supreme powerful being on earth at that time
02:36:33 was the Vatican church,
02:36:35 especially for an Italian like Galileo.
02:36:37 So he wasn’t as brilliant politically
02:36:41 as he was astrophysically and otherwise.
02:36:44 Who’s doing Simplicio?
02:36:46 Simplicio is a friend of mine in University of Manchester
02:36:49 named Lucio Picciarello.
02:36:51 He’s an Irish guy, but he has an Italian,
02:36:53 no, no, he’s a full blooded Italian.
02:36:55 They all speak English and Italian, I only speak,
02:36:58 and the four words are written by,
02:37:00 so one four word in this place has three four words,
02:37:03 which is like a 12 word.
02:37:06 Okay.
02:37:07 The four words are written by.
02:37:08 Can you explain that joke for me?
02:37:09 Yeah, that was a good one.
02:37:10 The four word, three four words.
02:37:12 One of them is written by Albert Einstein
02:37:14 in which he says Galileo was not only
02:37:17 one of the greatest scientists in history,
02:37:19 this is Einstein telling Galileo,
02:37:21 but he was one of the greatest writers
02:37:23 and minds of all of human history.
02:37:26 That four word is read by Frank Wilczek, who you’ve had.
02:37:30 Jim Gates, who you’ve also had,
02:37:31 he reads the translation, the translator,
02:37:35 Stillman Drake, who’s a renowned scientific translator.
02:37:38 And then Fabiola Giannati,
02:37:40 she reads the introduction and dedication
02:37:43 from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany
02:37:46 and some of the different introductions
02:37:49 that Galileo himself had.
02:37:50 It’s just, it’s such a thrill to be able to do it.
02:37:53 I only randomly found out,
02:37:54 cause I wanted to study it and it’s like 500 pages long.
02:37:58 And I was like, let me get the audio book
02:37:59 cause I’m an audio medium kind of guy, didn’t exist.
02:38:02 So I said, let’s do it ourselves.
02:38:03 And so we did it and hopefully it’ll be out
02:38:05 on Galileo’s birthday, which is February 15th, 2022.
02:38:09 There’ll be a ripe 457,
02:38:11 but that’s not the only one of his books.
02:38:13 Galileo wrote many books,
02:38:15 one of which is called the Military Compass.
02:38:18 And this is an interesting book for my blockchain
02:38:20 and your blockchain aficionados.
02:38:22 In this book, he talks about a compass,
02:38:24 which is not a magnetic compass,
02:38:26 but an actual like slide roll.
02:38:27 It’s basically a slide roll.
02:38:29 And it’s a manual.
02:38:31 It’s like, imagine if your phone came with a manual,
02:38:34 nowadays they don’t, right?
02:38:35 But this was a manual for how to use this slide roll,
02:38:38 which is like enormously important.
02:38:39 And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples.
02:38:41 It’s a brilliant book.
02:38:43 One of the examples is how do you convert money?
02:38:45 So he does a currency conversion
02:38:47 between Ducati and Florentine Ducati
02:38:50 and Scuti and whatever, you know, lira, whatever.
02:38:54 He does all these currency conversions.
02:38:55 One copy of this book, or maybe two exist,
02:38:58 first printings from 1600 still exist.
02:39:02 If Galileo had just kept those in his family,
02:39:06 they’re worth a hundred million dollars.
02:39:08 Nowadays, you can’t get a Scuti.
02:39:10 A Scuti is worth nothing.
02:39:11 Like a Ducati is worth nothing.
02:39:13 I mean, maybe some collector wants a piece of paper, right?
02:39:15 So it’s a lesson.
02:39:16 Like there are value in physical, you know,
02:39:18 nonfungible tokens, this original nonfungible token.
02:39:22 But then a third book is called the assayer.
02:39:24 So what is an assayer?
02:39:26 So assayers were kind of like these alchemists, you know,
02:39:29 physicists, chemists that would be around a court.
02:39:33 And every so often for the treasurer,
02:39:35 they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens
02:39:37 and convert that to script or, you know, paper money.
02:39:40 And to do that, they needed someone
02:39:42 to verify with a standard of gold
02:39:44 that they knew to be gold and do some kind
02:39:47 of semi non destructive evaluation
02:39:49 of the purported object, the metal that
02:39:51 was supposed to be gold.
02:39:53 So they would take these pieces of gold, theoretically gold,
02:39:56 and they would rub it on something called a touchstone.
02:39:59 Touchstone was a special piece of rock, granite, whatever.
02:40:01 It has no intrinsic value.
02:40:04 It’s just a piece of rock.
02:40:05 But with that rock, you could assay and determine
02:40:08 the content of this thing that could be worth, you know,
02:40:11 millions of lira or whatever, right?
02:40:13 So it was an incredibly important job.
02:40:15 And so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock
02:40:18 and use it to do something valuable.
02:40:20 What I want to do in the Assayer Project
02:40:22 is take this plethora of physical theories
02:40:26 of everything.
02:40:27 I said recently, you know, we should give a Nobel Prize
02:40:29 to someone who doesn’t come up with a theory of everything.
02:40:32 Because there’s just like, it’s just rotten with them.
02:40:37 And I think it’s great.
02:40:39 You know, I often say that theory is kind of like software.
02:40:42 And I’m not denigrating software at all.
02:40:44 But like, you can create a lot of software.
02:40:46 You can make a quine, and it’ll make its own quine.
02:40:49 And you can make infinite amounts of software.
02:40:51 Look it up, kids.
02:40:52 That’s one of my favorite videos.
02:40:54 And you can replicate.
02:40:55 You can’t replicate.
02:40:55 You can’t make a telescope that makes a telescope that
02:40:57 makes a telescope.
02:40:58 In other words, hardware’s kind of like the nonfungible token
02:41:01 that’s the ultimate minted, limited edition, the book,
02:41:03 the compass book, like I talk.
02:41:05 And so it’s very expensive.
02:41:07 That means you have to be very careful before you invest
02:41:10 decades, billions, and humans into pursuing
02:41:14 one of these theories of everything.
02:41:15 You have to have good intuition for it.
02:41:17 And lately, what I’ve seen is not predictions,
02:41:21 but retrodictions.
02:41:22 So you see that the Large Hadron Collider will come out
02:41:25 with a measurement.
02:41:26 And then so and so will say, oh, this
02:41:30 is compatible with string theory.
02:41:32 Or g minus 2 of the muon, it has these bizarre properties.
02:41:35 Fifth force, string theory predicts this.
02:41:38 String theory solves this.
02:41:40 Neutrinos, sterile neutrinos, Large Hadron Collider bottom
02:41:46 or B experiment, blah, blah, blah.
02:41:47 They’ll say that it’s compatible after the fact.
02:41:50 And it’s not so bad, right?
02:41:51 Because what did Einstein do with GR, general relativity?
02:41:54 The first thing he did was not predict something new.
02:41:58 He looked at the anomalous behavior
02:41:59 of the planet Mercury.
02:42:01 And he saw it was behaving strangely.
02:42:03 And people had said, oh, that’s because there’s another planet
02:42:05 hiding behind the sun that we can’t see that perturbs
02:42:08 the orbit of the planet Mercury.
02:42:10 It’s called Vulcan.
02:42:12 That was one approach.
02:42:13 That’s kind of like the dark matter approach,
02:42:14 where it’s like there’s a clump of matter
02:42:16 that we can’t see that’s influencing the planet that we
02:42:19 can’t see.
02:42:20 And we use that to divine and intuit the existence
02:42:22 of the other planet.
02:42:23 That’s actually how Neptune was discovered.
02:42:25 Neptune was discovered because of the anomalous behavior
02:42:27 of the planet Uranus.
02:42:29 So Neptune was dark.
02:42:30 We couldn’t see it.
02:42:30 It was tugging on Uranus in a certain way.
02:42:33 And that led to Le Verrier discovering the planet,
02:42:36 predicting where this planet should be found.
02:42:38 So it had a good heritage in physics
02:42:40 to predict this planet that you couldn’t see that worked.
02:42:43 But Einstein said, no, it’s caused
02:42:45 by the warping and bending of spacetime
02:42:47 due to the presence of matter, who will later become known
02:42:50 as the Einstein equations.
02:42:51 So he explained why Mercury did that.
02:42:54 And it was known since the time of Newton
02:42:55 that Mercury was behaving in this really freaky way.
02:42:58 So he didn’t predict it.
02:42:59 He retradicted it.
02:43:00 That’s fine.
02:43:01 But at some point, you should come up
02:43:03 with something new that’s uniquely
02:43:05 predictive of your theory, as I just said.
02:43:07 The theory of dark matter in the context of Neptune
02:43:09 is actually a valid theory.
02:43:11 It just happens not to make sense
02:43:12 in the context of Vulcan.
02:43:14 And so if he had kept doing that,
02:43:17 maybe perhaps he wouldn’t have come up
02:43:19 with these other predictions that he would later reject.
02:43:22 He rejected the existence of gravitational waves.
02:43:24 You and Barry talked about that.
02:43:26 He didn’t actually believe it.
02:43:27 It was the one peer reviewed paper that he had.
02:43:29 He used to send back in those days.
02:43:31 He’d send a letter to Nature, physical review,
02:43:33 publish this, and know how much it cost.
02:43:36 And he got it rejected,
02:43:37 because he said you can’t detect gravitational waves.
02:43:40 And actually, or they’re not real.
02:43:41 And the guy showed that they’re real,
02:43:43 because he corrected a math error
02:43:45 in Einstein and Rosen’s paper.
02:43:47 So it’s fascinating.
02:43:48 What should the assayer do?
02:43:49 He or she should look at these theories,
02:43:52 look what things they explain that already exist,
02:43:54 and look at what new predictions they can claim to explain
02:43:58 if we can build experiments to test them.
02:44:01 So you have to kind of challenge yourself
02:44:03 to think about what kind of predictions
02:44:06 can they make such that we can construct experiments?
02:44:09 So that’s like ultimately back going to the signal,
02:44:14 to the experimenter’s theorist, essentially.
02:44:19 So like very experiment centric exploration
02:44:24 of the fundamental theory of everything.
02:44:25 That’s right.
02:44:26 And the best scientists, the best physicists,
02:44:29 were both experimentalists and theorists.
02:44:31 Or at least if they were experimentalists,
02:44:34 they understood the theory well enough to make predictions
02:44:37 or to explore the predictions
02:44:38 and the consequences of those predictions.
02:44:40 Or if they were theorists, they were like Galileo.
02:44:43 Like Einstein has patents for things that he invented.
02:44:47 And then some of his work led to the laser and the maser.
02:44:50 So he had practically, it wasn’t just pure airy fairy,
02:44:52 quantum reality and expanding universe.
02:44:56 So in this case, what I wanna do is look at,
02:44:58 there’s 10 different theories of everything
02:45:00 or cosmological models.
02:45:01 They make predictions, they have advantages
02:45:03 and disadvantages, and I’m just asking the question,
02:45:05 why aren’t we applying Bayesian reasoning
02:45:07 with confidence intervals?
02:45:09 Why don’t we have updates?
02:45:10 Every time an experiment comes out,
02:45:12 we can update our credulity in that experiment
02:45:14 or that theory rather,
02:45:15 based on the results of the experiment.
02:45:17 And we shouldn’t do it after the fact,
02:45:18 or as Michio Kaku has said,
02:45:20 well, you have to tell me what the initial conditions are.
02:45:23 And that’s not my job.
02:45:24 You’re supposed to tell me if string theory is correct,
02:45:26 what should it predict if it’s true?
02:45:29 There’s one big problem, which I should say,
02:45:31 that to be a good ass air,
02:45:34 I think you have to be worldly in the sense of,
02:45:40 worldly and curious, like we were talking about before
02:45:42 with you and Joe, and you can’t only talk your own book.
02:45:47 You can’t only understand your own pet theory of everything.
02:45:52 You can’t only say, well, I only understand string theory
02:45:55 and I don’t have time for these other theories,
02:45:58 or as if it’s beneath me to even go into Garrett Lisi
02:46:02 or Eric Weinstein or Stephen Wolfram
02:46:05 or aspects of M theory, et cetera, et cetera.
02:46:08 And there are some that say,
02:46:09 why do we give string theory so much of an advanced pass
02:46:15 when there are actually predictions that’s made
02:46:18 that are completely anathema to what we observe in physics?
02:46:21 Like the dark energy should be negative
02:46:24 and we see it as positive.
02:46:25 That’s a huge strike.
02:46:26 If you told somebody, here’s my tenure application
02:46:28 and what do you, oh, I’ve made this pretty,
02:46:30 if it wasn’t done by Maldacena and Whitten
02:46:33 and folks like that,
02:46:34 I don’t know if it would have had the traction,
02:46:36 the endurance, the resiliency that it’s had.
02:46:38 And that worries me because all these men and some women
02:46:42 are making these fantastic, brilliant, beautiful ideas
02:46:46 and they’re not even looking at what their neighbor’s doing.
02:46:48 There’s a thing that I really enjoyed seeing
02:46:52 and that don’t see often enough with these theories,
02:46:54 which is others who are also experts
02:46:58 kind of studying them sufficiently well
02:47:01 to steel man the theory,
02:47:04 to show the beautiful aspects of the theory.
02:47:07 I see that with Stephen Wolfram.
02:47:09 He has a very different sort of formulation of physics
02:47:15 with his physics project.
02:47:17 Now I’m, it’s, physics is a foreign land to me,
02:47:21 but his formulation, especially in the context
02:47:24 of cellular automata or hypergraphs,
02:47:27 just as objects, as mathematical objects themselves
02:47:29 are familiar.
02:47:30 And so I’m able to see the real beauty there
02:47:33 and it saddens me that others in the physics community
02:47:39 can’t also see the beauty.
02:47:41 Like give it a chance, give a chance to see the beauty.
02:47:44 And that.
02:47:45 Give it your respect.
02:47:46 So there is one person who does take time
02:47:48 and is what I consider to be a great scientist
02:47:51 in terms of what he thinks.
02:47:53 He obviously has invested interest in his own theory
02:47:55 and it’s Eric.
02:47:57 Eric’s got a truly encyclopedic knowledge
02:48:00 of the history of physics.
02:48:02 And he has a great warmth and graciousness
02:48:06 when it comes to giving other,
02:48:08 and I’ve witnessed this and I’ve had,
02:48:09 look, first of all, I think debate is pointless.
02:48:11 Like, I don’t know about you, but if you’ve ever voted like,
02:48:14 oh, I saw this debate and you know,
02:48:15 because Trump did so badly, now I’m gonna vote for Biden.
02:48:18 No, never have.
02:48:19 You almost never change anybody’s mind
02:48:21 unless you debate with love.
02:48:23 Unless you have almost like we’re gonna win together,
02:48:26 like the red team approach in the military,
02:48:28 they’re trying to win a war.
02:48:30 So they may disagree on the tactics day to day,
02:48:33 but the strategy, we have to win this war.
02:48:35 I love you and I wanna protect you.
02:48:37 I don’t see that in very many of these physicists from Kaku.
02:48:40 I almost see it, it’s embarrassing in some ways
02:48:42 because they’ll almost mock with the exception of Eric.
02:48:45 You know, Garrett’s interesting.
02:48:47 You know, his theory is, you know,
02:48:48 people have a lot of issues, very technical,
02:48:51 but Eric has taken the time to try to understand it.
02:48:54 Eric has taken the time to understand Peter White’s theory.
02:48:57 And I don’t see the same graciousness extended from them.
02:49:01 I’m sorry to say.
02:49:01 Yeah, essentially, you’re right, you’re right.
02:49:03 I mean, with Eric, he hasn’t, he wants to,
02:49:05 but he hasn’t extended the same for Stephen Wolfram
02:49:08 because I think Wolf.
02:49:09 No, he did.
02:49:10 No, actually, no, he did.
02:49:11 I had a debate with them live on my show.
02:49:13 No, I did, I listened to it,
02:49:14 but I just think it’s outside of the toolkit
02:49:17 that Eric is comfortable with.
02:49:19 So it’s not that he’s not,
02:49:21 but the main thing that’s often absent
02:49:24 and Eric does have is the willingness
02:49:28 and not just dismissing or mocking that he’s reaching out.
02:49:32 But okay.
02:49:33 I mean, what if it’s not,
02:49:34 you know, I made a joke when they were on,
02:49:36 I was like, how many theories of everything can there be?
02:49:38 You know, Highlander, there can be only one.
02:49:41 I don’t know, maybe.
02:49:42 But he, of course, also, like the other folks
02:49:44 who propose a theory, has an ego.
02:49:48 Yeah.
02:49:49 He rides a dragon with the dragon representing the ego.
02:49:55 Well, let me ask you about your friend, Eric Weinstein.
02:50:00 So he proposed initial sketches of geometric unity,
02:50:03 which is his theory of everything.
02:50:05 Maybe you can elucidate some aspect of it
02:50:07 that you find interesting.
02:50:08 But what do you think about the response
02:50:13 he got from the scientific community?
02:50:17 Well, you know, some of the response came
02:50:19 from people, academicians, professors.
02:50:22 Some came from a lay audience
02:50:24 and some came from trained scientists
02:50:26 who are no longer, you know,
02:50:27 maybe practicing in the universities.
02:50:30 I thought it was, there was a lot of vitriol,
02:50:33 which surprised me because I look at what he’s trying to do
02:50:38 and it was always, the vitriol would always come
02:50:41 with some element of ad hominem.
02:50:44 And maybe that’s his personality,
02:50:45 maybe that engenders this or whatever.
02:50:48 Maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency.
02:50:50 You know, I always get these emails,
02:50:52 Professor Keating, I have a new theory,
02:50:54 Einstein was wrong, I’m gonna prove it.
02:50:56 I’m not good at math, but if you help me,
02:50:59 I will share my Nobel Prize with you.
02:51:01 And I’m like, oh, thanks, have you read my books?
02:51:04 In other words, it’s always taking down the dragon.
02:51:07 It’s always taking down the Kung Fu master, right?
02:51:09 That you get the hit points from D&D.
02:51:11 You get their hit points, you take their cards,
02:51:13 you get their risk tokens from Kamchaka.
02:51:15 And thinking about with Eric, it’s like,
02:51:18 because what he’s doing is so aspirational,
02:51:21 it is grandiose in a good sense.
02:51:22 What he’s trying to do is construct
02:51:25 a geometric theory of everything
02:51:26 that has aspects of supersymmetry
02:51:28 and stuff embedded in it.
02:51:30 He’s trying to meld that, it has very unusual features
02:51:34 and that it features not only multiple spatial dimensions,
02:51:37 multiple time dimensions,
02:51:38 it uses new mathematical objects that he’s invented.
02:51:42 And look, I had him on my show, I’ve talked with him.
02:51:46 We’ve had consultations with other physicists
02:51:49 where he’ll come down and I have a visitor’s office
02:51:51 and he comes down to San Diego sometimes
02:51:53 and spends time there.
02:51:54 And we talk with eminent mathematicians and physicists.
02:51:58 Eric’s been out of the academic world for a long time.
02:52:02 And there is, as I said before,
02:52:04 an aspect of persuasion that must take place
02:52:07 in order to get anything through.
02:52:08 And I think there was a slight amount of good nature,
02:52:12 not ignorance, naivete, but just the sense that
02:52:15 if this is right, everyone will recognize it.
02:52:18 If you build a better mousetrap,
02:52:19 the world will beat a path to your door
02:52:21 as the expression goes.
02:52:22 That’s completely untrue.
02:52:24 That doesn’t even happen with mousetraps.
02:52:25 I mean, you know how many fricking mousetrap types there are?
02:52:27 It’s like, no, they don’t beat a path to your door.
02:52:30 You have to sell that fricking thing.
02:52:31 You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or Elon.
02:52:34 I have never, I’ve had one paper out of 200 papers
02:52:37 I’ve published in peer reviewed journals.
02:52:39 I’ve only had one, half a percent,
02:52:41 published with no referees comments.
02:52:43 In other words, published like dream.
02:52:45 Submitted it, it happened to be in a prestigious journal.
02:52:47 Thought I was pretty psyched about that.
02:52:49 But you almost have to crave the response,
02:52:51 getting it back from a journal.
02:52:52 And I think he doesn’t, first of all,
02:52:54 he doesn’t subscribe to the peer review process.
02:52:56 He thinks that is anathema to the way science is,
02:52:59 invest interest in public, in journals, et cetera, et cetera.
02:53:02 I think you can have elements of peer review
02:53:05 that are substantive and valuable.
02:53:08 I think you have to learn from your critics.
02:53:10 One of my conversations with John Mather,
02:53:12 he talks about loving your critics in this book,
02:53:14 but not being so open to their criticism
02:53:17 that their criticism goes to your heart
02:53:19 and not being so open to their compliments
02:53:21 that their compliments go to your head.
02:53:24 It’s a very tough Scylla and Charybdis to walk.
02:53:26 Well, there’s something, I mean,
02:53:29 I wanna be careful here because I’d like to talk to,
02:53:31 talk to Eric about this directly,
02:53:35 but I’ll just, from a perspective of a friend,
02:53:41 wanna ask about the drug of fame.
02:53:48 So there’s also the public perception
02:53:54 of the battles of physics.
02:53:56 And so there’s a very narrow community,
02:53:58 but then there’s the way that’s perceived.
02:54:03 The exploration of ideas is perceived by the public.
02:54:06 And so there is a certain drug to the excitement
02:54:10 that the public can show when they sense
02:54:14 that you have something big.
02:54:17 And that in itself might become the thing
02:54:21 that gives you pleasure.
02:54:23 And I think that with theories of everything
02:54:27 or with any kind of super, super ambitious projects,
02:54:30 and this is taking us back to when you were ambitious
02:54:34 about trying to understand the origins of the universe,
02:54:37 if you convince yourself that you have an intuition
02:54:41 about the origins of the universe
02:54:43 and you have a platform like you do now
02:54:47 where you start to communicate your intuition,
02:54:50 it’s hazy, like all the science, you’re still unsure,
02:54:54 but you have a sense, I mean, perhaps you don’t have that
02:54:56 as much as an experimentalist
02:54:58 because you always kind of start going,
02:55:00 okay, how can I build a device to see through the fog?
02:55:06 But if you’re more like a theoretician
02:55:08 who kind of works in the realm of ideas,
02:55:11 in the realm of intuitions,
02:55:15 it is also a source of pleasure.
02:55:16 You mentioned dopamine, a source of dopamine
02:55:20 that you can communicate to others
02:55:23 that you’re really excited by the possibility
02:55:25 of solving the deepest mysteries of the universe.
02:55:29 So there’s some aspect to which you want to be
02:55:32 a Grigori Grisha Perlman and go into the hole
02:55:36 and get the work done and shut the hell up about the,
02:55:40 speaking about myself, about talking about the dream
02:55:45 and planning and exploring how great it will be
02:55:48 if my intuition turns out to be correct.
02:55:51 If the sketches I have turn out to actually build
02:55:55 the bridge that takes us to a whole new place,
02:55:58 as a friend of Eric’s or a friend of,
02:56:03 or my friend, what kind of advice do you give?
02:56:08 What is your role?
02:56:10 Is it to be a supporter given that he has many critics
02:56:14 or is it to be in private a critic?
02:56:18 Like a lot of my friends will say,
02:56:20 hey, shut the hell up, just get it done.
02:56:22 Well, first of all, I wanna ask you a question I’ve asked him
02:56:25 and then it comes from Animal Farm by George.
02:56:29 Probably my favorite book, yeah.
02:56:31 So you remember Benjamin the donkey?
02:56:32 Yes.
02:56:33 And he’s talking to the pig.
02:56:35 I forget the pig’s name, you probably know.
02:56:37 Anyway, the pig says to him,
02:56:38 you’ve got this long, lustrous, beautiful tail.
02:56:41 You’re so lucky.
02:56:42 I got the short, curly, little squiggly thing
02:56:44 that does jack squat.
02:56:46 Tell me, how does it feel to have such a lustrous tail?
02:56:49 And Benjamin says, well, the good Lord,
02:56:52 he gave me a tail to swat away the flies.
02:56:56 But you know what?
02:56:57 I’d rather not have the tail if I didn’t have the flies.
02:57:01 So I wanna ask you, as I’ve asked Eric, is it worth it?
02:57:05 You know, you’ve got these beautiful tail,
02:57:08 but there are flies.
02:57:09 I’m not saying in a negative way.
02:57:11 I’m just saying you get unwanted distractions,
02:57:14 dopamine, you know, it’s kind of the highlight,
02:57:17 the spotlight effect.
02:57:18 It’s obviously allowing you to do things
02:57:21 that you could never do alone.
02:57:22 And I think, you know, first of all,
02:57:24 I’d love to know how you answer that.
02:57:26 Cause that’s something I don’t feel I can relate to myself.
02:57:30 Well, this has to do with more like.
02:57:33 Platform.
02:57:34 Platform stuff.
02:57:35 Yeah, scale.
02:57:36 Oh, I, that has no, very little effect on me.
02:57:42 I enjoy it.
02:57:45 I enjoy meeting new people,
02:57:46 but that has nothing to do with platform.
02:57:48 Yeah, no, that has no effect on me.
02:57:52 I’m one somebody that enjoys the act itself.
02:57:57 So this conversation,
02:57:58 the reason I’m doing this podcast with you today
02:58:01 is because that allows me to trick you
02:58:03 into talking to me for a prolonged period of time.
02:58:05 I don’t care about platform.
02:58:07 I assume nobody listens.
02:58:08 It really doesn’t matter.
02:58:09 Yeah, I forgot it, right?
02:58:11 My whole test of it was a good podcast.
02:58:13 How do you know?
02:58:14 Like podcast has been around what, 12 years?
02:58:16 How do we know as podcasters we’re doing a good job?
02:58:18 Like sometimes someone will say,
02:58:19 that was the best interview I ever had,
02:58:20 but that doesn’t happen that often, at least for me.
02:58:22 But if you realize that you forgot to put the SD card
02:58:26 in that little guy and the Zoom didn’t work,
02:58:29 would you do it again?
02:58:30 And I think if you say yes to that,
02:58:32 that was a good podcast.
02:58:33 Yeah, exactly.
02:58:33 That’s exactly it.
02:58:35 So in that space, yeah, all of it is worth it.
02:58:40 But the dream, I’m more referring
02:58:46 to the psychological effects.
02:58:47 Forget the platform, forget all of that.
02:58:50 You know, maybe you shouldn’t even brought up the platform
02:58:52 because it really has to do even in your own private mind,
02:58:55 which is what I’m struggling with.
02:58:59 I enjoy the planning, the dreaming, the early stages
02:59:07 so much that I often don’t take projects to completion.
02:59:11 This is a psychological effect
02:59:14 that I’m sure basically everybody, every engineer,
02:59:16 everybody that does anything goes through.
02:59:18 I just, in this case particular, I think it also applies.
02:59:22 And I wonder as a friend, what is the role?
02:59:25 So yeah, I mean, that effect has been documented,
02:59:27 everything from planning telescopes to dieting.
02:59:30 So there’s a tiny bit of dopamine that you get
02:59:34 visualizing how you’re gonna feel.
02:59:36 You don’t need to know this, but you don’t deal,
02:59:38 but losing five pounds.
02:59:39 I say, oh, I’m gonna lose five pounds
02:59:40 and I’m gonna be able to run a minute faster.
02:59:43 So there’s a part of me when I’m planning the diet
02:59:45 and the meals and the exercise
02:59:47 that I get a little bit of that thrill
02:59:49 and that actually saps a little bit of my willpower
02:59:51 to actually complete the task that will take me to that goal.
02:59:53 So that’s a documented effect.
02:59:54 And that happens in project planning and project management.
02:59:57 It’s a very, very important thing to guard against
03:00:00 as a manager of a big project.
03:00:02 With Eric, it’s interesting because with him,
03:00:05 first of all, we relate extremely well
03:00:08 on a friendship level and very close.
03:00:11 He does remind me a lot of my father
03:00:14 and I’ve told him that just as a mathematician,
03:00:17 as a big thinker, in his case, as a father,
03:00:21 the father kind of figure that I didn’t have in a sense,
03:00:24 but that he is a true lover of life.
03:00:27 He knows he’s got a huge platform.
03:00:28 He knows he gets a lot of attention for what he does.
03:00:32 And I jokingly say, well, it’s one thing,
03:00:34 like how do you know, Lex, that someone’s an expert?
03:00:37 Experts say.
03:00:39 There’s a good rule Ray Dalio writes about in principles.
03:00:41 He says, an expert is someone who’s done something
03:00:43 three times successfully.
03:00:44 Like you can do something correctly once,
03:00:47 you could do something correctly.
03:00:48 It’s very hard to pull off like three projects,
03:00:51 three telescopes, three whatever, right?
03:00:53 So look for, it’s arbitrary, it could be four,
03:00:57 it could be two, right?
03:00:58 But the point is, look at Eric.
03:00:59 So how many things has he contributed to
03:01:01 and made pretty substantive kind of paradigm shifts
03:01:05 for different people?
03:01:06 I would say he’s been right many times.
03:01:09 Does that mean he’s infallible, that he’s ineffable?
03:01:11 No, of course not.
03:01:12 For me, so what I’m saying is I get a little bit of the joy
03:01:16 of kind of learning something purely as a scientist,
03:01:20 something completely outside of what I do, mathematics,
03:01:23 gauge theory, the kind of very advanced geometry topology
03:01:30 that he’s interested in.
03:01:31 But every now and then, I will sneak in that I want,
03:01:35 you know, I’ve told him, I’m gonna turn your son
03:01:36 into an experimentalist despite you.
03:01:38 You know, like he is not gonna be a theorist,
03:01:40 Zev is not gonna be a theorist.
03:01:41 He is working with me, he is learning from me.
03:01:43 We’re trying to get him into, he wants to bypass
03:01:46 all of the kind of nonsense of undergraduate
03:01:48 and go straight to graduate school.
03:01:50 And I’ve tried to encourage him
03:01:51 that maybe he could do it, maybe he can’t,
03:01:53 but there’s no other way than to try.
03:01:55 And so I prepared a whole curriculum for Zev
03:01:57 to basically bypass all of undergraduate.
03:01:59 And to his credit, he’s not earns all the credit.
03:02:02 He’s learned it to a level
03:02:03 that matches many of my graduate students.
03:02:05 Okay, hold on a second.
03:02:06 I have to push back and this is me saying it
03:02:08 and I’m sure I’ll talk to Eric about this.
03:02:11 But to say, you said Eric’s done,
03:02:15 was right on multiple things.
03:02:19 I think Eric has a great deep insight
03:02:24 about human nature and how societies work.
03:02:27 And he says a lot of wise words on that world.
03:02:31 But I think if we’re talking about experts,
03:02:34 you kind of have to prove, you know,
03:02:36 it’s like Michael Jordan playing baseball.
03:02:38 Like he’s proved it many times that he can play basketball,
03:02:42 but he’s also got to prove that he can play baseball.
03:02:44 And I would say the whole point of, I mean,
03:02:47 of radical ideas is you’re not, I mean,
03:02:51 it’s very hard to be sitting on a track record of,
03:02:55 I mean, when you’re swinging for the fences,
03:02:57 always there’s not a track record to sit on.
03:03:02 And like Max Tegmark is an example of somebody
03:03:05 who has a huge track record of more like acceptable stuff,
03:03:09 but he also keeps swinging for the fences
03:03:11 in every other world.
03:03:12 So he has that track record.
03:03:14 With Eric, if you look at just the number of publications,
03:03:17 all this stuff, he chose not to travel the academic route.
03:03:21 So there’s no proof of expertise
03:03:24 except sort of an obvious linguistic demonstration
03:03:30 of brilliance, but that’s not how physics works, right?
03:03:32 There’s a polite way to damn somebody as a scientist
03:03:35 and say he or she, they really know
03:03:37 the history of physics very well.
03:03:40 Like physicists always love it.
03:03:41 Like Sean Carroll always jokes about like,
03:03:43 physicists should never talk about history of physics,
03:03:46 but it’s more than that.
03:03:47 So Eric has certainly contributed in finance specifically
03:03:53 and gauge theory and economics and inflation dynamics
03:03:57 and the non cosmological.
03:03:59 Hold on a second, that’s yet to be proven.
03:04:00 He has a lot of powerful interests.
03:04:03 Calculate is calculus proven.
03:04:04 I mean, he has a gauge model for currency exchanges
03:04:10 between different nations that is explanatory.
03:04:13 Not, it’s not, you know, is this something,
03:04:16 in other words, it’s a model
03:04:18 and it’s used for pedagogical purposes.
03:04:20 And it might be, okay.
03:04:21 It’s unique to him.
03:04:22 I mean, to him and Pia.
03:04:23 Yes, it might be a powerful model.
03:04:27 It might be one that’s actually deserves
03:04:29 a huge amount of applause and celebration,
03:04:32 but does not yet receive that.
03:04:34 And that’s one of the things that Eric talks about.
03:04:35 It has not received the attention it deserves,
03:04:38 but it has not yet received the attention it deserves.
03:04:40 And so like the proven expertise thing,
03:04:43 I mean, there’s a lot of people that go to their grave
03:04:47 without the recognition they deserve and it’s a tragedy.
03:04:50 But the fact is like, you know,
03:04:53 you have to fight for that recognition.
03:04:55 The tragedy happens for a reason.
03:04:57 You can’t just say this person is obviously brilliant
03:05:00 and therefore they deserve the credit
03:05:05 in every single domain.
03:05:06 It doesn’t like transfer immediately.
03:05:09 There’s nobody that’s, well, at least I wouldn’t argue
03:05:12 Eric is one of the special minds in our generation,
03:05:15 but you still have to fight the fight of physics
03:05:18 and prove it within the community.
03:05:20 And I think the same applies in economics.
03:05:22 You can’t, I mean, as somebody that, you know,
03:05:27 I’ve gone through the academic journey,
03:05:30 just like you said, the peer review,
03:05:33 all of those things, flawed as they are,
03:05:35 that’s the part of the process.
03:05:37 You have to convince your peers,
03:05:39 the people that are as obsessed for whatever the hell reason
03:05:44 about that particular thing that you’re working on.
03:05:46 Yes, there’s egos.
03:05:48 Yes, there’s politics.
03:05:49 It’s a giant mess.
03:05:50 But I think it’s a beautiful mess
03:05:52 through which you have to go through
03:05:56 in order to reveal the power of your idea
03:06:00 to yourself and to the world.
03:06:02 Well, let me use an example.
03:06:03 So, you know of James Clerk Maxwell
03:06:06 and he invented the laws of electromagnetism,
03:06:08 which is the first example of a unification principle
03:06:10 ever displayed by the human mind in history.
03:06:13 Purely mathematics, unifying completely disparate phenomena.
03:06:17 In one case, electricity, charges,
03:06:20 static electricity, lightning,
03:06:21 and the other magnets, bar magnets, currents, et cetera.
03:06:24 Unify them.
03:06:25 And you know what he did?
03:06:27 I like to do a thought experiment.
03:06:28 Imagine Twitter exists, 1864.
03:06:31 Maxwell’s working away.
03:06:32 And he goes, I have this wonderful idea
03:06:34 with fluxions and inductive virtue and blah, blah, blah.
03:06:37 And it revolves on this thing called an ether.
03:06:39 And by the way, there are these little vortices and gears
03:06:42 and the gears have these planetary things
03:06:44 and they suck up vortices and the vortices determine
03:06:46 the density of the electromagnetic potential.
03:06:49 You feel like this guy’s a fricking moron.
03:06:51 And what would you do?
03:06:52 Come on, honestly, you would say
03:06:53 everything this guy does is wrong.
03:06:55 I mean, he’s got this idiotic idea
03:06:57 and it would be falsified a couple of decades later
03:07:00 by Michelson and Morley.
03:07:02 And in so doing, you would have thrown out
03:07:04 a very beautiful baby with bathwater.
03:07:07 Imagine Twitter, imagine the twit storm,
03:07:09 clerk Maxwell, at clerk Maxwell one would get.
03:07:13 It would be brutal, right?
03:07:14 And to the detriment.
03:07:16 And that might even set back history.
03:07:17 Imagine Yang Mills doing the same thing.
03:07:19 Chairman Simons.
03:07:20 All these things are very fantastic.
03:07:22 But why Lex?
03:07:23 Why does Ed Witten, why does Juan Maldacena?
03:07:26 Let me give a good example.
03:07:28 Juan, brilliant guy, I love him.
03:07:30 He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded
03:07:33 his black hole information paradox loss issue.
03:07:36 What did he concede based upon Maldacena’s calculation
03:07:40 in ADS, CFT and five dimensional wormholes?
03:07:44 Is any of that?
03:07:45 First of all, we don’t live in ADS universe.
03:07:47 Second of all, we don’t know if wormholes are traversable,
03:07:49 if they exist even.
03:07:51 These are devices, Kip Thorne is popularized for movies.
03:07:55 To say that this is something on which I will concede a bet.
03:07:58 Now, obviously Hawking was doing that for publicity.
03:08:00 Why does Maldacena?
03:08:02 And he’s got a pretty high H index,
03:08:04 pretty well respected guy at IAS.
03:08:06 Love talking to him, brilliant guy.
03:08:08 By the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia’s work
03:08:12 on gauge theory and economics originally.
03:08:14 And one, I believe the breakthrough,
03:08:16 I can’t remember exactly what,
03:08:17 but partially credit some of the work that he did,
03:08:20 which appears there’s a footnote to Pia Milani’s thesis
03:08:24 and some conversations with Eric, I think in it.
03:08:26 Anyway, getting back to that,
03:08:28 why is there not the same skepticism?
03:08:30 Is it because Maldacena,
03:08:32 who’s an eminent physicist obviously,
03:08:34 has published realistic work and done,
03:08:37 what about Witten?
03:08:39 Witten gets a pass.
03:08:40 I mean, if you, Witten just gets here.
03:08:40 Well, Witten gets a pass on which aspect?
03:08:42 The string theory?
03:08:43 Yeah, that M theory is correct.
03:08:45 I mean, here’s, well, let me just say Hawking.
03:08:46 Hawking gets the ultimate pass.
03:08:48 Hawking would say things like M theory,
03:08:50 there’s zero evidence for it.
03:08:52 I mean, there’s the famous meme
03:08:53 that went around this weekend, like,
03:08:54 what is string theory predicted?
03:08:56 And it’s nothing.
03:08:57 And by the way, that’s actually wrong.
03:08:57 I talked to Kamran, I know you talked to Kamran.
03:08:59 Kamran says that string theory does make predictions.
03:09:02 It predicts the mass of the electron lies
03:09:03 between 10 to the minus one Planck mass
03:09:06 and 10 to the minus 30 Planck mass.
03:09:07 Okay, whatever, or electron.
03:09:09 It’s a big range.
03:09:10 It’s a huge range.
03:09:11 Is that, imagine Kamran comes up and again,
03:09:13 he’s just some nobody, but he actually,
03:09:16 he doesn’t have a profile, he’s not Harvard,
03:09:18 has zero H and X or whatever Eric says.
03:09:21 Why do we not like, in other words,
03:09:23 why are we more harsh on people that are trying?
03:09:25 You know the answer to that.
03:09:27 So I get a million emails, just like you said,
03:09:30 you yourself, where they provenized in my world
03:09:34 as artificial intelligence, the equivalence of that,
03:09:37 is I figured out how to build consciousness,
03:09:40 how to engineer intelligence, how to, and sometimes.
03:09:44 You should send your emails to me
03:09:45 and I’ll send my emails to you.
03:09:46 And we’ll reply to each other.
03:09:48 I mean, and I don’t want to sort of mock this
03:09:50 because I think it’s very possible
03:09:52 that there is either kernels of interesting ideas
03:09:55 or in whole, like there is geniuses out there
03:09:58 that are unheard, but because there’s so much noise,
03:10:03 you do have to weigh out like a higher
03:10:08 the Ed Wittons of the world when they make statements.
03:10:12 And that’s why you build up a track record.
03:10:14 Like you just said with Ray Dalio,
03:10:16 you have to show that you can, like if you’re a Pollock
03:10:23 and you show us a painting of a bunch of chaos,
03:10:26 you have to, and this is a bad example, probably,
03:10:28 because he probably never showed this proof.
03:10:30 I don’t think he could do it.
03:10:30 Yeah, it’s much more comforting to see
03:10:36 that they can paint a good, accurate picture.
03:10:39 Still life.
03:10:40 Of still life, of an apple on the table.
03:10:43 So there’s, because then, I mean,
03:10:47 because then there’s something
03:10:50 about the scientific community
03:10:51 that they have perhaps an oversensitive bullshit sensor
03:10:54 to where they’re not going to give the full effort
03:10:57 of their attention if you don’t have the track record.
03:11:00 Now you could say that’s a kind of club
03:11:02 that only you have to like, you have to have 10,
03:11:04 you have to have this, yes, that exists,
03:11:07 but there’s some aspect in which you have to play the game
03:11:10 a little bit to get the machine of science going.
03:11:13 Otherwise, if you’re always saying,
03:11:16 well, I have my ball and I don’t want to play your game,
03:11:20 your game sucks, then nobody’s gonna want to play with you.
03:11:23 That’s true.
03:11:24 Look, inherent in all of this is an underlying grandiosity.
03:11:28 Look, how could you talk about doing what Kaku said
03:11:31 on here and elsewhere?
03:11:33 We’re looking for the umbilical cord
03:11:34 that connects our universe to another universe
03:11:36 that will then reveal in a one inch equation
03:11:38 that will surely win a Nobel Prize, the mind of God.
03:11:41 That’s like a prerequisite, I guess,
03:11:42 to tackle these questions.
03:11:44 I think it’s detrimental.
03:11:46 I think doing that, first of all,
03:11:48 I think there’s an element of almost snarkiness
03:11:50 because none of these scientists are believing,
03:11:52 you know, Gnostics, they’re not theists, right?
03:11:55 So they’re using it as kind of a stand in
03:11:57 and always talk about Einstein didn’t mean
03:11:59 he was like a Spinoza and he wasn’t a, you know, a theist.
03:12:02 God doesn’t play dice.
03:12:03 God doesn’t play dice.
03:12:03 Yeah, Einstein’s mentions of God, yeah.
03:12:05 Yeah, and then Stephen Hawking says if,
03:12:07 when we come, we get an M theory understood,
03:12:09 we’ll know the mind of God.
03:12:11 That’s the title of Kaku’s book,
03:12:13 The God Particle, The God Equation.
03:12:16 It, you know, do any of them really believe in God?
03:12:19 No, is that a prerequisite?
03:12:20 No, I’m not saying that.
03:12:21 But the point being,
03:12:23 you’re talking about something that has to do with God,
03:12:24 right, I mean, where else do you go from there?
03:12:26 I mean, I think God for now enjoys a little bit more,
03:12:29 you know, kind of a PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right?
03:12:33 So like it’s, you know, God’s got a pretty good,
03:12:36 you know, H index himself.
03:12:37 He has a, by the way, a Twitter account,
03:12:39 just so you know, it’s pretty good.
03:12:40 The tweets of God, yeah.
03:12:41 Yeah, that’s right.
03:12:42 The tweet of God.
03:12:43 So if you look at that, you have to go in there,
03:12:46 again, you have to go in with some swagger.
03:12:47 You have to have a little bit of arrogance,
03:12:50 but you should, I agree,
03:12:51 mix with a little bit of humility.
03:12:52 So he’s doing something, he comes from outside of academia.
03:12:55 Now, if he rails against, I’m talking about Eric now,
03:12:58 if he’s just railing, oh, the system,
03:12:59 and I’m not gonna publish because F that,
03:13:01 and that’s only created by greedy journalists,
03:13:03 I don’t think he’s doing himself any favors.
03:13:05 On the other hand, if he’s shopping it, if he’s talking it,
03:13:08 if he’s willing to expose it to criticism,
03:13:13 and to even embrace people
03:13:15 who may not have the purest intentions perhaps,
03:13:18 but in the sense of like they’re not arguing solely
03:13:21 to get to the truth with a capital T,
03:13:23 what they’re trying to do is take down Eric.
03:13:25 Hopefully those people aren’t out there.
03:13:27 But on the other hand,
03:13:29 looking at what Eric does for other people,
03:13:32 looking at the fact that he has courtesy,
03:13:34 he will look at Wolfram, he will look at Lisey,
03:13:36 who’s one of his closest friends.
03:13:38 I mean, he calls him as his aunt, not his aunt.
03:13:40 Nemesis. Nemesis, right, right.
03:13:42 I think that’s interesting that they’re loving friends.
03:13:44 I really enjoyed that portal conversation
03:13:46 between Gary and Lisey.
03:13:47 Eric is torn about that conversation because, I guess,
03:13:51 because of the nemesis of the beautiful dance of minds
03:13:55 playing with these ideas and theories of everything.
03:13:56 Some of these things, you know, look, so fundamentally,
03:13:59 now I may disagree with him, Eric, on a different aspect,
03:14:02 which is the only one I’m capable of,
03:14:03 but let me say one thing,
03:14:04 which is experimental, but let me say one thing.
03:14:06 I understand probably a third
03:14:08 of what Eric’s talking about with GU.
03:14:10 I understand, you know, GR, I understand mathematics,
03:14:13 I understand some group theory, fiber bone,
03:14:16 I can get a little of it, the age theory,
03:14:19 but I also understand what I don’t understand,
03:14:21 and I understand that there are people like Witten,
03:14:23 Maldacena, Nima, other people that can understand it,
03:14:28 and they’re not trying to understand it.
03:14:29 Sabina, she can understand it.
03:14:31 She makes all these, you know,
03:14:32 oh, I don’t understand it, I don’t want to understand it.
03:14:34 I don’t have time, and then she makes a video,
03:14:36 a music video, you know, kind of mocking Eric
03:14:39 and Steven and Garrett, and I’m like,
03:14:40 oh, you have a time to do, and I love Sabina,
03:14:42 and I’ve actually promoted my show on her,
03:14:44 and I love her, and she’s doing a wonderful job,
03:14:47 but you have a video that you said yourself
03:14:49 takes eight weeks to produce from start to finish,
03:14:51 and you couldn’t have spent, you know, 30 minutes, two hours.
03:14:54 I, Brian Keating, have done it
03:14:55 as an experimental cosmologist,
03:14:57 and I have enough to say, like, this is interesting.
03:15:00 It’s part of the ASEIR project, and it actually,
03:15:02 I shouldn’t say that there are no people.
03:15:04 They’re very serious.
03:15:04 Louis Alvarez Gommet at SUNY Stony Brook
03:15:08 at the Simon Center for Geometrical Physics.
03:15:10 Yeah, so he and I are running this seminar,
03:15:12 hopefully this summer.
03:15:13 We’re gonna reenact the famous
03:15:14 Shelter Island conferences in the 1900s,
03:15:17 where, you know, Feynman got together,
03:15:19 and they calculated the Lamb shift and all that,
03:15:21 but what did that feature?
03:15:23 The harmony, the resonant minds
03:15:25 behind the best experimentalists in cosmology,
03:15:28 particle physics, condensed matter physics
03:15:30 is now teaching us tremendous things about, you know,
03:15:32 lower dimensional systems that can be applied.
03:15:35 Theorists and experimentalists, observers,
03:15:37 cosmologists, we all will get together,
03:15:40 and we’re just gonna do it out of a spirit of love,
03:15:43 but if it’s just like, oh, this guy’s like a loudmouth,
03:15:46 I don’t have time for that.
03:15:46 I really don’t.
03:15:47 I don’t think it’s interesting way to spend my time.
03:15:50 There’s a aspect that I hope to see,
03:15:52 and it goes back to our sort of discussion
03:15:56 about Joe Rogan.
03:15:58 I do hope to see sort of love and humility
03:16:00 in the presentation.
03:16:01 Like, let go of this kind of fear of your ideas being stolen
03:16:06 and the ego that’s inherent to the scientific pursuit,
03:16:09 and now that everybody is established and known entities,
03:16:16 let go of that a little bit
03:16:17 so we can explore and celebrate ideas.
03:16:20 I would love to see more of that,
03:16:21 just like, as you were saying,
03:16:22 especially with these big ideas of theories of everything.
03:16:26 And I’ve talked, I mean,
03:16:26 this isn’t talking tails out of school,
03:16:28 but I mean, he has made claims
03:16:30 that I fundamentally disagree with,
03:16:32 in terms of like, he’s had this Twitter baiting,
03:16:35 loving trolling of Elon,
03:16:37 why are you spending all this money to get to Mars?
03:16:39 We should be spending money on interdimensional travel,
03:16:41 and we can unlock it if we…
03:16:42 And I said to him, and he makes the point
03:16:44 that the atomic theory, that unleashed the nuclear age,
03:16:49 and that could lead to planetary destruction.
03:16:53 But I make the point pushing back with love on him,
03:16:56 and I say, look, nobody looked into the equations,
03:16:58 like Fermi didn’t look into all these equations
03:17:01 of the unification, which still doesn’t exist, by the way.
03:17:04 We spent all this time, Lex,
03:17:05 and I don’t know why it is,
03:17:06 it’s a phenomenon purely in theoretical physics.
03:17:08 People are looking for the toe,
03:17:10 and they’re overlooking the gut.
03:17:12 In other words, they’re spending all this time
03:17:13 on the theory of everything, the God equation,
03:17:16 and there’s this gut that unifies the three stronger forces.
03:17:18 We don’t have a single theory for that.
03:17:20 And people like lash out, they’ve tried and failed at it.
03:17:22 Yeah, for people who don’t know,
03:17:23 there’s four forces, gut grant unification theories
03:17:27 that unifies the three forces stuff,
03:17:29 and I’m trying to get a shortcut
03:17:30 to the theory of everything, which unifies the four.
03:17:34 And then there’s this whole thing
03:17:35 that maybe quantum gravity is not even a thing.
03:17:38 So we’re trying to solve the puzzle of everything
03:17:47 at the physics level.
03:17:49 And then already before solving it,
03:17:51 already saying, once we solve it,
03:17:53 here’s going to be all the beautiful time machines.
03:17:55 We’re just level jumping it, going to level 256.
03:17:59 Time x and everything.
03:18:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
03:18:02 I suppose you need that kind of ego, that confidence,
03:18:06 that ambition in order to even have a chance
03:18:09 at some of these things.
03:18:10 The only two people in this book of nine Nobel laureates
03:18:13 who told me they don’t have the imposter syndrome
03:18:16 were two theorists, Frank Wilczek and Sheldon Glashow.
03:18:19 And Frank is a pretty interesting,
03:18:21 and I know eventually we’re gonna talk
03:18:22 about the meaning of life, but you talk about Frank.
03:18:25 Frank invented this theory along with his advisor
03:18:27 and another third person in the early 1970s,
03:18:32 which from 1974, three, when he was at Princeton,
03:18:34 all the way up until 2004, when he won the Nobel,
03:18:37 every day of his life.
03:18:38 Imagine this, Lex.
03:18:39 You’re gonna have this startup.
03:18:41 Actually, someone tells you you’re gonna win a lottery.
03:18:43 You’re gonna win a lottery in 40 years.
03:18:45 What becomes your singular focus in your life
03:18:48 from now until the next 40 years?
03:18:52 Well, I’m not sure.
03:18:54 I mean, would it be winning the lottery
03:18:56 or if I’m so confident?
03:18:57 No, I’m saying you’re guaranteed to win a lottery.
03:18:58 Yeah.
03:18:59 Here’s this wallet, Bitcoin wallet.
03:19:01 It’s gonna guarantee I have this much money.
03:19:02 It’s stable coin, whatever.
03:19:04 You’re gonna win it, but you have to wait 40 years.
03:19:06 To me, it would be surviving for the next 40 years.
03:19:09 You wouldn’t leave your house.
03:19:10 You would go out in a bubble wrap hat.
03:19:12 You wouldn’t go out with that 20 masks on, right?
03:19:14 Your whole life would be consumed with.
03:19:17 Now, imagine everyone’s telling you
03:19:18 you’re gonna win the Nobel Prize,
03:19:19 which is bigger than the lottery.
03:19:20 I mean, many P prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize
03:19:23 and every person who wins a prize
03:19:25 that’s worth three times the money, like Maldacena,
03:19:27 he would trade that breakthrough prize
03:19:29 for a Nobel Prize and a heartbeat.
03:19:30 So these guys had to wait 40 years.
03:19:33 Imagine the excruciating pain.
03:19:35 What got him through it?
03:19:36 He didn’t feel like he didn’t deserve it.
03:19:38 He felt like, hell yeah, I earned it.
03:19:40 He has that swagger.
03:19:42 And what I’m looking for in this asset is to try to find
03:19:46 ways that we can test stuff now,
03:19:47 cause I don’t know if I’m gonna be here in 40 years,
03:19:49 I hope I am, but can we bypass, can we get shortcuts?
03:19:51 What’s called the low energy regime.
03:19:53 And to me, that’s what’s interesting.
03:19:55 Like, what can we do now?
03:19:56 I don’t care.
03:19:57 Like Isaac Newton came up with color theory
03:19:59 and he did something really interesting.
03:20:00 Next time I come, I’ll bring you some prisms.
03:20:02 What did he do?
03:20:03 He took a white light.
03:20:04 He took a prism from the sun, actually.
03:20:06 He put it through a slit, put it through a prism
03:20:07 and it made a beautiful rainbow, like you’ve seen.
03:20:10 And then he took another prism
03:20:12 and he put it upside down,
03:20:13 like, you know, dark side of the moon, whatever.
03:20:15 And the light went through the first prism,
03:20:17 turned into a rainbow.
03:20:18 And then the rainbow went into a prism
03:20:20 and came out a white light.
03:20:21 That’s pretty cool.
03:20:22 Then he took a popsicle stick or whatever,
03:20:24 it’s probably, you know, pipe tobacco.
03:20:26 And he put it in the beam, like blocked out the orange
03:20:29 and it didn’t make white light come out.
03:20:31 So he showed like colors of synthesis.
03:20:34 It’s a common, he didn’t use like
03:20:36 the Large Hadron Collider to do that.
03:20:38 You know, he used a very low energy experiment
03:20:40 to prove a unification in this color physics
03:20:42 and different kind of color physics
03:20:43 than in quantum chromodynamics.
03:20:45 But nevertheless, can we find things like that?
03:20:47 Are we spending way too much time and energy
03:20:49 thinking about the future circular collider,
03:20:52 which even if it gets built will cost $30 billion
03:20:54 just to build.
03:20:55 By the way, anytime from now on,
03:20:56 if I leave you with anything,
03:20:57 anytime an experimental physicist tells you a number,
03:21:00 always double it, maybe triple it.
03:21:01 How much is it gonna cost?
03:21:03 To operate it.
03:21:04 So like, do we build an aircraft carrier
03:21:06 to build an aircraft carrier?
03:21:07 Do we build a nuclear reactor, a semiconductor facility?
03:21:10 And the rule of thumb that works pretty well
03:21:12 in project management is it costs about 10% per year
03:21:14 to operate a given object of sufficient complexity.
03:21:18 And in this case, so in 10 years,
03:21:19 it’ll cost double the cost.
03:21:20 So never believe a number,
03:21:22 whether it’s from our mutual friend, Harry or whoever,
03:21:24 don’t believe the number, double it.
03:21:26 And then say, is it worth it?
03:21:27 And so building a solar system size accelerator,
03:21:30 even if it were possible, do we have to do that?
03:21:32 Or can we use these two 30 solar mass objects
03:21:35 colliding together to test the number
03:21:38 of large extra spatial dimensions?
03:21:40 Can we do that?
03:21:41 People are working on it.
03:21:42 I think it’s fascinating.
03:21:43 So focus on building detectors.
03:21:46 Experiments.
03:21:48 That like, where the cosmos is part of the experiment,
03:21:55 I suppose, is doing the hard work.
03:21:57 Cause when you’re saying low energy regime,
03:22:00 cause for some of these, especially big questions,
03:22:02 like theories of everything,
03:22:03 you need some high energy events.
03:22:07 And so somehow figure out how the high energy events
03:22:10 that are already happening out there,
03:22:12 how to leverage them to understand here on earth.
03:22:16 So one of the alternative theories of cosmology
03:22:19 that is not a singular quantum gravitational requiring
03:22:22 as the big bang and inflation are,
03:22:23 is are these bouncing models.
03:22:26 Some of them feature a similar kind of entity
03:22:29 called the quantum field.
03:22:30 And that quantum field in the initial stages
03:22:33 of the universe of our current, after the bounce,
03:22:35 which is not a singularity,
03:22:36 it compresses to a classical kind of rebound
03:22:39 and the universe starts expanding.
03:22:41 During that process, the expansion is governed
03:22:44 by what’s called a scalar field,
03:22:46 of which we only know one that exists,
03:22:48 that’s called the Higgs boson.
03:22:49 Higgs is a scalar fundamental particle, fundamental field.
03:22:53 That field then later does double duty
03:22:56 and it becomes dark energy.
03:22:59 So it solves two problems.
03:23:00 And I’m not saying it’s correct, we don’t know yet.
03:23:02 But are there observations of,
03:23:04 and so dark energy is manifest today.
03:23:06 It’s manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions,
03:23:10 et cetera, et cetera.
03:23:11 We see the effects of accelerating universe
03:23:13 caused by presumably dark energy.
03:23:15 Is dark energy a constant or does it vary?
03:23:18 That has to vary in order for this theory to be true,
03:23:20 because that eventually has to decay
03:23:22 so that the universe can not support itself
03:23:24 and collapse again, again classically.
03:23:26 So we could use low energy phenomenon.
03:23:28 It’s hard to think of supernova
03:23:29 as being a low energy phenomenon,
03:23:31 but we use that as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field
03:23:34 and see, does it change or is it a constant?
03:23:36 That’s an example of a low energy limit
03:23:38 to prove a high energy phenomenon,
03:23:40 unlike this collapsing universe in the cyclic model.
03:23:43 Speaking of things that cost a lot, but are super exciting.
03:23:49 Page two, crap.
03:23:51 No, we’ll wrap it up.
03:23:52 No.
03:23:53 Calm down, this is, there’s more than page two.
03:23:56 What do you think this is?
03:23:58 This is a…
03:23:59 Thesis.
03:24:00 Well, Louis de Broglie’s thesis was three pages long
03:24:03 and he won the Nobel Prize for the wave particle duality.
03:24:06 So, size matters in different dimensions in life.
03:24:10 I think the lessons I’ve learned about life
03:24:13 is the short of the paper or the short of the thesis.
03:24:17 Actually the short of the paper,
03:24:18 some of the greatest papers ever written are short.
03:24:21 I feel like some of the best ideas in this world,
03:24:26 not to sound like a contradiction of Feynman,
03:24:28 a contradiction on top of a contradiction,
03:24:30 but it could be written on a napkin, honestly.
03:24:32 It just kind of tells you something about ideas.
03:24:39 What are your thoughts about the James Webb Space Telescope?
03:24:45 Is this, as somebody who likes telescopes,
03:24:49 and this is one of the, I think it says,
03:24:53 took 20 years to build, $9.7 billion.
03:24:57 Is that way too much, too little?
03:24:59 Are you excited about this thing?
03:25:01 It’s sufficiently different from what I do in my field
03:25:04 that it’s incredibly interesting to me
03:25:05 because I have no horse in that race.
03:25:09 And so I’m not competing with them for time or money
03:25:12 or resources or people or whatever.
03:25:14 So I can purely be an advocate
03:25:16 and an aficionado of science.
03:25:18 It is in some sense the successor to Hubble.
03:25:21 It will do things that Hubble can’t do.
03:25:24 It will also may or may not have the impact
03:25:27 on a visceral kind of artistic level that Hubble had.
03:25:31 What are some of the most iconic things that Hubble did?
03:25:34 The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the pillars of creation,
03:25:37 storms and imaging of these twisted deep sky galaxies.
03:25:42 Those resonated with the public.
03:25:44 Just visually, they were beautiful.
03:25:46 Yeah, when you look at these images,
03:25:48 the Hubble Ultra Deep Field,
03:25:50 you’ll maybe put that in,
03:25:51 you’ll show every speck of light except for one,
03:25:53 4,000 blobs of light.
03:25:55 There’s one star in our galaxy, the rest are galaxies.
03:25:58 Now that image is less than 1 10th of your fingernail
03:26:02 held out at arm’s length.
03:26:03 It contains 4,000 galaxies.
03:26:05 So now you can figure out
03:26:07 how many galaxies there are in the whole sky
03:26:09 just by seeing how long does it take you
03:26:11 to move your fingernail over the whole sky.
03:26:13 So we have another couple of hours.
03:26:15 No, so it comes out to be,
03:26:16 that’s how we get 500 billion or more galaxies.
03:26:18 Now it’s not exact to the galaxy,
03:26:20 but it’s a good order of magnitude estimate,
03:26:22 maybe even better.
03:26:24 Hubble produced that and it was basically serendipitous.
03:26:26 They pointed to some dark blank piece of sky
03:26:29 what they thought was blank and they saw it.
03:26:30 Same thing that happened with the CMB.
03:26:32 They were looking for something they didn’t find.
03:26:34 Same thing they found when they were looking
03:26:35 for the deceleration of the universe
03:26:38 and found it was accelerating.
03:26:40 So what I sometimes hear is that
03:26:42 we don’t know what we’re gonna discover.
03:26:44 I never think that’s a good idea
03:26:46 to spend billions of dollars on something.
03:26:47 Like you should have some guaranteed low hanging fruit
03:26:51 and then there should be swinging for the fences.
03:26:53 And I think in this case, it was really everything
03:26:55 is swinging for the fences
03:26:56 because it’s kind of a single point failure.
03:26:58 If that telescope, which is this origami construction
03:27:01 of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly
03:27:05 and then orient themselves a million miles from Earth
03:27:08 beyond the Earth moon distance by a factor of four
03:27:11 and still transmit telecommunication back to the Earth,
03:27:15 get solar energy, keep it away from the sun.
03:27:17 You don’t wanna look through the telescope of the sun
03:27:19 with your remaining good eye.
03:27:20 And you do that and you cover,
03:27:22 it’s gonna be phenomenal for science, for sure, if it works.
03:27:27 There are a lot of people think it’s so risky.
03:27:30 NASA sunk so much of their budget, it ate up.
03:27:33 And what if it does fail?
03:27:34 I mean, there’s no guarantee.
03:27:35 Yes, it’s insured, but so what?
03:27:37 You’re not gonna get back those 20 years of people.
03:27:40 Well, let’s start building it again.
03:27:41 Like they didn’t build two copies of it.
03:27:43 And then if it fails, it kinda has a dampening effect
03:27:49 on the prospects and the inspiration of the public
03:27:52 for what science can do,
03:27:53 what science engineering can do is out in space.
03:27:56 It will make a huge impact scientific.
03:27:57 Let’s hope for the best, let’s assume it does succeed.
03:28:00 It’s launched in a couple of weeks.
03:28:01 And when it does, it will transform our understanding
03:28:05 of we just discovered not only like extrasolar planets
03:28:10 that have moons on them and asteroid belt,
03:28:12 we discovered an extrasolar planet in another galaxy.
03:28:15 This will be able to see crazy stuff like that,
03:28:16 spectroscopy, imaging, but it will be able
03:28:21 to go back farther in time,
03:28:22 such that we will be doing cosmology.
03:28:25 Hubble did some cosmology and measured the Hubble constant.
03:28:27 That was its key project when it was designed and launched.
03:28:30 But because it is optical telescope,
03:28:33 it’s sensitive to more close in redshift,
03:28:35 so shorter distances.
03:28:37 Now James Webb is much, much higher redshift.
03:28:39 It can probe the darker, deeper, distant universe.
03:28:42 Okay, let’s talk about not the distant universe,
03:28:44 but our neighboring planets.
03:28:47 First, I gotta ask you about the moon.
03:28:52 So there’s a piece of the moon on this table
03:28:55 that you’ve given me that we didn’t have to pick up
03:28:58 that arrived here.
03:29:00 That’s right.
03:29:01 So how did a piece of the moon arrive here on Earth?
03:29:03 So this chunk of the moon, if it were delivered
03:29:06 by the Apollo and NASA missions,
03:29:10 you and I would be guilty of a felony right now
03:29:12 because it’s illegal to own pieces of the moon
03:29:14 collected by the Apollo astronauts.
03:29:16 So don’t even joke about that when you go over to Houston.
03:29:19 This piece of moon rock was delivered
03:29:21 via the old fashioned way by gravity.
03:29:23 So this was a chunk of the moon, which is blasted off
03:29:27 because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids and meteoroids.
03:29:31 Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon
03:29:34 into space, and it will then orbit
03:29:37 the common moon Earth system.
03:29:41 And it will then eventually enter our atmosphere.
03:29:44 And if the piece is large enough
03:29:45 and the trajectory is proper, it can land intact.
03:29:47 And this one landed with a few hundred grams worth,
03:29:51 and they sliced it up.
03:29:52 And then it was delivered via US Postal Service to my house.
03:29:56 So you can buy these pieces.
03:29:57 And actually, you can buy a piece of Mars.
03:29:59 You can buy a piece of Mars delivered by the same route.
03:30:02 Now, what’s so interesting about that?
03:30:04 Well, if a piece of Mars can get here,
03:30:06 a piece of Earth can get there.
03:30:08 Some piece of Earth has some life forms on it.
03:30:11 It could get there.
03:30:12 And if that can happen in our solar system,
03:30:14 it could happen throughout the galaxy.
03:30:16 So I’m actually not of the opinion
03:30:18 that there is life elsewhere in the universe,
03:30:21 at least technological life that we can,
03:30:23 I see this look of horror on your face.
03:30:26 I view it, I am personally extremely pessimistic,
03:30:30 would be extremely surprised.
03:30:31 I’m just, I’m curious by the transition
03:30:34 because you just said that life could have arrived from Mars
03:30:39 or like from planet to planet
03:30:40 because of the meteorites striking it and so on.
03:30:43 And then you went to,
03:30:45 you don’t think there might be life out there
03:30:47 in the universe.
03:30:48 Technological life.
03:30:49 Technological life.
03:30:50 Yeah, advanced intelligence civilizations.
03:30:53 Okay, so go on.
03:30:57 So that’s the generalization
03:30:58 of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called,
03:31:01 I know this is a PG 13, it’s called panspermia.
03:31:04 Panspermia.
03:31:06 Beep that out, please.
03:31:07 Yeah, yeah, please.
03:31:08 And that’s the exchange of genetic life form material
03:31:12 from other reaches on earth,
03:31:14 which explains the origin of life on earth,
03:31:16 but not the origin of life itself,
03:31:18 which I think is a much grander mystery
03:31:20 and much more interesting.
03:31:22 How did life get here?
03:31:23 And you’ve talked with many eminent people about that.
03:31:25 I’m not gonna add that much,
03:31:26 but just thinking about the reverse process.
03:31:29 Let’s say life started on the earth somehow
03:31:32 and then made its way out into the universe.
03:31:34 Is there enough time for the,
03:31:36 whatever material went from earth
03:31:37 via panspermic direction,
03:31:40 spraying the love gun out into the universe,
03:31:42 did that then have enough time to incubate
03:31:45 and go onto a planet that could support it?
03:31:47 Certainly not within our solar system,
03:31:49 which traveling at the meteorite speeds
03:31:51 would require hundreds of millions of years.
03:31:53 Then looking at the evolutionary history
03:31:55 from bacteria to Bach,
03:31:57 from rocks to Rachmaninoff,
03:32:00 I don’t know, I can do this all day.
03:32:01 Oh wow, that’s pretty good.
03:32:02 How do you get from those very simple
03:32:05 inanimate objects to life?
03:32:06 I just simply think there’s not enough time
03:32:07 for earth to seed life,
03:32:09 technological life throughout the galaxy.
03:32:10 I don’t think there’s any evidence for that.
03:32:12 But so you really think that the origin
03:32:15 of life on earth is a really special event?
03:32:19 Yeah, if it did originate on earth,
03:32:22 my question for those that search for life
03:32:24 outside the earth is what if you had a letter from God
03:32:28 and the letter said life didn’t originate on earth,
03:32:32 like would you choose a different profession?
03:32:34 Like it would seem hopeless.
03:32:36 Like in other words, we only have a sample of one.
03:32:38 In fact, we only know of one conscious life form,
03:32:40 let alone one planet that has life on it, right?
03:32:42 What if you knew for sure it didn’t start here?
03:32:45 That means that like there’s almost nothing about earth
03:32:48 that is originated, it didn’t originate the life process.
03:32:52 So to study purely the origin of life,
03:32:54 not life itself, I think that’s still fascinating.
03:32:55 But how could we learn about the origin of,
03:32:59 remember you have to go from inanimate object
03:33:01 to a living object, whatever that definition of life is.
03:33:04 And I’m not an expert in many definitions,
03:33:06 Max, Sarah, you know, many different definition.
03:33:09 But how do you actually go from inanimate to animate?
03:33:13 It’s a huge question.
03:33:14 Yeah, but then you don’t have to be the place
03:33:17 where life originated to replicate the origin
03:33:20 or to under, like, yeah, that’s one way
03:33:22 to understand something is to build it.
03:33:26 But another way is to just observe it.
03:33:27 You don’t have to truly re engineer from scratch.
03:33:32 So, you know, but then yes, if it didn’t originate on earth,
03:33:37 then your intuitions about the basic prerequisites
03:33:41 of life are off.
03:33:43 What’s the governing principle, right?
03:33:45 Like, what is, and then you can have just
03:33:48 almost an arbitrary number of possible,
03:33:51 like, if life didn’t start on earth.
03:33:56 So to me, that’s exciting because it’s like,
03:33:59 we know even less than we thought.
03:34:02 The thing is it can prosper on earth though.
03:34:05 Yeah.
03:34:06 So maybe the origin of life is fundamentally different
03:34:08 from the maintenance of life.
03:34:11 Right, and maybe the existence
03:34:13 of the earth life symbiosis is critical.
03:34:16 I think Sarah, and you talked about Sarah Walker,
03:34:19 that it’s a planetary phenomenon, et cetera, et cetera.
03:34:22 So doesn’t that make it less like, in other words,
03:34:24 like not only do you need special life conditions
03:34:27 to create life, but then sustenance of life, as you say,
03:34:31 that also has to be maintained
03:34:33 under very specific circumstances
03:34:35 by very specific planets
03:34:37 and with very specific tectonic activity and moon.
03:34:39 And by the way, you need a Jupiter nearby.
03:34:41 You need an earth and a moon system
03:34:43 so that you don’t get bombarded too early.
03:34:45 And I always think like this, like technological life,
03:34:48 I haven’t said this before, really, so I’m just speaking.
03:34:50 I usually like to write down before I say these different,
03:34:52 but one of the things I thought about is.
03:34:53 Somebody hosts a podcast.
03:34:56 You should probably accept the fact
03:34:57 that you’re going to say stupid things
03:34:59 every once in a while.
03:35:00 Not every once in a while, every while.
03:35:02 I claim that to get to sending people to the moon,
03:35:08 our planet needed whales and dinosaurs, right?
03:35:12 Like you don’t make a solar panel
03:35:13 from another solar panel.
03:35:14 Like you made a solar panel from a factory
03:35:17 that melted down glass, silica, aluminum,
03:35:20 extruded that using fossil fuels.
03:35:21 Where do those fossil fuels come from?
03:35:23 Like, so any civilization that’s going to be a Dyson,
03:35:26 you know, a Kardashev, do they have dinosaurs?
03:35:29 Like, do they have like prebiotic life?
03:35:31 Do they have a great oxygenation event?
03:35:32 Did they have a dimorphism between prokaryotic, eukaryotic?
03:35:37 All those hurdles, let’s say you give each one,
03:35:39 let’s say there’s eight hurdles.
03:35:40 And each one of those has a probability
03:35:42 of one in a thousand to go from, you know,
03:35:44 eukaryotic, prokaryotic, whatever.
03:35:46 Let’s say that’s a one in a thousand chance.
03:35:48 I think it’s like one in 10 to the 40th or whatever,
03:35:50 if you really do it.
03:35:51 But let’s say it’s first generous nature.
03:35:53 One in 10 to the three.
03:35:55 Let’s say there’s eight of those hurdles.
03:35:57 That means you have 10 to the 24th power,
03:36:01 different possibility.
03:36:03 And that’s just with eight.
03:36:04 Like the moon has to be there.
03:36:05 Jupiter has to be there.
03:36:06 Dinosaurs had to be there.
03:36:07 All the different things that we have
03:36:08 to get to technological life.
03:36:11 There’s only 10 to the, only,
03:36:12 there’s 10 to the 22nd, we think,
03:36:15 Earth, not Earth, planets in the observable universe,
03:36:18 not the galaxy.
03:36:20 So that’s 100 times fewer than the probability
03:36:23 to get, you know, 100% clearing these eight
03:36:26 very low hurdles of one in a thousand.
03:36:28 That’s fascinating, because now I really need
03:36:30 to listen to your conversation with Lee Cronin,
03:36:32 who I believe you had, because he believes the opposite.
03:36:36 Yes, I know.
03:36:37 Yeah, I want to have a debate with him.
03:36:39 He believes that the way biology evolved on Earth
03:36:45 could have evolved almost an infinite number of other ways.
03:36:48 So like, if you ran Earth over and over and over,
03:36:51 you would keep getting life and it would be very different.
03:36:54 So it’s, the fact that our particular life seems unique
03:37:00 is just like, well, because every freaking life
03:37:02 is going to seem unique, but it’ll be very different.
03:37:05 It’s not like, we shouldn’t be asking the question
03:37:07 of what’s the likelihood of getting a human like thing?
03:37:12 Because that seems to be super special.
03:37:15 It’s more like, how easy is it to make
03:37:20 Slime mold.
03:37:21 Anything that has the skills of a human?
03:37:23 And I don’t mean like something with thumbs,
03:37:26 but achieving basically a technological civilization.
03:37:29 And according to Lee at least, it’s like, it’s trivial.
03:37:33 I know, we fought, I fought a little bit.
03:37:35 I’d love to debate him and I think it’d be a lot of fun.
03:37:37 Because we debate with love when I talk with Lee.
03:37:38 I love him and he loves me, I think, I hope.
03:37:40 But let me ask you a question.
03:37:42 I asked this of him and Sarah on our Clubhouse ones.
03:37:45 So what do you think would happen the next day?
03:37:47 Let’s say we discover life, it’s Proxima Centauri B.
03:37:52 It looks just like Slime mold,
03:37:54 like you got on your Brie cheese or whatever.
03:37:57 We discover it, what would happen the next day?
03:38:01 And they were like, oh, this would be transformative.
03:38:03 And I’m not trying to be like Total Cassandra about this,
03:38:06 but I said, I don’t think anything would happen.
03:38:09 And what are you talking about?
03:38:10 It would be transformational.
03:38:12 I’m like, I stipulate that life exists.
03:38:14 Go down to like the river, I’m in San Diego,
03:38:16 go down to the Pacific Ocean, scoop up a glass.
03:38:21 You’re gonna find life in there.
03:38:22 And what are we doing?
03:38:23 What are we doing to our earth?
03:38:25 We’re destroying it callously.
03:38:27 We’re like pumping crap into there.
03:38:29 Like we have this toxic waste spill
03:38:30 a couple of months ago in San Diego,
03:38:31 I couldn’t go to the beach.
03:38:33 Let me take it a step further.
03:38:35 You know how many people, I’m sorry that you do know,
03:38:38 but how many people died in the 20th century killed?
03:38:41 These are advanced civil, this isn’t a slime mold.
03:38:44 We kill, we maim, we harm, we hurt, we hate.
03:38:48 I don’t think anything would happen the next day.
03:38:50 Then we go back to what we had.
03:38:51 And I said, if that weren’t proof enough,
03:38:52 life has been discovered at least two or three times
03:38:55 just in my professional career.
03:38:56 Once in 1996, these Allenland Hills meteorites in Antarctica,
03:39:01 they saw like microbial respiration processes.
03:39:04 Still we don’t know, it was a press conference
03:39:06 held by Bill Clinton on the White House lawn
03:39:08 that’s featured in the movie Contact.
03:39:10 My purpose for that movie.
03:39:12 And then there’s this phosphorus life,
03:39:17 this toxic life in the pools of Mono Lake.
03:39:20 Many, you know, extremophile, we don’t give a crap.
03:39:24 We continue to treat.
03:39:25 So why are we thinking that like our salvation,
03:39:27 from whence will our salvation come as the Bible says?
03:39:30 Like it’s not gonna change how we are.
03:39:32 It’s not gonna magnify how I treat you or you treat me.
03:39:36 And we’re pretty knowledgeable people,
03:39:38 you and I compared to, you know, lay people.
03:39:39 Okay, that’s interesting.
03:39:40 That’s a really interesting argument.
03:39:41 I wonder if you’re right.
03:39:43 But my intuition is I can maybe present
03:39:49 a different argument that you can think about
03:39:51 in the realm of things you care about even deeper,
03:39:54 which is like what happens once we figure out
03:39:57 the origins of the universe?
03:39:58 Like how would that change your life?
03:40:00 I would say there are certain discoveries
03:40:03 that even in their very idea
03:40:05 will change the fabric of society.
03:40:07 I tend to see if there’s definitive proof
03:40:10 that there’s life and the more complex,
03:40:12 the more powerful that idea is elsewhere.
03:40:16 That I’m not exactly sure how it will change society
03:40:21 because it’s such a slap in the face.
03:40:24 It’s such a humbling force or maybe not.
03:40:28 Or maybe it’s a motivator to say,
03:40:31 yeah, I don’t know which force would take over.
03:40:33 Maybe it would be governments with military
03:40:36 that start to think like, well, how do we kill it?
03:40:40 If there’s a lot of life out there,
03:40:41 how do we create the defenses?
03:40:43 How do we extract it?
03:40:44 Or mine it for benefits?
03:40:47 I mean, I just see like there’s 100 million
03:40:50 literal counter examples of that.
03:40:51 I mean, right now there’s like 700 million kids in poverty.
03:40:57 How do we go about our life and just not deal with that?
03:41:00 I mean, look, I put it aside.
03:41:01 I eat hamburgers and in 100 years I’ll be canceled
03:41:04 for being a carnivore or whatever.
03:41:08 So obviously to get through life,
03:41:09 you have to make certain compromise.
03:41:10 You’re not gonna think about certain things.
03:41:12 But I just think there is a sort of wish fulfillment.
03:41:15 Like every time there’s, why are we going to Mars
03:41:17 and digging and flying this cool ass helicopter?
03:41:20 We’re looking for water.
03:41:21 Like stipulate that water was there.
03:41:23 Like, I believe there was water.
03:41:25 I think we should investigate
03:41:26 and see what the geology was like.
03:41:28 But don’t you think, so you’re saying?
03:41:29 I don’t think you’re gonna get meaning from it.
03:41:31 That’s all I’m saying.
03:41:32 I’m not saying it’s not worth doing.
03:41:33 I’m just saying there’s a wish fulfillment aspect
03:41:36 that people will find meaning for life from science.
03:41:39 Okay, but there’s a complicated line here.
03:41:44 What if it’s this intelligent civilization living,
03:41:49 obviously probably not on Mars,
03:41:51 but somewhere like in a neighboring galaxy that we,
03:41:55 sorry, in a neighboring star system that we discover,
03:42:00 that we discover,
03:42:02 don’t you think that profound change in meaning?
03:42:05 I mean, I guess, again,
03:42:06 I assume that because of this panceramic process
03:42:09 or whatever, that the probability is much,
03:42:11 much greater than zero.
03:42:12 I mean, it’s not one, a hundred percent,
03:42:14 but it’s much likelier than that,
03:42:16 that at least some living material from Earth
03:42:18 has ejaculated itself into the solar system,
03:42:22 into the universe, right?
03:42:23 Into our galaxy. Beat that, please, as well.
03:42:26 That’s right.
03:42:27 So like the fact that that could happen
03:42:29 and that you’re holding a piece from a planetary body,
03:42:32 one that couldn’t support life as far as we know,
03:42:34 but next time, if you play nice
03:42:37 and you come on my podcast someday,
03:42:39 I will give you a tiny chunk of Mars.
03:42:40 So Mars theoretically could support stuff, right?
03:42:43 So yeah, so I believe that there could be remnants of Earth
03:42:47 so that means there could be evolution.
03:42:48 I don’t think there’s any chance
03:42:50 that there’s people using iPhones
03:42:52 and having podcasts and stuff in Proxima Centauri.
03:42:54 There’s some chance though, right?
03:42:57 So again, I think the simple statement to say,
03:43:02 it’s much, much, much higher probability
03:43:04 that life exists than technological life exists, right?
03:43:06 I don’t think we can argue that.
03:43:08 It doesn’t mean it’s forbidden.
03:43:09 Again, I’m not saying any of this is forbidden,
03:43:11 not worth studying, not interesting.
03:43:13 It’s a likelihood thing.
03:43:14 Yeah, and to answer your,
03:43:15 I think you’re wise to push back
03:43:17 and like, what does it matter what I’m doing?
03:43:19 And I like to think about that,
03:43:21 because it’s like, what is the value of what you’re doing?
03:43:23 Like you have to answer that question
03:43:25 or else at the end of your life,
03:43:26 you’ll have these existential kind of crises, right?
03:43:29 So when I think about like who I am,
03:43:31 part of my identity is answering
03:43:33 and asking scientific questions.
03:43:35 For me though, there is a religious kind of undercurrent
03:43:37 that does undergird in some sense, this quest.
03:43:41 Again, I’m not like a practicing,
03:43:42 I’m not like wearing yarmulke,
03:43:44 like I’m not like full on into my birth religion, Judaism.
03:43:49 But at the same token, I think as,
03:43:52 one of the things Einstein did say is that,
03:43:53 religion without science is blind
03:43:55 or is lame and science without religion is lame,
03:44:00 is blind and lame.
03:44:01 Anyway, the point is that like,
03:44:03 you can’t get meaning from just knowing facts.
03:44:07 Like Wikipedia knows more than all of us will ever know,
03:44:09 right?
03:44:10 It has no wisdom.
03:44:11 Wisdom, it means sapient.
03:44:13 The word wisdom in Latin is sapient.
03:44:15 We are wise.
03:44:16 And by the way, do you know what we’re,
03:44:18 our real name is Homo sapiens sapient.
03:44:20 So it’s man who knows that he knows.
03:44:22 Do you know what he knows?
03:44:24 Do you know what the knowing is?
03:44:25 It’s that he’s gonna die.
03:44:27 We’re the only creatures that know that we are gonna die.
03:44:29 We don’t know when we’re gonna die.
03:44:31 But like, you know, I have a cat,
03:44:33 a fierce attack cat, it’s beautiful.
03:44:36 She doesn’t know when she’s gonna die.
03:44:38 It doesn’t mean I’m more valuable than I think I am.
03:44:40 The survival instinct is fundamentally different
03:44:43 from like the knowledge of death.
03:44:46 And that’s where the Ernest Becker comes in
03:44:48 with the terror of death and that that’s a creative force
03:44:52 that seems to be more feature than bug
03:44:55 about the human condition is that,
03:45:00 I mean, it’s a gift of knowing our own mortality.
03:45:06 Yeah, to me, I mean, that’s why,
03:45:09 I agree with you in some sense
03:45:11 in terms of the aliens not being a thing
03:45:14 that solves all mysteries.
03:45:17 That’s why my love has always been the human mind.
03:45:20 So understanding who we are, what the hell are we?
03:45:25 And I think your love has been an echo of that,
03:45:29 which is where do we come from?
03:45:32 Or basically, as cheesy as it sounds,
03:45:36 Michio Kaku is away with words.
03:45:39 If you can just like enjoy the, you know.
03:45:42 Oh, he speaks in complete,
03:45:43 he’s like Sam Harris of cosmology.
03:45:45 I mean, he speaks in complete paragraphs.
03:45:47 But like also unapologetically, he says,
03:45:51 we will know God or we will know the mind of God
03:45:54 or whatever the quotes, those kinds of things.
03:45:58 That’s exciting that physics might be able
03:46:02 to find equations that unlock our origins
03:46:06 at the very core and like the fabric of it all too,
03:46:09 and not just our origins.
03:46:13 At the beginning, something tells me we’re too dumb
03:46:16 to truly understand what’s at the beginning, but.
03:46:19 I think we should be humble in that way.
03:46:21 I mean, again, another thing is, you know,
03:46:24 you ever hear the saying like we share 99% of our DNA
03:46:28 with chimps or bonobos or whatever?
03:46:31 I share like probably more than that.
03:46:33 Sometimes I wish we shared like 100%.
03:46:35 Like that’d be so much more interesting,
03:46:37 like, oh, there’s 50% of a fruit fly or banana.
03:46:41 No, no, no, there’s something,
03:46:42 but that should make us feel more precious.
03:46:44 And I almost feel like discovering life
03:46:46 on another planet, whatever solar system
03:46:49 would cause a diminution of humanity.
03:46:52 Like the one thing I do hold fast to from religion,
03:46:54 I don’t know where I am with God.
03:46:56 Like, do I believe in God?
03:46:57 I think that’s an unanswerable question,
03:47:00 but I have some thoughts about it.
03:47:02 But by the same token, I think the one thing I do get
03:47:06 from religion is that every human has infinite worth
03:47:08 because we are in a religious capacity
03:47:10 considered to be equal to God.
03:47:12 In other words, we are gods not to be like, you know,
03:47:15 but we can contemplate what God did.
03:47:17 We have aspects of God.
03:47:18 We have free will.
03:47:19 God had free will if he exists.
03:47:21 Again, I can’t prove that God exists,
03:47:23 otherwise you wouldn’t have any credit
03:47:24 for believing in God.
03:47:25 This is interesting.
03:47:26 I mean, it’s like I’m talking to Einstein here,
03:47:29 but let me ask anyway.
03:47:31 Can you clip that for my clips, John?
03:47:33 For somebody who’s looking at the young universe,
03:47:39 at the early universe, and are talking about God
03:47:44 and are agnostic, who do you think is God?
03:47:50 So I thought you had just like one of the best podcasts
03:47:54 with Sam Harris this past summer.
03:47:57 And one of the things I liked about that conversation
03:48:01 is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation.
03:48:04 And he said something that’s really resonated with me,
03:48:06 and I’ve been working it around
03:48:07 and trying to work on it my own way.
03:48:09 But he said like, you can never be happy
03:48:12 if you can only become happy.
03:48:16 And I try to take it a little bit further than that,
03:48:18 because I think it’s interesting.
03:48:19 Meditation is like, you’re not like, oh, I’m happy,
03:48:22 and now like, oh, my kid came in and now I’m not happy.
03:48:25 No, you can be satisfied.
03:48:26 Kurt Vonnegut said, you ever catch this?
03:48:28 Sometimes, Alexa, you’re walking around and you’re like,
03:48:30 life is fricking amazing, I’m happy.
03:48:32 And Kurt Vonnegut said, you should say to yourself
03:48:35 every time that happens a little mantra,
03:48:37 if this isn’t goodness, if this isn’t happiness, nothing is.
03:48:41 Just remind yourself how awesome it is,
03:48:43 every breath, everything that you do when you make an impact.
03:48:46 Even some of the bad stuff that happens, good, it’s good.
03:48:49 So Sam said that, and it made me think,
03:48:51 because I was like, well, what does it really mean
03:48:55 to be happy?
03:48:56 Because like, I can think of about two or three ways
03:49:02 that right now I could double my happiness.
03:49:04 You know, like win the lottery or whatever,
03:49:06 like I could double my happiness.
03:49:07 There’s only a few ways though, right?
03:49:08 Like, you know, I had this kind of thought like,
03:49:12 how many boats can you water ski behind?
03:49:15 Like you had twice as many followers,
03:49:17 now you’ve got 2 million followers, 5 million, whatever.
03:49:19 It doesn’t do anything, it’s called the hedonic treadmill.
03:49:22 Like once you get to a certain level,
03:49:23 it takes a lot more, you know, change in followers,
03:49:26 money, impact, women, whatever you want
03:49:28 to make you have one more quanta of happiness, right?
03:49:32 On the other hand, this is a concept from entropy.
03:49:36 I can make your life miserable in an infinite number of ways.
03:49:39 In other words, there’s more space
03:49:41 to make your life unhappy than happy.
03:49:44 And so I thought about that in the context
03:49:46 of what Sam said about happiness.
03:49:48 So it’s sort of like, yeah, it’s an expression of entropy.
03:49:52 And that what you should be doing in life
03:49:54 is doing that which will cause you devastation
03:49:59 if it goes away.
03:50:00 Because those are the things that like,
03:50:02 are where you’re reducing entropy,
03:50:05 like a kid, like anyone who’s a parent
03:50:08 knows instantly what I’m talking about.
03:50:10 Like how to make your life a billion times worse.
03:50:13 But there’s no way to make your life a billion times better.
03:50:16 And so thinking about that,
03:50:17 now turning it to the question of God’s existence,
03:50:21 I feel like there’s no way that you can believe in God
03:50:24 to quote, misquote Sam,
03:50:26 but there’s ways that you can become a believer in God.
03:50:29 In other words, you could increase
03:50:31 the Bayesian confidence level that there is some,
03:50:34 and let’s not call it God because that’s a freighted term.
03:50:36 Let’s just call it some infinite source of goodness
03:50:38 or our beautiful power in the universe, right?
03:50:42 Simple things can do that.
03:50:44 You can increase your credulity in the goodness of life.
03:50:47 And we have this bias as humans towards negativity,
03:50:50 negativity bias, well known fact.
03:50:53 So what I wanna do is, let’s call it God good, right?
03:50:56 That’s where it comes from, God good,
03:50:57 same words in German.
03:50:59 And when we think about what is good,
03:51:02 let’s do those things that would devastate us.
03:51:06 And a lot of that could be relationships.
03:51:09 And there’s a powerful concept from network theory,
03:51:14 which is that the number of connections in a network,
03:51:18 you know, I’m just saying it for your own,
03:51:19 it grows as the square of the elements in the matrix
03:51:21 in the number, right?
03:51:22 So you think of a matrix with N people,
03:51:24 you know person one, two, three, four,
03:51:26 and then there’s four other people.
03:51:28 There’s 16 different pairs, but half of them overlap.
03:51:31 The diagonal is where you know each other,
03:51:33 you know yourself.
03:51:34 But that still grows as N squared.
03:51:37 So those connections increase and decrease, right?
03:51:41 You ever have two friends that are fighting
03:51:43 and like you’re kind of upset,
03:51:44 even though you’re not fighting with either one of them?
03:51:46 So like a network grows like that.
03:51:48 So you wanna increase your network as much as possible,
03:51:50 but only the kind of high quality interstices between them.
03:51:54 And I think in doing so,
03:51:56 you make yourself fragile, not anti fragile.
03:51:59 And I think that is where purpose
03:52:02 and maybe approaching some notion of God can come from.
03:52:05 So that is a source of meaning,
03:52:08 maximizing the goodness in life.
03:52:11 And the way you know it’s good,
03:52:13 is if it’s taken away, it would devastate you.
03:52:16 That’s one way.
03:52:19 Think about it, your brand, your business,
03:52:21 your spouse, your kids.
03:52:23 I mean, parents can’t count,
03:52:24 I’ve known parents that have,
03:52:26 Jim Simons, here’s a perfect example.
03:52:28 He’s one of my oldest friends and mentors.
03:52:31 He is one of the richest people on earth.
03:52:35 Gulf Stream, Mega Yacht,
03:52:37 this is all documented books about him.
03:52:39 He lost two sons as adults.
03:52:42 And I hear people say,
03:52:43 oh, I’m so jealous of Jim Simons.
03:52:46 Would you take everything?
03:52:48 I don’t know where he has that strength
03:52:51 and his wife, Marilyn, and his first wife, Barbara.
03:52:54 I’m not like that.
03:52:57 Some people are, there are angels that walk among us.
03:53:01 And there’s this famous prayer.
03:53:03 It’s like, God, there’s an old saying,
03:53:07 one of the hardest tests there are in life
03:53:09 is to be given a lot of money.
03:53:10 And you see it happens with people that win the lottery
03:53:13 or whatever, or NFL football players
03:53:15 after their career’s over, they’re broke, right?
03:53:18 And I was like, God, please test me with money.
03:53:20 That’d be great.
03:53:21 But in reality, you should never say,
03:53:24 I want what X person has.
03:53:26 Unless you’re willing to take everything.
03:53:28 And you’ll find you won’t want to take everything.
03:53:32 Yeah, I think a lot about the altering effects
03:53:36 of fame, of money, of power on people.
03:53:44 It blinds people.
03:53:47 And I wonder about that for myself
03:53:50 because it seems like in themselves,
03:53:53 these are definitely not the goals
03:53:55 that I’m pretty much afraid.
03:53:58 I’m not desirous, and I’m definitely afraid
03:54:01 of each of those things, money, fame, and power.
03:54:07 But it seems the dreams I have as consequences
03:54:11 can often have these things.
03:54:14 And I’m really afraid of becoming something
03:54:17 that would disappoint me when I was younger,
03:54:20 that I wouldn’t recognize.
03:54:23 You know, because change happens gradually.
03:54:27 But are you using yourself as the touchstone
03:54:30 to use the assay amount?
03:54:32 What is your rubric to apprise if you have lived up
03:54:36 to that 12 year old, whatever year old Lex?
03:54:38 How will you know or not know if you’ve let yourself down?
03:54:41 Or I always think, live to impress yourself.
03:54:45 I don’t care if I have followers.
03:54:47 It’s nice, all right, whatever.
03:54:49 But it’s hedonic, and it’s just never ending
03:54:51 because you’ll always see the next level.
03:54:53 But I think it’s pretty damn cool
03:54:54 that I’ve gotten to go to these places, the South Pole,
03:54:57 and I’ve done these things, and I’ve made a family,
03:54:59 and I’m able to teleport my values into the future
03:55:04 through my children, and I’ve had ideological children.
03:55:08 So by what metric have you not already,
03:55:11 A, impressed yourself, and B, could you let yourself down?
03:55:13 I don’t want to turn to the therapist.
03:55:14 I think some of it is psychology.
03:55:15 For me, I’m very much just never highly self critical.
03:55:20 I’m never happy, never happy with what I’ve done.
03:55:24 But I’m always happy in the way that you describe,
03:55:27 which is that the Vonnegut thing,
03:55:29 where you just, often during the day, I will feel,
03:55:34 I don’t know, I just remember just eating beef jerky
03:55:39 and being truly happy.
03:55:40 That was just last night, and I have that all the time.
03:55:44 And that, to me, is why, I mean,
03:55:48 that feels to me like a healthy way to live life,
03:55:51 and at least for me, it’s the one I really enjoy.
03:55:55 A lot of people tell me that maybe being so self critical,
03:55:57 so hard on yourself, is not a good way to go.
03:56:00 But more and more as I get older,
03:56:02 I realize it’s just who I am.
03:56:04 You have to a certain point accept,
03:56:08 this is how I’m always going to be this self critical.
03:56:10 It’s like the Oracle of Delphi, right?
03:56:12 You know thyself.
03:56:13 But I want to leave you with one last thing,
03:56:15 which is to say, just on this topic,
03:56:16 you know, it could be different, right?
03:56:19 We could go down to the ocean and get some krill
03:56:22 instead of the 711.
03:56:24 You know, it could be that we have no other taste buds.
03:56:28 And you know, Eric’s talked about the four dimensions
03:56:31 of the vibration of your tongue, right?
03:56:33 It could be like there’s one,
03:56:35 and it’s just like, not Memphis barbecue,
03:56:39 whatever you like in your Slim Jim.
03:56:42 It could be something, it could be very boring.
03:56:44 Similarly, what if like that’s a clue?
03:56:47 Like what if that’s giving us evidence?
03:56:49 Here’s another clue.
03:56:50 There are many animals,
03:56:51 most animals have single monocolor vision.
03:56:54 They only see in black and white intensity.
03:56:56 They only have rods and no cones.
03:57:00 We could be like that, but we’re not.
03:57:03 Why is that not a clue?
03:57:04 Like if, like God’s not going to like hit you over the head
03:57:08 and say like, here I am.
03:57:10 Cause then everybody would believe in him.
03:57:11 And there’s very simplistic.
03:57:12 I’ve had debates even with like famous atheists,
03:57:14 like Lawrence Krauss.
03:57:15 He’s like self declared militant atheist.
03:57:18 And I was like, well, I don’t believe in the same God
03:57:20 you don’t believe in.
03:57:21 Like some guy in a white beard and a chair,
03:57:24 like that’s infantile.
03:57:25 Like I gave that away a long time ago.
03:57:27 But what if there are clues?
03:57:29 What if Yang Mills theory and you know,
03:57:31 Maxwell’s equation, like what?
03:57:33 Those are beautiful.
03:57:35 If you’ve ever seen like, you know,
03:57:37 expressed in tensor notation, Einstein’s equations
03:57:39 or Maxwell’s equations or,
03:57:41 and then Maxwell’s equations riding on Einstein’s,
03:57:44 it’s unbelievably beautiful.
03:57:47 Doesn’t have to be that way.
03:57:49 That we can comprehend it.
03:57:51 That’s a crack.
03:57:52 Maybe that’s where the light gets in.
03:57:54 And the light is what reveals what’s beautiful.
03:57:56 So I don’t believe in God.
03:57:59 I think that’s a stupid notion.
03:58:00 Like, do I believe in God?
03:58:01 Like sometimes I wonder if God believes in me,
03:58:04 like more than if I believe in,
03:58:06 like he needs Brian Keating.
03:58:07 Like, you know, it’s like one of my friends is a rapper.
03:58:11 He’s like, what would I be doing if I were God?
03:58:14 Exactly what God’s doing right now.
03:58:16 Like, you think I know more than God?
03:58:17 Give me a break.
03:58:18 Leaving clues of beauty for these hairless apes.
03:58:23 Yeah.
03:58:24 And to see what they do with this.
03:58:26 And then marvel at both the tragedy
03:58:31 of what those apes do to each other
03:58:34 and the rare moments of when they understand deeply
03:58:41 about how the world works.
03:58:43 Brian, you’re an incredible human being.
03:58:45 I’m a big fan and I’m really honored that he was,
03:58:48 first of all, showered me with rocks from the moon.
03:58:51 From space.
03:58:52 From space.
03:58:53 Space dust.
03:58:54 Space dust.
03:58:55 The villains.
03:58:56 Crystals, magical crystals, healing crystals.
03:58:59 Yeah.
03:59:00 That you can use for good.
03:59:01 And tell me your story and spend your really valuable time
03:59:05 with me today.
03:59:05 This was amazing.
03:59:06 That was a great pleasure for me, Lex.
03:59:08 Thank you so much.
03:59:10 Thanks for listening to this conversation
03:59:11 with Brian Keating.
03:59:12 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
03:59:15 in the description.
03:59:17 And now, let me leave you with some words
03:59:19 from Galileo Galilei.
03:59:21 In questions of science, the authority of a thousand
03:59:25 is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
03:59:29 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.