Sean Carroll

00:00and five four three two yes how are you sir good thanks yep thanks for being here man I wanted to ask you this because I was reading this today and I starting to freak out NASA is planning on drilling into Yellowstone okay to save the world I don't know about this you know about those leaving pressure what are they doing yes yeah there's the thousand I wrote practi we were talking about chiropractors for the started folks I think they plan on like you know how like if you have like a giant cyst and you sort of make a slice in it you can kind of squeeze everything out of there you ever see a doctor do that I've seen doctors do that I've never seen that to do this I have no idea NASA wants to send NASA wants to spend three billion dollars drilling into a volcano to save the United States and presumably a large chunk of the world to write because there would be some sort of a nuclear

00:55winter type scenario where the skies would be covered with this is not your area of expertise I'm sorry throw this I wonder about the provenance of this but you know these are things that it's some people's areas of expertise but no one has figured everything out right like we don't know all the forces that are pushing around right to make volcanoes and earthquakes stuff like that go back to that picture look at this picture yeah that picture freaks me out every six to eight hundred thousand years that thing blows sky-high Microsoft Paint version of yeah it's from like a Geo city site from 1994 yeah yeah I think well here's the thing to think about right and she keep this up close to you pull yeah pull it we uh there's all sorts of disasters that could happen to us that we don't really plan for because human lifetimes one hundred years technology is a few hundred years but

01:52maybe there are disasters that happen every thousand or ten thousand years right and they could be very bad I think solar flares are the ones to really worry about is that what you you're concerned with it's not my professional concern but I was one sitting next to a hotshot lawyer who had just been finished visiting Washington DC to campaign for we got to start hardening up the electrical grid because one kind of solar flare that he says happens every thousand years could wipe out electricity in the United States or the world for weeks or months millions of people would die right so a few billion dollars and we can harden it and fix things but who's gonna spend a few billion dollars for something that happens once every thousand years isn't that the issue it's like like even with preventing asteroids or doing something to avoid collisions it's right now we

02:41don't have an issue so we go we have other things to worry about we have a terrible president we have you know global warming we have this we have that there's always something that keeps us from being rational about the future yeah that's right and with the good news with asteroids is that there's other good reasons to look at the sky and map things right yeah so the what astronomers are doing are piggybacking asteroid mapping strategies off of things they can actually get money for right because yeah no one is gonna pony up that much money to look at the asteroid yeah well I would think that that would be like a really good use of money like let's let's keep an eye on the rocks that might kill everything you would think that everyone would say for their retirement and so forth right but this ability to plan for the future not what we evolved for well that's a big

03:26ability I mean that's a big plan for the future that I mean literally you're talking about like it wasn't there one that just whizzed by that was three miles wide yeah but whizzed by means it was something like eight times as far away as the moon yeah this is not theirs the chances of an asteroid even though be very bad the chances of a bad one are much smaller than some of these other thing you don't come from me all right the truth take the comforts as you will but isn't there like there's a lot of areas they can come from like behind the Sun where the the gravity of the Sun sort of distorts the the view orbit right they can't stay behind the Sun they sorry they can there are there's what's called a LeGrande the opposite where the earth is where you have to hang out if you were to be hidden from us for a long time and you can hang out there but you would never

04:20leave there so there probably are some asteroids right opposite the earth just like most planets have them so there's sort of orbiting so what you're saying there once a year 180 degrees away from the earth and that's what they will be doing until there is it possible that one can come up and hit us from the bottom looking no no way the danger is something from far outside the distance holers oh that we just haven't this too far away too dim and it wouldn't come from like in Hitler the South Pole is very roughly speaking we're looking at the whole sky mm-hmm not just you know you can see below the South Pole if you're in Chile for example with lots and lots of telescopes that's where they have that what is the the giant one they put in Chile recently that's not totally operational yeah there's a whole generation of telescopes I forget which one it is that's there yeah but one of

05:10them is it the giant Magellan telescope maybe essentially I don't know what I think they're just still working on now and Chile's because it's because it's a high altitude and the environment is very it's high flat and dry yeah so Hawaii's not a good place to put telescopes but that's gotten in trouble yeah local resistance and astronomer is just not even trying to take that into consideration and therefore getting themselves in trouble Canary Islands are ok but yet Chile is one of the best places Chile and Antarctica actually I've been to the Keck Observatory times been three times and every time I go like the first time I nailed it and every time I've been since then I just haven't gotten like one time we went and I didn't plan for the moon I was like oh there's too much moon out and it was you just wasn't it was just too bright this guy was too bright and then the next

05:59time unfortunately we got it when it was rainy and kind of cloudy we didn't get a good vision but the first time the first time changed my life I mean I've really felt like I was on a spaceship looking through a window I know what they were observing I don't know but we were actually just at the Visitor Center okay just looking at the visitor center of the sky is so magnificent at night you know there's no light pollution they use diffused lighting on the island you know the whole deal and the the image that you got from just looking up I mean just with the naked eye it's just spectacular just an amazing view of the Milky Way the telescopes are there right yeah but it gives you a perspective that I think I think we're missing with our cities and I think we've done something amazing by creating these cities where wow you know you just walk down the street and get some food delivered you

06:45know you can go get a car you can you know go buy a TV there's all this stuff in these congested areas but in putting all this artificial light we've removed our connection with the view of the cosmos it's absolutely true now I'm the biggest booster of cities I love cities I love living them I think that they're good for the planet etc but yeah it does exactly like you said it sort of makes our environments so artificial that we forget I remember a great story a friend of mine told me she worked for an organization called project exploration which is based in Chicago they were devoted to bringing the wonders of science to kids and minorities and so forth and they do these trips from Chicago on the train out to Lake Montana to dig up dinosaur bones right and so they were out there they get to go on a ranch they get to dig up real fossils bring him back and she said the thing

07:33that got them the most it was most affecting to them was they saw stars for the first time in their lives right they'd grown up in Chicago they'd never seen a star in the sky and I think that's a shame yeah you see like these faint little flickering things you don't see like a full the view of like the Milky Way will you actually look up and you see that white sort of stripe across the sky and you realize oh my god that's stars those are all stars the Milky Way's the best I get dizzy looking at it right knowing that we're at the edge of this spinning disc whirling around and if you don't get vertigo you're not doing it right yeah as a person who studies space do you ever take time to like go out into the desert and just just stare at the space with nothing out there no light pollution not that much you know honestly the thing that I study our equations and formulas and theories and

08:20I use space my friends who are observers go out there and collect the data and figure out what ideas we have oh right and which ones are wrong and I'd love it when I get the chance but I don't go out of my way anymore anybody else you were saying that people were asking about general relativity it was that the the quantum quantum mechanics yeah okay people on Twitter say yeah all right I hope to figure out quantum mechanics for the first time here well the problem is not impossible I don't think I'm just joking but what I meant with but it's one of those things where ever hoping that someone is going to be able to boil it down right and simple a Neil deGrasse Tyson does a very good job of doing that with the cosmos he's been able to boil down quite a few things on this show where a lot of people want thanks man finally I kind of get it sorta yeah he's fantastic he's an amazing ability

09:11especially off-the-cuff he well it seems like off the cuff I I had this vision that he goes home every night and plans out answers to every possible question because they're so slick when he delivers them he does a little cuz I've heard him give the exact same semi off-the-cuff but they're great so it's like it's like a stand-up comedian delivering a line it's new you yeah yeah so what is it about it that they don't understand you think quantum mechanics I think that's the subject of the next book that I'm writing the book I'm working on right now so I'm just starting thinking about it but it's not just the people on the street it's my professional colleagues with PhDs in physics who don't understand quantum mechanics and rather than being embarrassed by that you know rather than thinking wow this is you know a terrible thing that we should devote all our

09:56resources to understanding they flip it they it's like Aesop's Fox and the grapes you know the parable where the Fox is trying to get the grapes and he realizes he can't reach reach them so he says I never one of them anyway they're probably sour right right so that's what physicists are like with quantum mechanics like now if you try to understand it at a deep level they disrespect you you're like why are they wasting your time doing that when we could be calculating some number right ego and knowledge it's always a weird combination yeah I would always always I've always assumed when I was younger that well when you get to the highest levels of science or you know any sort of intellectual pursuit that the people that are really involved there wouldn't be any ego issues no outsider I was like well this ego and every other part of the world but those super-smart dudes

10:44that are figuring everything out they got all that stuff locked down kind of the opposite of that really I love them like these are my people you know and uh but but it's it's well explained quantum mechanics but please but but you are right I mean the I mean sorry the this ego thing the one thing that academia being a professor right whether it's science or anything else is that you are constantly being evaluated by every other person you meet there's a hierarchy there's a rank how good you are at everyone right and it's not written down necessarily there's a lot of rankings that appear in the sports pages but everyone is judging you all the time and you know my students and so forth they say well I don't like to ask questions in a seminar cuz I worry that someone's gonna be judging me and all I can say is that yes they are going to be judging you John that's so

11:33crazy you've met the very very very very tippy top you know it's like am i number two or number three right and it's yeah it's very sad and it's not not everyone's like that but a lot most people in the field get to be like that and probably it helps forward the advance of science right the competitive nature of competitive in logistic 'el and they won't do better than everybody else and prove that they're better and and I'm sure Einstein and Newton were just as driven by that as anybody else isn't it weird it seems like human beings need that comparative sort of competition thing going on in order to afford whatever they're doing they need peers they need some sort of it helps it's there yeah I mean and we live in a world with scarce resources right I know some of us are gonna live longer than others some of us are gonna get tenure and some of us are not and some of us

12:21are gonna be Nobel Prize winners and some are not so no matter what there's gonna be competition yeah yeah and in your in your field is there is a big issue I guess with people disregarding other people's discoveries or wanting to rather like like saying like wanting to poopoo things and yeah you know I think this is a very complicated issue that I don't really have clear because certainly scientists can be very very supportive of each other under the right circumstances but there are they're human beings there's all sorts of cognitive biases that they have prejudices Bayesian priors for what's likely to be true what's not likely to be true and it's not just perfect reasoning perfect rationality right people come in with their prejudices and if you go and tickle their preconceived notions they'll think you're great and if you say something that doesn't quite

13:13fit into what they're thinking about them they'll sort of look somewhere else - - you do you do you teach this when you're teaching classes and you're you're addressing potential future cosmologists and quantum mechanics would you say a quantum mechanics yeah would you tell them like about the potential pitfalls like and maybe plant a seed in their head like hey you can avoid this you could still be competitive but avoid all these traps that are essentially like these intellectual rabbit holes you can go down that are really not beneficial to anybody yeah I mean if I'm formally teaching in class I'm standing up there in front of the lecture hall 98% is teaching the material right straightforwardly I try to dribble in little words of wisdom here and there and especially if I think that there is a way that we always teach the subject that is wrong and wrongheaded and we

14:05should be doing it right I try to highlight the differences but if I'm advising students like my graduate students or my undergraduates then I you know lay on very hard my own perspective on how it is to be a scientist and and what is the good way to do it what's the bad way to do it what are the pitfalls and also just you know how to not make mistakes and trip up your own career yeah that's really important now what is it about quantum mechanics that you think people don't understand well yeah everyone agrees on what we don't understand there's the thing that makes quantum mechanics which is our single best theory of the universe in some sense the thing that makes it difficult to understand is that is the only Theory you've ever invented where there's a difference between what the world is and what we see when we look at the world right huh in every other

14:55Theory if we look closely enough we would see the world as it is and quantum mechanics has this fundamental rule that says you can't see the world as it is you if you have an electron right a particle that can be spinning clockwise or counterclockwise you think that's what can happen cuz every time you look at it you say is it spinning clockwise or spinning counterclockwise you get one answer or the other but the rules of quantum mechanics say when you're not looking at it it's in a superposition of both and you can calculate the probability that you're gonna get one answer or the other and this drives people crazy because they think that what they see is what is real and therefore they have very very difficult time's figuring out how to make a sensible theory of quantum mechanics that explains what you actually see yeah even you just explaining that I'm it's

15:44circling around inside my brain I'm looking for like a hobby to put place this yeah and like where does this go what super position what yeah is he saying he's saying that it's in two different places at the same time or that it's still and in motion at the same time good right that's right so exactly what you're doing right now you're saying that you know there are things that it can be right until in motion this place that place and somehow it's in both at once or something like that yeah and what quantum mechanics says it's not an either like if you ask where is the position of the electron there's no such thing as the position of the electron if you look at the electron you will see it in a position but that is not the fundamental essence of the electron there is something called the quantum state or the wave function there's a mathematical way that we have

16:31of representing the reality of it but the answers it gives us two questions are just not here it is there how fast it's moving etc that's not what we calculate using the theory does this is this sort of it mean it's very bizarre right and it's very complex and is this sort of lend itself to get hijacked by woowoo folks so totally this is why I like what the bleep like the what the bleep do we know that was when I first started really paying attention to this stuff and then I was reading criticisms of what the bleep and that's when I got an understanding like okay well this is kind of horseshit and this lady is kind of a channeler yeah like what and they're in a kind of a cult sort of a deal yeah what yeah wait a minute like when she was saying her name was ramped thought it was like that's real name ten thousand year old warriors I put that in the movie like there's a lady in the

17:23movie if you've seen what I and so many people oh my god that changed my life when we were trains my life because all of a sudden they thought that like magic was real and it is kind of right I mean something's not magic by magic the world is not magic but when you look at an atom and realize that most of it is space like most of the things that we're looking at are mostly space and that subatomic particles really do kind of blink in and out of existence and you look at all the various quantum weirdness that you is real and observable by people like you that actually study the stuff it looks crazy yeah in fact so I hate to be that guy okay but both of the claim that atoms are mostly space and the claim that particles popping out of existence or both entirely oh please educate why do people say that all the time then because they're privileged in what you see when you look

18:16right privilege ain't like white privilege or different exactly like that yeah they're there they have a view of what should be okay and so there if you have an electron in an atom right we have a mathematical way of describing it and it's a cloud it's not located anywhere it's not empty space and here's the electron and most of the rest of is empty it's not like a little miniature version of the solar system right the solar system is mostly empty there's empty space in between the planets and if you draw a picture of the atom or look at one from your high school science book an atom looks just like the solar system right it really is at the center and these things moving around it that's not what it is it's a smooth cloud that is everywhere inside the atom and that cloud is the answer to the question were I to look for the electron where would I most

19:04likely see it okay and so the leap that is very very hard to make is what the electron truly is is that cloud it's not what you see you never see the cloud when you look at it you see the electron in position but what it is is that cloud and people just can't and so that's why they talk about particles popping in and out of existence there is is this wavefunction this probability cloud that tells you how likely is that you'll see a particle and if the answer is well it's very unlikely it's you know Oh point zero zero one percent chance if I look here and look here again look here again then when you do see it you're tempted to say aha a particle has popped into existence the reality is there was the cloud that was there all along it was sitting there was not fluctuating he was not changing but it's not what you see and everyone from Einstein on down

19:54has had a real tough time wrapping their heads around that yeah I still don't get it so so when people say that an atom is mostly empty space it's not true it's mostly this it's a wavefunction for the electron yeah so there's this sort of very difficult to describe property to it yeah and then we're trying so what are we looking at things like sir is sort of in a very material sense like you know this mug is ceramic this table is wood and we think about the composition of it if we cut into the ceramic we know what it looks like so we're trying to apply those principles to like maybe an atom yeah exactly and they just don't apply because it's the other way around like we we think that our world that we see every day is sort of basically how things work and we're gonna sort of translate other extremes of existence into that language whether it's far away

20:47or way back in time or very very small or whatever but there's no reason to think that our everyday life experience has equipped us with the vocabulary to talk about these things in any sensible way and in fact it hasn't so we have a very completely viable way of talking about the atom we have very very rigorous mathematical ways of describing what happens and then quantum mechanics says what you see when you look at the atom is different and we just sit there and insist that what we see is the real way to talk about it no matter how anti quantum mechanical that viewpoint really is that's got to be incredibly frustrating to you because I've heard like legitimate mainstream scientists on television talking about the atom and describing it in that way oh yeah oh yeah I know believe me and this is to be to be super fair people disagree okay so I think that people disagree about what

21:40the fundamental nature of quantum mechanics is and I have no problem with that I mean I have a point of view and I actually believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and we can explain that and I think it is perfectly sensible and coherent and fits together but if you have another point of view on quantum mechanics that is also perfectly sensible and clear and if it's together that's fine we can disagree we can ask about what experiments to do the sad thing is that most physicists especially ones that go on TV and talk about this stuff just don't think about it that hard and therefore they're sloppy when they talk about it and they're more people come away going I don't get it very gettable it's totally understandable again we can disagree about what the understanding will ultimately be but physicists contribute just as much you know not on purpose but

22:26they they allow they open up the space for what the bleep do we know people to insert their whoo in there because they're not doing a very good job of measuring up for the reality themselves so it's it seems like it's something that's intensely complex that almost needs to be described with mathematics which would require you to have a deep understanding of that mathematics to really completely grasp it is that a fair assessment till my book comes out yeah that's good it's not well so the title of the book is something deeply hidden this is a phrase from Einstein and the ideas that there is something real that we can get a handle on it's just different than what we see and III don't think that we need the mathematical details to get it right what we need is to have the willingness to let go of our intuition a little bit to up to accept the idea that the way

23:17the world works at a fundamental level is very different than the typical ideas about space and time and stuff that we are born with where were you when that what the bleep movie was out were you a professor yet I think so I lost a prospective girlfriend over that movie yeah like we met and she's like I got the best movie I don't think I'm gonna like it as well you gotta be open-minded at least watch it and I watch it I was like oh my goodness did you try to explain to her that's not there was you know there it was not a close call it was not like oh if I explained this she'll get it it's important right I have a friend it was a really sad sort of story I have a friend who was really into the secret and she was actually a friend of a friend more than a friend and I ran into her at the comedy store and we were talking and she was explaining to me how she has sort of

24:15used the the power of the secret to map out her life and it was all gonna take place right and I didn't see her again for like like a year or so later or maybe more and then the next time I saw her she was like I don't understand you know I really thought this was gonna work and my life is still a mess and my dad is a loser and every guy date is a piece of yeah and she just could she couldn't get it right and she was convinced that this law of attraction which in my eyes is very similar in a lot of ways like the person the idea behind it is look you're taking a bunch of people that are extremely successful and you're asking them how'd you do it they're like why I visualize it holy that's got to be the answer right no that's that's one part of a giant thing that makes someone successful yeah and luck is an even bigger problem on there yeah like did you imagine that you were born with two

25:08legs because some people aren't right yeah so when you deal with something like the secret or something like the you know the the rabbit hole you know what the bleep there's this desire that people have to find like some secret message like there is here there's a magical quality to the world and all you have to do is think about it and look about it in a certain way and your life will take on this incredible quality right yep and I think that it's so in my last book the big picture I actually devoted even though it's mostly about physics and philosophy and cosmology and biology I devoted a little bit to the fundamental principles of reasoning and especially Bayesian reasoning I know if you ever heard of Bayesian reasoning I have what would you describe it sure I mean it's it's basically the essence of it is the following idea someone tells you a good idea or you come up with a

26:01good idea yourself the usual thing that people will do is either say that sounds right it's true or that sounds wrong it's false and what Bayesian reasoning says is no to every possibility you say okay maybe it's true maybe it's false I will assign a probability to it being true or false call that the prior probability and then I will go collect data I will say well what would the world be like if this were true and then I'll go look right does this woman over here like me she romantically attracted to me well maybe that would affect what she says if I say hi to her and therefore I'm gonna do the experiment right and this is everything from going through your everyday life to being a professional scientist so look read the secret be told that there's this law of attraction if you understand how physics works you know that it's completely nonsense but if you were

26:50tempted to believe it say to yourself alright let me test it let me figure out what whether it's true or false by saying if it were true the following things would happen if we were false the following things would happen and that little like I think that everyone thinks they work that way but almost no one really does hmm yeah it's very difficult we have these preconceived notions that we really like to clean poo yeah we really like to imagine that we're right about things we hate to be wrong and if you once you were on a path like I believe in this it's super hard for people to shake that loose and people generally think that the probability something is true is either zero or a hundred percent you don't like the idea that there's something is 70% true and therefore they can sort of improve that or deep or disprove that or whatever it's just it's just hard going through life thinking

27:36about probability distributions for every possible version of reality but that is the best way to do it if you can probability distributions yes hmm is that what you do when you walked on the street oh yeah totally I long list of numbers in my head I mean the good news is you there is a certain threshold right if something is 99 percent true or 99 percent 99.99% likely to be true get on with your life all right just accept that as true and don't keep trying to come up with evidence for it against it unless it's forced itself on you like when people say that the universe is not really expanding and my my field I get this right like we've had evidence since 1920s the universe is expanding well who says it's not everyone who emails me everybody cuz I get emails and letters and they've their own theories and the light just got tired coming from these other galaxies that's a herd like that

28:29it's tired there's literally something called the tired light fear light fatigue yes exactly and I'm not you know there so there's some version of the scientific method that says every idea should be treated seriously and you should sort of write down what the evidence for and against this is but come on I've done that I know the universe is expanding I'm not gonna waste my time that's okay that's why we can get through our everyday lives perfectly well without being very good Bayesian z' at all have you had many flat earthers email yeah I haven't had flat earthers email me I did once tweet I had one tweet mentioning the phrase flat earth and I did get an invitation come on a podcast a flat earth podcast they have a flat earth podcast I'm sure there's thousands but yeah they're out there were they gonna try to school you uh you know it was to their credit

29:19it was quite polite and you know we know you don't believe this but let's come on and have a conversation and we'll talk to you and and we're just about you know questioning things and getting in the truth and about getting an education in actual astronomy or astrophysicist know that the crucial thing that you notice whenever you talk to the many many physics and astronomy crackpots out there is that they're never asking questions they're always like here I will tell you the truth if you want to know it they're never like help me learn right if people if people email me and say help me learn that I'm usually very happy to converse with them one way or the other well it's super easy to start questioning things but it's very difficult to get a degree in astrophysics or to get a degree in astronomy or to just really read books about it like I getting through Lawrence

30:03Krauss his last book man there's chapters that I had to like go ok let's go through this one more time like when he came here I had to ask him like one of the first things we did I feel it's probably a mistake cuz it's so complex I tried to get him to explain gauge symmetry to me ok yeah and it was just like he did it like two or three times I'm like ok I'm not there's certain parts about it that are really hard yeah whereas and we can try that again if you want but it is there are hard things yeah that's ok you would be surprised if there weren't right like of course you force 500 years learning about the universe and everything's made perfect sense the first time that would be kind of remarkable no yeah it's it's super complex and I guess that makes sense it makes sense that it would be now when someone boils it down to something that's really woo like you know what in the bleep do we

30:50know but how is that very frustrating to you like what does it mean that must make you communicating with people that have seen that and have these ideas that are false assumptions based on it sort of like I've said to you that atoms are mostly Hollow yeah what does that frustrating I mean what is that like it's frustrating at different levels you know I think I my first impulse is to be charmed and happy when people care people are even interested I'm very positive of you yeah like I first want to give people credit and see if there's something inside them with that we can work with and try to work toward the truth right but then yeah so and I think most people maybe are like that and there's some hard core people who have made up their minds about the craziness I mean you see where it would come from right because quantum mechanics says what the world is is different than what

31:43we see when we look at it so it's a small leap from that correct statement to we bring the world into existence by looking at it right breath and your Deepak Chopra and Deepak he's found me on Twitter so whenever I tweet something about quantum mechanics he you know retweets it with something but it's all in your mind it's all consciousness bringing the world into existence he loves word salad yeah that guy is the biggest like dealer of worlds word salad yeah the world has ever seen this is putting them the word salad into a recipe that people think is nutritious for them right they really like to eat even though there's no actual nutritional value well there's you get a lot of that from like certain yoga classes like there's certain yoga classes that I go to where like the yoga teacher will start talking some woowoo and like your be in the middle of the pose and like what you know is

32:35helping me with that yeah I smile my way through but it's weird that that stuff is all can excited that's all sort of kind of in that sort of genre of people that are trying to improve their life or be spiritual or they love that Deepak Chopra like I've had that I had this conversation with a friend of mine who's like you give me a Deepak Chopra book and I started going through it it's like I go you know this guy's crazy right he probably wants to do well like probably not a terrible person probably wants to do well but he's also ignoring the actual scientists that study all this stuff and he's sort of pitching this thing that what what it is like this Deepak Chopra ISM this sort of like spiritual pseudo spiritual view of the world that he's pitching to like these these middle-aged housewives yeah they're like looking for some sort of a meaning to life but they don't like going to church

33:34yeah and Daniel Dennett the philosopher came up with a great word for it he calls them deputies when you string some words together in a way that sounds extremely profound but you look closely at it and doesn't actually mean anything at all you know there's a website that'll do that for you oh the Deepak Chopra quote yes I would like to laugh but there's another website that comes up with random physics paper titles and it's not that day usually tell the physics stuff is it's almost beat I guess there's there's similar issues with the reason why I deep rock can do that is because most people don't understand what he's talking about so if you say a lot of stuff about things that people don't understand like I've had weave there's been a bunch of videos that we played on this podcast about fake martial arts practitioners there's a whole business in these people

34:25that have these fake martial arts techniques and they use all these huge words that are very very rare about the central nervous system and about the you know the structure of the body and they'll they'll use all this stuff to try to get you think like oh well this guy obviously is a enormous vocabulary and a deep understanding of anatomy he must therefore be this she mastered that he's pretending to be it's kind of very similar so I kind of recognized that pattern in the woowoo people like oh I kind of see what you're doing you're throwing a bunch of very complicated words that aren't in most people's vernacular and you're saying them in a way that makes me feel like you have some sort of a connection to the the Chi into the chakras into the the inner or whatever that everybody's trying to reach to be happy yeah and another problem is just that whenever there is a

35:13field whether it's physics or medicine or whatever where we know something but it's hard complicated counterintuitive when we explain it we translate it right you know in physics we have mathematical equations that are quite unambiguous as to what they say but then we use words we say well there's a cloud there's a probability etcetera and every translation is inaccurate in some sense so if you were basing your beliefs off the translations then you can fudge them a little bit more to get almost wherever you want to go Oh confused me more I was good with the cloud up until now why is it a cloud like why when you're describing where the electron it inhabits why is it a cloud well it's if you're thinking about the electron the what the wavefunction is sort of how we use it is you ask the question if I were to look for the location of the electron right there's a

36:06machine that tells me the answer there's a probability of seeing it here with a certain number of probability of seeing it their probability seeing it somewhere else and so at every point in space there's a number the probability you will see the electron there right and so if you visualize all those probabilities all at once it looks like a cloud that is filling up all of space and then the leap is to say there's no such thing as where the electron is there's only the cloud it's not like the cloud is expressing your ignorance of where the electron really is the cloud is what there really is and and I sound exactly like Deepak Chopra but there's no way no no you don't bore versus electron cloud oh yeah here we go that's right yeah so on the Left these are this is the picture we like to draw electrons orbiting around as if they were little planets in the solar system on the right

37:00is closer to reality but you see even there they couldn't quite resist the temptation to make it pointillist and little dots yeah this really should be some smooth distribution this is well the physicists would call the thing on the right the wave function or the quantum state of the electron and it is that cloud and it answers the question what's the likelihood that we see it in different places the hard part to mentally get to is that the cloud is what is real is it almost like like what we're looking at here with all these dots here and it says it was James with go back to where it was that please where it says the probability of the density of electron and then you see all those dots is the issue like making a visual representation of it almost like like if I ask someone to draw a visual representation of a thought yeah it's something like that exactly because we're used to stuff

37:55coffee cups yeah the water like they have locations in space they have a shape a size so we believe in dots yeah exactly but it's hard to draw them right where's that going where the hell's that I mean that's the most important thing that we've ever had when it comes to the creation of civilization inventions innovation creativity all those things are just thoughts and tried draw thought right but we're intuitive we get that it's hard to draw a song right but okay know what it is these draw the musical notes and yeah and so if you talk about an electron that's supposed to be a thing right supposed to be somewhere that I can like find it and someone comes along and says no Nature is totally different than that and you will never in your life be able to see with perfectly clear eye glasses what nature is really like they get a little annoying but it's the truth

38:52what do you think about the very bizarre theory that the universe is incredibly fractal in the sense that what we're looking at when we look in the universe is essentially some sort of subatomic particles for a much larger atom and then it goes bigger and bigger and then there's a human out there I don't think also a part of another galaxy that's also part of another universe it's also a part of another atom that's also a no I get it but no I think though the closest thing that is a little bit more reasonable to that well so let's go the other way around yeah well let me ask me or let me ask you why is it no well so let's go the other way around let's let's let's ask if maybe what we think of as atoms could be alive with like little people and substructure we just don't know about so if you're an honest conscientious scientist you always say we don't know

39:44for sure right but what we everything that we think we know about quantum mechanics says that things like electrons and quarks are completely featureless that if you tried to put little wrinkles and and make them different like the earth and Venus and Mars are very different from each other every electron is exactly the same as every other John and if you tried to give it any distinguishing features it would cost an enormous amount of energy energy that's just not there so there's fundamental principles of physics that says that there are no people living on atoms okay and so what we're like with our solar system even though kind of vaguely resembles an atom in some sense we are nothing like real atoms we could not be packed together to make a solid object in this bigger world or anything like that so the so our existence efficiently different from the subatomic realm that

40:32I see no way that we could be the same thing as the subatomic realm to some bigger people I do think we could be living in a simulation as Elon Musk famously suggested we could be all living in a computer simulation I don't think it's likely but it's completely plausible given what we know right now where the real issue is that one day we most likely will have something as long as technology continues to exponentially advance will one day have something that's indiscernible from the reality they'll be able to interface more than likely yeah they'll be able to interface with your senses with the way the mind perceives reality and create something yet that passes that uncanny valley and literally feels like like real life like yay tricks I think that might be very far or we might be pretty close I think it's hard to tell because there's so much we don't know right now it's not

41:19like this is coming in the next 10 years but it could be a thousand but yeah absolutely that it could you know the the thought experiment that that helps people accept this is you know a single neuron in your brain you have something like I know 100 billion neurons in your brain but every single one is not that complicated it takes in some inputs it puts in some outputs it might be work to figure out exactly what it does but it's not mysterious right so we could imagine replacing one neuron in your brain with a solid-state micro device that does exactly the same thing as that neuron and you would be the same person roughly speaking right mm-hmm so okay so if you believe that then do that with two neurons and do it with three neurons and you're gradually building up who you are but just replacing your brain with something that is machine made and if you believe that can happen there's no

42:10reason to think that machines can't be as human as we want them to be do you follow any array Kurzweil a little bit I don't think that he's an especially deep thinker but he's a good he's right now pounding on his desk it could be this mother you don't think he's as especially deep thinker I mean he's a brilliant guys invented a bunch of really fascinating things yeah he likes to extrapolate without without limit pretty fearless Lee well he must have irritated you for you to jump right out with I don't think he's a particularly deep thinker no but I do think he serves a role I think it you know there are people who make us think more deeply right like I remember seeing a panel discussion with Murray Gelman who was a famous physicist and Isaac Asimov this was like 30 years ago and as well was still alive and there was some someone else who's on the panel I forget

43:02it was another physicist and the amazing thing was the science fiction author was by far the most conservative thinker up there in terms of what he thought would really be happening a thousand years from now right the physicist had these weigh out ideas and Asimov was like yeah I don't think it's gonna be all that different right and it's hard to predict the future accurately and there's a role serve both by trying to be as realistic as possible and careful and Bayesian and saying what are the probabilities and so forth there's another role served by just being the provocative and saying well maybe this crazy thing is gonna happen maybe we'll cure death in the next hundred years and life will change for everybody dramatically that seems fairly likely right there they'll be gonna figure out some way to reverse aging yeah I think that's plausible there's no biological reason why not

43:49Kurzweil has got some weird motivations to he literally wants to sort of rebuild his father yeah yeah he wants to be able to piece together some sort of an artificial intelligence version of his father and go back and see him yep that's deep that's a word for it yeah yeah he fit he thinks that there's going to come a time inside his lifetime hopefully that you'll be able to download consciousness that consciousness is going to be something you'll transfer sort of like you know code yeah I think that there's there's a difference between you know what is potentially possible given arbitrary amounts of time and resources and what is realistic in the relatively near term by the near term we mean fifty or hundred years right and I think that people like Ray Kurzweil are far exaggerating what's going to be possible in the next fifty or hundred years because they underestimate how little we

44:49know about how the brain works how important it is for the bane bring to be in our bodies right mm-hm we you know one of the one of the breakthroughs and artificial intelligence over the last couple decades was to realize that if you try to build an artificially intelligent computer it's it becomes much more realistic if you give it a body if you give it a face and it can interact with people I mean we underestimate the extent to which having a body is an important part of how we think and who we are and these this is just like such baby steps in understanding this stuff that to imagine that in the matter of decades we'll have it all figured out and have downloadable consciousnesses it's not realistic to me do you think we do we have to absolutely understand the exact way that the human brain works in order to replicate its possibilities no I mean I think that we

45:35probably won't that probably won't be the way that we make artificial consciousness or artificial intelligence like we won't just be reconstructing human beings like when we made cars we didn't reconstruct horses right we just did it in a very very different way and cars are much better than horses in in various ways not as good in other ways like going on the hills going up hills but also in the early days of cars one big complaint was but if I'm drunk and passed out it won't take me home because the horse would just take you home and knows how to get there exactly nobody gets mad self-driving cars will be able to do it final if you're driving a horse drunk nobody gives a know you're passed out that's right yeah that'd be like a big adjustment for people yeah exactly we're driving drunk and so the idea that the way that we'll make artificial intelligence is to sort of

46:24mimic a human being is just crazy now that's that's not how it's gonna be what do you think it's gonna be like well I don't know there are there are the problems that can be solved by things that we design are just a different set of problems than the thing that evolution naturally made us do-right like evolution built a very very general purpose machine that is inefficient and irrational in all sorts of ways like anyone's pocket calculator since the 1970s can multiply numbers way better than your brain can right your brain has enormous ly more computational capacity than a pocket calculator why can't we multiply numbers that ability was not important back when we were evolving these things right so the set of things that it is easy to design is just very very different than what the brain does so who knows I don't know exactly what will be the world will look

47:13like I actually think that the more important thing will be blurring the distinction between human beings and machines you know the the crossovers is another one of Elon Musk's project is called the neural link the idea of you know basically a neural lace something that is just interfacing with your brain very very very fast so that you have access to the entire internet or whatever peripherals you want in real time so learn Wikipedia is part of your memory essentially and that's just who you are now you walk around and you can multiply numbers as fast as you want to that seems like very likely yeah that augmented reality yeah and in some sort of a weird symbiotic connection to the net into electronics whether it's a wearable thing or maybe even an embedded thing yeah that's I think will be embedded either so yeah this is more efficient will you will you

48:03be one of the first adopters are you gonna wait a little while I'm never a first generation it up or even if iPhone that's much less you know things embedded in my body but look I just adopted two kittens they get microchip implants oh yeah you adopt a cat to get some microchip inside so you can't lose it yeah and so to think that we're very far away from doing that I don't think is right I think that we're gonna be doing things I was just looking at a laptop bag it's a laptop bag that also is you have a passport bag and a laptop bag and then a carry-on and then a check and stow you know on a four airplane airplane luggage and all of it is bluetooth and all of it is location coordinated with GPS so that if somehow another your bag gets lost you literally can go on a computer and I'll show you where your bag is yeah it's like whoa yeah how long we gonna when we gonna do

48:52that with people and I feel you know I I'm a big believer in privacy rights and so forth her dilemma do I let my employer microchip me what is this there you go there's a company in Wisconsin that had microchip day on August first and they implanted microchips in people first of all that dude with his ears in that those ear plugs and the lower earlobe thing you ain't doing nothing buddy it's sticking that in me look what you've done to your ears fella Wisconsin company becomes first US employee what and these are very simple just location tracking things right why don't you allow the company to do that I wouldn't allow my company to tattoo me why would I allow my company to microchip me it's for tracking and you can also like they can buy stuff in the cafeteria yeah you know what else you could do use your wallet you say that but you know those do you turn off all

49:41cookies when you have your laptop on and your browser yes I do you don't be nyan yeah these guys say like they get they can buy their snacks with their microchip this was writing machine and get a snack but here's where they're for every loss I can go like that and then I can walk out the door and that laptop stays here and all the cookies and all my browser history stays here it doesn't it's not an ester they wanted to think now you're freaking me out another thing I wanted to talk to you about with quantum mechanics that came out of that movie what the bleep that was very confusing to a lot of people was the whole observer effect now that is something that I've tried to explain to people that the issue is well please if you could explain it like this is the thing is that people believe that in quantum physics it's been proven that if you look at things that you looking at

50:37things changes those things but the way it's been described to me it's like no it's actually because you are measuring those things and that's what changes it the act of measuring it yeah and there's some sort of a physical interaction when you're measuring something that's what's changing the effect that's correct yeah I think that's right the this is a legacy of the bad old days of quantum mechanics when people were a little bit fuzzy about these things it was battle days that our attic the bad old days yeah if I say black battle rap battle days maybe like see I'm signing board going at the bad old days people had a more limited understanding of what quantum mechanics really is and and spoke about it in slightly sloppy ways so there is the truth that if you want to describe what you see when you look at an electron what you see is different than what it

51:30is like you you do change it by looking at it and therefore back in the bad old days a lot of people wondered whether there was something special about consciousness or human perception or something that is helping us explain the laws of quantum mechanics so as you are pointing toward no the answer's no is nothing special about quantum mechanics and consciousness in any way a rock could do the same thing or a video camera or a speck of dust the the quantum mechanics rules says that things change when systems interact with each other hmm though the way that you describe the system is different when it's all by itself then when it interacts in some interesting way with some other system and that system can be a person but it can be anything else also so in that famous experiment that's in that cartoon that gets passed around by people every two or three years when they're like wow

52:19the world's made of magic and they it passed us around it's usually a yoga teacher they that that shows that you know there's the particles and the waves you need to remember the the vidi-vidi funny I don't see the fun of its dr. quantum will we get in trouble playing that maybe maybe if we're on it we will they get mad at us we might get pulled they get pulled from you had a good run well people you know they own these videos and so I it's a real issue as wildlife videos those suckers they're they're so quick to pull the trigger and you know they have a claim it's their videos so if you use working together yeah so if you use it in mock whatever is happening or even if you tell them hey go watch this video it's on YouTube here's the name of it right you would think that'd be like good advertising but no okay so give give me some volume so I can hear this is from what yeah

53:17yeah the double-slit experiment right see when we add the second slit something different happens if the top of one wave meets the bottom of another wave they cancel each other out so now there is an interference pattern on the back wall places where the two tops meet are the highest intensity the bright lines and where they cancel there is nothing so when we throw things that is matter through two slits we get this two bands of hits and with waves we get an interference pattern of many bands good so far now let's go quantum okay now you're gonna freak out this is this is where you start getting mad they're going quantum quantum I know shaking his head folks not a tiny marbles right I can do the guy I know exactly what they're talking about is very famous experiment so yeah so if you have two slits that you let marbles go through they get two slits in the

54:49receiving screen on the other side right whereas if you let a wave go through two slits you get this interference pattern right and so what happens when you let an electron go through the answer is you get an interference pattern it's more like a wave than a particle but the real weird thing that they're gonna get to eventually is if you have if you let an electron go through two slits but you put little detectors on the slits so you say which detect which slit did the electron go through then it always says it goes through one or the other it never goes through both and the interference pattern on the other side disappears you only see the two lines that you would have seen if they were marble so the point is when you're not looking the electron is acting like a wave and when you look at it the electron acts like a particle right that is the lesson

55:40of the double slit experiment right why why because when you put that detector on the slits you interacted with the electron and you localized it right there was no such thing as the position of the electron there's no such thing as the answer to the question did it go through one slit or the other there was only a cloud there's only a wave going through but you affected it or whatever the detector was affected it when it looked through the slits to see did it go through this one or this one and that effect changed it from being going through both slits to being only going through one and how does it affect it like that well there's it's what what's called quantum entanglement the detector becomes entangled with the electron and this is where you get into what I my favorite version of quantum mechanics which is the many-worlds interpretation the the right way to think about the

56:32electron was that cloud that wave going through that's the natural thing the weird thing is that when you look at the different slits you only see it go through one or the other and acts like a particle so how do you explain that so in other words our natural intuitive way things that electrons is as particles little marbles and quantum mechanics says no no no it's naturally a wave the weird thing is when it acts like a particle and if your many-worlds person what the answer you give is the following when you look to see did the electron go through one slit or the other you or whatever video camera you had or whatever becomes entangled with the electron and what that means is that the wave function of the whole universe the wave function of both the electron but also your camera and you and the stars and galaxies and so forth splits in two and there's now one branch of the

57:21wave function which which acts like it's own separate world which says the electron went through the left slit and your camera saw it go through the left slit and it made a little line on the other side and there's another branch which says the electron went through the right slipped and your camera saw go through the right slit and it makes a line on the other side and so they're both still there but the world split in two and now you're only in one of you don't see the whole world anymore you managed to make it more confusing congratulations you screwed my head up even more I did that I understand it less now that's even more baffling but the bit you understand is actually true that's illusion of understanding doesn't count okay so by not understanding I understand more likely there you go you have a weird job it's a very very weird job well I get it now though in talking

58:16to you why you know you have the Deepak Chopra's of the world and why you have like the what the bleeps because it's so intensely confusing yeah and especially with the limitations of language of right just it's counterintuitive it's against every little bit of our everyday experience it's a set of concepts that were not equipped with that we're not born with that we have to struggle to get into our heads over many many years and it shouldn't be surprising so you as an educator when you are you know you're talking to people about this it's you know obviously you've probably done this thousands of times right tried to have that kind of weird conversations with people like myself that sort of lack the tools to really truly understand what you're saying what is what is that like I mean it's got to be frustrating in a sense or no I love it yeah yeah I do yeah that's great

59:08because what a great attitude I was there I that used to be me like it's not like my brain was born ready to I'm saying quantum mechanics I worked at it and struggled with it and got it wrong and who knows maybe ten years from now I'll think oh I was so stupid ten years ago right but I think that it can be understood I think that people who want to try to understand it number one are already 90% of the way to being awesome and number two the remaining 10% is very very achievable it is understandable wasn't it Fineman that said if you think you understand quantum mechanics you don't understand quantum mechanics he said something like that he said he can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics yeah which is fine except that you should therefore be outraged you should not be proud he was kind of a funny guy yeah he was being funny and I think that it

59:57certainly true that we don't understand quantum mechanics if I understand you mean both understand and everyone else agrees that you understand right maybe someone understands it but certainly there's no consensus on the right way to understand it mmm no consensus and the right way to understand it is a very disturbing concept to people like me we want you to say well water is wet and oxygen is this and this you know this is what wood is I think a thousand years from now historians of science will look back on the 20th century and shake their heads in despair they'll say look you guys quantum mechanics fell into your lap and you didn't spend any time thinking about it you didn't try very hard to understand it that's embarrassing really yeah like the general public or science no professional scientific people with PhDs in theoretical for a while so when it

60:43comes to the people you were talking about like scientists who sort of dismiss quantum mechanics what are they dismissing and how are they doing it well to be very very clear they're not dismissing quantum mechanics they use quantum mechanics every day they love quantum mechanics quantum Kanak Sapir calculating what's going to happen in your experiment that is of unprecedented precision it's really the best way we have of knowing what's going to happen in the lab that we've ever invented and there's no reason to think that it's wrong but then when you press them on ok what was really happening what is the description of reality that corresponds to the calculation you just did they get annoyed and frustrated with you rather than give you an answer to the question how sound like with it they get annoyed and frustrated with you like when you have these conversations these

61:28people with anyone yeah they will you will because well they don't understand which is fine but they act as if not understanding it is ok and to me that is not fine they will say my job is not to understand the world's just to make predictions I think it's not really the job of science or physics at all their job is not to understand it's to make predictions well how can you make predictions if you don't understand what you're making well that's that is exactly the situation with quantum mechanics right now like we have a recipe we have an algorithm you know a set of rules do this do this do this you get an answer right and the answer is right the answer is verified and experiments over and over again and you say well K why is it right what was happening what is the thing that is moving around and they go I don't know don't ask me about that that's hilarious now what do you do most

62:14of the time when you're not teaching right so like if you're working on this stuff like I would imagine there's not someone telling you what to do right so when you're at all when you're working on this kind of stuff like how do you structure it yeah it's up to you you know there's a sort of a selection effect that that the ability to structure it on your own is necessary to get to a certain stage in your career but yeah I have students graduate students who I work with as well as other colleagues that I collaborate with but it's roughly speaking going into the office or going to a cafe sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil and writing that's what I do that's my job you go to office or cafe yeah and you sit down with like one of these yellow legal pads yep and you write all that chicken scratch that nobody understands but you guys yep I've recently changed

63:00now I have an iPad pro with an Apple pencil and I do oh you do all that only very very recently upgraded but if you can get yourself when I'm saying Samsung Note eights that has the pen on it have you seen that you can yeah while the screen is dark like this you don't have to turn the screen on you pull out the stylus and you can draw notes on a screen okay up to like a hundred and eighty pages of notes yeah like on the actual screen itself you don't even have to open it up alright that's pretty cool but now I'm invested now I got the iPad so I know that's how it works right but the things the difference is you can carry that around your pocket yeah I know that is a difference yeah so when the idea is that you know we there's a set of questions in our brains as professional physicist there's an infinite number of questions but at any one time you're focusing on a couple and

63:46you have a couple of ideas and so you know you say to yourself well maybe if things are like this then this would follow and let's try to calculate what that would lead to and does that lead us someplace good or is that just crash and burn and that's what you do over and over again until you get a paper you can write and where do you start from like what is uh like well like say you get to the cafe mm-hmm like what's your starting point well so for example let's do quantum mechanics all right so we want to understand the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics okay so you say that the world really is some quantum wave function but you and I observe things like space and tables and stuff like that right so what does that mean what what does it mean to say there's a there's a table lurking in the wave function of the universe or there's you know stars and

64:35galaxies so that means that there's some way of writing the wave function of the universe that is sort of here's a table here's the rest of the universe so I might write down on a piece of paper well here is a toy model like a simple representation of the wave function of the universe that includes one piece and another piece and they're interacting with each other how would I know that that was table like how would I know in tables are not really what we care about but why is space three-dimensional right this is the kind of question we would worry about so what would a wave function look like that represented three dimensional space is that natural could I poke at it and kind of make a prediction for what the early universe was like on the basis of that things like that whoa so now like when you do calculations like say if you were doing in calcio do you study black holes at

65:22all a little bit yeah a little bit yeah writing paper right now Michael are you yeah and what are you writing about like what specifically well there's this famous problem in black holes that they evaporate right they give off radiation Stephen Hawking back in the 1970s said that black holes weren't completely black right there's there's quantum mechanics as they will gradually evaporate away so that's fine we think we understand that what does that mean what does it mean yes I mean they're not completely but like what it is but a black hole is essentially like the event horizon is this tiny infinitely dense area right and it's sucking in the galaxies around it and like supermassive black holes is that does this still believe that they're in the center of every galaxy and they represent one-half of 1% of the mass of the galaxy itself tiny fraction right so the larger the

66:10galaxy the larger the supermassive black hole basically yeah that's right so what is it so what is the black what is it yeah a black hole is a region of space it's a region of space where the gravitational field is so strong that you can never leave that region of space to go to the outside world Jesus that's what it is but so Stephen Hawking so that's that there's there's different sort of levels of sophistication and thinking about what black holes are so one level is to forget about quantum mechanics entirely use general relativity Einstein's theory of gravity that he invented a hundred years ago 1916 and he says what is gravity it's space-time curving on itself that's what gravity is and he has equations to tell you how much these time curves etc so we can describe black holes in in those terms and one of the things you find is that black holes only ever

67:01increase in size you're right they can suck things in but they never shrink because they just suck things in right but then in the 1970s Stephen Hawking says well what if we take into account quantum mechanics there are you know there's these clouds of probability all around the black hole and he says if I look at a black hole does it look completely black and the answer is to his great surprise and still to ours no it doesn't look completely black even black holes when you look at them will be seen to gradually emit photons to emit radiation very very very slowly and how are you looking at them like what method are using this is a thought experiment we've never seen this in the real world the actual black holes we know about the mid radiation so slowly there's no practical way to actually observe it so this is entirely theoretical right now so but if it is

67:55entirely theoretical how do you measure that they're not entirely black we haven't been able to do that we predict that they're not entirely black but we've never verified that prediction yet you're freaking me out man there's a lot a lot of physics is making predictions that we can't get past but someday we're hoping but why even assume that I mean I don't understand what the the motivation for assuming that they're not entirely black it's not an assumption it is if you believe what we think is already true about general relativity the curvature of space-time and quantum mechanics then Hawking says it follows from those assumptions that black holes are not completely black they give off radiation mmm okay now what about the theory and then I've heard this fairly recently that there is a potentially another universe inside of a black hole that as you go into a black

68:47hole you may in fact be going into another universe that's filled with hundreds of millions of galaxies that have hundreds of millions of black holes the center and perhaps hundreds of millions of universes inside of them right it's possible which again as I said earlier is what you should always say in these circumstances there's no reason to think it's likely but it's certainly conceivable that that happens by the way the journey would not be pain-free when you were inside the black hole you would die okay you'd be very very the technical term is spaghettified right because the gravitational pull is much stronger at your head than at your feet as you're diving headfirst so you would be pulled into a very thin non-living which cannonballs it yeah that doesn't help doesn't help did you go crazy when you saw that movie interstellar we I mean you know there's

69:36a weird thing I actually know a lot about the backstory there because Kip Thorne who was who invented the idea what is it my colleague II Caltech so if you know remember the movie or the book contact calls a short movie so Carl Sagan was a brilliant guy but he was not a physicist he was a planetary scientist he studied life on other planets and things so in his novel he had this idea he wanted his heroine le to get across the galaxy very very quickly faster than the speed of light and so in the first draft he said she falls into a black hole and then she gets spit out somewhere else in the galaxy and he knew that that couldn't that's not exactly right that didn't sound right so he called up his friend Kip Thorne who's a very famous physicist at Caltech who is by the way will be winning the Nobel Prize in a couple months in October is it rigged no but it's just

70:25such an obvious choice for because he also helped invent LIGO when they discovered gravitational waves and that's definitely gonna be worthy of a Nobel I go like oh yes what's that do you remember hearing the gravitational waves were detected a year year and half yes so LIGO is the observatory that did that oh okay so that's his the observatory so he was one of the other one of the moving pieces moving forces behind that so gravitational waves were some theoretical thing yes that's right big announcement about the new gravitational waves from LIGO might be coming yet that's Argos 24th pretty recently our goes another I know has been what is it tell us can tell us I can tell you because it's on the Internet you can see I don't want to tell you because it's say I should let LIGO tell you and this is a rumor but I would just say stay tuned when wha when we saw last year the announcement was

71:21black holes were spiraling into each other and giving off gravitational waves and that's what we saw okay that's that was the source of the gravitational waves that we saw this news story is about neutron stars spiraling into each other or spiraling into something uneven know the details it is the rumor but it's a different source for the gravitational waves than we had before here it is beyond black holes could LIGO have detected imaging neutron stars for the first time now merging meaning I'd like this infinitely slow pace that you're sort of measuring nobody's very fast very fast yeah take seconds once once they're together yeah once they're very very close and emitting gravitational waves you can observe Wow and the exciting thing is it's okay once black holes can merge why not neutron stars the difference is that black holes despite everything I just said them

72:11about them not being completely black are pretty darn black so you see gravitational waves but you don't see them in your regular telescopes with neutron stars there's a chance you can just see them as well as detect the gravitational wave now neutron stars now when they're doing this you know we're talking about like how far away are we observing this oh I don't know usually millions of light years Wow so anything you're observing happen millions of years ago yeah that's right yes that's the that's one of the bigger mind Fox it's hard to get your head around when you look it up in the sky and you're seeing something that's a million light years away yeah when you're looking through a telescope you're seeing something that might not even be there anymore oh yeah well in this case you know it's not because it what gave off one of the biggest explosions in the universe and

72:59that's what you're seeing the aftermath of yeah those neutron stars are no longer around if they're if they're then I might have made a black hole there might be some black hole Wow if we observed the birth of a black hole for I don't think we've observed the birth we've observed one big black hole being made out of two smaller ones that's what that's what LIGO song right they actually observed it taking place depends any definition of observed we know then it happened yeah um the gravitational wave signature that we observed okay so you you have a signature that is undeniably the evidence of this now this one I don't know the details here with the neutron stars but there they might be able to say there is now black hole left behind I don't know I'd be surprised that sounds very precise you know very unrealistic but that's the kind of thing we would hope to be able to say someday

73:47I've seen that on drugs this thing yeah are you showing you take DMT you can see that so what is this this is the animated depiction of these two black holes spiraling into each other and begins another one of my Caltech colleague that dude needs to get outside looks like he's just been buried in books then we wouldn't let him outside a little bit stay inside come out a little bit buddy yeah some pictures don't make themselves I'm sure know them sure they delegate he's got this fish on the wall he's losing his mind he's drawing fish when like when you try to make these visual representations of something that is like essentially your your your only interpreting you're getting the gravitational wave you're getting the information that data and then you try to make a visual representation of this thing that's for the general public right it's not basically really for you

74:46guys that's right so if you could also though see the event happen using visible light or using your regular telescopes that would give you enormous Lemoore information so that's always a good thing to aim for so as they do like this this array that they're putting together in Chile and all these different new more advanced super telescope arrays they're trying to get more and more actual visual information yeah that people could see this stuff or something something yeah I mean there's a there's a lot it's much easier to detect light than it is to detect gravitational waves is the sound this is a actually gravitational wave from the early detection the first ones we got last year so this is like Oh Hanford on top and LIGO Livingston that's the actual sound there is no actual sound they translate it into sound it's a gravitational wave that they said well what if it were sound

75:42waves that are gravitationally didn't that would sound so confusing I was watching a documentary and they were talking about hyper Nova's and they were talking about the initial discovery of hyper Nova's that they detected this gamma radiation these bursts in the sky and they originally had one working theory that there was some sort of an alien war going on yes right oh yeah that like astronomers bless their hearts they you know are happy to at least contemplate some of the more way-out speculations like when pulsars which are just spinning neutron stars when they were first detected they were called LG m/s for little green men because they were these very very regular pulses and people said what could it be right it was not like one of those planets that we've observed recently had something that was orbiting it and they were trying to figure out if it was some

76:36space yet enormous space station that was causing this well there was yeah there's a something that got labeled the alien mega-structure yes that's which is basically like something that is bigger and colder than you would expect but maybe if it were you know some structure surrounding a star that's what it would look like yeah I wouldn't bet on that I don't think that's a reasonable whenever I read something like that I'm like oh they just want funding they just want to get people excited you don't get any funding for that no anti get funding for that for really for an alien biggest star yeah because the people give you funding or your fellow scientist you think is taking cheap thrills rather than being serious so what you do is you get hits for your website and you might not necessarily like when you're going to some of these websites that science websites for the most part have

77:22really straightforward sort of titles to their articles but occasionally you get a little click Beatty oh yeah with some stomach screaming they're having beings they're like little more you know a little likes on there juice it up get people excited yeah so when they first initially discovered this these gamma-ray bursts and they thought there was some sort of an alien war going going on in space I mean there's mean so far nothing right so far there's no detectable evidence whatsoever of anything out there other than us that's right but when the thing if there is I mean when and if right if the thing comes if one day we get some sort of undeniable signal whatever it is or we see something all right how does that get processed like do you have to go like straight to President Trump and go hey man I would not do that who is like say if it was one of your colleagues ya

78:26know there is a procedure it's not even very well publicized as far as I I don't know is it a legal procedure for like a prat that has more self-appointed you know people have said all right we are the alien detection network they might be able to keep your mouth shut if you like oh yeah yeah well I think it's I think that we're not very realistic about these I think that it could happen but we're just like with quantum mechanics or artificial intelligence or whatever we tend to put everything in the frame of what we're immediately used to right so we can remount radio signals into space we're really good at that right so we tend to think that aliens will either be discovered or actually contact us by beaming radio signals on us right but that's a horrendously wasteful way to do interstellar communication right for one thing radio waves move at the speed of light so imagine you're a

79:23thousand light years away you have no idea what's going on on earth but you say well there's a promising location for life to arise I know what I'll do I'll beam a signal at them well how long did a beam in you're gonna turn the telescope on for a month then in the whole history of humankind they'd better be listening at the exact right month otherwise they're not going to hear it it's actually way more efficient to send a spacecraft even though it's much slower that's okay you know anytime send a spacecraft and park it in the system that you want to know about and then wait for life to arise in that system so honestly if we're gonna detect evidence for aliens it's much more likely we're gonna find a monolith on the moon or something like that then we're gonna hear him in our telescopes a monolith on the moon wasn't it 2001 right but wasn't it something that uh

80:11one of the astronauts said they saw something up there some of those astronauts have lost their mind as they got older and I've always wondered like Edgar Mitchell's the big one he's the one who says he's seen some things and the aliens are real and I always wonder are those guys getting crazy as they get older or they're going look I gotta get some money I need some I need some attention what's the best way to do it it happened to that alien market that alien market is a big market they could be perfectly sincere but look the what you want when you pick who's gonna be an astronaut is someone who can fly the spacecraft Bank right right they don't need to have good judgment about whether or not there are aliens up there right not what you're going for right you they just need to have an understanding of what the task is and how they're gonna perform it yeah yeah Edgar Mitchell was

80:56uh he I think he might have passed away recently did he pass away but he's one of those guys that people always bring up what I I'm not a believer necessarily in not that I'm not a believer in alien life but I'm not believer in any of the people that say they've seen aliens or you know I've just I did a show for sci-fi and one of the episodes we did we spent weeks talking to people that are UFO researchers and studying the air-quote evidence right and there's nothing there yeah like look be a good Bayesian if someone sees some flashing lights in the sky what is more likely a lien civilization door they're not accurately reporting what they saw like eyewitness testimony is terrible terrible turns out and especially in these weird cases yeah it's just very very dismissible so right and you want to keep an open mind because if there was a unique event where an alien

81:48spacecraft did enter our atmosphere and observe us and then take off it would be quite fascinating if you could actually get a good read on someone maybe hugely important to the history of life on Earth right human history if we've won if and when we finally discover intelligent life out there somewhere else that'll be one of the most important events in our history the idea that it's a you know a 20 foot long flying saucer that comes and visits you in Wyoming is not very possible well also the idea of physical beings are onboard this thing seems counterintuitive why would they do that yeah we don't have to do that anymore like we send the Mars rover up there we get amazing footage it stays up there forever it doesn't need food exactly yeah it's so that's what they do they'll send a rover here yeah not not a either a person or radio wave that's what I

82:39would imagine I would imagine would be obviously I don't know what the I'm talking so forgetting that right now I would just assume that it would be some super complicated drone yeah and that yeah they would try to just take data observe maybe get some sort of a visual understanding and obviously with the kind of telescopes that we have like the Himawari 8 when they would 22,000 miles out we take these incredible high-resolution detailed video and photographs of the earth itself what kind of to the aliens out they probably don't need to get anywhere near us right yeah imagine the weird thing is they're you know the Fermi paradox they should be here already right like the solar system should be buzzing with these drones and either well almost certainly it's not because it's not clear why they would try to hide from us really and if they don't try to hide they'd be easily noticeable

83:34so there's something we don't understand about life in the universe either it's much more rare than we might guess or for some reason it's not very gregarious it doesn't go and visit the rest of the stars in the galaxy hmm my thought was and this is a obviously a very controversial thought but but no one wants to think that we're the first right that's like well if there's us then there's probably more right maybe right but maybe it has to happen once some it has to happen for the first time somewhere yeah right like this like a single-celled organism had to become a multi-celled organism it had to take place through me and it had to take place at one point in time well that time on this planet at least it was the first time one yeah at one point milk billions of years ago right why do we this is all we know that we are the only thing that's ever done

84:30that as far as we know here so why would we assume that anything else we might be the tip of the spear it's completely possible I think and it's also possible that we're that life happens all the time but it never becomes multicellular or intelligent mmm or gums intelligent but never build spaceships there's many many ways it could happen but yes we could be in the entire observable universe the only space Shipbuilding species right now well we also have this weird way of defining intelligence by the ability to change your atmosphere or your environment or your to build things like that's what we think of as intelligent whereas dolphins are obviously extremely intelligent but they don't really impact their environment much at all other than biological life like eating things yes and waste and things along those lines but they don't build structures they don't they don't

85:17keep records and we live in a weird planet that is roughly you know a comparable proportion of land to ocean right be very easy to imagine planets that were all ocean mm-hmm that that the dolphins were the apex predators now yeah right and so he's got really spaceships really good at eating fish yeah yeah they played games and whistled songs and that was great yeah well also the idea that life only has to exist in this Goldilocks zone has always been weird to me oh yeah you know very strange also I don't know one that we're already finding exceptions to that right like even here in the solar system you wouldn't necessarily look to earth first if you didn't already know the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are very plausible places to look for the beginning of life you know they're outside the Goldilocks zone because it's just different conditions so I think we

86:06should be very very open-minded about the conditions around other stars where life could form yeah I mean we find weird life at the bottom of oceans and volcanic vents it's insanely hot and they find these these life-forms that are able to thrive yeah in those conditions that would kill almost everything else yeah yeah and part of that is you know it's I think that the response to that would be well life started in fairly benign conditions and then evolved to survive in these harsher conditions but I just think that our ability to understand chemistry and biology is not that good especially hypothetical speculative chemistry and biology which are very humble about saying how life needs to be on other planets right we always assume that it has to have water and then asking a carbon-based and and maybe that's right but we can't say that we know right did you ever go through a

86:55period in life where you were obsessed or fascinated by aliens yeah when I was a kid I certainly not only aliens but psychic powers and and all that stuff I was very you know interested in all the cool stuff and I became more and more scientific as I aged yeah those are weird things that are somehow or another linked together because they're I don't want to be mean and saying this but they're you know like were psychic powers or aliens and when you bring up the fact that it's very likely these things are people get very upset like you're taking away their Santa Claus yeah you know I don't know there's a video I saw literally this morning on the web of the these people stood outside a little Mart on the corner of a street in New York where people were buying Powerball tickets okay so the people buy Powerball tickets and it's like 10 bucks and they come out

87:51and they were offered can i buy your Powerball ticket from you for $20 for twice what you paid for it and 11 out of the 14 people that said no I'm holding onto my ticket right because they thought that this ticket was the winner right and they're like this is 700 million dollars that I'd be giving you for $20 right with no rational justification but they you know I think it's and it's in some sense innocent if you just okay your wishful thinking about your own little ticket that's fine but it leads us to be not completely rational when planning our futures yeah I'm with the people that won't take the 20 gotta roll it come on I can go in and buy two more tickets yeah but the twenty would just be twenty it would just be twenty dollars no you can right but you might have in your possession you might the ticket or it might be the next one but what if you

88:39give it to them you give them the ticket you get the twenty you go buy some useless tickets and turns out the ticket you gave them was 700 million bucks you gotta jump off a roof and what if the one you buy is the one the one the way you're a glass-half-full kinda guy aren't you the probabilities work out you know it doesn't really matter you don't know what the numbers gonna be right but that's the randomness of it all is what gets people like panicky right like what if what is that but yeah it could be I mean the the best way to you know calibrate your odds of winning the Powerball or saying you know just play the numbers one two three four five six and people go like well that's never gonna come up right like actually the probability of that kind of it's the same as any other one that you're gonna pick huh doesn't matter what it was yeah it's just random now have you ever read

89:28anything compelling at all that leads you to think that maybe somebody might have observed something that could potentially have been something from another planet or some sort of an no I don't think so I mean I think that astronomers do have a set of things that they don't understand very well the most recent example of these things called fast radio bursts which are a little bit different than the gamma bursts gamma ray bursts but you know as always the more we think about it the more we say oh actually I can come up with a perfectly plausible explanation for that and then nothing to do with aliens going back to this sort of uploading consciousness thing there's a very real possibility that once civilizations or intelligent species become sufficiently advanced they upload themselves and they realize there's not really any motivation to go exploring in the

90:12universe and maybe die anymore yeah that's what my thought would be that once civilizations get sufficiently advanced they would go virtual ya figure out some way to create these artificial universes to travel into that are probably just as complex if not more I think we have every right to imagine that give you know so little about what it would be about right now yeah well if we can create artificial intelligence - that's the what's very bizarre it's like if we can create artificial intelligence and somehow or another corral it into existing only in this virtual world that we've created and then inside this virtual world you're interacting with these artificially intelligent creatures that are disembodied right and then in this world you would give them some sort of a body and you would interact with them I think that again the thing that we under appreciate about that is what is the

91:03motivation that these artificially intelligent entities would have human beings like it or not we get hungry we want to have sex we wouldn't have power or whatever right but like if you're just a virtual being an environment without these energetic constraints or need to eat and sleep and so forth why do you do anything at all I don't know I mean why would I have no idea what the psychology would be like for something like that did you see ex machina I did not how dare you that's an amazing movie I saw it twice I actually I think I saw three times it's really good I mean it is a very balanced take on potential artificial intelligence and I on someone making it I should see really well-made movie but you see the store - I don't want to give away too much of it but you see the struggle in these things as this guy is interacting with these things and you see the struggle as they're trying

91:59to interpret what they are like versus what he is but they are in bodies right there like that yes yeah yeah got a wonder like what I mean Elon Musk is terrified of this right I mean he said that we might be summoning the demon that's his exact quote yeah yeah and I get trouble I tend to agree with him and again I get in trouble on Twitter for saying that I agree with him but because people who are actually doing artificial intelligence have this very real appreciation for how far away we are from something that you would classify as intelligent in any real sense and so therefore from their day-to-day perspective to worry about super intelligent AI is taking over the world is laughable but my argument I think Ilan's is that yeah but what does the percentage chance have to be that this is gonna happen before you start worrying about it if the consequence is

92:51really the ruination of the world right right there are only so many things that we do for which the worst-case scenario is quite that bad that's what makes it a special circumstance and it might be very very unlikely but are you willing to say like okay 1% chance that all human beings destroy don't think that's that's actually the worry but we should just do our due diligence right we should think about what the possibilities are we should plan for them probably no big deal when I said this on Twitter people knowing that was a physicist were like well what did you think about people who were worried that the Large Hadron Collider was gonna destroy the world right I said well what do you mean physicists did many many studies checking to see whether or not it would destroy the world we don't want to be destroyed any more than anybody else and so I think

93:36that's a very sensible thing to do for artificial intelligence also yeah I agree just when you see articles like did you see the recent article or the Google AI that they had to shut down because they were starting to communicate with each other and the language they invented that language was not very convincing if you saw it printed out I'm sure but to me that's that's like a scene in a horror movie where like and then you go to 10 you know blank screen 10 years later and you know we're all dressed up like Mad Max with you know bandanas over our face and we're running from Terminator bots well I think that's the thing again and again we're coming to this theme that our imaginations are not quite up to the task because their imaginations about super intelligent AI or something like that something you know Frankenstein ask just in robots or something like how do Asimov but that I

94:25think much more realistic worry are things like currently existing neural networks and deep learning algorithms so basically there's all sorts of problems like pattern recognition facial recognition right we are very very bad at sitting down and writing a program that recognizes faces human beings are not very good at figuring out how to do that but we have ways of building programs that can teach themselves to recognize faces and they're amazingly good so we have programs like when you go onto Google or your iTunes or whatever and you know your iPhoto is recognizing your face there is some neural net that is doing that and there is no human being alive that understands what it's doing all we know is that it's getting the right answer okay and that can be that kind of logic can go very very far and so it I'm not worried about like a robot like Ultron taking over I'm worried

95:21about our all of our infrastructure being run by programs that no human being understands whoa that's something I hadn't even considered but yeah that's a real issue yeah that's a real issue right that's an actual real thing I've always wondered whether or not what human beings are doing with our insane lust to innovate and to constantly create new and more spectacular things and to always look for the next version of something we're not satisfied with the iPhone 6 we want the iPhone 7 what sounds fun with that when's the 8 come out yeah we always we have this intense desire for better things we don't I mean unless you're a classic-car advocate or a devotee really what you want is like oh this new car stops faster it handles better it accelerates quicker we always want things to constantly improve and I've always and when you look at human beings like if

96:15you looked at us objectively that's one of the main things that we do we produce better technology better objects better engineering it's like constantly improving and accelerating and then there's this potential artificial intelligence thing I've always wondered if that's really what our focus or what our purpose is on this planet that we're like some sort of an electronic caterpillar it's going to become a butterfly that yeah that what we recognize in some sort of a weird way or nature recognizes the biological limitations of flesh and tissue and that it can advance far better with something that we create so that we don't even realize what we're doing by making this cocoon that we're just like building it out building it up we're not even thinking about what we're doing we just I want a new laptop whoo and by buying this and by this materialism that we all

97:05have right we have this this people have this innate sort of desire for new and shiny objects that that is fueling this innovation and that's pushing along this and that one day we're going to give birth to this new version of life we can call it artificial life but it's not artificial if it's right there it's just created by human beings which obviously are created by this intense and very long evolutionary process this might be a part of that process yeah so I would I would tend to want to remove from that the sort of anthropomorphic or teleological aspects of the language like that it's the purpose or we're meant to be here but I completely agree with the idea that there's a threshold that has been crossed whether you want to say it's the last 500 years or the last 10,000 years they're human beings had developed the ability to do something that has never

98:00been done before and that has this sort of recursive self reflective thing that we can build things that can build things that we can build things that can learn and we can build things that are like living things and we are just at the very very beginning of exploring the space of what's going to happen because of that and the idea that we human beings are gonna be around 10,000 years to enjoy the fruits of that I have no idea whether that's true or not I don't even know that's bad I mean maybe it'll still be human beings maybe a hundred years from now we'll cure death and aging and we'll stop having kids and the people who are alive a hundred years from now will differ in other million years maybe human beings will just become more and more melded with artificial things and they'll have artificial bodies and so forth or maybe you know one another under appreciated thing I think is that

98:54at the very very small scale where we do like nanotechnology and so forth there is a whole bunch of problems that have already been solved at that scale namely biology cells right like cells do many many things really really well and they also repair themselves they're much less brittle than things that we build using metal okay so synthetic biology just programming existing biological organisms or designing new ones but we would still recognize them as biological but they might be very very different than anything that naturally appeared through the course of evolution so far that could be the thing that takes off and a hundred years from now that's all the living beings or all the beings with higher intelligence left on earth I mean I don't know what the actual thing that's gonna happen is but what I know is that the pace of change is just accelerating we're just at the very

99:46start yeah we really are and it's it's so what do you ever sit around and try to extrapolate and try to like look at where we are now as opposed to where we were at the turn of the century and it's lasting on 20th century yeah and just right thinking like where is this going I mean this it seems like any day now some new invention could be put forth that changes the way we interface with reality right and it's subtle because it's not uniform right it's not like there's a weird fact if you wanted to make a movie and set it 50 years ago right so in the 1960s it wouldn't be that hard to film you know outside and in certain areas certain suburbs it kind of looks more or less like a look in the 1950s whereas it's actually would be harder to make something that was in the 1960s look like it did the 1910s right there's sort of more obvious visible change just as cars were different and

100:43so forth but you don't see the sort of technological change that might be have a far bigger impact in electronics and artificial intelligence and so forth that happened in the last 50 years so just because there's no visible sign of the change doesn't mean that the changes cannot be eventually very profound it's always amazing to when you look back and like science fiction movies from like the 80s where they were predicting 2017 you know they thought we were gonna be flying around in space constantly yeah like the movie alien what year was that supposed to be I think that's like the year 2100 or something like that right not that far well what we're really good at is taking things that already exist and extrapolating them to be faster and bigger yeah all right so if you can build an airplane then you can build a rocket ship arbitrarily fast that's easy to imagine but things that change

101:32culture like really curing aging that's hard to imagine what that would be like it's also greedy because like where we gonna put all these goddamn people if they live forever yeah they're forever and everybody has four kids we got a real problem on our hands when we were quick no more no more kids ma'am clearly you have kids no that's why you say that forever either you know my if I did have kids that maybe their kids would live forever but you know that's that's the thing that's the size of the change in society that will be required by something like that 21 22 that's when a lien takes place that's a hundred years from now get out of here there's no way could be maybe him ah they had some shitty monitors 2122 I mean God yeah but the inside of the cockpit for mother when that dude gets in there and finds out that you know there's some if she's late for

102:25the future oh yeah this is really really hard yeah I think we're more likely looking at some sort of a augmented desktop sort of scenario like have you seen these new products like that Microsoft is working on and some of these other companies but I think before very long it won't be a desktop it'll just be our thoughts really we'll just you know like I remember what I had for lunch I'll remember what the population of Malta was in the year 1500 what am I looking at here Jamie which movies is yeah this is the first one I was googling it could've got tagged or something else and I didn't recognize it but huh that's pretty more money that's pretty good looking no that can't be the original alien is it I think that's like alien 2 or 3 no strumice yeah there's a is that the first one the second one you clicked on yeah that's yeah they look pretty badass so that's trauma what I

103:24meant was there's a white room that uh I forget the the actor's name in the original alien the original alien people don't realize was in the 70s it seems crazy yeah it's corny we were ages very well by the way just sorry what was all the defenders yeah yeah cuz she was in that movie up she's probably in her 20s back then but that movie in 1979 like their idea of what 21 22 was going to be like they had a lot like weird lights flashing in the cabin that didn't really seem to make a lot of sense but they looked electronic I said this might have been pictures from the new alien yeah that's what it looks like yeah cuz it did kind of look like a Tesla it was weird because they're kind of saying this is like from actual production set yeah that's the new one see because they're kind of saddled down by the the problem that they're replicating a film you know that was from the 1970s and

104:21they there might be settled down by the numbers that look like you're in an airplane yeah you don't think so no it's good to be here in your head do you think so I need buttons yeah so even navigation walking well I think we live in the only generation that's gonna get repetitive stress injury from poking out our devices all of it really yeah I mean what that's the most useful thing well it's a very slow inefficient interface tightening on your cell phone that takes press I hardly do it anymore a lot of times I'm talking to my phone now that's very old-fashioned of you all right very retro no no using voice recognition software okay right that's retro seem to make phone calls oh I do that too I'm a crazy phone call person but the text function ready voice recognition function that's really amazing yeah I don't use it as much I'm no it's like yeah look how good

105:13it works I'll show you right now it's really pretty interesting we can click on this right it's like the notes thing this is how I do a lot of the stuff like if in my car and I have an idea that comes to me I'll either record it with a voice recording function or sometimes it's better to do this and when you're doing this it essentially can pick up everything you're saying in real time and print it out yep they got it right that's amazing right baby I mean anything perfectly spelled what I just said folks is now on my phone amazing what is this new I don't know how well they worked I've only seen them out and whatnot but real time in your translations and French Spanish English I've seen Chinese Japanese Oh size of an earbud yeah I've seen that so again once you have the link inside and we just interface with your brain then essentially you will speak every

106:06language 129 bucks that's amazing so you can go is it called Babel Fish that's what it's called like it like it like oh I know but that's not the name of it was it what's the name of it this one I've just have now it's from Waverly Labs it's called the pilot I think the pilot this is pretty awesome though they just go this is Japanese one of them on this particular one I don't believe so but I'm 90% sure I've seen videos like on Facebook showing a Japanese one and finding my first trip to Japan and that'd be very bottom a zhing yeah I've never been there what you gonna go Tokyo where you gonna go we were flying there's a conference in Foucault and then we'll visit Hiroshima and Osaka after that Wow I went to Japan a few years back and it feels like you're in a super polite alien world it's beautiful they're very polite the food's amazing yeah they're even more

107:00what's and Watson to do more languages and I just said before Portuguese scroll up so I can see what it looks so Watson is an example of one of these programs which learns things we don't know how right okay that's a problem and now it speaks Japanese and French yeah so this one is how does it we're jamming we this is the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi out of the range of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi translate one-to-one can still work just as well as the first device on the market for language translation using AI that does not rely on connectivity to operate it offers significant potential for its unique application across Airlines foreign government relations and even not-for-profits working in remote areas whoa that's crazy so so it's different than the pilot earpiece how is it how do you wear that sucker looks like it over your head it's sound way just like a hearing aid I probably just look like

107:55that and I'll probably big now just like these probably yeah this would not be sexy while you're wearing it but yeah unless you're into that stuff it was saying that you download language packs so it'll take me off the internet yeah so it essentially it'd be like there's these map applications like onyx maps and stuff like that you can get download like like sort of a Google Earth type to topographical map of areas and you could look at it say if you're hiking you could look at these on your phone even if you don't have cell service you can just pull them up and get a google image of like oh hey here's the creek that we have to go down to get water yeah yeah that's yeah we're getting it's getting super slippery 279 bucks and you can use that sucker that's right now that's amazing at the cart don't do it takes three to five seconds to translate whoo most

108:50languages there's a thing called google lens which is pretty amazing too I use this when I was in Italy and you take your phone and you look at something through your phone right and it translates it on the screen which is amazing like you're looking at a sign and you hold it up and it'll tell you what the sound like we were at a train station I was like what the does that sign say yeah you put your phone up there with the Google lens and it'll translate it I know I use that the only problem was like four menus it's like what is this oh it's roses chicken I have no idea what that is yeah well fortunately or unfortunately when you go abroad Americans travel so much and so the English people from England I'm sure but it's such a common language most of the world can speak English that's right yeah we definitely have an advantage oh it's huge in Italy I mean it's like you

109:40barely need to understand anything other than saying thank you and saying you know hello and good evening things along those lines buona sera you uh you can get by yeah the first time I went abroad to a foreign speaking country was France and I was just too shy to talk to anybody because I was not in Paris I was like out of the middle of nowhere where people could not speak English ooh and you know by now I'm and I and I even had like red phrase books and things like that but by now I've decided so many times I don't really care I'll try to speak my two words of the local language and then try to switch to English and if it doesn't work it doesn't work we just do hand gestures G when you traveled a place like France France excuse me people have this French people in particular there's always the stereotype to hear that French people think that Americans are rude like I

110:24would like try to go like way out of my way to make sure that no one thought it was like a rude American yeah because there's always this reaction that they have like the worst case scenario is the American goes over there and it's pissed off that they don't speak English and they start I got I don't know my first trip I was treated very very well in France very very politely I even like I bought something in a store and I didn't understand what the price was so I just sort of kept giving money until they nodded and by mistake I had given too much and the guy like ran out after me to catch me leaving to give me my money back I that was uniform except in transportation industries like whenever I want to buy a plane ticket or whatever that was very very hard well ironically enough with a rude or were they just really tired of dealing with tourists so you know i would i would say

111:15in french i would say you know do you speak english and they would say of course i do in french right like okay well then can we do that right yeah they're probably just exhausted they're just exhausted but that's how it is in america you do people the airline counter they always have this look in their face like what time is it when i go to yeah doing something you're not passionate about unlike you with your legal notepad writing alien languages and you know somewhere it's a it's a great privilege what i do for a living right like i can't believe that i get paid to do this and it's hard i have to tell my incoming graduate students if you get a PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech and you probably want to be a physics professor because that's the only thing you can do with that degree and your chances are maybe 25% that's pretty damn good it's good but after you you're like 26

112:05years old and putting a lot of work right to still all you know there's a 25% chance of succeeding that's still pretty amazing i mean if you're trying to be a stand-up comedian your odds are like 1% if they're lucky no the very very good thing about academia is it's very clearly up or out and you you know you there's time limits like if you haven't succeeded by now you're gone you can only be discovered tomorrow you usually go to wall street and make a lot more money oh so you get a PhD in physics from Caltech you're not gonna start right now who will hire you to do something interesting so what would you do on wall to wall street with a PhD from Caltech these days all the money's be made by algorithms study the stock market and destroy human beings picking stocks right renaissance technologies and places like that i mean it's like we were just talking about but soon the

112:54entire stock market will just be dueling algorithms trying to sell something a microsecond before something else does now you are involved in a hard science right i mean you're you're involved in this trying to understand the world and the universe itself you do you see any of the identity politics issues that are going on on campuses today I mean it's such a hot subject or as see a little bit you know I don't I my job at Caltech is research professor mm-hm so I don't even teach a lot of courses to be honest and Caltech is not a typical campus in many many ways but you know we just had a professor who was basically fired for harassing students it does happen sexual harassment yeah that's really it wasn't quite it was more complicated than that he fell in love with the student and fired her and there's just no question that you know I'm in an area theoretical physics where there's a very

113:53tiny fraction of women an even tinier fraction of african-americans and so forth but that's kind of less surprising because they just don't come up usually in economic circumstances that put theoretical physics as one of the plausible future research careers but you know I see an enormous amount of discrimination against women in my field and it's there and women leave and some of the complaints against it are overblown but many of them are very very real so that's a real problem for us I think it's changing I think it's fixing but it's low what kind of discrimination do you see it's these days it's usually very subtle it's usually you're taking a little bit less seriously if you're a woman I mean there's all sorts of tests that have been done right like people handed out mathematics papers with and then all they did was change the name of the author James Smith versus Jennifer

114:48Smith and they were always ranked much worse when it was Jennifer Smith who was the author even it's exactly the same paper really and any oh there's a certain style of aggressive in-your-face egotism that serves you well in academia generally and in physics in particular putting yourself forward asking questions being loud and noisy and women are less good at that for whatever reason they're not trained to do that or it's an 8 I have no idea but they can sort of get bullied into silence or just say like this is not worth it I'm gonna do something we go to Wall Street to make money also a woman who does that is not likely to be received as well as a man who does that yeah it's they're deemed to be like a yeah so there's my guy was already at Caltech I'm on the fourth floor of a building which is the theoretical physics theoretical high energy physics

115:38group so there's maybe 30 people total professors postdocs graduate students and until this year there were zero women out of 30 which is just embarrassing this is bad right yeah and who would want to be the one woman who right it's not gross yeah yeah but you know especially there's two like men either who think they can have sex with you or men that can never have sex with you right those are we both annoying yeah and then like if you're lucky you get a guy who doesn't want to have sex you just wants to be your friend in any way that's all right yeah but and I think that you know honestly if I were giving advice to young women whose primary goal was to become a successful theoretical physicist you know if that was your only goal then don't raise a fuss about sexism or discrimination because just like worrying about the interpretation of quantum mechanics

116:33counts as points against you when you're being judged as a theoretical physicist worrying about discrimination against you counts as points against you people think like oh you're you're not really interested in physics you just want to make a political fuss Wow that's unfortunately quiet yeah I mean I know that what you're saying is pragmatic but a lot of people don't want to hear that like keep quiet I don't want to hear keep quiet when you tell women to when you're talking about discrimination right now so maybe your only goal in life is not to personally become a successful theoretical physicist I mean just as a I don't my advice is not keep quiet my advice is if that's your goal the way to achieve that goal is to keep quiet god that's gross though right it is and so I think that it's kind of the job of guys to raise a little bit of a fuss among this and you know I saw it at

117:20Caltech where this guy recently got fired how many people were willing to make excuses for his really really really bad behavior right you know it's it's unseemly to talk about these things we hope it's not true like these this is our friend this is someone we worked with we don't want to believe this about we want to protect him so physics philosophy astronomy all these areas are now having these examples of famous big-name professors that it's finally being revealed for last 20 years have been regularly harassing graduate students and pushing them out of the field mmm I think maybe finally that's coming to light enough that it's hopefully will go away a little bit human folly you know it's interesting it's a lot of like what we're talking about earlier with the people that don't necessarily understand quantum physics and so they sort of dismiss what's

118:10important about it or people that you know use their they rely too much on ego or they there's too much of a part of their life and the human folly that yes we're making excuses and yeah it's involved in everything and you know I'm I'm not the broader question about any politics etc I mean I'm I'm pretty lefty justice warrior about this stuff to be honest I think that the number of women for example women are just the most obvious example in my field who have been pushed out of my field because of bias and discrimination in very very obviously you know verifiable ways is just that's the big embarrassment you know but at the same time in kind of a free speech absolutist if some crazy person who has very retrograde views wants to say those retrograde views and I think that if someone else wants to invite them on campus to do it I think they should be allowed to say all the

119:06craziness that they want I don't think that's the right solution to these problems yeah I think the solution in those cases for someone who's got a legitimate viewpoint to debate them yeah the marketplace of free ideas left actually the the Chancellor of Berkeley just put out a very good statement saying exactly that and I give her credit for that well that's great you know because I know that they have an issue there with ben shapiro coming who's a very reasonable guy and sometimes gets lumped into the alt-right and gets lumped into these fees and i thought it all he just happens to be conservative and young and i'm very articulate but for a while they were trying to limit his participation there and putting him in the same category that they would put my lien op elasaur some of the other guys so much it's a we're very weird with free speech in that you know we love free speech as

119:52long as it in line with how we been free speech people we agree with yes yeah yeah yeah I mean I don't know ben shapiro but larry summers is another example he gave this famous speech at Harvard he was the president of Harvard and a world famous economist and he gave the speech saying well maybe the reason why we don't have as many women physicists as male physicists is because of a different distribution of innate abilities now I think that you can make a very very good case that his substantive claims were entirely like he misread data and he was making excuses and that's it's one thing if that's a guy on the street it's another thing if it's the president of Harvard okay right but then after that like people were saying well he shouldn't be invited to give talks about economics at other universities cuz he said this bad thing I think that's ridiculous he said we're

120:42world-class economists like he was wrong and you should criticize him but I want to hear what he has to say about economics that's something that could entirely different listen also there's a narrow issue with someone who's a professor who's constantly used to really not being questioned and you've been giving lectures and being able to talk in front of students and you develop sort of a general hubris about your own opinions I was a possible well I would hope that I don't know in my areas of academia you can't get through lunchtime without having all of your opinions but I'm like that's just what we do right like it's you know you never sit around and say something and everyone agrees that's a very healthy profession yeah and that's how to yeah that's how to get things get make progress but of course usually we're talking about the wave function of the

121:28universe right from the dark matter right and to you know to be very very fair there's like we said before there's still prejudices about purely physics topics like you can talk about quantum mechanics or the nature of the dark matter and discussions get very very heated and emotional and people's jobs depend on it and the whole bit but the idea that things go unchallenged is not that just doesn't fly very far in this field yeah yeah well that's beautiful I would love to talk to you about what you just said dark matter yeah because that's something that I would imagine if you went out and just randomly polled a thousand people all 1000 would have no idea what dark matter is yep it may be go yeah it's like part of the universe like it's really we can't find it but he was Rick and Morty recently that had a silly episode about Dark Matter what is really know Morty it's a it's a cartoon

122:22Oh Cartoon Network show it's a hilarious silly thing that uses science fiction okay yeah I think I know what you're talking about I mean Dark Matter is real it exists yes okay how do we measure it we measure its gravitational force okay it pushes things around in the universe so what do we think it is yeah we don't know that's the that's the thing we know certain things about it we know that it's dark we know how much of it there is it's about five times as much mass in dark matter than there is an ordinary matter ordinary matter is every particle we've ever seen ever right so all the atoms all the stars all the galaxies that we see in our telescopes that's 5% of the mass and then dark matter is 25% and dark energy which is something completely different as the other 70% of the universe and these those are facts those that's basically you know 99% likely to be true what it is the dark

123:21matter the dark energy that is much more up in the air we have lots of candidates and we're not sure which one that's right well you know like so I went on Science Friday you know Science Friday with Ira Flatow NPR show okay and he says he says like you cosmologists like shouldn't you be embarrassed you only understand 5% of what's in the universe that's amazing universe like a hundred years ago we didn't know anything about the universe we do know the universe was expanding we didn't remember other galaxies you know come on this stuff takes more than a few months to figure out 5% i think is pretty healthy yeah I think we're getting there um what is the the current theory as to like where it resides and how its formed and what its properties are and what impact it has on the galaxies I think this is a really really good question because we might be in flux right now for a long time like

124:14basically from the 1980s to today there was a leading candidate for what the dark matter was something called the WIMP the weakly interacting massive particle okay so if you indulge me for just a second we have the particles we know and love there are four forces that push these particles around there's gravity there's electromagnetism and then there's the strong and weak nuclear forces two nuclear forces and the nuclear forces are distinguished by being short-range like you don't notice me in your everyday life you got to be down there at the atomic scale so it turns out that if you imagine a new particle that obviously interacts through gravity because everything interacts through gravity but doesn't interact through the strong nuclear force like a proton does or through electromagnetism that will be charged but it interacts through the weak nuclear force okay so you imagine a

125:04particle interacts to the weak nuclear force relatively heavy and you calculate how much of those should be left over from the Big Bang you get the right amount to be the dark matter so this is called the wimp miracle the idea that if you just hypothesize out of the blue a new particle that is invisible and stable and interacts through the known force of nature that we call the weak nuclear force that could easily be the dark matter so that was seemed so natural and simple and there were many more complicated theories that predicted that such particles would exist I would say that many people ten years ago or so would have said there's a 90% chance that wimps weakly interacting massive particles are the dark manner here's the problem if the wimps if the dark matter is wimps we can build detectors and look for them and we have done that we've build these giant detectors deep

125:58underground you're shielded from all the cosmic rays that are just noise and contaminating your experiment and you wait for a little weakly interacting massive particle to pass through your detector and bump into an atom underground underground underground usually these are in mines right so they're an old gold mines a mile underground counterintuitive so you're going a mile underground to search for something that's in space I made up the mile you might wonder if you can look at will in a deep mine right it seems so common to ative yet you think you'd have to throw something into the sky we live in a noisy environment right that the trouble is not detecting them the trouble is seeing them peek out over the noise okay that's what we're trying to do it's like going into a quiet room to listen to something very very what was the initial discovery that led to the conclusion that dark matter

126:47is the preeminent mass of the universe what what percentage of the mass is it well sorry let me just finish this look very closely the point is that we have built these detectors and though haven't seen the wimps oh okay so for the first time people are beginning to shake their belief that maybe wimps are the most likely candidate there are other candidates other kind of particles that could be the Dark Matter maybe it's still wimps we just haven't found them yet that's still possible but I would say if five years from now we haven't found the wimps then people are gonna start saying it's something else hmm okay so the first evidence well you know it comes in drips and drabs my my Caltech predecessor Fritz Zwicky famous astrophysicist back in the 1930s pointed out that galaxies were orbiting each other too fast in what are called clusters of galaxies you look out there

127:35in the sky you see like these bunches of galaxies that are orbiting each other if you calculate how heavy the galaxies should be from what you see you can calculate using Newtonian laws of physics how fast they should be orbiting they're actually orbiting much faster and he said the only way for that to happen is if they're much more massive than you thought if there's much more mass in there there's some missing mass okay but at the time we didn't know it could just be stars that we didn't see or gas or dust or whatever it wasn't really till the 1970s that Vera Rubin famous astrophysicist looked at how individual galaxies are rotating and she found that it's a similar kind of thing the edges of the galaxies are moving way faster than they should be given the amount of matter that is inside and she concluded there's like a lot of dark matter causing a gravitational pull that

128:25we didn't see but is causing this the edges of the galaxies to spin a lot faster than they should be Wow so that is the reason what is there is it a possibility that some new discovery could happen or could come forth where you would re-examine this idea that there's some missing mass there's always possibility I so there's certainly this idea that is on the market that because all of our evidence for dark matter is indirect because it's through its gravitational influence not by directly touching it or seeing it maybe we just don't understand gravity all right maybe gravity's a little bit different now I would argue and I think I'm right not everyone agrees with me sadly but that idea has basically been killed off by our observations of the microwave background radiation you know we are 14 billion years after the Big Bang there was the Big Bang was very very hot and dense and

129:25is glowing to beat the band everywhere but it was also opaque the light didn't get very far and about 400,000 years after the Big Bang it cooled down enough it became transparent and then these this these photons of light just stretched travel through the universe unimpeded and we can see that the leftover radiation we can see these faint patterns these oscillations in the microwave background which look exactly like they would look if dark matter were causing them and they don't look what they would look like if gravity were modified so there's a much longer version of that story but the basic thing is if you if I can just pull if already and say trust me on this mmm I was I was totally on board with the idea that there was something wrong about gravity that would be very cool thing if it were true there would be a big mind-bending discovery but we've

130:14tested that and the microwave background there were predictions it would look this way if you modify gravity that way if they were dark matter and the answer is spot-on to the dark matter predictions very different from the modified gravity predictions so dark matter exists so dark matter exists and what percentage of the universe is currently believed to be dark matter 25% 25% yeah and I read once that they had discovered in entire galaxies that was made out of dark matter yeah pretty close maybe not entirely because then you wouldn't see it right discover it that was what I was gonna ask how how do you see this stuff like how does like if you can't detect it well you know it exists right you know because of its effects that's like you don't you can't like point to it like you point to the Sun right so you need some tracers you need something that tells

131:04you that dark matter is influencing the motion of stuff in this vicinity of space so in a galaxy it's just like the stars at the edges of the galaxy and most of the mass in our galaxy is dark matter like we see like these pictures of galaxies that you see that look very beautiful the actual size of the galaxy is much bigger than that but it's all dark matter oh the galaxy you see is a tiny little puddle you know one fifth of the total mass let it sort of settle down to the center of this big puffy cloud of dark matter whoa and the when people say well there's a galaxy that is only dark matter what they really mean is it's almost only dark matter it's a puffy cloud of dark matter where most of the stars have been pushed out by something but some of the stars or the gas you can still see orbiting around and that tells you there's a some concentration of dark

131:53matter there do we know what dark matter is or desert as there are there's larger theories wimps were the biggest theory but there's alternatives there's one alternative it could be small black holes that were made in the very early universe that seems unlikely there's another kind of subatomic particle called the acción which is nice because people invented it for totally different reasons and they also worked out that could give you exactly the right abundance to be the dark matter and there's all the dozens of different theories out there for what it could be so we're looking we're trying to figure out which one is right what a weird thing to have something that's invisible that's a giant percentage of the entire universe and a large percentage of galaxies right yeah when they're sent of galaxies is dark matter most 90s in the 90s yeah well let's say 75 percent 80

132:43percent something like that depends on the galaxy but on the other hand what right to be thanked did we have to think that most of the universe should be readily visible to us now does Dark Matter exists on earth or is it only in deep space it depends on what the right theory of dark matter is but in most theories their dark matter particles passing through your body right now so with this wimps detection Theory where they've developed these detectors deep into the ground would that would be able to detect thing that's actually prevalent here on earth yes and it's not that they're stuck to here on earth there where the earth is just moving through space there's a wind of dark matter particles that we're passing through and and occasionally bumping into right and we're moving in some sort of a spiral yeah through the looping we're orbiting by the Sun right yeah poof now the the

133:35the big bang one is another weird one because I was watching this thing on television that was proposing alternative theories to the Big Bang and one of them was that the universe is next to another universe and that somehow another it collided with this universe and that this is probably a process that repeats itself I know we get paid to come up with these ideas and that's what we're doing you know there in Starbucks with the pencil and paper yes what do you buy into that like which one do you buy it I don't think it works I don't I don't personally think that that's very likely it's on the table it's a reasonable is it still enough is it was it a recent yeah how long was it first suggested maybe around the 2000 or so and did it did a bunch of people jump on board or one say if something like that comes up one of your colleagues yeah has this idea so then you go to the

134:23cafe with your legal pad and all right how do we do this exactly that's right and so what you would do in that case so someone proposed an idea and you say well okay how would we test it how would we know well maybe like we said before maybe it predicts some pattern in the leftover microwave background radiation from the Big Bang if you're a different theory for what happened at the Big Bang then maybe your imprint post Big Bang is a little bit different and that's exactly the kind of thing we're looking for now so the imprint the microwave imprint of the Big Bang this 14 billion year old event yeah what is the like Terence Mckenna had a hilarious way of describing it I do a terrible job of a butchering it but that people like this is funny how he was talking about how many scientists are atheists that they don't want to believe in God they know what in he was

135:16an atheist as well he was an atheist rather as well but he said but they are they do want you to believe that everything came out of nothing for no reason that anybody knows of 14 billion years ago there was this infinitely small area that was smaller than the head of a pen and that's everything you've seen the sky and it exploded 14 billion years ago and no one knows why that's right yes good but isn't that what I mean that is so crazy and you know it's one of those things that theists you know people that are really into gods and in religion they point to like well this is the scientists god this is this this event this is a miracle I mean this is the way bigger miracle than walking on water or turning wine into you know water into wine I mean that's baby stuff except that this scenario would be a hundred percent compatible with the laws of physics right in a way the turning water

136:13into wine is kind of not yeah I think that the so here's the thing and I think this is actually not always communicated very well the Big Bang is is the phrase the Big Bang is used in two different senses one is what we call the Big Bang model which is the whole history of the universe for last 14 billion years from an original hot dense state expanding cooling galaxies form here we are that's true that's settled art we know that that's right okay the Big Bang model but then there's also the Big Bang event the beginning of that story time equals 0 the initial singularity it's a prediction if you again if you remember we talked about in black holes you have general relativity Einstein's theory of gravity it makes predictions and one of those predictions is if you trace the universe backward in time you hit a singularity you hit a moment when everything was infinitely dense

137:08infinitely fast expanding etc etc that's the Big Bang moment and it is certainly not true it's the opposite of true it's it's if no right to believe that that actually happened because it's a prediction of general relativity but general tivity is not right in that regime because you're ignoring quantum mechanics once again so if you don't think that you understand the fundamental quantum mechanical rules of the universe you have no right to say what happened at the Big Bang and what physicists should say if they're being honest is that could be the there was a first moment in the history of the universe a first moment of time a day without a yesterday and once we understand quantum mechanics and gravity and how they play well together that will all be very clear or there could have been something before you know there could be the what we call the Big Bang may have been just a phase the

138:01universe goes through occasionally and this bouncing universe idea that you were talking about with the two different universes hitting each other that would be an example of a scenario in which the universe actually was eternal that it lasted forever and right now we have no way of knowing we're very open minded it's 14 billion years ago maybe it was the beginning maybe it wasn't we just don't know what do you take of the idea that the Big Bang is a process a continual expansion and contraction process and that it starts with the Big Bang the universe expands and then somehow another pulls back into itself until it becomes this infinitely dense small point again and then the whole process starts from scratch right yeah that's one of the scenarios on the table in fact this this idea that you referred to which was what was originally called the x-pyr Adak universe don't ask why it

138:53was some ancient Greeks cool name yeah it's cool work name so that was the idea there's this extra dimension and two universes smacking into each other they later realize the same people very well-known respectable physicists realized they could just play the game over and over again so you could have this smacking together call that the Big Bang it expands and cools but then it recon tracts and there's another bounce and this goes on an infinite number of times I am personally not that fond of this idea number one there's no evidence whatsoever or reason to believe that our universe will ever contract it's not only expanding but it's expanding faster and faster it's doing the opposite of what you would expect if we're gonna contract so I don't think that's very likely and number two the single most impressive empirical fact about the universe is the difference between the

139:39past in the future what we call the arrow of time right you remember the past but not the future you make choices now that affect the future but not the past so this difference between the past and future is nowhere built into the laws of physics as we know them all the laws of physics that we know treat the past and future the same the reason why there's a difference is because of the Big Bang because the Big Bang was a very very special organized state that the universe could be in and ever since then we have been expanding and cooling and sort of winding down and that's the fact you have to explain if you want to explain the origin of the universe in my view and the idea that there's an infinite number of cycles doesn't explain that fact at all there you go Lawrence Krauss was trying to explain to me the size of the universe and the age of the universe and he was saying that

140:31fourteen billion years like when we look back into the known universe like the what we can see is like 14 billion years yeah but he was saying that that essentially doesn't mean that that's as far back as it exists it just means that space is moving faster than light when you get back to that distance there might be something even further back than that but we're not gonna ever be able to see it I hope he didn't say exactly that I probably sure he did right so that well sure but again sometimes even my favorite people in cosmology use this language of space expanding faster than light entirely okay because space doesn't have a speed the expansion of space is the answer to the question you know space is this big by what amount has it expanded in one year one second later right I have heard that expression before that space is moving faster than light so why

141:26now why do they say they shouldn't say that I know because they're lazy and bad these are like high level guys yeah I know mmm okay so what is the never gonna be invited back to quality conference after this podcast well you always have the infinite monkey cage yeah that would be my new career right so what is happening then well space is expanding and light is moving through it right and what is certainly true is that the speed of light is a finite number right right it's one light year per year the way to remember it right so if the universe had a beginning a finite number of years ago then there's only so far out that light can get between now and then that's all there is so there are things far away that are so far away we can never possibly see them at this current age of the universe because it would take longer than 14 billion years for light to get from there to here oh and

142:21that's just because the universe has a beginning as nothing to do with the fact that space is expanding at the speed or that speed okay if there is a a point where the Big Bang begins right there is a single origin point and it explodes outward and we are seeing it from some position so we're seeing this explosion 14 billion years ago does it move in the opposite direction as well is there twenty eight billion years and and you know from point to point right so it's not like that no the Big Bang is not a point okay the Big Bang and this is this is hard to wrap your mind around the Big Bang is not a location in space it's a moment in time the time in the history of the universe when everything was on top of everything else it's easier to talk about one microsecond after the Big Bang than the Big Bang one microsecond after the Big Bang the universe could

143:17very well have been infinitely large we don't know it's not like the universe started a microsecond so or any other time infinitely small let's just forget about one felice mom okay insanely small things we're closer together there's no such thing as the size if the universes are infinitely big it's always infinitely big okay but you can stole the Big Bang oh okay so if all matter is condensed into a very small spot it doesn't mean that all things around it are not infinitely large well you don't want to say around it because we're talking about the entire universe so if you visualize an infinitely big universe okay full of stuff okay stuff stars galaxies okay stuff like right now yeah right now okay and let's wind the clock backwards so suck it all in yeah so the thing is that as far out as you look even if you look at you know with your God's eye view faster than the

144:12speed of light there is still stuff out there it's uniformly spread let's say okay so but it's closer together it's the relative size the relative distance be being galaxies and stars is smaller in the past than it is today hmm but the whole size of the universe is still infinity and that's still true all the way back 14 billion years right up to the Big Bang the universe could have been infinitely big but the density the amount of stuff in a cubic centimeter goes to infinity whoa yeah how big is the estimation that it was at the moment of the Big Bang before like before it expanded right it's thought to be fairly small but infinitely dense right well I don't even think you can say it was thought to be in fairly small no the observable universe so I think this is this is maybe what gets lost because the universe is finite in age we only see a part of it okay I see a part of it a few

145:12tens of billions of light years across call that the observable universe that's finite in size okay so that definitely was smaller and there was an actual number you can attach to the question how big was it at the Big Bang and we don't know the answer we we can sort of it depends on theoretical predictions it was the biggest possible size it could have been was about a centimeter across the biggest possible yeah as big as it could be so you're talking about essentially like a pinkie nail that's right that's as big as the whole universe could have been that that's right in fact in this so everything you see everything around you right now that you can reach out and touch every galaxy out there with billions of stars in them they were all condensed into this one centimeter cubic region of space what is the large it could be much smaller that's the largest because

146:01that's the large yes that's as big as it could have been it could have been much smaller it could have what is the smallest it could have been what we call the Planck size 10 to the minus 35 or 10 to minus 40 centimeters something like that Oh invisible oh yeah very very invisible yeah whoa yeah why do we think it happened well what what is the reason what evidence we have yeah like what what is the current theory as to what what the big bang like why did the Big Bang take place well that's so that's a good question so there's no preferred conventional answer we just don't know that's not that's not a we don't know because we're not sure that's how we have no idea is my answer obviously if there was a bounce or if there was some universe before ours out of which ours came there would be a sensible answer to that we just don't yet know what it is it's a more

146:55challenging question if you think that the Big Bang was truly the beginning of the universe which is perfectly plausible that's perfectly compatible with the laws of physics and then you're in one of these situations you have to reorient the kinds of questions you allow yourself to ask because if the Big Bang was the beginning there's this intuitive feeling that there was time before the Big Bang when there wasn't anything and there was nothing yes and nothingness sat around for a long time and then it decided to bang okay I could have sat around for an infinite number of years right yes but but don't think of it that way what I'm trying to say don't think about nothingness transforming into the Big Bang okay think about our universe think of it from the other side thinking from the side that we already exist but visualize into the past and imagine that as you visualize into the past

147:45you hit a beginning you hit a first moment of time a time when time itself came into existence but there's no time out of which it came that's the beginning of time okay it's like walking north you hit the North Pole once you're at the North Pole you can't keep going north right there's nothing weird it's just that everywhere every direction you go and would now be south at the Big Bang time is only toward the future not toward the past time the arrow time is the particular fact that not only does time flow but it the universe changes there are differences between the past and future this is tough it's tough too how do you guys sleep not very well actually when I was a kid like it was ten years old or so when I first got interested in this stuff and so yeah when I was 11 or 12 the thing that would stop me from sleeping was I be you know dreaming about you know the Big Bang in the

148:49universe then I would come to but what if the universe had just chosen not to exist and then I was no sleep for me that not a choice right I know better now I moved on to other more worldly concerns keeping me awake at night so is there anybody working on any sort of theory to try to understand what forces might have caused it to burst forth yes so I mean there's two answers to that one is yes I'm one of them there's plenty of people thinking about this kind of question but really I hate to say it but you shouldn't ask that question because again we're embedded in this world so the question you asked was what are the forces that caused it to burst forth right so that presumes that there was a cause right and that I mean causes and effects worked themselves out over time so there was a time when there wasn't a big bang and then there was something that caused the Big Bang to

149:48occur right so what I want to suggest is that that's just not the metaphysical framework in which to think about the origin universe don't ask what caused it asked what were the laws of physics that can be compatible with both the universe we see today and with the universe having a beginning 14 billion years ago we don't know the answer that but that's the question we should ask it's it's it's such a complex discussion it's it's so complex that it's almost like infinite in its possibilities they you you go over all these variables these possibilities and and what we know and what we're learning and yes well it's very it's complex but more importantly it's a realm that is just so far outside our experience on our toolkit for dealing with the world that we have no guidance right we're kind of at sea like what are the kinds of things we should be asking about what are the answers

150:43that would satisfy us right I would argue that there are brute facts there are things we just need to accept if we come up with a picture of the universe a set of laws of physics and a story for the history of the universe that says well the universe started this way and then that happened etc and someone says well why did it happen that way and I would say there is no answer to that question this is just what it is I might change my mind if you convince me but there's no right to demand that there is a reason why things are one way rather than another do you have difficulty you like thinking of a potential reason that one day we will wrap our heads around do you think that it's within the realm of our possibilities or our understanding it's always possible that there is a deeper explanation right but then you want to say whoa KY is that deeper explanation

151:34true and I think that this chain of explanations bottoms out I think that there will be one foundational point which is not sort of self explanatory but is just and that's the way it is are there any legitimate scientists that are contemplating the possibility of a Big Bang not being the origin of the universe oh yeah absolutely the Big Bang could be just one of these moments one of these things that happens one possibility is that there's another universe that is sort of big and quiet and empty but through a quantum mechanical fluctuation a little part of the universe could pinch off and become a separate baby universe and then grow by itself and that could be the origin of our universe so like a stellar nursery for universes yeah and it could the great thing there really so I haven't blown your mind yet but now I'm about to do it oh you already did when

152:29you look at the universe if the universe is finite in size you know we're talking about it could be infinitely big it could be finite in size but if it is finite in size we think that a finite universe has zero total energy zero total charge zero total velocity etc so making a universe costs nothing Alan Guth is a famous cosmologist at MIT says the universe is the ultimate free-lunch universes are not an expendable resource you can make if if you can make one universe you can make an infinite number of universes just as easily I don't understand that there is yeah well there's Beth right so look you look at the Sun and you say look the Sun that would that seems to be like it would be hard to make a lot of stuff there it can imagine appear but the Sun also has a gravitational field right there's gravity around the Sun and what the math suggests is that there is energy in the

153:31gravitational field of the Sun which is negative and which is exactly equal to the energy of the Sun and cancels it out so that if you had a universe with nothing in it but the Sun that universe would have zero total energy if it were closed in on itself whoa yeah it cancels itself out yes so negative energy and gravity cancels the positive energy and stuff therefore universe's can have zero total energy and this is all obviously very hypothetical speculative mathematical stuff that's nothing we've done in the lab so take it with a grain of salt we could change our minds but that's the current state of the art Wow so the entire universe you believe revolves around that principle free lunch yeah you could easily so again if you can make a universe at all then you can probably make an infinite number of universes just as easily it's not like you have a hundred pounds of universe

154:29stuff then that gives you a finite number to make every universe costs you nothing to make people have a hard time even thinking of there being more than one universe you start thinking about the fact that there's a hundred million galaxies in this or 100 million yep at least a hundred million solar systems right and there's galaxies is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies the known universe and that there might be more than one universe right and the idea that this was all for our benefit seems a little ridiculous very very tiny compared to the size of the universe yeah well that does get to be a bit of an issue it at a certain point in time just the mass of it all is defies it suffice not just our understanding or like for the average person like myself it defies your ability to put than what what you're describing into words right that's a part of what the problem is

155:29that's like I'm training like yes we keep into but here I can restore your Europe your thought that we matter for the bring it back bring it back we're wrapping this up in some sense we are in the middle of the smallest scales in the important part of the universe versus the largest scales if you look at the universe on very very small scales or very very early times near the Big Bang the universe looks very simple not a couple lot of complications like we said you can't build a civilization on an electron there's just no possible intricacies there it's a very simple thing the universe is also very very simple on large scales and it will get only simpler in the future the universe is sort of dissolving into emptiness as the universe keeps expanding it's only in between on scales like the size of a human being or the earth and ecosphere that things are complex right so even

156:25though we're much smaller than the size of the universe we're very big compared to atoms the number of neurons in a human brain is roughly the same as the number of stars in a galaxy so we are kind of a peak of structured nosov the universe of complexity I mean until we build even bigger artificial intelligences and so forth but there's something that we are maximizing something that is is sort of concentrated on us which is not size or scale or time it is complication and complexity Wow now in the same sense that the the energy and the gravity of the stars sort of manage to cancel each other out yeah is that the case of people as well well if this this is all again math right the whole universe is a free lunch yeah the claim would be well consider a universe with nothing in it but you pick your favorite thing a person the star a galaxies whatever then the total energy

157:28in that thing minus the total energy in this gravitational field because it's negative would be exactly zero wow that's super hard to wrap your head around yeah then there's the big question you wouldn't get paid the big if it were you but the big question is why yeah why do you think this is all happening or do you ever use that word why it's why is a weird word right yeah why is it where is happening it is so what's causing it to happen what are the forces that caused it to happen yeah ever why do you ever look at all and go is there a purpose to all this so short and I think the answer is no I think they no I think that yeah there's no reason why and again just looking up into the sky you know unless the purpose was to make a pretty sky boy anything that we're seeing here on earth could have been done much with much less effort than making 100 billion galaxies

158:25right there's no evidence in anything we learned about science or the universe that gives us a reason to believe that there's a purpose behind it all if anything as time goes on the entropy of the universe is increasing and the universe is becoming more random and disorderly I think that we're you know riding a wave of the universe that is growing and expanding and cooling and becoming more and more disorderly and that's a finite amount of time so 14 billion years from the Big Bang to today sounds like a lot that's 1.4 times ten to the ten years but the future of the universe is enormous Lee longer than that according to our best current theories it's it's way it's potentially infinitely long anyway the last star is not going to burn out until a quadrillion years from now we are very close to the beginning of the history of the universe and but it's not forever

159:22doesn't last an infinite amount of time so the universe is ephemeral we human beings and living creatures are temporary structures within it and the idea that it's all for some big cosmic purpose it seems to hold very little water do you ever contemplate what what function human beings have in the in the university the way we interface with reality the way we interface with our the nature with around us yeah I think that we don't have a function I don't think that's the right way to think about what human beings are we should be glad to be alive enjoy it while we're here be nice to each other and try to learn more about the universe but it's not if we choose not to do that that's not going against any preordained function that we have you're remarkably calm when you discuss these things do you have any existential angst do you have any like I think the other way

160:15around and honestly this is very very small amounts of data but from what I can tell when personal tragedies strike people who are atheistic cosmologists and scientists deal with it way better than people who think that we're embedded in a matrix with a bigger purpose or a spiritual reality really yeah because you get that this is this happen and you have an infinite perspective when someone dies it's sad you can be sad but you you can't say well it shouldn't have happened Brian right this is these are the kind of things that happen damn dude it's gonna take a while to process this one man this is a long one go out look at the Milky Way I'm have to listen to this about 30 times and take notes but thank you very much song it was awesome really yeah thank you so much if people want to get a hold of you or read some of your stuff what is the the best way I have a

161:07website called preposterous universe and you know my last book the big picture talked about all these questions about purpose why we're here what we should do about it is there an audiobook available as well is I recorded it not far from here excellent beautiful thank you so much man that was awesome like thanks everybody you