Sir Roger Penrose

00:01all right here we go three boom and we're live how are you sir I'm fine pretty good thank you for doing this I appreciate it that's fine my pleasure who roped you into this I think I suppose James Tague probably I I'm a big fan of your work I've read much of your work I've seen many of your interviews and videos online and one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about I find quite interesting is consciousness and your belief that consciousness is not simply calculation but that there's something more to it and what what you think this more could possibly be from a scientific perspective which is unusual because a lot of people have some theories about consciousness but they're usually crazy people like myself well I mean we're all conscious and so we may have theories about it yeah but no the ideas came by somewhat roundabout route I I went to Cambridge do graduate work

01:07it was mathematics I was working on pure mathematical subject algebraic geometry but I thought you know we got three years or spend some of the time going to other talks that might be interesting so I went to three talks particularly which had a big influence on me one was a talk by Hermann Bondi was a general relativity cosmology wonderful talk with very sort of animated presentation II had and then there was a talk by Paul Dirac one of the founders of quantum mechanics and his talk well his complete wonderful talk to wonderful lectures as well but in a completely different style he was very quiet and precise and what he said and everything and we in the very first lecture he was talking about the superposition principle in quantum mechanics so if you have a particle and it could be in one spot or it could be in another spot then you have all sorts of states where it

02:03can be in both places at once I mean that's sort of strange but you've got to get used to that idea and he Illustrated with his piece a piece of chalk and I think he broke it in two to illustrate it could be in one spot or in the other and my mind sort of wandered at that point I don't know what I was thinking about but I wasn't concentrating and a few minutes later he'd finished his description his explanation and I had some vague memory of something about energy but I didn't understand what he said and I'd been totally mystified by this ever since so I suppose if I had heard what he said he would have said something to calm me down and and I sort of accept it in one way or another but as it was it seemed to me this was a major issue how on earth do you have things that don't behave according to what wander mechanic says like cricket balls and baseballs and things like that

02:56anyway that's two of the talks the other course was a course by a man called Steen who talked on mathematical logic and he explained things like girdle's theorem and Turing machines Turing machines being the mathematical notion upon which modern computers are base for all computers basically and the thing about girdle's theorem you see I heard I used to have a colleague when I was that undergraduate in first of all who was who became a scientist later on and we talked about logic and you know how you could make these kind of mathematical systems which worked out logic and I'd heard about this girl's theorem which seemed to say that there were things in mathematics that you just couldn't prove and I didn't like that idea but I when I heard the when I went to this course weisstein and he explained what it really says and what it says I suppose you've got a method of proving things in

04:05mathematics and when I say things I mean things with numbers the one famous example is there must Last Theorem there's the Goldbach conjecture which isn't yet proved that every even number bigger than two is the sum of two prime numbers that's the sort of example is the thing it's just sort of mathematical things about numbers which you can see what they mean but it may be very difficult to see whether it's true or untrue but the idea often is in mathematics you've got a system of methods of proof and the key thing about these methods of proof is that you can have a computer check whether you've done it right so you these rules you know they could be adding a and B it's the same as B and a and things like that and you if you give your you say to the computer say here's a theorem like Goldbach conjecture and you see whether it can be proved and you say maybe I got a proof

05:09and this follows these steps and you give it to the computer and it says yep you've done it right it's true or maybe it will say you've done it right and it's not true or it may not say anything but just go on forever but these are the sort of outcomes and the point about it is that if you believe that these procedures do give you a proof in other words that if the algorithm says yeah it's true then you believe it it is true because you've understood all the rules you looked at the first one say yeah yeah that's okay you little the second one said ma'am oh yeah I see okay that's great and you go all the way down and as long as you're convinced all those rules work then if it says yes that's something you believe okay now what girl shows as he constructs a very specific sentence a statement which is a number thing like likely there must last theorem or

06:03something the thing about numbers which what he shows is if you trust this algorithm for proving mathematical things then you can see by the way it's constructed that it's true but you can also see by the way it's constructed that it cannot be proved by this procedure now this was amazing to me because it tells me that okay you cannot formalize your understanding in a scheme which you could put on a computer that you see this statement which girl comes up with is something you can see on the basis of the same understanding that allows you to trust the rules that it's true but that it's not actually derive about by the rules it you see it's true by virtue of your belief in the rules and this to me was amazing and I thought golly you know what's understanding what does it mean is it something following rules this is an algorithm well this more or less says

07:11it's not an algorithm because whatever it was there would be something that you could still see is true even though you don't get it through the algorithm that you had in the first place so this was a bit alot of subtleties about this to which people argue about endlessly but it was pretty convincing to me that this shows that we don't think when we understand something that what's going on in our heads is not an algorithm it's not following rules it's something else it's something that requires our conscious appreciation of what we're thinking about I'm thinking is a conscious thing and understanding is a conscious activity so I form the view that conscious activities whatever they are not just that kind of thing but you know playing music or we were falling in love or whatever these things might be aren't not computations there's something else going on and then I

08:07thought because I you know I'm like to think myself as a scientist and I think that what's going in on our heads is according to the laws of physics and these laws of physics pretty good they seem to work well in outside world and so I believe that the laws that work in our heads are the same as those laws so I began to think about it well what about Newton's mechanics well you could put that on a computer what about Einstein's special relativity you could do that what about Mack was wonderful equations which tell you how the electricity and magnetism operate and light and radio waves and all these things that so follows this beautiful set of equations that max were produced you can put that on a computer okay you may have to worry about approximations and the least depend on continuous numbers rather discrete things but I didn't think that's the answer then I thought what about general

09:03relativity Einstein's theory of gravity with curved space and all that well we're familiar now with LIGO this detector which is detected black holes spiraling into each other from distant galaxies and how do we know that those signals are black holes but well because of calculations people have put this thing on an algorithm and you know what those signals look like so Einstein's general relativity sure you can put that in a common of computer what about quantum mechanics well there's the famous equation of Schrodinger which tells you how a quantum state evolves you could put that on a computer too it's difficult in many ways there's many more parameters you were to worry about but it's just as computable as these other things well you see I then remembered Eric's lecture you see and how it is that these things that work in the quantum world don't seem to work at

10:01the level of classical big things and it all depends on this process of what's called measurements in quantum mechanics and the measurement process is something you learn how to do but it's not the Schrodinger equation it's something else and Schrodinger himself was very intrigued by this facts that his own equation gives you nonsense and you the famous Schrodinger's cat where he produces a situation in which the cat would be dead and alive at the same time he produced that an example simply to demonstrate that roughly speaking his equation gives you nonsense under these circumstances so there's something else and something else goes beyond our current quantum mechanics and it tells you what happens when the quantum state makes a decision between but it doesn't follow the requested one thing or the other no everybody knows that who does quantum mechanics but they think oh it's what's

11:00called making a measurement and you're larger to something different but that didn't make sense to me and so I had the view that okay there is a big gap in our understanding and if there is something in the world which isn't something you could put on a computer that's where it is so the view I've held that for a long time and that there's something non computable something beyond computation involved in our understandings of things so that's a view of Health for ages I didn't do much with it I just held the view until I think there was a radio talk between Marvin Minsky and edward fredkin and they were explaining about what computers can do and they were talking about okay you have a computer two computers talking to each other over there and you walk up to the room and the time you've walked up the room to the computers they have computed commuted communicated with each other

11:55more thoughts than the human race ever has done you see and I thought well I see where you're coming from but I don't think that's what's happening in human communication human understanding is something different from what computers do and consciousness is the key thing consciousness is something different from computation so I've held that view but then when I heard this stop by Minsky and in fredkin I thought well I had ideas of writing a book sometime you know a long time in the future when I'm retired this was some while back I say and I thought well maybe this gives you the focus and so I wrote this book called the emperor's new mind which was supposed to be saying well you know we everybody seems to be thinking one thing but yeah little kid notices it let the Emperor it doesn't have any clothes so it was the that theme of that story which was the basis of the book so I say

12:54okay maybe a lots of people think that what we're doing is computing but if you stand back and you say well no there's something else going on so that was the basis of my thoughts about consciousness but I wrote this book thinking that by the time I got to the end of the book you see it was it was a lot mostly about physics and mathematics and things like that but I was really aiming for this thing about what's going on and conscious thinking and I thought well I'll learn a bit about neurophysiology and so on and by the time I get to the end of the book know pretty well what it could be I didn't know it's the end of a book and I just sort of tapered off rather with something a little bit unbelievable and that was the end now you see I'd hoped that this book would stimulate young people to get interested in science and that sort of thing that mathematics oh

13:46that was fine and when the book was published I didn't get letters from young kids I got letters from old retired people who the ones who had the time to read my book okay well that was a little disappointing but okay I'm glad the old retired people liked my book but the other thing was I got a letter from Stuart Hameroff and this letter said more or less I think you don't appreciate that there's something else going on not neurons I mean the neurons I could see you couldn't isolate the quantum effects and you get the what's called environmental decoherence would happen and you get no way of keeping the quantum state to the level that you need in this picture so I realize didn't have it but Stuart Hameroff pointed out to me these little things called microtubules and he'd built up a theory that microtubules were absolutely fundamental to consciousness he had his own reasons for believing

14:43that I'd never heard of him at that time but then I checked up you know I get lots of letters from people who maybe don't make sense sometimes the letters and this one I thought well is this another one I realized these microtubules are there and they looked like just the kind of thing that could well be supporting the kind of level of quantum mechanics up to a level where you you could expect the the quantum state sort of collapse that's the terminology people using quantum microtubules they are inside brain neurons and this is a recent discovery from those only to be there actually in lots of cells you see people often complain oh they're in your liver too not just your brain so why doesn't your liver conscious and all that but this has to do with the organization of them and the nature of them the particular kind of microtubules how they're arranged which

15:35is different in the brain how does it vary in the brain compared to other cells I think one big difference other not Stuart emphasizes is so much there are two kinds of microtubules they're the ones called a lattice and the B lattice and the a lattice ones are the very symmetrical ones they're tubes and they look the same all the way around they've got a very beautiful arrangement of these proteins called tubulin and they make a very nice arrangement which is connected with Fibonacci numbers and things like that so they look bit like fur cones but they're all parallel they're not they don't taper off but the thing is in the brain I think most microtubules are probably what are called be lattice ones and they don't have so much symmetry they've got a sort of seemed on the one side and they're very important in transporting some substances around cells and so on and

16:29microchip is all sorts of things they don't just do what much Stewart and I think they may be doing in the brain so the idea is that in the brain they're organized differently and the probably the ones that are important of a lattice once which is a very symmetrical ones and for a long time people couldn't see the difference and because they looked very similar and they may well be the ones that's happened to be in pyramidal cells as a particular kind of cell so you know one of the things interested in me a lot is how it is that not all parts of the brain are the same in this respect you see you've got the cerebrum this is the part at the top and you know divided down the middle and that when you see brains that's what you normally see with the convolutions and in the init but right underneath and at the back there's a thing called the cerebellum which more looks more like a

17:20like a ball of wool or something and the cerebellum and it may still be argument about this but it seems to be that it's completely unconscious and it has comparable number of neurons far more connections between neurons in the cerebrum and it's what takes control and maybe when you're driving your car and you're thinking about something else and you you don't you're not thinking what you're doing because it's unconscious and the unconscious control you're not pianist who is very expert and moves the fingers around and plays it up with a little finger that pianist doesn't think well I got to move that muscle this way in this bone that way and so on and it's it's all controlled unconsciously and a lot of this unconscious control is done somewhere else in the cerebellum when you get really skilled so it seemed to me okay you've got different kinds of structures

18:12different and it could well be that these pyramidal cells which have a particular organization of microtubules are the ones that wear that consciousness is really coming coming to light mainly I don't know there's a lot which is which is not known about this controversial and all sorts of things but the cerebellum seems to be different and organized differently so it's not just how many neurons how many connections are there because there are more in the cerebellum so it's not that something else do they know this from observing the brain through fMRI or something like that during particular activities like I don't know I would imagine partly just examining it when from dead people and looking at brains and trying to estimate how many neurons there are in it right but how would they know what which part Parcells which is conscious I I don't know that they do

19:01know well I guess but the cut of the cerebellum there is a bit of an argument about that I thought whether it's completely unconscious or not but it seems that actions that that are carried out by the cerebellum you don't know aware what you're doing mmm but I mean you know if you're the tennis player who has to think very carefully about whether we know which way to tilt the ball no the control of what you're doing so overall control is probably done with the cerebrum but the cerebellum is controlling the detailed motions how the fingers move and all that kind of thing and then you make sure that if you the player thinks gonna hit the ball down down the line there and then the rest is done under the control of an unconscious procedure I mean I may be simplifying but I understand what you're saying so you're saying that there's we don't totally understand but we know

19:57that there's different parts of the brain that are responsible for different activities and some activities don't seem to be conscious yes yes I mean I think it's probably the case nah maybe I don't know I shouldn't make a statement my don't really know but certainly there are lots of different parts of the cerebrum which may be which may be not conscious to so I'm not saying that the whole thing is capable of being conscious since they seem to be differences in different parts but are you convinced that microtubules are responsible for consciousness or it's a primary theory I think they're the one of the best candidates oh you see I don't think it's only microchip I don't know I'm not sure what Stuart Hameroff sphere and this is he certainly thinks the microchip was exceedingly important in consciousness and I think he's right that's the feeling and again and he's

20:50done a lot of work on trying to find what anaesthetic gas is just an important one of the important ways you can tell things about consciousness and most of it you can't is just here saying whatever it is but one of the important ways you can tell something about consciousness is what turns it off in a reversible way in suus job is do you know he's an anesthesiologist he puts people to sleep well I think he would complain if I say putting it to sleep because under anesthetic is actually different for sleep but you make them unconscious in the reversible way you want to make sure you think you can wake them up again and it's obviously a very skills thing but I guess a lot of his colleagues might be skilled at doing it but don't they ask the questions about what they're actually doing from the point of view of the biology and the physics and so on so Stuart was really

21:44interested in that question it's partly I think the things like mitosis cell division and he was very struck by the way that the chromosomes or lyin' lyin' up and that this is this microtubules which and they're really a big part in in in the structure of cells and how they how they behave and so on but why they are consciousness well I guess it was an experience with with putting people under anesthetics and the fact that their gases which put you to sleep and there again I shouldn't say to sleep but right but you're on the anesthetic very unconnected chemically they different kinds of things be yet they still seem to have the same effect and to understand what it is that they affect is you know that's a lot of his interest is to do with that so just by putting someone unconscious and registering what parts of the brain are no longer active this is what they're using sort of

22:45reverse engineer by turning those parts on that's what enables consciousness is this well I think it's probably simplification but that's that's a good first first step yes consciousness becomes as a subject it's very it's it's very susceptible to woo right indeed it gets it's one of those weird ones where people want to start talking about souls and universal consciousness and they start it gets yeah it's a murky area yes and there's no clear borderline what Suzy Stewart runs these consciousness conferences and he's very broad-minded he has people all sorts of different views like the ones you mentioned and it's not necessarily his view but he likes to get a broad perspective on what's going on I'm a bit more narrow minded than he is on these matters yeah I am too I'm very skeptical because I just I understand the inclination that people have to lean towards the whoo

23:43then it's very fun yes it's for whatever reason people are inclined to lean towards Jefferson you saw that movie I don't know if you saw what the bleep do we know oh yes I did I love that kind of stuff that was a little worrying to me a little bit yes yes indeed now that did worry me well it's it's just you know was written the movie was made by a cult leader and you know it gets a little squirrely right you're absolutely right uh yeah as I was just thinking I'm sure you were a lot of people that I know they were like yourself we're worried yeah but it's this is something that everyone contemplates like what makes you conscious what is the soul is it a real thing what is what is your consciousness is it simply just your own biology trying to calculate your environment and looking out for its best interest in trying to procreate and move forward with the the the genes that it has or is

24:37it something almost mystical or far more complicated maybe even instead of the word mystical might be tainted man something far more complex than we're currently able to understand I think to some extent I would agree it is because it's certainly different I mean to have some internal perception of the external world and yeah think abstractly and all these things it's surely different from where baseball runs through the air and what what makes it spin and and different than every other conscious animal I'm not so sure about that so I think the difference isn't that big well I mean okay we you know we use language to a degree I mean some animals use language to some kind of degree hmm there's a huge difference in degree I'd agree with that but whether it's a difference in kind I'm not at all sure you know you watched these nature movies and I remember seeing one about

25:37elephants and this was about how the elephants were they were always they're always led by a female elephant and that's not relevant to the story but they were trying to go from A to B I don't know what it was and they're like there's a whole herd of them they'll be doing that but then at a certain point they did made a detour and they went off to a place where the leader of the elephant herd her sister had died and there the bones and the tusks I suppose were their bones anyway we're there and the elephant's picked them up handed them around and and seemed to caress them and move them around and then they went back and joined to the the roof that they were now what does that tell us there's something going on which is not just some machine behaving yes like a robot there's some some feelings there we can appreciate I'm another one I remember was one with

26:32these African hunting dogs and the dogs you see there's a road where some antelopes would tend to go and they're to go across the river and when they got to the point with the cross though it might slow down and and make their way to get across now these hunting dogs you could see them I think it was taken from the air and they would go along towards this place where the river was and then they would break into two so half of them would go one way towards thick and they were hide just where the river starts and the other half but go and chase the antelopes they've gone bark and make an awful noise chase them right there and then the other ones were pounce on them I mean there's something there which is you know that they've been working it down between themselves how to do is compute communication of some kind yes and I think there is what will you call understanding okay mmm at

27:24a more primitive level and then human understanding but nevertheless there is something there's no sort of clean dividing line in my view it's it's it's pretty continuous yeah and this exists in wolves as well so very very similar behavior and they do seem to have not just verbal but nonverbal communication they seem to have some understanding of what the task is uh-huh and what their roles are in the task and even though there's not as many variables maybe as human life there definitely seems to be a conscious awareness of first of all their their position in the hierarchy of the tribe yeah of the the background things but also their what their objective is is this is not a selfish objective it's a group objective and they operate as a group and they do move like those African dogs you were talking about yeah no it's fascinating like that yeah and there's a lot of indication that we're

28:21certainly chimps and humans and things and dolphins you we know about them but ice imagine it goes quite far down I should think how much have you studied octopi they're fascinating yeah yes no I haven't there's a new book about them which I haven't got the chance to read yet I want to read it I think they're they're highly intelligent yes yes yeah I've been really paying attention to them for a few years I'm a good friend my friend Remy Warren was doing a television show called apex predator we studied the way different animals hunted and he started studying the way octopus and cuttlefish and all these different yeah the different octopi and what the way they could adapt to their environment by changing their actual not just to look but the texture of their skin instantaneously and how this is not really understood how they not only how they do it but how they know what

29:17they're what's below them what they're copying yes that they somehow or another can figure out how to blend in almost perfectly with their environment it's amazing isn't it they also can open jars and they cannot climb out of tanks there was one guy had a he had a camera on his tank because he had two tanks yes and one of them had very expensive tropical fish and the other one had his octopus and he was trying to figure out what was happening to his expensive tropical fish so he put a camera on it and the octopus was climbing out of the tank walking across the ground climbing into the other tank killing one of the fish eating it and then going back into his cave yes yeah that's heavy well there's one I saw about I think I heard the description or I read it I think I read it about there were some experiments on testing the intelligence of octopuses oh and they had a little

30:09thing they had to pull a chain and then open a door and get food out and this octopus was thinking that I'm gonna fed up with this thing and so yank the chain it came right off and then it rose to the top and started squirting all the people in their white coats I know it was pretty good do you know there's something else going on than just there is something going on absolutely now when you if you weren't pressed for to figure this out and some sort of a a paper that you had to display in front of scientists if you were you were like you're trying to figure out like what do you think it is like what did what do you think consciousness is well you see how I I mean - it's going to fart I think you know I know whether or the answer isn't anything I just I just think that this issue of having some kind of quantum state which preserves itself up to a certain level and the

31:04microtubules at least suggested something where you could isolate them from the outside and the symmetry of these things is important and there are other structures I suspect it's not just microtubules I suspect there are these in classrooms these are molecules which inhabit these synapses and and the thing about these ones is that they're incredibly symmetrical they're like a soccer ball you know they're you have these Pentagon's and hexagons and at each vertex you've got a protein is called a Triskelion and they joined themselves along the edges of the pattern of the soccer ball okay but it's just the it's just a substance made of these proteins and what are they doing hanging around in the synapses I know but the symmetry has a key role as a thing called the yarn teller effect in quantum mechanics which tells you that when you have a highly symmetrical

32:06structure like that then there can be a big gap between the lowest energy level and the next one and there can be information in this lowest energy level which can be shielded from the higher energy levels so this is a sort of suggestion that some kind of quantum phenomenon is going on in a serious way and there's a lot to understand there I mean synapses themselves the kind of strange things you might think if you were going to build a brain why don't you just solder the wires together at the connections you see what are you doing having this thing with all the chemist chemicals transferring this information you know I don't know but it's something very needed for my the system and it's all tied up with these Clarins there and and decide to skeleton structures which microtubules are one of the main constituents so you see I don't know that there's a lot to learn I'm sure so

32:59it seems like there's a bunch of different factors there's the biological understanding of the brain itself yeah and then there's the understanding of the actual nature of cells and of reality itself this is being more illuminated by science with every new discovery and we're getting a better understanding deeper and deeper as to their very nature of matter and of these structures themselves I think it is getting deep into the end of the way the physical world operates and things that we don't understand about it just yet yes I mean the biology is one side of it you know coming as an outsider I get struck by certain things I mean quite familiar with the fact that the right side of the cerebrum controls the left hand and the left hand the right hand but then you look at this and it's not just that what about the soles of your feet right at the top what about your

33:52eyes the the signals right at the back hmm you think this is the most ridiculous construction you've gone to the worst possible place yes there must be a reason and the cerebellum is different go cerebellum it's the left side controls the left side and the right side the right side so there's something going on which involves these signals going having to cross each other or whatever it is I don't know well we'd like to think that there's a reason but then we look at other biological life-forms and they look kind of preposterous like a platypus for instance what is that is that an experiment is that a prototype that just ran wild well I guess you got to think of it in terms of natural selection so yeah I guess the circumstances there I don't know yeah in Australia wherever you find it must be specific we got I guess the a lot of that was because they

34:43were isolated from from the rest of the so you get sort of strange animals in Australia and in New Zealand where a lot of isolation from from the rest of the evolution so they did their own thing there yeah marsupials yes yeah just intriguing what this the the phrase quantum is another one that's fraught with whoo indeed right and some people like Deepak Chopra and the like they love to use that word because as soon as you use that word you can kind of get away with almost anything after it's just yes I have to say I have quantum mechanics is a strange thing and I saw the blame it for certain things I don't want to be unfair I'm not saying yes I blame it it gives some people of the impression okay the fact your theory doesn't make any sense that's nothing against it you've said crazy things quite a McCants is crazy so why don't you accept some other

35:41crazy theory of course quantum mechanics has the virtue that it does agree with an awful lot of experiments he gives you a huge insight sense of things that one didn't have before so just the fact that it's crazy isn't enough to to make to make it something you should study seriously well well it's very very difficult to understand even for people who study it yes indeed so for someone like myself I'm trying to pay attention to this without devoting my entire life to it yeah and it gets it becomes a big problem because there's two III in one of my books I tried to explain there are actually two mysteries in quantum mechanics and they get muddled one of them is the whole subject is pretty crazy yes but it's coherent and it makes sense and if you study it properly and you say okay but that makes sense and this includes things like non-local effects where you can have two things

36:39now even thousands of kilometers apart and you can see these quantum entanglement effects yes they still in some sense connected with each other even though they're that far apart which is pretty amazing that's baffling that's baffling but that's part of the comprehensive or particle yeah it's muddied up because there's the other part which has to do is this collapse of the wavefunction and standard quantum mechanics really doesn't make sense but people get them muddled in my view you think because this doesn't make sense and doesn't mean well it's all but crazy and so anything crazy is up for grabs but it seems to me that quantum mechanics the things which are crazy and they do hang together and the theory works and you understand that that's fine but the things which involve the collapse of the wavefunction that's not fine because we don't have the right

37:28theory yet that's why it doesn't make logical sense because it's not the right theory yet that's my view I mean I'm a minority in saying this most people who study the foundations of quantum mechanics say well we haven't got the right interpretation right yet we we have to think when it means and so on they don't think well hmm maybe it's not quite right maybe there's something when this effects get big enough something else comes in and we need a new insights a new theory so that's what I think now in something like superposition where something can be both still and in motion at the same time as soon as you say that yeah to the common person like myself my brain glazes over and my eyebrows raise up and I go okay what is and then you're talking about entanglement things hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart that are somehow or another interacting with each other in a way

38:21that we don't totally understand or we don't have a theory that absolutely explains in a concrete way well it does as long as you don't get to the measurement measurement the entanglement part is pretty well understood but the measurement the measurement part is not me see the the puzzles about the entanglement is when you come to the measurement you make a measurement over here and the measurement over there and they can be well had now fast meters apart right the record was only a hundred and forty three or something a little while ago Wow but it's it's a long time a long distance but there's finally any movement of material so the things that see in the scheme I have which involves the collapse of the wavefunction involves a certain amount of displacement of mass now if it's just photons that's light and modern these experiments tend to be just right then

39:11there's no mass displacement in the state and so sure what quantum mechanics says is fine by me okay it is hard to get your mind around and I certainly agree that but it's logical what's not logical comes apart but when you worry about the measurement issue in the collapse of the wavefunction and poor old Schrodinger was very upset by this quite right yes now when you discuss consciousness and the mystery of consciousness and then you take into account some of these characteristics that are being displayed in the quantum world do you think that perhaps some of them are interchangeable or similar to consciousness itself that there is some sort of a connection that human beings share and some some strange unique and miss or not not understood way yet I think one has to be careful about these things and sometimes do well even Niels Bohr who's one of the

40:11founders of these ideas and he tried to make a philosophy out of quantum mechanics and you know what you call it so complementarity and so I think that's going a bit far I don't really see because there's no evidence for it I don't think so I think it's a bit misleading that one you can see analogies between things but I don't see for myself but that should be taken much further than that but I you know maybe there's more there but you're open to the possibility should new information be yeah yeah I mean if it comes to things like you know when people talk about the entanglements and things quantum states can spread to long distances doesn't mean that human beings Minds gonna stretch to long distances and so on so these people will raise questions like that I don't think so myself I think that's that's pretty far-fetched but you you know you might worry well it could it be that there's

41:12some quantum state which is shared between different individuals it's hard to see that could be unless they were well I mean if they're identical twins I suppose they were once one cell at one time but you'd have to preserve that information all the way through and I just don't see how that could have so I'm not a fan of trying to use quantum ideas sort of directly in say human behavior or something I think the you know those analogies are pretty far-fetched partly because the sort of mathematics you use in quantum mechanics is very specific to quantum mechanics and doesn't really apply to macroscopic behavior as far as I can see is this something that is that your ax asked about most often you mean in my research all together or just common people like myself it's only one of them but you see it's slightly misleading when you're thinking about what my interests are

42:13because I had this as I say the I explained more or less the history of my ideas they only did write a book or at least another one after that too in fact I guess I've written three books about that other one was taken down lectures so on but it's not what I do mainly right main research is is his own cosmology well thinking there's this area called twister theory but necessarily going to that but it's meant to be foundational quantum around a tional physics not necessary but general relativity I mean I guess the work I did originally was people paid attention to is in general relativity in black holes what a black hole is why we have the idea that they're there at all that sort of thing I worked on that at one point cosmology as a whole is one of the most terrifying concepts to me because I just when I start thinking about the size and scale of everything I get to a certain

43:13point and my brain just shuts off there's not enough juice well it's pretty huge when this has to think on a pretty huge scale but it's like so many things you it looks sort of mind-boggling at first and then when you get used to the idea you can sort of play around with the ideas and maybe forget how mine bothering it should be I was watching a documentary on supermassive black holes and they were discussing how the size of this is I don't know if this is still a current theory this documentary was a few years old but they were saying that the there's a supermassive black hole inside of every galaxy that's 1/2 of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy and that they there's that one of the theories was that inside the supermassive black holes could be an entirely different universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies each with their own black holes and then it's

44:04infinite well you see I have a fairly an idea which I think the mainstream does still regard there's a bit crazy but not like that I don't think you're going to have much fun inside a black hole nobody's in there not much well you could have a really big black hole and there's a lot of time in there a really big one if you if you were in this spaceship you could you could have a few parties before you yes but I'm not sure I recommend it no yeah I mean black holes are remarkable enough and but I mean the thing I did which was in well 1964 in the published in 65 wished to show that black holes but I'm using a terminology it wasn't around at that time that the black holes clattered it was cut gravitational collapse you see the this the history went back to originally I guess Chandra Sekhar Indian scientists when he was not quite 20 I think I can't remember in 19 or 20 and

45:06he was going to England to study physics astronomy and so on and he worked on this problem about what holes white dwarfs apart these are these very massive stars the companion of Sirius Sirius is a white dwarf and he was doing calculations to find out whether they but the interior is a very particular structure structure of matter and he came to the conclusions if they had a bigger mass than a certain amount which is about bit less than one and a half times the sun's mass they wouldn't be able to hold themselves apart and so they would collapse and he didn't speculate on what didn't happen he just one is list there was some very modest comment he made his one we left speculating on possibilities or something but then that was in the 1930s I guess around about 1930 and much later just before the war sigma-1 1913 that way I see a bit later I guess 1939 there

46:13was a paper by Oppenheimer of atomic bomb fame and Schneider which is a student of his department Snyder and they produced a model which was a solution of the Einstein equations which describes a cloud of dust which collapses and becomes what we now call a black hole so this was the first clear picture of collapse to a black hole now in their picture they made two huge assumptions well one of them is thus the material that means it didn't have any pressure and so you could imagine and when it gets close to itself it might push away if it had pressure and isn't in any way but this was just dust that was one thing but more important that the model was exactly symmetrical so it was just very clear symmetrical all a matter falling in the dust particles would be focused right into the central point and so it's not so hard to believe that you get a singularity where the

47:13density goes infinite the curvatures go infinite and your equations go crazy so at that point when the dust reaches the middle point okay it's not so surprising because it's a very contrived situation so I think a lot of people thought well perhaps we shouldn't take it seriously I think they weren't sure but then there was a paper by two Russians Cooke kaletnik Lifshitz and Kalashnikov and they seemed to have proved that you didn't get singularities in the general case that somehow it would swirl around and swish out again you see so that was the possibility and then there was this discovery I think in 1962 when Martin Schmidt Dutch astronomer okay Dutch American I think he where he was living there at the time I don't remember but he observed what became what we call the the first quasar so this was an object which was radiating an awful amount of energy far

48:11more than an entire galaxy but it seemed to be a very small thing it couldn't be much bigger than the size of the solar system if even that big because it variations and brightness indicated that the speed of light could size of it had to be comparable with the speed at which the variations in in you know in brightness came about so it seemed to be an object that was enormous ly energetic producing more energy than the whole galaxy and varying with such a degree that it must be fairly small and this raised the question of whether it was small enough to be what we now call a black hole in other words it there's a thing called the Schwarzschild radius which what was the man who first discovered the solutions of Einstein's equations which described this spherical body but he didn't extrapolate inwards to what's called this horizon we call it a rice and now it used to be called the

49:11Schwarzschild singularity and people began to realize that it wasn't really a singularity it's more something you could imagine falling through I guess it was the metro who first made clear that clear but not many people paid attention but that was the idea of a black hole and it looked then is that these quasar ass could be having some black hole in the middle of them and I remember John Wheeler who was at Princeton then very distinguished scientists and he got way worried about these things and he talked to me and he were right about it and do we believe is there a singularity in the middle do we believe Lifshitz Nick latnok Offutt they sort of swirl round abouts at what are we supposed to think so I started thinking about this problem and since at that time well you see either people when you want to solve the Einstein equations either you make a lot

50:03of assumptions and it's a symmetrical light like thee Oppenheimer schneider model you assume it's got very special properties and then you can maybe solve the equations but only very very special cases and the computers weren't powerful enough to tell you very much about what happened so I started thinking about this problem and realizing that I attempt to think about it in a different way and so I used ideas which both ideas from topology and things like that to show that there had to be a singularity in the middle provided that the collapse had reached a certain point of no return I guess to get some idea of it I don't know it's not too misleading there's a mathematical theorem cover the hairy dog theorem hairy dog theorem yes I mean ssf ocular terminology but you think of a something which is topologically a sphere that means you see you imagine a

50:59dog shape but you could sort of move it around with a piece of plasticine until it looked like a sphere it doesn't have holes in it okay forget about this digestive system you see you're thinking about the surface outside and then you're out the problem is you try to comb the hair on the dog all the way around and the theorem says there's got to be somewhere where the hair doesn't lie flat and you try it on the sphere there's got to be a point where where the hair makes a kind of singular point so it's a bit like that you have no idea where the singularity is but you know from general topological reasons that there's got to be one somewhere and that was the sort of argument that I produced and I guess a lot of people had a little bit of trouble because they'd never seen this kind of argument and a lot of people picked up on it and particular Stephen Hawking and it became for a

51:52while a lot of many people working on it I guess it's not so popular now because they probably would run out of theorems the idea of a singularity like is when you see something like a quasar or the the the the center of a galaxy nam and we were talking about a black hole when you say a singularity what exactly are you do you mean by that with a normal expectation is that you have a place like in the middle of the open animus neither dustcloud that a point there where the density becomes infinite and so the curvature of space-time infinite so you have a place for the equations and run away and they go to infinity and you say well something's gone wrong but maybe initially it was in these very symmetrical cases but but you could show by these indirect arguments that somewhere something's got to go wrong you can't continue the equations of Einstein and they get stuck right in

52:58that place where they go infinite Dora what in detail happens the theorems don't tell you they just say that something goes wrong and that's what we call a singularity and if a black hole is larger or smaller the singularity remains constant it remains in in there it remains in there but it's not measurable in terms of its actual size so whether you could measure its size very well because its size that's a that's an intriguing question you might say the size has gone to zero but it could be quite complicated irregular not like the original opera no Messiah at one we saw something even then the point is the wrong point of view but let's not go into that no there is something about the structure of these things you can say they're not all the same no then the singularities and all the same but the black holes are not all the same they're not all the same but they this one of

53:49the strange things about black holes is that if you let them settle down they're not all the same to begin with but they're not many different things they can settle into they can have rotation they can have a certain mass and the mass translates into the size of a diameter of the hole and you've also got rotation so they can rotate and these are hard shell found the non rotating ones and it was Roy Kerr an Australian who first produced the solution for a rotating black hole rotating yes a rotating one but then you see the remarkable thing is that's what they settled down to so they're good theorems which tell you that the general black hole to be very complicated fairly rapidly will settle down and become one of these curse Aleutians the rotating black hole I remember when I first saw that documentary I saw the the one they were discussing the the shape of these

54:44galaxies and that the center of it had this supermassive black hole that was slowly devouring the galaxy yeah I mean it's it is an unbelievably beautiful yet simultaneously terrifying idea is that there's this yes infinite power in the center of infinite mass that's absorbing slowly but surely everything around it yes but it's not infinite mass the mass is quite well-defined and it's not infinite but yeah I was a good question I mean if you wait forever how much of the mass actually gets swallowed by the mine hole you see I think the pictures to think not just a one galaxy but a cluster mmm you see our galaxy has this 4 million solar mass black hole and we are on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy and I don't know how long but many but some time in the future yes the black holes will probably spiral into each other and there'll be one big one

55:41so it's definable mass but in infinite density and that this point which were they were speculating that this could possibly in the center of the supermassive black holes yeah if you could go through that there would be another universe well yes that's all nice speculation it's a nice romantic thought is it more whoo I'm afraid so so good though yes I know well it's a shame for science fiction yeah makes a nice little it's interesting that we try to make things more complicated than they are because they're so complicated as it is like dark matter for instance it boggles the mind that we don't really totally understand what 90 plus percent well that's a good question yeah what is that stuff well you want me to tell you my theory yes please well you see it's part of a story which I don't know about 15 years ago I must have years a passing by I can't remember how long ago huh so

56:38I had this idea you see the universe as a whole is expanding now early in the this century don't ask me dates again some people by observing super not supernovae saw exploding stars very very far away they found out that the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion and some people found this very mysterious on the other hand it's in all the cosmology books because there is that expectation you see in 1915 I sign produced his general theory in 1917 he introduced what's called the cosmological constant so you think of a it was called lambda you think of a v-shape turned upside down which is remember and he introduced this term for the wrong reason because at that time people weren't there was some indication in the universe was expanding but not very clear and Einstein I guess maybe didn't know or didn't believe it and this the couple's observations hadn't yet come to make a

57:53convincing case of the expansion so I thought well maybe the universe is static it's kind of philosophically nice to think that it's sitting there all the time and he couldn't make it do that so he had to introduce this term called the cosmological constant and he did that and then not while very much longer after this Hubble showed that the universe does seem to be expanding and Einstein regarded this lambda term as his biggest blunder which is an irony because it turns out that this term is probably the explanation for the expansion of the universe we now see so it's what people call dark energy I don't like the term very much because it's neither dark nor proper energy in any clear sense but still don't listen twerp out that right it would so it's it's an odd term yes I think so it's a little confusing because it's dark matter as well which is quite

58:52different you know she must yeah I'm confused with the dark energy as it's called or the cosmological constant which as far as we can tell it is completely consistent with the observations it's a positive number very small but it seems to be producing this expansion and I'm quite happy with that viewpoint because it leads to a picture which I've been trying to plug for a while now maybe up to 15 years I can't remember the idea yes it's hard to explain but let me try it came about because I was worrying about the remote future and I was thinking okay when these black holes are on this wall I love all the stars and they're just sitting around and what's the most next exciting thing happening well the Hawking of apparation they're going to radiate away Stephen Hawking showed that black holes had this temperature extremely cold how many of these enormous ones are

59:53absurdly cold much colder than anything made on the earth and but when the universe expands and expands and expands it gets colder than the black holes and so those black holes get become the hottest hottest things around and so they radiate away very very slowly this Hawking radiation and that carries energy and so they shrink and shrink and they shrink and finally they disappear with a pop my set pop is probably a pretty big explosion but that not that big from a cosmological that's the physical scale so they disappear well it may be you've been pretty boring when you're sitting around waiting for the black hole to go pop but afterwards that's really boring so this was a picture I thought of being rather depressed by thinking that's that's our that fate you see the fate of all the interesting things happening ultimate fate is this unbelievably boring final

60:49state okay this is an emotional argument but give me a bit of leeway okay so I began to think well it's not going to be us who are going to be bored because we're not gonna be around that the main things that look me around will be photons and it's pretty hard to borrow Photon for two very good reasons one is it probably doesn't have conscious experiences now that's sure so but the other is more of a science point that that they don't measure time because a photon has no mass it travels at the speed of light but the way relativity works it means that clocks stopped if you like so if it had experiences it but the moment of its creation would be one moment and the next moment would be infinity and so they just zip out to infinity without noticing a thing now you see I'd been doing work on this kind of thing thinking more about gravitational radiation and how you measure its energy

61:45and things like that and it was a very useful picture to squash down infinity a useful thing to think about here if you've seen these pictures by the Dutch artist MC Escher mmm and there are those which are called circle limits and there's a very famous one with angels and devils interlocking and they get all crowded up onto the edge now what you've got to think about is that this is a kind of geometry called hyperbolic geometry and the angels and devils live in that geometry and the ones right close to the edge think they're the same size and same shape as the ones in the middle oh yeah and so the idea is that if you look at it from the angels and devils point of view that's infinity that boundary but from our point of view we can look at it and we have what's called a conformal map that picture is a conformal map what that means is that little shapes are quite consistently

62:44drawn but there can be big or small and you don't care about whether there be or this more as small shapes are accurate or angles if you like a correctly drawn so it's what's called a conformal map and that conformal map describes infinity now you can do the same thing to the universe but I said do it I mean you can imagine hitting them with this remote future you can squash it down just like in the Escher picture to a finite boundary and as far as the things with no mass they don't have a way of measuring how big or small it is the Maxwell equations don't know the scales they don't care it's that work just as well for small as for big and you can stretch it in some place and squash it somewhere else as long as the stretching and squashing is isotropic so just as much one way as the other way which means more or less that you keep what I call the light cone

63:36there let's not go into details here but it means that that if you have things without mass the most particularly the photons then that boundary is just like anywhere else and the photons go zipping up to it and so you might think they gotta have somewhere to go okay well that's a you don't have to think that but that was the point of view I had the photons need to need somewhere to enter in a way but then where does it go but then there's the other picture which is the opposite then there's the Big Bang now you can do a similar sort of trick there which is stretching it out and making it into a boundary and that can be down to I played around with these ideas for a long time and the standard cosmology models you can do it with but the more complicated cosmology models you might have one which is very complicated Big Bang the general ones don't look like that at all so you need

64:32a condition which tells you that the Big Bang was a very special kind that it was it's all tied up with this thing called the second law of thermodynamics and it all ties together with physics in a way which perhaps we don't have time to talk about but it seemed to me a really good idea to have the condition on the Big Bang that you could continue it in the same way I should say the idea of doing this was a former student of mine Paul Todd who was called a good man and he used this as continual conformal continuation as a nice way of saying what the condition is on the Big Bang to give you what you want but that's a huge condition but it nevertheless it's what starts our universe off in in a very special state which is what we live off in a way it's the second law of thermodynamics needs that to get going anyway I don't know if you want to worry about that but anyway the point was that

65:29it looks as though it's a good condition on the Big Bang but it also should be conformally I like a boundary which if you had no mass you wouldn't notice it okay you've got particles with mass running around near the Big Bang but as you get closer and closer and closer the energy goes up the temperature goes zooming zooming up the slipping around such a speed that the energy of their motion is much bigger than the equals mc-squared mass Einsteins mass the energy in in the mass is a certain amount but when they get so hot you can forget about the mass so they like photons behave like particles without mass and so they're just interested in the conformal geometry so the crazy idea I had not just only stretch out the Big Bang nice washed on the Infinity but maybe our Big Bang was a squash down infinity of a previous Eon so I'm saying ariane began with a big bang ended up with this

66:39exponential expansion there was another one before us there will be another one after us there was another one before that and so on so it's an infinite cycle of Big Bang that's the picture and constant expansion to the point where there's no more energy and then somehow or another a Big Bang comes out of that yes that's right well that's the tricky part that people have trouble with it's universally accepted that the Big Bang was an event there's no pretty well universally theories that are attractive I would say nothing terribly popular there are certain ideas which say you can continue into the before the Big Bang Paul Steinhardt and what do they think that was it's it's such things in common with my model but it's not quite the same and you see it still you see there wasn't it right not long after Einstein produces theory and this Alexander Friedmann who was a

67:33Russian mathematical physicist he produced the first cousin cosmology models and one of these was a one which has sort of bounces it big bang it expands out and then it contracts again during these bounces in conduct so that was one of his models the only trouble is if you put irregularities into these models you get black holes and these black holes can Palmer Crooker I mean incredible mess at the end and that doesn't join onto a nice smooth Big Bang the next one so you have trouble with those months but still people take these things seriously and as I say Steinhardt and toric have a model which is like that so these are things were nice to think about my own view is that they don't take into account the the black hole problem which is that my 1 gets rid of that because the black holes all evaporate away by Hawking evaporation hmm and so it forms a model I used to give talks about this

68:26feeling quite happy nobody would ever prove it wrong so I can go on talking away but I wasn't quite happy with that I thought maybe you could see signals coming through so I had one idea about that but more recently and this is only just this year I have two polish colleagues that's Christoph Meisner and Pavan Yourofsky and there is a Korean who works in New York called Daniel Ann and we the four of us have a paper which I think today or tomorrow will be the new improved version of this paper should be on the archive and this the title of the paper is are we seeing Hawking points in the CMB sky now what's a Hawking point you see I talked about the black holes sitting the previous Eon to our us assuming it's more or less like ours there will be black holes in clusters of galaxies huge enormous ones swallowing up pretty pretty well the whole cluster and what happens to the energy in those

69:26black holes well it goes out in Hawking radiation it takes an age ages and ages and ages maybe 10 to 100 year Google years or something ages and ages but all that energy in the picture comes out basically in one point think of that Asha picture and right at the very edge you see there are novel lot of angels and devils squashed together there so that the entire radiation from that single black hole will be squashed into that little point now we're on the other side what do we see well there will be a big release of energy at that point and that's what we call the Hawking point and it spreads out you see what we see in the Cosmic Microwave Background this is radiation coming from all directions and this radiation doesn't come from the Big Bang exactly it comes from 380,000 years after the Big Bang so there's a sort of last scattering surface where the photons which are trying to get out

70:28finally finally can escape and we see them now that spread out from the Hawking point to what you see in the in a cosmic microwave background in the last scattering surface is something of the diameter of about eight times the diameter of the moon no bigger no smaller now you wouldn't see the whole thing because our past cone where we what we see cut across it we don't see the whole thing but we see probably most of it so you could imagine something from about four to eight times the moon's diameter which is a small region which is highly energetic more energetic in the middle and tapers off as you go to the edge and we seem to see these things the analysis that but the polls they have the techniques and the actual analyzing the data this is the Planck satellite data whose done by Daniel an and then we look at the data and we seem to see an effect which see what you do is you we've got

71:38only one universe that's what to complain about so how do you know if something's real or not where you make zillions of fake universes and you compare this with them there's a lot of technique about how you do this but Daniel first did a thousand of these fakes and they were sort of two sizes of these you look at these rings to see whether the temperature goes out from the outside to the middle and there were two sizes both within this size that I'd say about four degrees across the sky and there was no evidence of them at all in the simulation so this is a real effect okay then people were skeptical of this for one reason or another so Daniel did another well 10,000 altogether and you occasionally there one or two which do what two or three to be precise where you see this effect in simulations but if you work out the probability that this is a real effect

72:34you come up with a confidence level of 99.98% that this is a real effect so we're waiting to see what people say about this what are you thoughts on multiverses well you see this is different because this is what sequential yeah so I don't call it a multiverse they each influence the next one and so they're not independent worlds right but in the possibility of independent yeah well you see there are two reasons for believing multiverses one of them is the quantum reason that maybe will you have the Schrodinger's dead cat in the live cat they're in different worlds and they separate universes I don't believe that argument I don't think that's the right way to look at quantum mechanics but many people do and that suggests that you might have these multiple universes and some what's unattractive about that to you it doesn't explain what we see so you want a theory which explains the

73:31world we see mm-hmm and the world we see you get collapse the the state does and to explain that well it's only because we've drifted off into some world and another version of ourselves is drifting to another one and some see one and the other city over and they're all in superposition it doesn't explain why you see one world in this kind of coherence I mean lots of people try and there are many attempts at this sort of thing it's quite a widely held view and if you believe quantum mechanics that the collapse is not real and it doesn't happen and all the alternatives the dead cats and a live cat coexists in different worlds that's the interpretation that's a view I don't think that I want I want an explanation for the world we live in and you don't see cast different worlds with cats and well it's a long story right I mean it's clearly it's a view

74:28you can home to and if you don't want to monkey with quantum mechanics it's where you let so that's that's right that's the alternative either you don't make a single trying to change quantum mechanics at all and then you are led to this multi-world many many world picture yeah I think it even doesn't make that much sense so you gotta be careful about it and that whether they are really like different distinct worlds I don't think it really my view is it doesn't really work but let me not try and attack that I think I have a different view which is that the theory is not quite quite right right and that there is something which makes the the collapse into a physical process and there's only one world now the other many worlds view which is comes from a different reason and that is that there you see there seem to be various accidents in well maybe one of

75:27them being that the neutron is just slightly more massive than the proton that's one there are lots of other accidents we see that if they were a little different then life as we know it couldn't happen hmm and so how do you explain this well some people say well all these universes with different values of these constants or coexist it's just we only see the one that we're in because the numbers come out right for us so that's what's causing the throw poq argument mm-hmm okay I can see the argument I don't like it much it's sort of I think we need a better explanation for why the numbers of what we see and so on but that's that that one makes more sense to me than the other one so so I think one can maybe has to take that seriously but it's certainly not the view I'm presenting here with this picture it's for someone like me it's so interesting to know that

76:21there's still a considerable amount of speculation yes oh yeah well it's it's there's a lot of speculation but a lot of it is pretty off the wall and a lot of people think mine are off the wall I see okay I'm no man and so it's okay you know decent things in the past but you shouldn't trust this abuse now you see so I guess that's what people think I don't know but you see if it's just me I could understand that right but I've got these pose and Armenian colleague who's done things on this too and it can't be they were all all off the rails I think there's something out there and now with the Hawking points there's something people can really go out and look for and if they don't see you and there's something funny going on somewhere if they do see them there's something else going funny on which which they'll have to think of another explanation unless it's my

77:16explanation they'll have to think of a different view from the current inflation view which is in real trouble with these observations as far as I can see do you anticipate in any foreseeable time the future a better understanding of dark matter and dark energy or perhaps a better definition of what those things are yeah we see I think my own current view is that dark energy as it's called is the cosmological constant now that's not an explanation if you like because why is it that good why is it the value it has why is it there at all and there are certainly questions about that which I agree with dark matter I didn't go into this but in this scheme of mine it has to be there when I say it I mean that if you want the equations to make sense which cross over from our remote future to the Big Bang of the next Eon you have to have a creation of a dominant new

78:14material which is scalar and as I said it doesn't spin it's just ordinary particles and but they only interact gravitationally and that's what we see but the theory that I'm putting forward would make these things very massive they're about what's called the Planck mass I don't know exactly because there's some freedom in this something like the prank Planck mass which people describe as the mass of a fleas I don't quite know why they make it well but that's about 10 to the minus 5 grams so you're looking at a one hundred thousandth of a gram so it's sort of a an appreciable size it's not you know it's not like basic particles and physics measurable it's the sort of measurable thing you could imagine you you could get hit get hold on in some way but that's huge for a fundamental particle hmm so it's a it's a wild idea from that point of view but also they should decay and they should

79:15decay into gravitational signals which maybe could be seen by LIGO maybe have been seen by Lego and thrown in the rubbish bin because there'd be different types of signals from what people would expect I wouldn't like to put my money anywhere there but I'm liking hoping that these dark matter particles are the ones that come from the theory that I'm putting forward so that would be another consequence of this particular point of view and they've observed correctly from wrong entire galaxies that they believe that consist of dark matter there is let me see if I remember what it is there are some galaxies the other way around which don't seem to have any dark matter buzzing there are other galaxies which have huge amounts that's probably what you're referring to whether they were only dark matter you'd have trouble seeing them right because dark matter

80:10after all it was just a measured thing yes it may be I don't know that one it's quite possible yeah I don't see why not they just have to have some reason why they clump together in this way you see it's quite possible if galaxies collide then when you see the stars tend to go through so they would accompany with they'd accompany the dark matter the the dust and the galaxies tends to get stars and stay where it is so if two collide then you'd have a big pile of dust in the middle but I think the dark matter tends to carry on through with the stars I don't know there may be some process which could produce just islands of dark matter I don't when you discuss the cosmos maybe the single most intriguing possibility to us as human beings is what other intelligent life if any is out there and how interesting is that to you because you spend so much time studying the

81:10fundamental particles of the universe itself how interested are you and the possibility of other intelligent life forms or have you just like put that out into the it's just so ridiculously unlikely or so far away from us that we're probably never going to make contact well you see it's not so there's a SETI program looking at to see where they can see signals from distant civilizations the problem there from my perspective is that although they might be out there they've got to have had a real head start on us before you would see them horizon they might have done so but then I don't know you see actually why he goes to John who's my Armenian colleague and who looked also for these ring shaped things and looked at them in a different way from the Polish people but we seem to have seen something there but we wrote a paper in which we speculated on beings

82:10from the previous eon communicating with us and the advantage there is that you're looking at the really advanced civilizations very as you see billions of years ago that they their universe disappeared and then had to come back to a big bang stay the signals could come through and somehow or another those signals remain it's conceivable I agree it's pretty far-fetched but you know so-yeon how many billions of years are you talking about like that the Big Bang was 14 billion yes but you see that's way way at the beginning in a sense or it's 3/4 of the way through in another sense it depends how you draw the pictures right in a sense of interestingness or in the conformal picture we are already three quarters of the way through so 14 billion to now so we have counted you see the trouble is it's this ochite she the year count it's as much as you like it depends on on on something else

83:16the mass has to fade out and how you measure time is it becomes problematic and it's either infinity you see which isn't much use or you might have a different definitions of time which depend on what particle you're using it's your clocks and things like that so are you essentially saying that it's entirely possible that we are the farthest in terms of our technological achievement and our understanding of the universe itself it's possible that we're at the front of the line though there might be some other intelligent life forms in the universe but they might be behind us well there would have been I'm not saying they got through you say well maybe they have techniques for getting through but that's that's a bit harder to imagine but maybe information from them to get through it may attack you mean from the previous yes yes oh they might have got through like somehow

84:06another survived yes but it would have to be in the form of photons or something yeah no you could it's not I'm talking about ridiculous right speculation so encoding information yes in the photons yes yes Wow it's conceivable sure now I don't want to say that I see it happening or anything but it's not out of the question that they could develop some technology which would get information which might be them in some sense across in the form of photons but you're not optimistic about current intelligent life somewhere in the universe not too optimistic just because well maybe it took us a long time to get going because the dinosaurs were there for a while and somebody might have got in there earlier and they're different planets and they could have got there quite ahead of us it's conceivable I'm not gonna rule it out I just not terribly optimistic about

85:01it no I think it's worth doing it's worth looking yes but it's not something that you're really not serious but I'm expecting it's not so much I'd be curious certainly then I'm not expecting it I guess is it just because of the overall lack of real evidence and it's just not an attractive thank you to pursue it's quite attractive it's shirts right you know I've just been doing other things and I don't know there's enough to do in the world I haven't really come to terms that vary hugely so I know there's this activity and I'd be interested to see if any kind of you know if this there was this thing that came past that some people speculated it was a scent they're buying different intelligence which came quite close in our solar system oh that was that strange-looking yes that's right yeah I mean I don't see any real reason to believe it's a alien was

85:58it because of the way it was traveling that was the yeah the idea was something about it serious people did suggest it might be something sent by an alien civilization it's worth you know may connect with it in some way but I don't know I guess it's too far away now well it's another thing that's so uniquely fascinating for us the concept of saying of another of another life-form out there oh sure yes no you see there lots of things I'm interested in the ones I talked to you about and perhaps though some of the main ones although the consciousness one is I'm glad that there are people doing it and you see this is one of the things there's this institute that's that's being created using my name and James Tague has involved for this started it and I'm quite a nice MIT and worried about having my name attached to this human I didn't know much about it but it

86:57seems to me a really important thing where you can which the deliberate purpose of it is to develop ideas which are makes sense but are not mainstream hmm and one of these was the consciousness thing so you know Stuart Hameroff is doing it but it's not a activity that's being taken part of people researching it in in detail in other parts of the world so to have a place which supports that kind of thing is great and I think that's very good but when I heard about it first I thought well most of my interests you're on the physics side and not so much in biology which I'm pretty ignorant about and there are lots of ideas on that side not just the cosmology but ideas and building experiments which might detect the collapse of the wavefunction and one idea is to look at bose-einstein condensates see I have a colleague that's Yvette Fuentes who I knew about

88:02and who had these ideas of how to use bose-einstein condensates to detect gravitational waves and that's also very you know an under mainstream way of looking at it but a very clever idea and the bose-einstein condensates because that's so quantum mechanical and they are so cold they're almost virtually absolute zero and they can keep external disturbances from causing problems and you can manipulate them in ways to make them in two places at once people have done this kind of thing and so it might well be a good way of testing me when the Schrodinger cat thing with whether state reduction or the collapse of wave function is a phenomenon that which is the kind which I hope might be like gravitational effect and in that case if it is then that would be relevant to the consciousness problem so all these things tied together in various ways and so the hope was that these things which

89:04are you know could be supported and I thought it was important because there's always the danger of such an institute being regarded as flaky but yeah he was doing weird things who cares so the important point from my perspective is that they should be things which can be and either now immediately tested experimentally or with a few years so the things which are really you can get your hold on you can get and test them and see whether they're right or not so this would be a protection against thinking well these these are great crazy ideas that are being pursued they have to be ideas which are capable of tests and have a reasonable chance of of showing evidence in favor in their favor or guests you know whichever would be interesting and important to know so from the outside looking in to me it's so fascinating to watch intellectuals as you said like yourself that are bouncing

90:03these ideas around that are possible but are not mainstream and it seems to me that it's a precarious sort of tightrope walk like you don't want to say anything ridiculous that's not true it's what you would love to say something that seems to be ridiculous but turns out to be in fact accurate and provable yes so that was this dance I absolutely agree yes that's absolutely right and of course you've got to play with ideas which are on the sort of edge of what we know otherwise you're stuck with what we know and these things will simply get channeled on the old roots and and you need to be able to break break free of those from time to time but not in a way which is too crazy to be examined to see whether there is truth in these ideas or not because of the cinco nation that people have to go towards wu or towards crazy ideas it is important for the skepticism right it is important for the

90:55scrutiny yes oh absolutely so Israel is real danger in that ledge I agree well you see there's a strange kind of problem you see because with these observations I'm not about there Hawking points which are just described but the earlier ones about black hole collisions and my Armenian colleague and I had written a couple of papers on this and we hadn't got any response at all and the Polish people and they'd written papers two of them accepted by respectable journals and Christophe asked me know what kind of response you got I say zero so I seem what about you how about what response your zero so this is kind of spooky you see all right we've got these things out there in the literature refereed excepted publications and instead of people you know saying this is a load of nonsense look it doesn't make any sense for this reason and this disagrees with this

91:51observation and so and that was fine if I see that I might be unhappy with it but it you've got somebody to work on you say oh I see what's wrong something needs money that doesn't explain properly that's what's needed or yes no you you're right I put it abandon this idea all these things come from criticisms and to have absolutely no tension whatsoever paid to these papers something I find spooky why do you think there's no attention paid I don't know I don't really know I mean one of the things is there's so much information and that people don't have time they've got run projects and they don't want to pay attention and they think it looks crazy because it's too much outside the picture of the world that they have and I think a lot of its that and they maybe say well look I've been thinking I'm you know guy now and I maybe I did good things in the past but

92:52maybe I've gone a bit off the rails but I think that you know I've got colleagues it's not just me right and these respected people who work on these things too so I don't think that can be a complete explanation maybe it's part of it but the sheer volume of papers that are published it's got to be impossible to keep up with although I think that's a big part of the trouble because there are other ideas which which to me look crazy and other people don't look any it as crazy as my ideas you see so maybe this why a lot of them have more attention page than the ones we actually I'm curious to know whether the Hawking points will take off or not well I'm so happy there's people like you doing this kind of work and then someone condensing it down to an understandable point that someone like me can absorb and just try to get a better picture of this insane reality

93:42that we're living in yeah but it's pretty weird you're right and it seems like the more I talk to people like yourself and the more you study this it doesn't get less weird it gets more weird yes I think that's right well I don't know with more information it seems to be more fantastic there's certainly a lot of very weird things but the point about them is that they gotta make sense yes mathematical sense they've gotta agree with observational facts and that rules out a lot of the really weird ones it does but even the ones that are observable and do adhere to the facts they're so fantastic it's so the reality this is one of the things that's most frustrating about people's inclination to lean towards the whoo and I've been guilty of it myself and so attractive yeah but what's frustrating about it is that provable reality is so titanically bizarre that's true no I

94:43agree that it's almost like why bother with the whoo well reality is you make a very good point it move in and of itself you're absolutely right no it's very very strange in quantum mechanics in so many ways is but you see you got a I think there's a little bit of a danger of separating the things which are well first of all it could be just wrong secondly there are things which do require quantum mechanics to be changed in some way and there be other ones which are within quantum mechanics are just weird and that's absolutely true there are these things which which I believe have to be true as much as the dyed-in-the-wool quantum mechanics people who follow the party lines and so on yeah I mean these quantum entanglements the fact that things can be whatever it is couple of hours and kilometers separated and yet know each other in a way you can't explain that

95:44they're separate individuals they behave as though they're one but called an entangled state and you can make experiments which reveal that I mean it was Sir John Bell who was an Irish theoretical physicist who who really made made all this very clear that these things are real manifestations of the peculiarity of quantum mechanics and really out there in the world was it JD s Haldane that said the world is not only queer then you suppose it's queer than you can suppose that's right that's what this is right is that kind of thing listen sir thank you for your time a real appreciate it I really appreciate talking to you and thank you for all your work and your your contribution to our understanding of what we're looking at here I hope it helps a bit it helps a lot I appreciate you very much thank you thank you sir