Factually! with Adam Conover - The First Scientist with Carlo Rovelli

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Adam invites one of his favorite guests Carlo Rovelli back to the show to talk about the deep history of science, the first physicist, and the conceptual revolutions in understanding that may still await us in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show once again. I'm so happy to have you here. Now before we get into this week's incredible interview

with an amazing expert from around the world of human knowledge, I want to let you know I am back on tour this year. I just added a whole bunch of new stand-up dates. On March 23rd through 25th, I'll be in Austin, Texas. On May 5th and 6th, I'll be in San Francisco, California at Cobbs Comedy Club. On May 11th through 13th, I'll be in San Antonio, Texas. And from June 8th through 10th, I'll be in Batavia, Illinois. For tickets, head to adamconover.net.

That's adamconover.net. And watch this space. I will be announcing more tour dates very, very soon. And don't forget, if you want to support the show, please head to patreon.com slash adamconover for just five bucks a month. You get every episode of this podcast ad-free. You can join our community Discord,

and we got lots of other great goodies for you. Okay, let's get to this episode. You know, last week in our wonderful interview with the incredible Dr. Chanda Prescott Weinstein, we talked about the human element of science, about why it's so important to help us understand science better, and why when you include the human element, it makes science better. You know, when everyone is allowed to participate in this human pursuit of understanding the universe around us that is better for humanity and science together.

around us that is better for humanity and science together. Well, that's also part of why understanding the history of science is so crucial. You know, again, we often think of science as being this impersonal, perfectly rational process. But in reality, if we know a thing, then someone had to figure it out, right? Some human at some point in time who is embedded in a social structure who had feelings and thoughts and, you know, needed to eat and take a shit. This person or this group of people, often a very large group of people, had to come up with the idea and not just that, but write it down and disseminate it to other people using whatever technology was available at the time.

Which means that there are so many human reasons that a particular scientific innovation does or doesn't take hold. You know, maybe the person who thought of it was an asshole, or maybe they knocked a candle over and burned down all of their writings. Like, it's simply not the case that science marches steadily forward because of the progress of the human mind. No, because of the incredible messiness of human life, incredible scientific discoveries can be made and then forgotten. Like, take this truly impressive artifact from the ancient Greek world. It's called the Antikythera Mechanism.

The Antikythera Mechanism. I'm sorry, if there's any ancient Greeks around, you can correct my pronunciation on Twitter later. But it's essentially an analog computer with gears that was used to make elaborately precise astronomical predictions. And it's from a couple of hundred years before the Common Era. And this profound scientific instrument seems so impressive because whatever genius went into making it was lost. It did not become the norm. People literally forgot how to make this artifact and what it was for, and we're still putting together what the mechanism actually does today.

The point is that science is a human enterprise subject to human social forces. In other words, the forces of history. And if we don't understand that history so that we structure the social forces. In other words, the forces of history. And if we don't understand that history so that we structure the social forces correctly to avoid the mistakes of the past, well, we're not going to advance science or do good science. So today on the show, we're going to be talking about the history of science and specifically the history of physics, making this a little two-part physics series if you add it to our wonderful interview with Dr. Prescott Weinstein last week. So here on the show today to discuss the ancient history of scientific discovery, we have an absolutely incredible guest.

It's his second time on the show. His first time was one of my very favorite interviews that I have ever done in my life, frankly. His name is Carlo Rovelli. He's an incredibly eminent physicist. And he's the author of the new book, Anaximander and the Birth of Science. Please welcome Carlo Rovelli. Carlo, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Thank you for having me back, Adam. It's a great pleasure. You were, our last conversation was one of my very favorite interviews we ever did on this show. You helped me understand quantum mechanics and the very difficult parts of physics

in a way that helped me integrate it with my philosophy education, helped me see the universe in a new way. I probably only remember about a third of the revelations that I had back then, because I'm getting a little bit older now, and my mind isn't what it used to be, but it's always so much fun to talk to you. And you have a new book out already called Anaximander

although my understanding is that this is it is a re-release of some slightly older work of yours but tell me about it that's right it's a combination of new and old it's a new book it's being just published, republished

in fact. And it's going around. I'm expecting it's coming out with enthusiasm. But it's something I wrote long ago, about more than 10 years ago, almost 20 years ago, 15 years ago, I guess. And which came out by, it's my first book. And in my opinion, it's my best book. And at the time, I sort of wrote for myself.

And then a small teeny publisher published it and printed the 25 copies or a little bit more and nobody bought it. And it was sort of a cold secret thing that was going around among my friends until... The real Ravelli heads knew about it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Only them.

And then my big publisher said, wait a minute, that book, we want that book. And I said, well, that's my best book. So it's now coming out. But Adam, it's also a mixture of old and new for another reason, because you mentioned Helgeland about quantum mechanics and about the great scientific revolution. This is about the greatest scientific revolution. And I think if you want to understand quantum mechanics, you have to understand this,

because it is about a revolution that happened 26 centuries ago. it is about a revolution that happened 26 centuries ago. What revolution was that? I don't know what you're referring to. And I'm so curious to know. The title of the book, Anaximander, it's a guy who lived 26 centuries ago. Let me start.

I know you're supposed to ask questions. No, I want to hear this story. I feel like this is going to be useful. Okay, but let me ask a question to you. Oh, please. When it rains, I mean, you guys there in California don't know that much, but sometimes it rains. We had a lot of rain this year, so I recently experienced it. Okay, so you know what I'm talking about.

There's water that falls from the sky, right? Yes. Where does it come from? It comes from clouds, is the child's answer. And I know a little bit more being an adult. And I know that it's water vapor that condenses when I believe it cools down up there. And then it condenses into water, into liquid,

from a gas to a liquid and it falls. Exactly. And then how it gets back up? It gets, okay, it evaporates in the sun, and then it goes back up into the cloud. Wonderful. So right answer. And now the second question is,

do you know who understood all that? Who? Araximander. But he lived in 600 BC or so? That's correct. That's correct. That's a guy who understood where the rain come from. He wrote a book, all sorts of stuff in the book.

And that's one of the many things that he understood. Nobody had that idea before. People thought that, you know, rain is sent by a god or something like that, or that there are a huge amount of water in the sky, a reservoir of water forever. He's the one who understood that. But that's not his main idea. I mean, he has many ideas like that, and many are right. Where did he live? What part of the world was he from?

It's a cost of what today is Turkey, which was, but he was speaking Greek, so the population was Greek. And this is Greece, the ancient Greek civilization. A couple of centuries before everybody else we know about,

you know, Plato and Aristotle and Archimedes and all that famous people and the artists and the comedians. The famous ancient Greek civilization is a bit later. So he's just before that. Before that sort of high class. OK, sorry, keep going. Sorry, keep going.

The Greek world had expanded outside Greece, and there were colonies in what is now France and the other side, what is now Turkey. And that was one of the main colonies. It's called Miletus. And it was a big city, commercial, quite rich, very alive, and in touch with sort of the old kingdoms, Babylonia and Egypt, was a central point of the ancient world.

And there was a school of philosophy and science, I would say, that developed there, and Axelman was the main character there. And here are the books. We don't have the book, but we have many ancient people. We have the text of many ancient people who talk about him. So we know a little bit what he said. We have the Amazon reviews of the book of people saying, oh, the book was good.

I learned a lot. Like we have people talking about the book. Yeah, exactly. Very similar. So there was a Amazon.Rome two millennia ago and you could check and people would say, oh, Anaximander is a gay guy. In fact, we have one of these Amazon quotes by a guy called Plinius, who was a Roman writer, sort of the best scientist the Roman Empire had,

who said about Anaximander, this is the guy who opened the door of nature for all of us. The old title of my book is The First Scientist, so you can view Anaximander as the first scientist. But this was a time when, because you said it was also a school of philosophy, when science and philosophy were very closely knitted or maybe indistinguishable. Is that the case? Yeah, that's correct. In fact, somebody considered Anaximander's school as the beginning of philosophy as well. I would say it's the first

rational reflection about the world and trying to make sense of the world. So it's the same time, the beginning of philosophy and the beginning of science are not yet differentiated. But we haven't got to his main idea yet. Yes, please. This is what I was going to ask. What did he do that was so significant that was first that made him the first scientist? The really, really extraordinary idea he had,

and I think this is perhaps one of the greatest revolutions in human thinking. I'm not the only one who thinks so. The philosopher Karl Popper said this is the most portentous idea that humankind ever had. It's the following. Look, everybody until him, and by everybody I mean everybody. I mean not just the Greek and the Babylonians and the Egyptians, but also the Chinese, the Indians, the people in Mexico,

and the people in Africa, in all the civilizations. Everybody has always thought about reality as the world, the cosmos, in the following way. Up there is sky and down there is earth, right? The sky is above our head and under our feet there is the earth. And so that's the picture of the world that everybody has had until Anaximander arrived. Just him.

He's the one who changed that. And he convinced everybody, he wrote this book and convinced everybody that things are a little more tricky than that because the sky is not just above our head, but it's all around us. So the earth is not just this thing under our feet, but below it, there is the same sky than above.

So the earth is like a big rock that floats in the middle of the sky. He postulated that the earth was a round ball at that time? That's correct. Wow. But wait, let me say a couple of things. He didn't postulate. He understood it by observation and thinking. And I'm going to tell you how,

because it's pretty spectacular. And he didn't really think it was a ball. He didn't know what shape it is. But in fact, it was a generation later that people understood it was a sphere. It was a ball. But that's an easy step. You know, the shape,

once you understand that it's a rock that floats in the middle of nothing, then figure out it's spherical, it's a simple step. In fact, it only took a generation. The hard part was to understand that it floats. So, Adam, let's imagine this conversation. We are, you know, three millennia ago, and we are two smart guys, you know, looking at sunset. And I say, oh, look, the sun is going down.

And you say, boy, tomorrow is coming up, but the other side. Yeah. And you say, how the hell does it go, the other side? And, you know, I say, maybe there's a tunnel. I side and you know I say maybe there's a tunnel I say no come on there's no tunnel if there's a tunnel also the moon goes down that same size and all the stars so they cannot all just crowd up and go through the tunnel

so I say yeah yeah so they should all sort of roll around us. Yeah, yeah, they roll around us. So you say maybe there is nothing behind the earth, behind us, below us, right? Maybe it's just space so that everything. And I say, oh, come on, this is a silly idea. If there was nothing, the earth would fall, right? Yeah. So we just give up. No, oh, come on, this is a silly idea. If there was nothing, the Earth would fall. Right?

Yeah. So we just give up. No, no, no. It's not possible. And Anaximander had this coup de génie, like the French say, that there's a strike of genius. He said, yeah, maybe what if the earth is not falling or maybe what is falling is to fall toward the earth,

not just to come on down. So our side of the earth, things fall down, but the other side, things fall up. So falling is relative to the earth, maybe, and up and down is relative to the earth you know and we're having we're having this conversation a few millennia ago and we say well what do you mean up and down

what do you mean that for the people down up is down, down is up it doesn't make any sense it's like when I we were talking about quantum mechanics or relativity it doesn't make any sense and this guy conceives a completely new

way of thinking reality in which up and down are different in LA, here in Toronto or in Sydney. They're different directions. It's a magical step. So he understands that reality is far more complicated than what we,

that everybody thought before. Things don't fall all parallel in the same manner, but they fall toward the earth in different directions. And so the earth can fly in the middle of nothing, and the sky can be all around. Isn't it magical? That is magical. It's also the way you describe it.

It sounds like such a natural conclusion to come to. Because if, yeah, you're, as people have done ever since, you know, they had enough neurons to have the thought, watched the sun go from one side to the other and watched it come up on the other side. And even, you know, I mean, there's so many ancient civilizations

that tracked the movement of the sun and the stars. Yes, that's right. And knew that over the course of the year, they changed. But even, you know, even someone who's even someone who's not inventing a form of numbers or anything like that, even a shepherd on a hill knows that the sun comes up in a different location in winter than it does in summer. Of course, of course.

Et cetera. And so to me, I'm like, wait, yes, wouldn't it be a very natural conclusion that the earth would be suspended in space and that there'd be something on the other side? The way you put it, it sounds so obvious. And yet, it's funny, most people would look at it and say, oh, it's just impossible.

There must be some other explanation that they wouldn't continue reasoning it through. It seems very unnatural to me. He was the first person to do it, or at least in that tradition that we know of. No, no, it was a first person period, not in that tradition, because we know what the Indians thought, we know what

the Chinese thought, we know what people in Mexico thought, we know what the Africans thought, and we know that all these other civilizations accepted the idea that the sky is all around us only when they learned it from the Greeks, step by step.

So it's really a step. And, you know, he was living, so it's the 6th century before our era, which seems a lot of time in the past for us. But remember that big civilizations are much more ancient than that, right? Egypt was already a big state, civilized with big cities and the pharaohs and the big army and big institutions since 2,000 or 3,000 years. And Babylonia was very ancient.

And, you know, so it's not that, this is not the beginning of civilization. Civilization existed since long. People were writing poems and, as you say, tracking the path of the stars in the sky since quite some time. And look, the Chinese, I'm a philo-Chinese, which is a sort of hard thing to do with these times now and this Chinese sentiment, but I love China. So do I. It's an incredibly fascinating country. Yes, and the Chinese had a, but with all my love for China,

the Chinese had an institute of astronomy since very ancient time to track the seasons and when is to anticipate when summer is coming and so on and so forth and establish the dates and everything. And yet the Chinese didn't do the same step that Anaximander did.

They remained with a picture of the universe in which the Earth was resting on something else for very late until the communications with the Mediterranean civilization were strong enough that they got the full information. And they got sort of Western astronomers

to go there and tell the story. And then very rapidly, the Chinese astronomers, of course, very smart, say, oh, yes, that's obviously the right solution. So it's a remarkable step that humankind has done. And we know the name of the guy who has made this step ahead. There's an axiom under. And this was a lasting step. People believed it

they didn't go oh you're crazy let's kill you or whatever this this actually changed the way that uh you know science was being done or that or that astronomy was being done not just in greece but in other places in the world yeah this is very interesting um he he wrote a book about that and the book is called Physis so it's on nature which is where the name physics come from

from the title of his book wow okay yeah physics come from there and the there was it was debated, of course. It's not that he immediately convinced everybody, but about 100, 150 years ago in Athens, we know a lot of books at that time,

everybody was convinced by this idea. So all the people who were writing and the intellectuals and philosophers all got it convinced by that. And they started piling up evidence and scientific evidence for that. And in fact not even 200 or 300 years later they had measured the size of the Earth. They found ways to measure the size of the Earth.

This measurement was in the second century before our era, and pretty good. So these people knew the size of the earth with a very good precision. How did this change the way people thought conceptually? I mean, you describe it as a revolution, and so it must have been a conceptual revolution as well, right? Yes, it was. But it was not been a conceptual revolution as well, right? Yes, it was. But it was not as a consequence of that.

I think something was going on that caused that. Because look, this is the same century in which the first democratic constitution of Athens was written. And you see, it was a very peculiar place where this happened, Miletus and the early Greek civilization, because it was very close, Miletus is very close to the big empires of the past, the Egyptian empire, the Egyptian kingdom, and the Babylonian kingdom, and it was replaced by the Assyrian empire. the Babylonian kingdom, and it was replaced by the Assyrian empire. So these were big civilized structures with very centralized,

where all the knowledge, the ancient knowledge was collected. So there was knowledge about the stars, about mathematics, about all sorts of things. But Greece never unified, and it remained very fractured and not only that but within the cities, the Greek cities there was a very complicated political structure where the kings were taken down and there were

groups of people who were managing the city together or there were groups of people who were managing the city together or there were even democratic structures like in Athens that was coming out. Exactly Miletus and exactly at the time where Anaximander lived, so the sixth century before our era, there was the first parliament because the different cities along the Greek, the different Greek cities along the Turkey coast, they made a sort of alliance together, but it was not one dominating the other. They were meeting regularly and debating the political problem together and trying to come to a decision together. It was called the Ionian League. And it was completely different than the big empires because there wasn't a central

power. There was no heavy, powerful priest caste. You know, the typical structure, whether in India or in China or in Mexico or the Incas or Babylonia or wherever, is that you have a monarchy and a religious structure that supports the monarchy with the priests and everything. Yes. And decisions are taken from the top. Right. Right? And here in Greece, there is a much more flexible thing

in which decisions are debated, are discussed. And at the same time, they are near this empire, so they can absorb them because they trade with them, and they're rich. So these are people who started thinking, and this is a big revolution, I think. They've been cultural revolutionists. Started thinking that debating is the best way to get to the best solution.

Yeah. And this has a political side. Let's talk rather than have a chief that is more powerful and tell us what to do. And it has a scientific side or a philosophical side, if you want, which is instead of, you know, believing the priest or believing what the religion tells me, let's debate this story. Let's talk about this. And the key thing,

let me get to what I find the most fascinating things at all, is that Anaximander is part of a school and his master, it's also the name of his master we know is a famous nameander is part of a school, and his master, it's also, the name of his master we know is a famous name, is Thales. Thales was considered one of the great wise men, and he has some results in mathematics, and all sorts of things are attributed to him.

And we know some of the idea of Thales, and clearly Anaximander follows a lot of the ideas of Thales because there are some similarities in the way they think. But Anaximander has no problem in criticizing Thales. And this is the magic because you see it's not that in ancient time before him, before that century, you find great masters with schools behind them, or you find strong criticism. I mean, if you read the Bible, it criticizes Babylonia very violently. And great masters have always been existing in old civilizations with their disciples.

Jesus had Paul and Confucius had Mencius and so on and so forth. But here there is something new. There is a master and a follower who criticize the master, follow the master but criticizes. So there's a third way. And that's the beginning of science.

That's the beginning of philosophy. That's the beginning of rational way of doing things. You learn, you absorb everything, and then you say, wait a minute, maybe it's not exactly like that. I can change something. So there's a critical thinking with respect to what you learn. Yeah.

Man, that resonates to me so much with so many debates that people are having today about, you know, there's a perpetual thing where younger people come along and they criticize the work of the older masters in every field, including science. And there's always people who go, oh, how could you, you know, you should have respect for your elders or whatever, or the, you know, the great people who gave you all these wonderful things. But that really is, I think those people forget that the soul of, you know, rationality and progress and all of that is being willing to

question that received wisdom and the sort of sacred cows, it sounded like a little bit of a cliche, but to push back against the people who taught you, you know, it makes me think of all the debates about what happens on college campuses with, oh, these kids today, da, da, da, da. Well, isn't that, you know, having an argument with your teacher, as you described it, that's the soul of where science began. You're completely right. And I think my book is mostly about that, right? And it's this funny balance, right? Because you, knowledge, go ahead only because you criticize your master.

Everything we know is because somebody told his master you're wrong. Okay? If we know that the Earth floats in the middle of nothing, it's because Anaximander could tell Thales you're wrong. And if you know quantum mechanics, it's because Heisenberg could tell his masters you're wrong. And if we know relativity, it's because Einstein could tell Newton you're wrong. And if we know relativities, because Einstein could tell Newton you're wrong. Okay?

So when the young criticize the old, that's great. That's what we need to go ahead. Okay? And Talas was probably writing long op-eds in the newspaper, being like, these kids today,

they don't want to respect their elders. There is no respect anymore for the elders. But that's what happens. Where is civilization going? But at the same time, you see, it's a balance. It's a collective balance. Because it's not by taking everything down and starting anew that you go ahead. It's by learning, by building on what, and so on and so forth.

You know, you asked at the beginning what shape Anaximander thought the Earth could be. He had no idea, okay? He understood that it was floating in the nothing because things should go around, but he had no idea. But in one of the texts, he says it's like a disc, a sort of little cylinder, a flat, not very tall cylinder so you say why the hell

this is a completely absurd shape where it comes from but then you look at Thales and Thales had an idea Thales didn't know that the sky it's all around us so he was still thinking that the earth should lie on something

but he thought that maybe since there is ocean all around us. So he was still thinking that the Earth should lie on something. But he thought that maybe since there is ocean all around, maybe the Earth is like a big island that floats over ocean, right? That was Thales' idea. And if it is something floating over ocean, obviously it has to be like a disk. So you see how beautiful it is here. Thales comes with a strange idea that there's water all over, so maybe the Earth is just over an immense ocean.

After all, wherever you walk, you find ocean. L.A., you walk west, you find ocean. Where I am, east, you find ocean. And then Alexander comes in and says, oh yeah, the Earth can be just one big thing, but why do we need the ocean? So we take away the ocean. It's no role.

Okay? And so you see how knowledge comes from building and changing, and every time you do it better. Then a century later, somebody says, yeah, yeah, of course it should be like that, but it cannot be a disk. Come on, it doesn't make sense. All directions are the same, so it should be spherical.

Yes. And then you find arguments. Yeah, it's spherical. Aristotle, look at the eclipses, the lunar eclipses, when the moon gets covered by the shade of the earth, right? Yes. And if you look carefully, you see that the shade of the earth is round, And if you look carefully, you see that the shade of the earth is round.

So which means that the earth is round, because something must be round to have a round shape. Again, this seems very obvious to me now when you say it now. It's one of those, yeah, there's so many things. After you get it, you say, yeah, of course, it should be like that. But civilization, humankind, took centuries, millennia, to figure these things out. Well, we have to take a really quick break. This is so fascinating.

We'll be right back with more Carlo Rovelli. Okay, we're back with Carlo Rovelli. Why do you feel if Anaximander was, you know, sort of the first scientist, why do we not know him as such today? You know, there's plenty of firsts who people, I don't know, Hippocrates, right? The Hippocratic Oath, I could name the first doctor, at least who in classical culture would be considered the first doctor in some traditions. So why is Anaximander not more famous?

Yeah, it's a very good question. And there's a reason I wrote this book. I started teaching history of science because I was fascinated by history of science and went back, back and back. And when I stumbled upon Anaximander and studying Anaximander, I was astonished because once you really study what he has done and his role, and especially his legacy, it's just immense. So why don't we know more about him? And I think the reason is subtle and important. It is the following. Let me separate in two parts

in antiquity so at his time or at later times during this classic Greek civilization or the Roman civilization people knew about him everybody knew about him and he was sort of a champion of a

scientific and naturalistic understanding of the world but at the time science was not powerful like in modern times sort of a champion of a scientific and naturalistic understanding of the world. But at the time, science was not powerful like in modern times. So, for instance, you read comments about him like, you know, Anaximander says that the rain that comes from the sky, it's water that has evaporated from the sea. But Anaximander says that, not Anaximander has understood that, evaporated from the sea. But they say Anaximander says that, not Anaximander has understood that,

because people were not sure. Everything was still debated. Now, in modern time, it should be obvious that that ideas was correct, and he was on the right track, and his full cultural approach was so powerful, and it was the right legacy that developed in modern philosophy, modern science.

But, and this is the key answer, today the people who do science know nothing about history and the people who do history know nothing about science. So it's very remarkable because when I read,

I read all the reads about Raximander, all the books, there's not much as you say, because it's not like Plato or Aristotle so famous. And the people who write about him, and I don't hold that against those writers, but they're completely

ignorant of science, of physics. So they just don't get that this is a scientist and this is a major step ahead in the building of science. And vice versa, the scientists, most scientists today just think about technically their problem, okay? How you split an atom and what is the chemistry of the sun. They don't look back. So it's really the separation of culture into different domains which don't talk to one another, which has blocked understanding the relevance in modern times,

the relevance of Anaximander. But perhaps it's changing a little bit. It's not me. Other people have been recently writing. You can find in some books people saying this is a genius like Newton at the level of Newton. But this is marginal. But I think it's going to come because the separation between the humanities and science is diminishing.

There's more beginning of talking to one another. Nowadays, your work certainly diminishes that that distance. That's one of the reasons I love your writing. I love talking to you because you're able to synthesize the two. Yeah, I believe a lot that a scientist should have an understanding of philosophy and vice versa. I think that humanities shouldn't not ignore science because understanding the complexity of reality, you need everything somehow. I also wonder, though, if the reason that he was not considered the first scientist by so many people is we so often think of the birth of science as being in the 18th century or the 17th century. Newton and those figures and the gentleman scientists of England in that period and that being the birth of the scientific method. And, you know, that being the birth of the scientific method. A lot of times when I hear about, you know, ancient Greek scientists, for instance, I read a wonderful book called The Swerve a few years ago about the... Democritus.

Yes, the rediscovery of Democritus' work. Via Lucretius. And it's all about how a lot of it is his work prefigured the atom, that he sort of, in these sort of poems, figured out what the atom would be in this very prescient way. thousand years, you know, did that. We had to rediscover it many years later, or it was a foreshadowing, perhaps. And so that's when, you know, how we often think of that period of science being, but was that not the case with Anaximander? Because you do make it sound that his discoveries were lasting, and that it was, you know, it did move the progress of science forward, even though it was centuries before when we think of the beginning of science as being? Yeah, look, yes, it's a complex story. First of all, when I first published this book, the title was The First Scientist. But of course, you know, The First Scientist, it's a notion that can be turned in all the way you want, because, you know,

it's like, you know, who is the first American? Well, depending how you, what you mean by American. And if you, more specifically, if you think what is modern science, it's something in evolution, which has learned new tools through the centuries and is still changing. which has learned new tools through the centuries and is still changing. So there are some aspects of modern science which are the same as something that was done 2,000 years ago and some aspects which are different. So, for instance, Anaximander was not using mathematics

in his book, okay? And nowadays, mathematics is a key tool in science. Mathematics comes later but careful, it didn't come with Newton or Galileo, it came in ancient time with astronomy the astronomy of Ptolemy

was very very good science, it was very mathematical and very based on observations it was very good science you can take the book of Ptolemy today it was really 2000 years ago and do a calculation compute where is Venus in the sky now and it works

so it's very predictive very very powerful but then steps were added and in the beginning of the modern times with Galileo mostly and then with Kepler and Newton and Huygens. And the idea of making experiments, so not just observing nature,

but doing something in the laboratory to interrogate nature, this did not exist in ancient times. And this is a powerful, powerful tool for understanding better, or instrument, tool like a telescope, a microscope. This came in modern times. So depending on what you mean by science, if you mean the full package, okay, with experiments, mathematics, and blah, blah, blah, yes, of course, it's recent. But if you mean understanding nature rationally with observations, then it's more ancient. And I think the key of science is neither mathematics nor experiments. The key is what we said before in the previous section. Namely, the key is that you have a view of the world

and you're smart enough to understand that there's a better view of the world. Yeah. Right? This is what the strength, the marvelous strength of science is, to revolutionize your concept. Okay?

Think about Copernicus. Before Copernicus, Copernicus already knew that the earth, he had totally absorbed the Anaximander revolution, right? For Copernicus, the earth is, not for Copernicus, for Ptolemy, for all through the Middle Ages, the earth is a sphere and there's all the sky around. So the lesson of Anaximander has been completely absorbed. But up to Copernicus, the Earth was the center of the universe. So here comes Copernicus and tells you, Adam, so far you have thought about the world as celestial things and terrestrial things.

That's all wrong. You have to think in terms of the sun and then the earth, which is the same thing as the Venus and Mars, which is very strange. I mean, Venus and Mars are little dots in the sky. The earth is mountain people, birds, you know. Why do you want to put in the same category with dots in the sky? I mean, dots in the sky go in the same category as the moon. No, no, no no no no that's wrong the change your categorization entirely okay so they're all this right and then there's another category it's the moon just by itself i mean you was a copernicus you're stupid this make no sense no he's right he's right okay it took a century for

convincing everybody but he's right So this changing conceptual structure, changing the way you make your basic way of understanding the world, this is the best of science. Yeah. But you have to leave open that chance that, well, what I think I understand now is perhaps wrong. Yeah. Because there are things I don't understand,

and so therefore my model I've created might be incorrect. You like that, that space for doubt is the soul of it. Yeah. And this means exactly. And this means living in uncertainty and accepting uncertainty. So it means understanding. And this is,

I think the core of the story that knowledge is not to be certain. Yeah. Knowledge is not about certainty. Knowledge is about, you know, a better view, a better understanding, a better, more reliable ways of expecting what happened tomorrow. But you're never sure 100% about anything. Even the most basic thing. I mean, the sky is over our head, it's not below our feet.

That's the basic thing. I mean, how can you question this? But it's wrong. And Einstein questioned things, clocks go at the same speed wherever you are. No, that's wrong. Quantum mechanics, last conversation, questions, you know, reality of particles. It seems obvious that a particle is a particle. You cannot spread

out like a wave. It's wrong. So we should be open to learn better. We should be accepting the fact that nothing that we know, we know with certainty. Yeah. But that does not mean that everything is equal to everything. Because, you know, when you, if I come to California, come to LA and ask for directions, I don't have certainty, but still some directions are better than others. Right. So knowledge is knowledge and you can compare knowledge But still, some directions are better than others. Right.

So knowledge is knowledge, and you can compare knowledge and get it better. Even if you always leave a door open, maybe I could be wrong. Yeah. Well, it reminds me of when people make the mistake of using science as a bludgeon to sort of kill off a new idea. You hear that sometimes where people say someone will propose something new, and then in the others will say well that's not science science doesn't say that well if it's that new then it's something that needs to be studied you know it's not something that because we can we can throw out prematurely um something that is a you know threatens or threatens to alter our current conception just because it's not currently comprehended in science

doesn't make it false. It means it's an object for study. Yes. That doubt is important. Yes, doubt is important. And once again, the difficulty is the balance, right? That's the difficulty. Namely, the thing we know, we know reliably,

and yet we should be open to consider alternatives, which doesn't mean that all alternatives are good. Most alternatives are bad. You know, I receive, since I publish books for the large public, people write to me with scientific ideas. I receive three great scientific ideas per week. And they're all bad. Maybe there is one that's good and I don't recognize it. ideas. I receive three great scientific ideas per week. And they're all bad. Maybe there is one

that's good and I don't recognize it. It's also possible. But you know, most are really very bad. Yes. I've seen some of these. I receive this sometimes too because sometimes people find my email address and my sister is a science journalist and she receives these all the time of people who write and say

I figured out a new law of the universe and i have all the equations and i can show you and you feel sort of bad because you look at it and you go well i i don't think i they it could be right but i don't have time to read every single one of these and you know the way this person has written it it seems kind of kooky so you know i i don't uh time to read it. But you do feel bad because you're like, well, somebody, they really feel certain that they have figured something out. And you want to be able to be open-minded, but the volume is too high. That's been my experience sometimes. That's right.

That's right. You feel sorry. You feel sorry for the people. And, of course, we're pretty confident that most of these things are very bad and useless. You know, we may always be missing something, some idea. But at least in my experience, the more a person is certain about some new idea, the less credible is this idea. Ah, and the crackpots who write in are usually very certain about their idea. Exactly, exactly.

Now, if you read what the real geniuses wrote, I mean, Faraday, when he discovered that there's electric and magnetic field is one of the key moments in modern science because fields is just more than physics. You read his books and he says, well, I think that these things are real, but I write this with hesitation. The hesitation, it's just beautiful. And Einstein, in the paper, the paper that got him his Nobel Prize,

in which he understood the photon that light is made by little particles which are photons in the abstract he says it seems to me that this phenomenon might suggest that okay and so on, Darwin

Darwin in his book in his notebook when he comes about this idea of evolution, there is a beautiful picture of the species branches. So the tree of life that, and it's the key moment in which it starts. And then this written, I think. Yeah. Not I'm sure I've discovered, I'm certain I found. No, no, no.

All these people say, hmm, maybe this works, right? Yeah. And of course, when you have a new idea, you're not sure. You cannot be sure. You're trying.

Yeah. And it's frightening, I'm sure, to have that idea. I mean, electrical magnetic fields are, that's a spooky thing to discover that's a very strange idea if you if you hadn't conceived of them before the fact that there would be you know fields in in space generated that way or or evolution is such a famously disorienting idea you know i i

will sometimes just lie around and just think about how strange evolution is that that you know endless forms most beautiful come from just this simple process repeated over and over again. Yeah, you go out in the field, you sit down in the grass, and there's a butterfly going on, and then you think, well, the mother of that butterfly and the mother of the mother, my mother, my mother, my mother is the same guy, the same woman. We're actually cousins.

We really are cousins. We come from the same, from a common ancestor. Isn't it fantastic? Yeah, when you propose it, you would say, I'm not sure about this because it's kind of weird. We have to take another really quick break. We'll be right back to finish up with Carlo Rovelli. Okay, we're back. Carlo, I've been loving this conversation. I'm curious, though, you said you started teaching history of science,

and you started studying it despite not being, I assume, originally trained as a historian. Most scientists don't do history of science. I'd love you to talk a little bit more about what do you think the value is for present? I mean, look, obviously, it's very interesting to learn about Anaximander. It's interesting for me as someone who my feet are a little bit more in the humanities, I would say, than in the harder sciences. So I enjoy learning about it. But, you know, for someone who's just working on neutrino detectors or whatever, right, you know, in some big laboratory in France, what do they have to gain from studying the history of science? A lot of fun.

Mm. It's just, I mean, that's good enough. That's good enough for reasons. No, look, yeah, no, I guess it's two different answers. I guess it's two different answers. First of all, science is a collective enterprise and like most collective enterprise, everybody does his part. Somebody is very good in doing calculations,

somebody is good in building machines, somebody comes out with ideas, somebody is very critical and tests everybody else's idea. So not everybody needs to do everything. somebody comes out with ideas, somebody is very critical and tests everybody else's idea and so on. So not everybody needs to do everything. So there are fantastically good scientists who are very, very good in solving the Einstein equations and super mathematically technical who just only know that and are totally focused on that.

And that's very good. I mean, we need also people like that. But for the large enterprise of science to go ahead, that's very good. I mean, we need also people like that. But for the large enterprise of science to go ahead, that's not sufficient. You need people, I believe, that thinks large, think like Faraday and Darwin and Einstein were thinking. And those people always had a vast culture and a mind which was filled with, you know, what our civilization has produced best, including philosophy and including literature and different ways of thinking and possibly knowledge of other cultures.

And that's needed to go ahead. But the other half of the story, in my opinion, is that, you know, it goes in both ways. I mean, there are people who like to say, oh, I never understood mathematics. My mind is completely away from that. It has nothing to do with science, nothing scientific or mathematic. I'm sorry for them because it's like saying,

oh, I never understood music. I don't care. I'm sorry for you. I mean, why do you want to miss the pleasure of music? It's just fantastic. I'm sorry for you. I mean, why do you want to miss the pleasure of music? It's just fantastic. I'm not a musician. I'm not capable of writing, reading the music, or maybe just one note at a time in half an hour.

I reconstruct a little motive. But music, it's part of my life. I enjoy. And I think in the same sense, everybody can enjoy history and philosophy and the greatest idea in science. It's one package. It's what we've learned about the world. Yeah.

I love that, that science should be something that we can appreciate like music. And that's one of the reasons I love talking to you is because you help give me that ability. It's actually a compliment I also paid to a guest that we had on a few weeks ago named Chanda Prescott Weinstein, who's a physicist. And something that she said to me in that conversation was about how it's unfortunate that more physicists don't have the opportunity to think about those big questions or to integrate with the humanities, that you spend so much time focused on what you get the grant for is to do the math and to design the neutrino detectors and to do the technical paper with the graphs and make the big publication. But the sort of thing that, frankly, you do in your books about writing about what does quantum mechanics mean to us,

what does quantum mechanics mean to us, right? Or how does this interact with the history of science? It kind of seems like nobody's paying for that work to be done and that you're in the very lucky position to be able to do it because of your long history and eminence. Because I'm old. Do you agree with that? Because I'm old, yeah. I said eminence.

It's a different word, but yeah. Well, but that's what you meant. Well, I mean, do you think that's unfortunate? I mean, should 30-year-old scientists be able to, you know, do the humanities-inflected philosophical, what does this mean to us part? Would we get more out of science if they did? I think it would be better, not if everybody was forced to do that,

but if more people did that and if people were forced to do that but if more people did that and if people were allowed to do that look my interest in philosophy and history has always been there I started writing in my old age because before I had so many other things to do but the interest has always been there since the beginning.

In fact, when I graduated in physics, I enrolled in philosophy shortly after, but then I could not finish because the pressure on going ahead with physics was too strong. But the interest was there. And I think it would be useful for science. You know, there's a lot of science being done today. A lot of people paid for doing science. Of course, science

is going ahead. But I think if there was more culture in the sense of a large perspective, clear perspective, wider perspective, the entire scientific institution will be more effective. We waste a lot of time because I think many people don't reflect enough. Do we really need what we're doing now? I mean, of course,

if you build a neutrino in a big experiment, a neutrino detector in a big experiment somewhere, it's a big reflection there. But there's a lot of papers which are written which we could do without. A lot of the science being done, you feel like we maybe don't need. Yeah.

And instead we could spend our time what integrating with the humanities thinking a little bit more soulfully about what science yeah i think what we really need i mean things what are really open questions i mean before i think the people before before starting a scientific project should think is it really needed is it this is really serious you have a chance to go somewhere uh it's part of what we have a chance to too much science is done oh let's do that let's ask money for doing that uh just too much focused i imagine that step back it will be useful i imagine that you know when i i think a lot about in my own work which is comedy comedy, about when I get to feel like I do the real work, when I feel like I'm doing some comedy

that my 14-year-old self would have been proud of, that this is why I got into it in the first place, because I wanted to make people laugh, I wanted to express my point of view, etc. And I try to make sure that people around me have the same opportunity. When I'm working with a director of photography, I want to make sure that he he gets he or she gets to um you know express their uh their love of painting with

light and making a beautiful image you know and i imagine for but if i might interrupt you adam you're a champion of that right because you do comedy you make people laugh but you make people think and you collect serious ideas it's a it's a it's it's an equilibrium. You don't just, you know, say funny jokes, stupid. And that's it. Is this richness? And you think about the photography thing is that is this complexity that makes value of what you do and makes it so valuable? Yeah, I I really appreciate you saying so.

That's that's such a high compliment. Yeah, I really appreciate you saying so. That's such a high compliment. The point I was getting to was that I feel like for a scientist, you know, I was always moved by the original project of science in the human heart, which is to look at the world and say, I have a question. I'm confused about this. You know, I was fascinated when I was in college with the problem of consciousness, you know, philosophically and psychologically, and how do you connect the physical meat of the brain to the experience of consciousness? And that question really powered me, and I'm sure it powers a lot of other people. And I feel like there's probably a lot of people who got into science with that question, but then whatever they're working on now, say they're working on, you know, they're in neuroscience, and they might be trying to answer questions that don't get them back to that essential curiosity, you know? So it's not just do we need the answer to this question, it's does answering this question, is this a question I really have? Is this something that we really don't know the answer

to that I desire to know? I wonder if that's a roadmap to, you know, a more holistic and fulfilling form of science. I think it is. And I even think that it is a good career advice. At least, you know, one can never generalize too much one's experience. But my experience was that, you know, it's hard to find a position in the academy today. There's a lot of competition. But when I was young, also was hard. In fact, it seemed even harder.

And I made some choices. And the choice was not to follow what people were doing at the time, not to specialize too much, not to just tell me, not just to do what my advisor was saying, I need this technical thing, please do it to me. But to try to think, to see, to look what were the serious open problems. And it paid very well for me. I found myself working on the project that 10 years later everybody was working on.

Which is not because I was particularly farsighted, but because I stopped and thought, wait a minute, everybody at the time was doing something technical called anomalies in physics, in theoretical physics. And so why should I do that? This is a technical thing that is, what is a deep reason for doing that? Look, there's a much more interesting problem here,

just quantum gravity. This is serious. This is big. Maybe we have a way of doing that. I went for that. And it paid off. As you say, years later, I am old, and I can talk about that.

I said eminent, but sure. Well, we can say old. And that does seem, I don't know, I think there's a connection to when you talk about Anaximander or Darwin, who was such a beautiful, soulful writer and thinker of connecting that to that older tradition of just somebody sitting on a hill going, why the fuck does the sun come up that side

and go down that side? And then the next day it happens again. Like, you know, there's... By necessity, science is more technical and more detailed now because we know more and the gaps to fill in are smaller, but it can still be powered by that same thing. We can still have continuity

with people like Anaximander, right? Yes, i think so and in fact um the sort of the secret reason for which i i was so fascinated by an axamander and and and uh when i figured out exactly me as a scientist i figured out exactly what what was a step he did this deep rethinking of what it means to be up and down, right? Because that's the core thing. Up and down have a different meaning, so before Naximander and after Naximander.

Before Naximander is just a common up and down for everybody. And after Naximander is an up and down relative to where you are in the Earth. You know, I work in quantum gravity, the problem of combining quantum mechanics with Einstein relativity. And that requires changing what we mean by space, what we mean by time,

because we have to understand what is quantum space, quantum time. So it's exactly doing the kind of steps that Anaximander did. So that's why I think looking back at history is interesting. I mean, it's kind of rethinking, reorganizing the conceptual structure. It's what he did, what Newton did, what Galileo did, what Darwin or Faraday did.

And that's the kind of things that we have to do in deep problems like consciousness that you mentioned, or quantum gravity, the things we don't yet understand well. We are confused. We have hints, pieces, but we're still confused, probably because we have the wrong concept of structure, right? We think like, you know, all cosmos is divided in two, the terrestrial and celestial, and then you never figure out the solar system this way.

You have to jump out of that. It actually reminds me very much of the conversations around consciousness, which are still around dualism versus materialism. And it often feels like our conceptual structure is what's in the way. And there's many philosophers and cognitive psychologists who have argued that actually we need a conceptual revolution. But there's argument on that point. It's recent work in the field. Do you feel that there's other conceptual revolutions in the future for us scientifically, as great as the one that enacts Amanda? Changing the meaning of up and down, that's huge. I would love to live through a conceptual revolution as large as that. Do you think we're due for one? Yes, I think we're due for two. And we've mentioned both of them.

One is consciousness, as you said. I mean, we don't have clear ideas, but as you said, they're hints and bits. And there should be a way of jumping out of this a bit silly alternative between dualism and naive materialism or naive idealism which both seems insufficient as one but I'm pretty confident that we're going to come out of that

I think I'm old, I remember the discussion about life is life something totally different than non-animated nature? It seemed impossible to fill the gap between biology and physics 30 years ago. Really? Nowadays, nobody feels that this is a serious problem. I mean, there are all sorts of things we don't yet understand about

the biochemistry of life and how it started. But it seems that, you know, it's just details. We got what is, we got most of what is life. It's not perceived as a fundamental problem like consciousness anymore

so I think that something like that will happen with consciousness but it's not happening yet and the other one is quantum gravity quantum space and quantum time require us rethinking what is time what is the difference between past and future and also this, I think, is coming. It's not too far, but it needs a lot of discussions and it needs, you know, Alexi Manders, plural. Well, and this makes me want to go back and re-listen to our previous conversation because I felt that you gave me a hint of that conceptual revolution in how I think about quantum phenomena versus my own problems of consciousness.

And we touched on how those problems are linked. And you also touch on those in your wonderful book, which I now want to reread on Helgoland. But I'm so excited to read this book as well, since you do describe it as your best. And I want to remind folks they can pick it up at our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. And is there anywhere else that you'd like to encourage people to pick it up, Carlo, or anywhere that they can follow your work? No, I think this book is particularly,

you know, it's my first book, and the book in which I put all my thinking and my soul about what science is. And as we started this conversation, it's connected the past and the future so much, right? Because it's the same revolution in the next mandarin and in modern science. That's what I'm talking about.

Wow. Well, it's always a delight talking to you. It always expands my understanding of the world and my place in it and what a marvelous thing it is to be a reasoning being that's trying to figure things out in this mess of stuff that we live in. So thank you so much, and I hope you'll come back again soon. Thank you very much,

Alan. This was a great pleasure. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Carlo Rovelli for coming on the show. If you want to pick up his book, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producer, Sam Roudman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and as always, everyone who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. This month so far, we have 12 new subscribers at that level.

Thank you to Pat, Hayden Matthews, Eric Zeger, Jen Hoffman, Smiznjgol, a little bit of an unpronounceable name there, Rick Statton, Blake Kolb, Robert Irish, James Lynch, Chris Parker, Millennial Glacier, and Opal. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. That's patreon.com slash adamconover. And hey, if you want to see me live, head to adamconover.net for all my tour dates. Thank you so much for listening. I love you, and we'll see you next week on Factually.

I don't know anything.