Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Alan Lightman: Astronomy's Tolstoy -- Improbable Possibilities, Einstein's Dream, & More (#164)

Starting point is 00:00:01 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Professor Alan Lightman, a really spectacular writer, a thinker, an intellectual, and the author of so many wonderful books. I've read them all. And today, Alan, we're going to talk about the book that most influenced me in my life. It's influenced millions of people around the world. I'm talking about a problem book in relativity and gravitation. Let's talk about that for the next hour, shall we? Sure.

Starting point is 00:00:38 It's actually one of my favorite books, Alan, and it's a little-known book. It's probably your least read book, but it's one of my favorite books of all time. It has a series of books, but problems in it, but it's not written in a dry textbook style. In fact, it's written in a style that I use to this very day, and people ask me, like, how hard is it to generate gravitational waves? And I say, well, read Lightman's book, and you too can generate gravitational waves when you're on the Mass Pike or in the I-5 here in California.

Starting point is 00:01:11 Just shake your fist out the window. And I use that example. I've never forgotten it in 25, 30 years. Alan, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing today in these wild times that we're enduring? I'm doing okay. The world is not doing okay, but I'm doing okay. My wife is a painter and we live on a small island in Maine during the summers.

Starting point is 00:01:35 And so I'm there now looking out at some woodshed path that goes down to our dock and the ocean is beyond that. So I'm very, very privileged to be here. Oh, that's not a place, not a terrible place to be confined in some sense. but of course that theme runs through your book, which I understand is being turned into a movie. I wanted to get a quick update on that. What is the status of that wonderful book, which I've listened to and read as well,

Starting point is 00:02:13 Searching for Stars in the Island and Maine. What is the status of the movie adaptation? Well, we have a producer, Jeffrey Haynes-Styles, who was the senior producer of the original Carl Sagan-Cosmos, series. We've written and rewritten the script. We have some associate producers who are camera people. We have a musician, Zoe Keating, same last name as yours. She's a cellist. And we've done everything except the filming. And my first conversation will be with the Dalai Lama in one month. In that book, you talk about explorations with encounters with Buddhism and notions of time.

Starting point is 00:03:01 And I think that theme runs through many of your books. Maybe we'll start there. One thing I've noted, and it occurs in almost all of your books, I think, is the notion of the plank time. You know, the plank time appears in many of your books. I wonder, what is it about the plank time that's so interesting to you? Is it a fundamental or is it kind of like a coordinate singularity? It's kind of an accident of, you know, just a coincidence of numbers. Or is there something significant about it?

Starting point is 00:03:29 You know, does motion really act jittery at fundamental level, or is it just an accident of some, you know, numbers that human beings use? Well, I don't think it's an accident of numbers that human beings use, just like the number of particles and a mole, Avogadro's number, is a real number. The significance of the plank time is that that's approximately the moment in the evolution of the universe where quantum gravity was important. That is the merging of quantum physics with general relativity. Quantum physics, of course, you know all of this, but I'm saying this for your guess.

Starting point is 00:04:19 quantum physics tells us how matter behaves at the subatomic level. And one of the characteristics that particles can be in two places at once, very, very strange. General relativity tells us how matter and energy change the flow of time and the geometry of space. And the two of them are both important at the, particular early, early, early moment of the universe when it was about 10 to the minus 43 seconds old. And the reason why that's significant is because that is probably the earliest moment where we can speak about time and space. At that moment when both gravity and quantum physics were working together, when the whole universe was smaller than the size of an atom,

Starting point is 00:05:19 that time did not behave as we know it today. That is, it went forwards and backwards and jittered around space. The geometry of space was constantly fluctuating. And if there was any moment in the early universe, when you can say that the time and space began, it would be at the plank time. So it's not just a coincidence. of numbers.

Starting point is 00:05:46 I think if we could contact intelligent beings elsewhere, the universe, who were at least as advanced as us and science, they would know about the Plank time. And of course, Plank famously said that science advances one funeral

Starting point is 00:06:05 at a time. Do you feel that spirituality advances one funeral at a time in the same way? In other words, do you think we almost have to wait for you know, hopefully it'll be many years in the future for the Dalai Lama or, you know, the Einstein's or the people that the Spinoza, so to speak, to pass on before we can have the paradigm shift in spirituality or in these kind of existential questions that you like to consider,

Starting point is 00:06:32 or are they totally different? I think they're totally different. Science, I think, is a vertical progress that is each, new theory, which replaces an older theory, is a closer approximation to nature. Whether or not there's an ultimate theory that needs no revision. Scientists disagree about that, and we're talking mainly physics here. So when Plank said that science progresses one funeral at a time, he means that a theory is supported for a number of years until it's found to conflict with experiment and then it's replaced by a new theory which is supported for a number of years until it's found to conflict with experiment. But each successive rung on the latter is a better approximation to nature.

Starting point is 00:07:32 Whereas I think that spirituality, and I wouldn't include in that all of the arts and humanities along with spirituality is more of a horizontal endeavor. That is Plato's ideas about the best kind of government and about what constitutes good and evil are still as valid today as they were 2,000 years ago. And so I don't think that and I think that the Buddha's ideas about spirituality and that the cause of suffering is attachment to things and too much involvement with our own ego, I think that that's just as valid an insight today as it was 2,500 years ago. What do you make of the fact that great men in science, in theology even sometimes are not the greatest fathers or not the greatest, you know, husbands or not the greatest, you know, mentors. Einstein

Starting point is 00:08:42 himself, as you know, was not a great husband or father. You know, the Dalai Lama, obviously, is not a father. I once heard him quoted, I've met him personally. He's a wonderful man. And I once heard him quoted, you know, somebody asked him, you know, your holiness, if your brother were to die, would you not be sad? And he said, I would try not to be sad. I don't think I would. be, you know, I try to be detached. I have three brothers. They give me a lot of trouble. We fight. I have, you know, I have sons. I can't imagine being so detached. And I can't imagine having a full life, a life devoid of suffering, as I know Buddhism seeks to be. I'm Jewish. By the way, I'm a practicing Jew. But the point is, how do you reconcile these great minds

Starting point is 00:09:31 with the fact that many of them were kind of, I don't want to say schmucks as fathers? And I'm not including the dilemma, but Einstein was certainly not a great father, and that's been well documented. How do you reconcile these great men with great flaws? Is it necessary or is it just a correlation? I'm Jewish also, and Wagner, the great composer, was an anti-Semite, as was T.S. Eliot. So I think that these are perpendicular aspects of human nature. That is the part of our DNA that codes for creativity, imagination, intelligence, talent, I think it's a different part of our DNA that controls for our values and our behavior. So there's no reason why these things should be correlated, why they should have anything to do with each other. And there are people have made brilliant contributions to music, to literature, to science, who are, you and I would call them decent, honorable human beings.

Starting point is 00:10:52 And there are also people who have contributed to art and literature and science that you and I would consider to be horrible. human beings. So there's no reason to expect a correlation as far as I'm concerned. And yeah, I certainly view that. And also, you know, Carl Sagan, who was, you know, ethnically, biologically Jewish. I think he was a great father. And obviously, it's not a prerequisite that you're practicing in any way. He was a lot. I actually had his widow, Andurion, and I had his daughter on the show last year. It was quite delightful. I want to ask you a little bit more about Einstein. But before I do, I want to ask you about your current book, the role of ego that is played throughout the book, or that is demonstrated throughout the book, at least in

Starting point is 00:11:52 the character of Andre Linday, who plays a role in my story, the story of Bicep 2, the story of inflation, chaotic inflation. And you look at this remarkable individual, and you sort of about him as the man, you know, who comes closest to grasping infinity in the modern application of chaotic inflation. You say of him, and I quote, it's a beautiful kind of passage, you know, that he has this, this healthy ego, and it is something that drives him, but it is, you know, he has come up with the most expansive concept of spatial infinity. And you compare him not disfavorably with the great, you know, an axi mandor and so forth. And I'm not disputing that. But how do you reconcile these kinds of things with the type of science that he does, which you admit may not be falsifiable?

Starting point is 00:12:48 And we'll talk about that as a rubric for science in a minute. But how do you balance that kind of ego that it takes to do great novel science with the humility that you have to have that nature may never afford you the opportunity to be proven wrong? It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today.

Starting point is 00:13:25 Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Well, I don't think it requires humility to think that you might be proven wrong. I think that you can be a great scientist and either be humble or arrogant. I think that, again, going back to whether you can be a talented person and not be morally good, I think it's the same thing. that I've known great scientists who are arrogant and I've known great scientists who are humble. But it certainly does not take, require humility to do science. You might remember that when we're speaking of Einstein, Einstein now,

Starting point is 00:14:32 that when his theory of gravity, general relativity, predicted that light would be deflected by the gravity of the sun or any massive body, which is not true in Newton's theory. And the British scientist, Arthur Eddington, went to test that during an eclipse, to measure that. And sent a telegram to Einstein saying that his prediction of his theory was confirmed and I think someone asked Einstein what he would have done

Starting point is 00:15:16 if the experimental result had disagreed with this theory and his response was then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord because the theory is right that's right And, you know, that brings me to my, to another theme of today's conversation, which is, you know, the proliferation of that three-letter word, God, that appears so often in various regimes in physics, but specifically in cosmology and particle physics. You know, Alan, I don't know about MIT, but, you know, I never noticed, you know, in the condensed matter, you know, experimentalist hallway, you know, I never noticed them talking about the, you know,

Starting point is 00:16:05 the god instantan or the superconductor god or you know it's always in the and you know the god equation it's always in the god particle the theory of everything is the mind of god according to stephen hawking what is it about our friends and and some of my best friends are string theorist right that that gives this imprimatur by the way do you think they really believe i had minchiokaku on the show uh he claims to be agnostic i really think he's functionally indistinguishable from an atheist. In other words, he doesn't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to. He was raised Buddhist. His parents were Buddhist. He was raised Episcopalian, Presbyterian or Episcopalian. I can't remember which one. But now, you know, he doesn't practice, and he kind of believes in the Spinoza God of Einstein.

Starting point is 00:16:56 But, you know, I kind of view that as almost a cop-out. I taught Freeman Dyson that as well in our many conversations. What do you make of this? And you're a humanist and you talk about that quite frequently. But, you know, sometimes I view that as kind of like a shorthand, like, I don't want to commit when they say they're agnostic. Is that just like a safe way of not having to commit to being an atheist so that maybe, you know, that won't impact book sales, as Stephen Hawking's editor used to say? Or do they really not believe or not have enough evidence to say one way or another that God doesn't exist? Yeah. Well, of course, I don't know what's in the mind of Michiko, Kakou or Freeman Dyson.

Starting point is 00:17:39 I don't know what's in their minds when they say they're agnostics. So, but I would speculate that they're atheists, as I think you are suggesting. And, of course, in the world that we live in today, it's unpleasant socially to say that you're an atheist. Richard Dawkins, of course, has made his name on saying that is an atheist, and I don't agree with much of what he does, not because I think his arguments are wrong, but I think that he is condescending and dismissive believers. And so I respect people who believe in God.

Starting point is 00:18:36 I have many, many friends who are quite smart and talented and creative who believe in God. And I totally respect that. But I do think that many people who say that they're agnostic are really atheists and they're just trying to be polite. and that's my speculation. One thing that is in Hebrew, the term is ain't self without end is God himself. And God is the only entity without spatial extent, without temporal extent, without preexisting creator. And again, I consider myself, this isn't about me the show, but I consider myself a practicing agnostic, you know, in that I am searching, I'm looking, I am not ruling out. But I am also not, you know, I am not devout.

Starting point is 00:19:32 I don't wear yarmaca. I don't, I keep kosher, et cetera. But I think if you tell somebody from the beginning that there's no God, as Dawkins does, you establish, as you say, dismissiveness, divisiveness. And you might even undermine your own case against atheism, you know, for atheism. And I think Hitchens and others did a much better job. Well, Dawkins not only says there's no God, but he says that people who believe in God are stupid, part ways with him on that.

Starting point is 00:19:58 Yeah, and he also said things, you know, if you raise your child as a Christian, it's like child abuse because no one's born a Christian. Anyway, we don't have talking about him. But in Judaism, there's a notion of, you know, God is infinite being and in your conversation in probable and probabilities and talk with Linday about infinity. Now, one thing I've had a lot of discussions, for example, Sir Roger Penrose, I'll put a link to it somewhere in the screen here, is about, you know, the notion of singularity. we're always told we need a theory of quantum gravity because the singularity in a black hole or at the origin of time in the Big Bang, which he doesn't believe in, as you know,

Starting point is 00:20:41 features this kind of transition from infinite temperature, infinite density, infinite pressure to something finite. But I don't know of a single phenomenon in nature that is infinite. I know of things in math that are infinite, but I don't know of any physical process that can transition from infinite.

Starting point is 00:21:00 to to finance. And he gives you an answer in the book that's reminiscent, as you quote, very astutely as you know, you know, Hilbert Hotel, which will put a little diagram, you know, people checking in and checking out. But he doesn't really answer the question, which you pose, but I think is a very good one. Have you ever gotten a good answer to that question of how do you get from, you know, Zeno has asked this question in a different form 2,500 years ago? How do you get from an infinite quantity of something to a finite quantity of something in a finite time? Does anyone have an answer to that? Well, you're not, when cosmologists talk about the infinity, spatial infinity, what they mean is that you could get into a spaceship that went at the speed of light or even faster.

Starting point is 00:21:55 Well, we can't go faster. And you would never come back to where you started. At the universe is finite, eventually you would come back to where you started if you could freeze it at a given moment. So I don't think the question of going from infinite to finite ever comes up in that kind of understanding what's meant by cosmologists. we're not each thing within the universe is finite

Starting point is 00:22:36 but if you got into a spaceship and traveled at the speed of light you would you would keep going and keep going and keep going and keep seeing new things

Starting point is 00:22:49 except for the the fact that discovered in 1998 that the universe appears to be accelerating. So there would be a limit to how far you could get in terms of seeing new things.

Starting point is 00:23:11 But if you could freeze the universe right now so that it was not expanding, not accelerating, just freeze it. Then if you got in a spaceship and went at the speed of light, you would never come back to where you started. you would just keep seeing new galaxies, new things. And that's what the cosmologists mean by the universe is infinite and extent. So I think that we don't have to worry how to go from the infinite to the finite. Lindy himself has been remarkable. You know, maybe it's the, you know, it's this indomitable Russian spirit, which I love and have always been enamored of as a Russian file.

Starting point is 00:24:04 My wife was asking me yesterday, how do you say, you know, there's like signophile and there's, you know, Japanophile, but is there a word for Russianophile? I don't know. Maybe you know. But at some level, you know, these Russians have this predomnatural, you know, gift for confidence. And I remember a debate that he had with Martin Reese and Stephen Weinberg, and they were talking about the multibreys. And they were saying, you know, what level of credulity and confidence do you have?

Starting point is 00:24:26 Would you bet your life? Would you bet your dog? Right. And, you know, and the famous joke is that, you know, Linday would bet Martin, Martin Rees, who's been on my podcast, and he said he'd bet his dog, and Lindy said he'd bet his life, and Weinberg said he'd bet both his life. And, I mean, he'd bet Linday's life and Reese's dog on the existence of the multiverse. You know, and I did a video once about this,

Starting point is 00:24:55 and the nature of faith. And to what level do you really have to have faith? And you end the book and you end that chapter about, you know, it is kind of this most beautiful and kind of the closest we get to, you know, the improbability of infinity and so forth. But, you know, at what point do we really let the beauty of equations substitute for, you know, evidence? And you speak about Dirac's God, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:23 the only time Dirac ever mentions God, You quote in the book, you say, you know, God is a mathematician of a very good order. And that's the only time Drac ever talked about God. You mentioned that in the book. And so, and he also said it's more important that your theories be beautiful than they be, you know, subject to experimental verification. So I guess Linday and him would get along well. But, you know, what's your opinion, Alan? Should we, you know, are we relying too much on pauper?

Starting point is 00:25:49 Are we putting too much faith in the paparazzi, as my friend Leonard Suskin says? The desire for beauty and our laws of nature has turned out to be an excellent guide defining the right laws. So just on a practical basis, it's worthwhile for people like Dirac, Paul Dirac to and Ed Witten with string theory to look for for beautiful mathematics. That has paid off in the past as a practical matter. But science ultimately is an experimental enterprise. And ultimately, any theory, no matter how beautiful, if it conflicts with experiment, has to be discarded.

Starting point is 00:26:50 And a prime example of that was something called parity conservation, which is the idea, and this was very prevalent in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, that everything that you see and a mirror exists in nature. When you look in a mirror, you reverse right hand and left hand. And the statement of parity conservation is that the right-handed things, that there are an equal number of right-handed things and left-handed things in nature, that the mirror image of nature also exists, in other words. And it's a very pretty idea. That is, why should nature have a handedness? Why should things, more things be right-handed than left-handed?

Starting point is 00:27:41 And as you know, in the 1950s, I think it was, there were some experiments done that showed that nature, in fact, does distinguish between right-handed and left-handed, that the mirror image of nature does not exist in the same quantity, and that this beautiful idea is wrong. So then everybody had to go back to the drawing board and start revising their theories to agree with this new inconvenient fact. And, you know, even Einstein, despite his statement about the bending of light, I think did put a lot of stock into an experiment and even suggested some experiments of his own. So it's true that today theoretical physics has sort of backed itself into a corner where we believe in these things like the multiverse and string theory. that have beautiful aspects to them. And of course, string theory is very beautiful mathematically,

Starting point is 00:28:53 even though I don't understand all the mathematics of it. But we have to be willing to discard those things if they're experimentally proven wrong. The problem is, the rub is that we will probably never be able to prove string theory wrong and will probably never be able to prove the multiverse wrong. will probably never be able to test those ideas. And that's where the real problem comes. And then you have to ask the question,

Starting point is 00:29:25 if we're doing things in science that we can't test, if we have theories that we can't test, is that really science or is it theology or philosophy? And, you know, we can debate on that question. That gets into the question of what is something? clients. My theme, and I can't resist putting in one sound effect if my listeners will indulge, I'll put it in a baseball sound effect here, Alan.

Starting point is 00:29:57 And that is, I think it's very important to get points on the board. And I talked to your cross-town rival Kamran Vafa last year. And I said, you know, tell me a falsifiable prediction that string theory could have been wrong. And he said, well, string theory has a prediction that the mass of the electron should be essentially it was, you know, a couple thousand or million times greater than the plank mass or, you know, less than the plank mass and a couple of billion times less than the plank. You know, so some range that's pretty big, you know, plank mass is pretty large. But anyway, it was a prediction.

Starting point is 00:30:31 It was a wide range. It was like me saying, you know, I weigh less than, you know, 80 tons and greater than a microgram, you know, which after COVID, you know, I put on the, you know, the COVID-90. I haven't put on quite that much, but my viewers will notice undoubtedly some gain in my girth. But nevertheless, I saluted him because, Alan, it was putting points on the board. It was showing something that could have been wrong. It could have said, you know, it's greater than the plank mass,

Starting point is 00:30:59 and then you could just rule out string theory, right? On the other hand, you have people like Kaku who will say, well, the G-minus-2 anomaly, you know, that's a prediction of string theory. I said, really? I don't recall anybody, you know, a month ago saying, don't worry next week, this result's going to come out. Even though Brookhaven had the results 22 years ago, nobody did that. And he said, no, no, no. You have to tell me the initial vacuum conditions of string theory. Then I can tell you which instantiation of the string theory landscape is, and I said, that's not my responsibility. And he said, well, how many, you know, how many solutions to Maxwell's equations are there? I said, there's an infinite number, but we have boundary conditions from observation.

Starting point is 00:31:46 And so my implication, you know, to strength yours is look for the low energy limits, look for the ways to connect with observation that you already have. I mean, you know, when people tell me they need a future, you know, Hadron Collider, you know, squared, I say, well, you know what you do have that, you know, that God or, you know, the multiverse has given you. It's given you this collider that takes these 30 solar mass, you know, black holes and crashes them together at half the speed of light. You know, what's wrong with that? Can you do something with that to test your theory of everything?

Starting point is 00:32:17 And usually they say no. I say that one of the problems with string theory is that there are a zillion different possibilities or vacuum states to use your language to start off from. So they're 10 to the 500 power or something like that. And so that's one of the reasons why I can't make any predictions, because there are too many possibilities. And Maxwell's equations, there's only one set of equations, so the two are not comparable in any way. Going back to your crosstown rival at Harvard,

Starting point is 00:33:03 the late great Stephen J. Gould used to speak about non-overlapping magisteria. He used to say that religion and science were separate, you know, but equal. I want to apply that to writing and science, and you do both exceptionally well. Should we view those as non-overlapping magisteria? I usually say to my friends, you know, I joke around. I say it should be a moral obligation to communicate science. If we get paid by the public, Alan, I feel that, you know, people should do what you do, you know, and communicate to the public, whether for profit or to write and think in public,

Starting point is 00:33:41 because without the public, you wouldn't be able to do what you do. I wouldn't be able to do what I do. And so not giving back in a way the public can understand. They can't pick up PRD and understand it. So what do you feel about that? Is there a NOMA aspect that, well, no, you're good at science, just stay in your lane? Or should we be encouraging young people to do what you do so well at MIT?

Starting point is 00:34:02 Should that be a model for the rest of the world to adopt, including here in San Diego and elsewhere? Well, I think that there should definitely be some scientists who communicate with the public and explain science well to the public and write about it in not only a factual, accurate way, but in a literary way. But I don't think that all scientists need to do that. you know, if every scientist wrote a popular book, nobody would have time to read them all or even a small fraction of them. So I think it's efficient for the community of scientists to produce several people who are writing about science for the public. But it's certainly not a moral responsibility for every person to do that. That's my, when I say every person, I mean every scientist.

Starting point is 00:35:02 I certainly think that every scientist should be sympathetic to this activity. And there was a time in the early 1970s when very few bona fide scientists were writing about science. Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould and the area of biology. let's see, Jim Watson and Richard Feynman in the areas, well, Jim Watson is biology, Richard Feynman and Steve Weinberg in physics. There was a period of time then where writing, for a scientist to write about science for the general public was considered a waste of time. time. It was, you were looked down upon as a scientist by the scientific community. I think that that era has passed. I do think that every scientist should respect those people who are spending part of their time or even all of their time writing about science and talking about science for the

Starting point is 00:36:14 public. Yeah, and certainly, you know, sounds like you were also influenced very much by Carl Sagan, who you met. I understand at Cornell during a sabbatical you had for a couple of years. He was a great influence. I regret never having met him, but he was a huge influence, and I do know his widow has been on the show and his daughter's been on the show. He's a great influence, and of course, I think he was unfairly penalized for outreach, famously not getting into the National Academy, despite his incredible scientific output, creating, you know, new fields, astrobiology and so forth, and not the least of which was his outreach to the public

Starting point is 00:36:58 that reached billions in a way that even Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was in some ways a protege of his, who's also been on the show. I'll put a link to his episode somewhere around here. I want to get to, because I know you only have another 10 or so minutes, I want to talk about a book that made a huge impact on my life when it came out in 1993. I was just a beginning graduate student,

Starting point is 00:37:21 and that's Einstein's Dreams. And that is a wonderful, delightful fantasy book. And that's so, you know, just, I remember reading it. It was like, how can a professor in MIT write a book like that? And I wonder, first of all, if you're familiar with the works of MIT graduate, Jan 11, and her wonderful books, her fictional books, you know, that she seems to be kind of in that mold of, like, you know, super competent. Also, you know, a relativist like you. What is it about the water on that side of the Cambridge River that gave you the liberty to kind of write a fantasy, a book about these different modalities, these different ways that time can manifest itself?

Starting point is 00:38:07 And what gave you the confidence to do that? You were, you know, this is 30 years ago almost now. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

Starting point is 00:38:30 The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. What gave you the confidence to write that book at that time in your career? Yeah. Well, that book didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, as a child, I was interested in writing and science both. And I wrote a lot of poetry as a child.

Starting point is 00:39:00 So I was interested in trying to somehow pursue a career in both the arts and sciences from a young age. So I was writing and publishing poetry in small magazines in the 1970s and early 80s. And I began writing essays about science in the early 1980s. And as I wrote more essays, I began twisting them to include fictional elements. The essay is a very flexible literary form. You can be informative, you can be poetic, you can be personal. And I began putting fictional elements into the essays that I was, writing and eventually that led to Einstein's dreams. So there was a long runway for Einstein's

Starting point is 00:39:55 dreams. The runway started when I was 12 years old. It didn't have anything to do with being at MIT. It just had to do with my longstanding interest in both the sciences and the arts and in philosophy. I've always been interested in philosophy. When I was in college, I was debating about whether to major in philosophy or physics. I took a lot of philosophy courses and philosophical ideas have entered and all of my writing, which is, I think it's apparent in the book Einstein's dreams. And I have a question from my audience about that wonderful book, and it relates to a topic that we had discussed earlier, and that's Sir Roger Penrose's past guest Nobel Laureate, a past guest on the show of his conformal cyclic cosmology. There's a lovely quote, and this is from James R, one of my

Starting point is 00:41:00 listeners. There's a lovely quote in Einstein's Dreams, which made me wonder, suppose time is a circle bending back on itself. The world repeats itself precisely, endlessly. What do you think about Sir Roger Penrose's ideas? And obviously, those came out actually afterwards. You talk about his ideas later, this kind of Uroboros in other books that you've written. But what do you think about his ideas now,

Starting point is 00:41:26 28 years after Einstein's dreams? If you wrote Einstein's Dreams too, would Sir Roger Penrose be true? Well, I wasn't aware that Penrose was advocating a cyclical universe. I'm aware of his work in cosmology, and I'm aware of his book, The Emperor's New Mind, in which he says that mental phenomena have a quantum mechanical element to them. But I don't know anything about his advocacy of a cyclical universe. I know his work on twisters.

Starting point is 00:42:08 Yeah. He's a real. He's a, he's a, a phenomenon. I mean, he's one of a kind. He's one of the, you know, maybe the greatest mathematical physicist in the last century. Yeah, he's, he is a phenomenon. He turns 90 this August. I'm delighted to be able to speak of his birthday party virtually.

Starting point is 00:42:30 He's become a friend. And so his model, I'll put links to the interviews I've done with him up here in the video when it comes out. His model came up really, in contrast, Andre Lindy and the work of inflation, which he views as, you know, I guess I can't imitate him, but as is a form of, you know, rubbish as the British might say in that, you know, this spawning of the multiverse, at least in spatial infinity, is very problematic. and as he has said, and my friend Paul Steinhard has said, is undermining of the scientific method and that it basically makes falsification and the 400-year-old practice of science dating back to Galileo, you know, impractical and so forth.

Starting point is 00:43:17 We don't have to get into that. We've already spoken about it. But he has these unending cycles that he calls aeons during which the very low entropy conditions of the universe can be gobbled up, and the universe can be started off cyclically, without a bang, without a singularity, and it can repeat many times over.

Starting point is 00:43:38 And he claims there's evidence for it. I've actually fought with him about the evidence that he claims as kind of confirmation bias, and that's kind of fun to do to challenge somebody who himself is an iconoclastic character challenging the dominant orthodoxy.

Starting point is 00:43:54 I want to ask you, getting back to Einstein's dreams, What of those many scenarios of time, of universes, of different ways that things can play out? How did, you know, which one kind of resonates with you? For me, as a parent, it's impossible not to think about the universes, you know, where, you know, children and parents are interacting in these ways. Either there's a barrier and they cannot interact and there's a mournfulness and there's a soul in that book. It's so painful.

Starting point is 00:44:27 couldn't have appreciated that, Alan. I didn't as a 21-year-old graduate student. And now I do, reading it again. It's so delightful. By the way, if you're an Audible member, and I hope someday Audible will hear this and sponsor me. But anyway, but you can listen to it for free. It's unaudible, I believe, if you're an Audible member. So I urge people, if you've read it already, please read it again, listen to it again. I think Alan will get the residuals no matter what you do. But the bottom line is, it's such a delightful book. But are any of those more resonant with you now? as an author. I know as a reader, many of them resonate more with me now than they did 30 years ago. Do any of them resonate more with you as the author 30 years hence?

Starting point is 00:45:06 Well, there's some of them that resonate more with me as a human being. And those are the worlds in which we try to live in the present. The present moment is important. And I think that since I've written that book 30 years ago, since that, we've had the advance of the internet, smartphones, Google, all of those things have come about since I wrote that book. And it's made the world faster and faster. The speed of, the pace of life has always been regulated by the speed of communication. And communication has gotten faster and faster and faster and faster.

Starting point is 00:45:52 In 1985, near the beginning of the internet, it was about a thousand bits per second. And now it's a billion bits per second, is the speed at which we can transmit information. And we just rush around far more than is healthy for us, checking off items on our to-do list, and we cut down our efficient use of time to 10 minute units of efficiency.

Starting point is 00:46:22 You know, if it takes your printer more than a minute to spit out five pages, you get impatient. If you have to wait in a doctor's office longer than 10 minutes, you get impatient. So we need time to slow down. I mean, we need the permission to slow down and just pay attention to where we are at the moment and what's happening at the moment. I think the pandemic has helped a little bit in that regard because it's forced a lot of people to slow down. But looking back on that book now, 30 years ago, the worlds in which the moment is precious are the worlds that are most meaningful to me now. Yeah, and me too. I get emotional thinking about it, Alan. You know, also.

Starting point is 00:47:25 having young kids, a little bit older kids, you know, intermediate kids, listening to it. And I'm guilty. I feel so guilty, he's telling you this. But when I listen to it the second time, I listen to it at 2x speed. And I knew you'd probably be mad at me, but on the other hand, I can listen to it two or three times. And I can jump around. And I just feel like it's such a gift that you gave to the world because you're also giving

Starting point is 00:47:51 permission to geeky, nerdy physicist. And, you know, the joke about scientists, how do you know a scientist is outgoing because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you? And most of my audience are brilliant, and they love it. But it's a book that a real scientist, a real scientist can get into, and you can grapple with these notions of causality, of reality. But you'll also be, it's a literary gift. And I want to thank you. I've wanted to tell you that for nigh on 30 years since I was a graduate student, but I have, I appreciate it more as a parent and being mindful and thinking about meditation, but also listening to it at 2X speed.

Starting point is 00:48:30 Anyway, Alan, we only have a few more minutes. I want to ask you the questions. I ask all my guests from billionaires and brainiacs to Nobel Prize winners, MIT professors. I think MIT and Harvard are battling it out, along with UCSD, for the most frequent university employees to grace my show and be and honor me with their presence. So, Alan, I sent you the questions. If you're willing to answer them, I would be so honored. And one of them relates to the title of your book. So that'll be the last one.

Starting point is 00:49:00 First one is a question I asked my guest, and that is, what would you put on your ethical, not in your material will, your ethical will? What wisdom or values do you most want to articulate to future generations as an inheritance? And it is some piece of wisdom that you'll give to your biological errors, but also to your ideological errors of which I consider myself one. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I think that religions differ greatly and their values and morals, but I think most agree on that.

Starting point is 00:49:42 I think that that statement first appeared in Isaiah and the Old Testament, and that would be what I would pass on. That's funny. You're not the first secular humanistic Jew to quote from the Old Testament, the Tanakh. One of the first was Androian, who quoted from Mika, and she said, act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly. But she admitted the last three words with your God. And we laughed about that. But that's okay.

Starting point is 00:50:21 That's okay. Okay, the next question has to do with a great scientist and communicator, very much reminiscent of you, Alan, and that is Arthur C. Clark, not a Jew. Nobody's perfect. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. What material object or knowledge would you put on or in your monolith? So you've probably seen in Arthur C. Clark's 2001, a space odyssey. There are these monoliths that are built by extraterrestrial species, which are eventually discovered in the solar system. And this is not too dissimilar from Feynman's cataclysm questions. So what thing would you put on a monolith, a billion-year time capsule to be discovered that's to be an emblematic representation of what humanity achieved? Well, I would not put any of our mathematics and science, because I would assume that that would be known by other civilizations. I would put some of our art.

Starting point is 00:51:19 and I would put some of Beethoven symphonies in there because the artistic expression of a civilization is unique. And I would put music because it does not require a language to translate it. So I would put some of Beethoven's symphonies on there. I'm particular about symphony number nine, I think, or maybe the maybe the Moonlights, Marada. But that's what I would put in the time capsule. Wonderful. And yes, when I asked Anjurion that, she said, oh, I already did that with the Voyager

Starting point is 00:52:02 Golden Disc. She put her brainwaves on it along with world music. So that was the first example of world music in human history being recorded. So I hope ET can understand a phonograph. Okay. The last one relates to probable impossibilities, and that is Sir Arthur C. Clark's third law, which states the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. I thought you'd like that. That's the origin of the name of this podcast. Alan, what aspect of life seemed mysterious and maybe even impossible to you, but now that you've had the benefit of life and experience, you'd tell that young version of yourself to give you the courage to go into the impossible. thought about this one. Well, I think something that I couldn't imagine

Starting point is 00:53:07 when I was a young person was being a parent, making a baby with another person and then being a parent. I think as much as we read about that and talk to other people that we don't really understand what that is. until it happens. It's, of course, your parent mentioned that here, but it's one of the most glorious aspects of living.

Starting point is 00:53:43 Of course, people who don't have children often have good reasons for that, so I'm not, you know, discounting that decision. But that's something that I couldn't possibly imagine when I was a young, person. Yeah. But as you already said, even if you don't have parent, even if you aren't a parent and don't have children, you can still pass on your values, your wisdom to ideological errors. Alan, I want to thank you so much for being a mentor remotely to me, whether you wanted to or not. Thank you so much. And have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you, Brian. Thanks for inviting me and having me on you.

Starting point is 00:54:28 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at

Starting point is 00:55:09 Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th,

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Alan Lightman: Astronomy's Tolstoy -- Improbable Possibilities, Einstein's Dream, & More (#164)

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