Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Anthony Aguirre: Cosmological Koans (#184)

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Physicist Anthony Aguirre studies the formation, nature, and evolution of the universe, focusing primarily on the model of eternal inflation—the idea that inflation goes on forever in some regions of universe—and what it may mean for the ultimate beginning of the universe and time. He is the co-founder and associate scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute, which supports research on questions at the foundations and new frontiers of physics and cosmology. Anthony is also a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, an organization aiming to increase the probability that life has a future, and of Metaculus, an effort to optimally aggregate predictions about scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs, and other interesting issues. Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality, physicist Anthony Aguirre explores deep questions about the nature of reality, using an approach inspired by Zen koans to take the reader on a thought-provoking tour of the cosmos and the core ideas of modern physics. The book covers a wide range of topics, woven together with a fictional storyline that recounts a journey from Italy to Japan. Multiple universes, the nature of time, the meaning of quantum theory, and entropy and information are among the subjects explored. @AnthonyNAguirre http://fqxi.org/ http://www.futureoflife.org/ https://www.amazon.com/Cosmological-Koans-Journey-Physical-Reality/dp/0393609219 00:00:00 Intro 00:06:22 Why did you right Cosmological Koans? 00:11:48 How do you reconcile the mysteries unanswered by physics? 00:17:08 Are you a Buddhist? Views on theology and the nature of reality. 00:22:18 Do we need a theory of everything? 00:31:56 Why did you set the book for when you did in the 1600s? 00:39:01 About the historic period in which the book is set. 00:41:23 What you have to say about cosmogenesis and big bang cosmology? 00:50:52 Thoughts on the multiverse theory. Could other universes have different constants? 01:11:56 How much of physics/cosmology is really sociology and our need to believe? 01:21:42 What discovery gift of knowledge would you put into a time capsule for the ages? LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/impossible to post a job for free.  Audible is hands-down my favorite platform for consuming podcasts, fiction and nonfiction books! With an Audible membership, you can download titles and listen offline, anytime, anywhere. The Audible app is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. Audible members don’t have to worry about using their credits right away. You can keep your credits for up to a year—and use them to binge on a whole series if you’d like! Start your free 30-day trial today:  Audible.com/impossible or text “impossible” to 500-500 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️Listen on audio only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php Please contact [e-mail] to learn more about sponsoring Into the Impossible. A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everybody. You're not going to want to miss this episode of The Into the Impossible podcast featuring a scientist I've known for well over half my life. Incredibly impressed with him when he was an undergraduate at Brown University, where I was a graduate student. He is a theorist by training, but he works on some of the most cutting edge aspects of physics, ranging from information theory, quantum mechanics, the multiverse, one of the foremost proponents of visualizations of the multiverse. inflation, but also an old-time cosmologist in a young person's persona in that he really doesn't just dismiss things because of, you know, received wisdom. In his book, Cosmological Coens,

which is one of the most delightful books I've ever read, in kind of the spirit of a Stephen Hawking or Carlo Rovelli, you will find yourself betwixt and be mused by this wonderful book, which is really a travel log that takes place in the 1600s and kind of teleports the reader through time and space to encounter the most magnificent and mesmerizing concepts in the world of physics in cosmology, ranging from the arrow of time to cosmological inflation to the Big Bang, the steady state as well.

And ultimately, the meaning of paradoxes called co-ons. in this case, it's Professor Anthony Aguirre, a university professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, way up north, one of the northern UC schools in these wonderful university that I am a part of. And I'm proud to be a part of this university because of professors like Anthony. So I do want to alert you to this amazing podcast. You're going to love the interview. And we covered so much. He's a close, close friend and colleague of Carlin. Raveli himself and Max Tagmark and many other great scientist, Sean Carroll, that we've had on the podcast.

And I can't believe that someone's so skilled in sort of the hardcore quantitative arts of theoretical physics can write such a magnificent book that's kind of part Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance combined with a book on modern cosmology. So you're not going to miss it. Please do me the favor of subscribing. to this channel on YouTube or if you're listening on iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify or any of those places, follow it, subscribe to it if you can't. Leave a review. That really helps me. We're up to about 200 reviews so far. I can't tell you how much that means to me. That's all I'm asking for. And so for now, sit back, enjoy the phenomenal, the effervescent Anthony Aguirre, a man I've known since he was a young kid. And now he's a university professor. The highest, uh,

honor we can give to a faculty member at the University of California and for good reason. So enjoy this episode with Anthony Aguirre and stay tuned for more wonderful guests coming up on this podcast. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And today it is a great pleasure to talk to a friend of mine, a colleague, a fellow professor in the same university, that being the University of California. California. And that is Anthony Aguirre, who is a professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, home of the banana slugs. I always forget. That's correct. That's good. Okay. Banana slugs, that's why you never

come down to UC Irvine, because there might be an ant eater that mistakes a banana slug for an ant. Anyway, I don't know why I would bring up. Because it's also very dry. You know, we like our moisture. That's right. Anthony, I've known you since you were an undergrad. at Brown University when I was a graduate student, so much older, so long ago, and yet it won't even come close to talking about the subjects of your book, which take place in the 1700s. And that book is really a work of art, Anthony. You know, we haven't talked very much lately, recently with the pandemic and so forth. I stopped by your neck of the woods about a year and a half ago, right before COVID sort of kicked in

and I wanted to stop in and see you, but we didn't get to connect, but nevertheless, here we are. And in that time, I hadn't read your book at that time, even though it was published by the same publisher published, Losing the Nubal Prize, which is Norton, and endorsed by some of the most luminous luminaries in the world, including my new friend Carlo Rovelli, who is teaming up with me, and another Italian physicist to make the first audiobook of Galileo Galilei, dialogue on the two world systems, which features, plays a role in cosmological co-ins. And that is really a book, as Carlo said, a gem of a book. I found it magical.

I found it really delightful. And, you know, it's like I read these books and they're written, and I'm sure if you ever get a chance to look at, you can skip over most of my book because you know a lot of the physics in it. It's the personal story that's different. This book, you really can't skip over so much. Very dangerous to do. It is.

And it has such a delightfully playful approach to the biggest questions in the universe, the smallest things in the universe, and everything in between. So first, welcome to the Indian Impossible Podcast. I've wanted to have you for a long time. I'm so glad you can make it. Thank you. It's great to be here. So this book was seemingly came out of nowhere, and yet there's nothing really else like it. It's sort of when you pick it up and you see Kohan, you think, I immediately thought, oh, great, Anthony's gone woo.

He's gone woo-woo. He's gone to the woo-lee master side of things. No offense, whatever, his name is Gary or whatever his name is out there. But I was a little afraid. You know, you see Kowans. You see the physics of God and the God equation, which is now coming from our friend, Michi Okaku, who will be on the show shortly. What inspired you to write this book, Anthony? I think it was really thinking about what I find inspirational as a physicist. I think there's a sense that what physicists do is like sit down and do dry technical stuff and they try to make predictions and they run gigantic experiments to test physics theories. And all of that is true. All those are part of the job description.

But for most of the people who are really, really excited about physics, like you and I and many of our colleagues, that's not why we got into physics to, like, write grant proposals and sit on committees and, like, look for funding for massive, you know, experimental programs. We got into it because- I like that. I like being on committees. You like being committees and fundraising. I get long-in. Gotcha. But I think most of us got into it because we see this world around us and want to understand how it works. And as we discover some of what science has discovered about how it works,

we realize how crazy and mysterious the truth of how the universe works really is. That it's not at all the way we think it is, you know, in our everyday life, you know, we've got objects and they kind of move around. And there's physics that describes that. But as we get deeper and deeper into it, we understand, you know, how mathematical it is, how paradoxical it is, how counterintuitive things are, when compared to sort of our everyday understanding of things. And the magic, I think, of physics is seeing that there's this kind of secret world behind the scenes, there's this whole other way of looking at what the world is doing,

which is different and also true and mysterious. And you can come to understand more of it, but the mystery remains. And in fact, I think part of what inspired this book was the feeling that the deeper you go, the more you understand about how the universe works, the more mysterious and the more subtle and interesting the questions get. And so my hope for this book was to really try to give a reader a bit of that experience, that there are strange things about the universe and there are big questions for physics, like, what is the dark matter? You know, this is a big interesting question. But there are a whole

bunch of other big interesting questions that are very subtle and very deep about the nature of reality that you don't read about so much. And so that's one goal. And the other goal, I think, was to give a little bit more of the, I write in the book a wonderful description by Albert Einstein. who said one of the, one of the most beautiful experiences that a person can have, I'm paraphrasing here, is of the mysterious, you know, to see that behind, as I was saying, behind the sort of facade of the world, there's this deeper reality that we can, that we can only touch upon. And I wanted to try, if I could, to give the reader a little bit of that experience.

And as I recount in the book, there's some parallels to this. and the process that takes place in Zen Buddhism, where the idea is not to sort of impart knowledge on you, but to give you an experience, to confront you with a question, and confront you sort of so forcefully with that question that you have no choice but to sort of be all about that question and an awe of what the different answers could be to that question

or what that question means, what it means for you. So there was an inspiration in this method of Zen of kind of sort of confronting the student over and over again with more and deeper versions of fundamental questions. And that's kind of what I wanted to do in the book, to take the reader and kind of and bring them to this place of here's what we know about reality, but there's this question. Here you go. Have at it. Think about that. And to bring them to that place. where that's so wonderful as a physicist to say, I don't get it. I don't understand. How can reality be that way? And yet, it's got to be like this or it's got to be like this, but they're both super weird, that feeling of strangeness of the way that the world really works. I wanted to help the reader come to that. Yeah, I find that stochotomy that we have as physicist.

On the one hand, you know, people, as you say, look at physicists at, you know, towards the end of the book, you talk about how, you know, in principle, it should be, I think Rutherford said something like that. You know, everything is either physics or stamp collecting, meaning that the laws of chemistry can come from the laws of physics, the laws of biology can come from chemistry, which comes from physics, et cetera, et cetera. So there's this kind of... So we have this, you know, swagger associated with ourselves

that we're, you know, kind of the top apex predators of the scientific world. And yet, you know, this book really points out this undermines that that pyramidal structure because you really reveal, not that we're ignoramus, but just that, you know, as, as Wheeler, John Archibald Wheeler said frequently, and you quote him throughout the book, I'd love to know if you ever met him. I never did, but, but Wheeler said something to the effect of, you know, as the island of knowledge grows, so does the boundary of our ignorance, you know, the coastline of our ignorance grows too. How do you handle that? You know, when you, you know, you have young kids, I have kids, you know, they think of us as just like, we're Wikipedia,

basically you put in and ask them a question, I'll come and answer. Yeah, we can handle most of the ones that are tough for late people. Why is the sky blue? You know, what, you know, what caused the galaxies to move away from us, whatever. But we can't answer, you know, what happened before, on a Tuesday before the Big Bang yet. We can't say what our electrons made of yet, or, you know, what is the true fundamental theory. You think that's just a byproduct, you know, In other words, of our success in that we've explained so much with so little, just the laws of mathematics and some observations. We've only been doing this since about the time of Galileo in a quantitative form. What do you attribute that to?

And are you uncomfortable, like not knowing? Because it seems like a con, if I'm not mistaken, is sort of a paradox that makes you uncomfortable or should. Yeah, I would say, you know, my reaction to that is sort of one of the light and opportunity in that, I think once you really understand something really well, it's not that interesting to keep thinking about, right? You know, certainly as a physicist, we learn Newtonian mechanics, for example, you know, in high school or college, and there are, you can go sort of deeper and deeper into Newtonian mechanics, but nobody wants to just spend 30 years doing incline plane problems. Like, you can get really good at them, but, okay, where's the challenge? It just doesn't get, it's not interesting

anymore. So I think what is amazing about the way the universe has turned out to be is that it is both comprehensible that we can make tremendous progress in understanding how it works to the extent that we can, you know, make predictions that show 11 decimal places of accuracy. We can launch satellites along the right trajectory to basically then just coast their way to another planet, you know, that we can do all these things with enormous precision, and yet it also holds enough mystery that there are so many still open, unanswered questions, and even some of the most basic, simple ones, like you said, what is an electron? We know everything about how electrons act in order, you know, in the sense of predicting

everyday phenomena that involve electrons. We can do it so well, you know, we can, that we can devise devices. and with whatever characteristics we want, whatever behavior we want, we can build computers with gigantic amounts of computation built into them. But the question of what is an electron exactly in a way that is really sensible

and really feels comfortable in a sense and you feel like, yes, you told me, now I really know what an electron is. That doesn't exist at the moment. And that's an amazing thing to be able to understand the world so well in certain ways, but still have that mystery there. But I'm so happy that that's the case. I would find it so disappointing if I felt like the whole world was just fully understood. We understood

how everything worked, and there was no more mystery there. I would find that terribly disappointing. Other people might find that comforting and pleasing, but not me, though. So that's my own personal preferences, I guess, that I would want that mystery to remain there. Yeah, and it sort of echoes a conversation that I've, that I had with the late great Freeman Dyson, and it actually did involve religion. You know, I, you know, I'm forbidden to convert by nature of what my religion is. He was a matter of the Jason Society, allegedly, it's top secret, but they meet here in San Diego, California, and La Jolla. And so he'd come to visit in the winters. For some reason, he didn't like being in Princeton in the middle of January.

So he'd come down here and it spent some time. we got to know each other really well. He's actually like 90 years older exactly than one of my kids, and they got along really well. And we talk a lot. And sometimes we talk about religion because he was famous for kind of being an agnostic in some sense of devout agnostic, as I call myself, is not too far from what I perceived him to be. And I said, well, what is it about religion, you know, that is interesting to you? And why don't you, as most, you know, scientists are pretty fairly strongly held in terms of secular. And he said, well, you know, God is a mystery. And, you know, and science is a mystery. There may be puzzles along the way. And the distinction he made is,

you know, puzzles can be. The mysteries perhaps can't be. You know, you were always a better student than I was, Anthony. So you could solve some homework problems or whatever that I could never do. And, but, but there might be mysteries that you can't solve. I can't, nobody can solve. And that's kind of the essence of these con. So, uh, talk, us, sir, what, what, what, What inspired you? I mean, are you a Buddhist? I mean, have you been, like, have I known you for 30 years and secretly you're a Buddhist? I've dabbled in the sense that I've certainly read Buddhism. I've sat Buddhist meditation retreats. So I don't like being any ist too much. I still, you know, I do consider myself a scientist, but, you know,

that's a bit of that's a bit necessary but I you know I try not to adhere myself too strongly to to any particular set of beliefs other than the ones that I've you know feel a really good have have sort of a professional interest in in some sense but so yeah certainly I've I've read Buddhist philosophy and done some practice. But I think this, this is, you know, the purpose of this book is not so much about, you know, trying to merge physics and Buddhism or something. I think there are some, there are some nice parallels in certain places, but, but it's more, here is this parallel in, in method, really.

and a little bit inexperienced, like the sort of mystery and awe and kind of don't know, like, God, I just don't know, that is part of some of those fun, interesting science, I think has a parallel in the questions that Buddhism confronts people with of who are you, what is this about, you know, what are you as a person in this world, what is the meaning of all of this?

Those existential questions, and it's not just Buddhism, of course, that confronts you with these things. I think, but I think there's a parallel in that the part of the Zen practice is to confront you a bit more forcefully. Like, not let's idly speculate about who are you, but like, who are you right now? Who are you? Answer the question. And you're like, I don't know who I am. What am I? I'm just this thing. The sort of bafflement is, it makes you very uneasy in a sense, but I think is also a sort of a gateway to like a deeper investigation of yourself.

And in the same way, I think these, I hope that these questions that are in cosmological co-ons are kind of a gateway to deeper investigation of reality of the physical universe that we live in. Yeah. It wouldn't be the first time, though, that members of the Buddhist persuasion were practicing physics in your part of Northern California. Our mutual friend David Kaiser pointed out in how the hippies say physics, many of them were not located too far from where you are in our lovely city to the north. I do miss it, and I hope we can get together in person one of these days. Either you come here. I've been there a couple times, including a... around the Bicep 2 affair, which we just celebrated, it's March 2021, we're according

this now, we just celebrated the 7th anniversary of the announcement of Bicep 2's, you know, ill-fated announcement, but you were kind enough to invite me to give a colloquium there. And I had a wonderful time and I met some wonderful colleagues of yours. And in fact, you know, I'm remembering you did, you do quote Freeman Dyson, actually in one of the chapters of the book in correspondence with Dick Feynman, with Richard Feynman. Right. Oh, I'm sure we'll get to. But in this concept of, you know, what sounds crazy, maybe so, but it may be true.

Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host and style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini-craft ice, cube ice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd. at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, U.S. only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See Store Online for details. And I think, yeah, there are these interesting

kind of co-ands. And so you've answered that because I think it kind of aligns itself nicely with what we do in physics. It is, it is sort of, you know, these inscrutable things that the more you think about it, the less you understand, perhaps. But maybe, as Wheeler said, you're just pushing this, that's a byproduct of this game. And I think, you know, maybe just combining the Bicep 2 experience with this book and with what you talk about, you know, I often thought during Bicep 2 that there, you know, obviously there was a huge competition to win, you know, one of these, which, you know, one of my guests, John Mather left in my mouth. Is that filled with chocolate? This is, I can't say. But, but, you know, the competition to do that, I think, you know,

to win a Nobel Prize. And as I said, I have Mitch. Chiaukaku coming on, and he's not afraid to be a little on the woo-woo side of things. But in his new book, The God Equation, he keeps tweeting out that, you know, you can be the next Einstein and win a Nobel Prize and be a physics god if you can discover this equation, which is one inch long, and it contains all the mysteries of the universe. And, you know, first of all, what kind of font, you know, could you write, you know, even the laws of strict? But I want to ask you, one of the questions I've been really ruminating on a lot lately is, you know, do you know, do? Do we need a theory of everything?

And this is kind of Brian's co-on. Actually, I have a couple that I'm going to run by you for, you know, the second edition of Cosmological Coins, which is just such a lovely book. I really feel like it's a book that you could give to somebody. I've been dealing with some extremely well-known individuals who are very wealthy, very successful. And they're like, I want to learn quantum mechanics. And I'm like, all right, well, let's start with trigonometry. me.

If you put it in the effort, you learn trigonometry, which is a prerec, you can learn it. But one of my cons is, you know, is sort of do we need a theory of everything? Like, who says there is a theory of everything? Because, you know, when I talk with Sir Roger Penrose on the show a couple months back, I said this to his base, or at least to the screen, I said, Roger, you know, and Hawking prove these singularity theorems and black hole theorems, et cetera. but the circular logic, which lends itself to the Keating Kauan, is to say, well, the only two areas that I ever hear we need quantum gravity for are for singularities in the black hole or in the beginning of time if there was a beginning of time. And yet, both of those are inscrutable, completely. We can't go through an event horizon. We can never get some data from inside of a black hole. We can never go back and observe the physical conditions at time equals zero, if indeed, time.

time had a zero point, which you discuss in the book. So I want to ask you, you know, what is it? What is it about? Is it just this need not only to wrestle with koans, but to come up with them ourselves? Because I don't see that there's some letter from God or from, you know, the Buddha or from whoever, or from Feynman. I mean, just take Feynman as a God. He said, if it doesn't, I don't care how beautiful your theory is, Anthony, and you have some beautiful theories. But I don't care how beautiful it is. If it doesn't agree with the experiment, it's wrong. Now, I said, said that to John Preskill, who's the Feynman professor of physics at Caltech, and he said, I said, what about string theory? We can't even see if it's wrong. It might not even be wrong.

And he said, well, you just have to try harder. So what are you saying? Is it a fool's errand? Is it a Buddhist quest? What is this quest for the theory of everything? Yeah, well, there are a lot of pieces of that. I think one is why do we think of a theory of sort of fundamental particle interactions, including quantum mechanics and including gravity and including all the other fundamental forces, why do we think of that as a theory of everything? It's sort of clearly not a theory of everything in the sense that there are many, many questions for which that theory will be absolutely useless

in predicting anything. So it is a, so there's, the very question includes a sort of worldview, in which there's a sense of, there are levels of description of reality. There's the everyday level with objects moving around and things and substances and stuff. There's a sort of chemistry level of reality. There's a particles and fields level. There might be a string or whatever level.

So everybody sort of agrees that that is the case, that there are these different ways of looking at reality. that are useful for different purposes. String theory will be totally useless for deciding, you know, what the climate is going to look like next week. You know, you don't need string theory. You don't want string theory. You can't use it.

You want hydrodynamics and a climate model and a big simulation, right? So it's utterly obvious that everybody agrees that these are, these different levels of description of reality are good for different things. But there's a, there's also a worldview that says, But the lower down ones, the more fundamental ones, are more real and more true and more right in some way. And so as we get more fundamental theories, we are getting better and truer and more right theories until we get the most fundamental one, and that's the most true and most right, and that's the theory of everything. And I think, you know, I never quite bought into that worldview. there always felt like something was a little wrong with that.

But as a card-carrying theoretical, you know, high-energy physicist, at some level I had to adhere to that creed for a long time. But I think, you know, as time has gone on, I've just less and less been able to swallow that idea, that there's something more true or more right about the more particle or field-based descriptions of reality. and more sort of accepting of the point of view that reality is what it is. There are many different sets of tools that we can use to investigate and understand it that reveal different truths and different things that are useful and not useful in different ways of understanding reality using them. And they're consistent with each other to a large degree that I won't find in my everyday physics of the world

that energy conservation is totally violated and that things can just pop in and out of existence. And there are reasons for that that I can sort of trace to what I call more fundamental levels of reality. But I can also trace things the other way. You know, that given that the everyday world is the way it is, chemistry couldn't be that different. You know, particle physics couldn't be that different. These things are very connected. And what you call more fundamental, as I've, you know, as I argue in one of these, co-ons is really rather unclear when you start to really analyze what do we mean by fundamental.

So I'm, I at some level, take a little bit of issue with the question of the theory of everything being a theory of fundamental particles or fields or strings or whatever. I think there may be some theory that we come to that we have trouble finding anything to to improve upon in the sense that we have trouble finding physical phenomena at that level of description that aren't accounted for by that theory, but that will not be a theory of everything, I don't believe. Now, in terms of the technical details of like,

why are we discontent with the theories that we have of quantum mechanics and gravity, as you said, there certainly are places where we know we can't just do with one of the other. We, that there are sort of physical paradoxes that occur, that if you just naively say something is gravitating like it is in general relativity and it's quantum mechanicating like it does in quantum mechanics, that you, you can't write down a consistent set of equations that make sense in both ways. And, you know, so that need is, the need is there intellectually.

I think I would agree that at the moment it's not there experimentally in the sense that we don't have experiments for which they're you say, oh, I can't account for this experiment using the known physics that we have other than questions about cosmology and like the nature of the dark matter, the nature of the dark energy. where, you know, relics like baryons that were made of came from. So there are these cosmological questions, but as you know, it's very difficult to find things terrestrially that the confronts us with some piece of experimental evidence that doesn't fit into the physical theories that we have. So, yeah, I think in that sense, we want those theories. We need them if we want to feel that they're, that at the sort of,

particle and field, very tiny micriscuitant level of reality that things are consistent and comprehensible. But I don't think that if we found a theory that did that, we could say, okay, we're done. We understand what reality is and how it works, and we don't, you know, I'll get my T-shirt and we'll be done. We can pack up our bags and go home because, you know, science is complete. So, yeah, that way I see it would be my feeling. When I think about the book, you know, can't avoid the impression that the setting of the book, and I always hated Anthony when you were asked to go on a podcast and the host says, you know, can you tell us everything about this book?

And maybe, you know, so just save, you know, 20 bucks so that they don't have to buy an actual copy of it, please, you know. I want to deliver value to my audience. We never ask for that. My audience gets the value from the guest and they read the book. hopefully they will buy many copies of it. It certainly is one of the most delightful books. I've read in a long time. It's really no parallel to it.

Carlo Revelli kind of comes to mind, but even he had to submit that this is a gem of a book that he did not write himself. So I want to congratulate you on that. And I want to just ask you a question because I can, as the host of the Into the Impossible Podcast, do this. I want to ask, why did you set it when you did? I don't think it will spoil anything to tell the readers that the book is a journey and it's an experience,

but it kind of jumps between times, but it's always taking place in the 1600s. It interleaves the Middle East, the Far East, and actually Europe, and it takes place in some parts, you know, before Galileo was Galileo, in a sense. And as you may know, Galileo is one of my heroes. I write about them a lot. I have even a further puppet of him. So, yeah, why do it? More of a fan than I.

I have a fan. I don't have the puppets. I have one of the Anthony Aguirre one over here. No, no, that's not one. So, yeah, why does it take place in that time? And why does it take place where it takes place? Yeah, so originally, so this is just a sort of a history of the ideas in the book at some level. originally I thought of when I thought about writing physics co-ons I just started having ideas for ones that would take place in all kinds of different locations and settings and everything so I just started writing them down I then tried to kind of organize them into different time periods so I could have some sort of narrative and I ended up with some that were taking place in in Japan in sort of the 12th century that's when when the great Zen teachers

Dogen was teaching, some that were taking place in Italy with Galileo and then some that were taking place now. But then it started to feel like there are three different time periods. Everything is not in order, hard physics ideas. Nobody's ever going to possibly, you know, even make it through this book. It's so confusing. That may still be true, but I made it true. I try to boil it down a little bit by picking one time period and turning it into a single journey. So the book does recount a single journey that starts in Italy, ends up in Japan, takes 30 years or so of historical time. And although the co-ons don't happen in order, there is an order to them, which would be even fun to read sometime the co-ons in the book in their historical order. That would be rather different.

So I think it's an amazing time because it is the birth of science, really, in the Western world. Well, the birth of science, period, at some level with Galileo. I don't think that's any real exaggeration. It was astonishing, I'll fanboy a little bit on Galileo now, it was astonishing, you know, you read his dialogues. And I basically transplanted one of them directly into cosmological co-ons, you know, and attributed, of course. because they read so much like modern physics reasoning. I mean, you can just read them right now. They totally make sense.

You're totally thinking, wow, he's really, oh, my God. And that's true. If you go back and read Plato, Aristotle, for example, it's in a very different sense. You're confused reading it. It somehow doesn't connect. You have to really pour over it to try to understand what they're saying. Yeah.

It's like right there. It was like it was written last year. And he even comes up with things that are philosophical and psychological. I had this quote. I did a video called Deconstructing the Dialogue, and I actually read the whole book, which prompted me to realize, you know, as I did with your book, I listened to it because I can set it on 2x speed and get through it in only six hours for your book. But Galileo, I was like, oh, man, this book's 550 pages longer than Anthony's book. This is going to be ridiculous.

And I know people on my channel are getting sick of me. always talking about this project, but I'm very excited about it, because there is no audiobook of the dialogues, you may know. And reading it, it's one of the most, it's one of the most delightful books, I think, in human history. There's a passage in this conversation between these three interlocutors, where Sagredo, who's kind of the educated layperson, I'm going to play Sagredo and this work with Carlo Rovelli being Salviati, as you couldn't guess, which role he's going to play. And then my good friend, Luccio, Picciarillo, is going to be Simplicio, the simpleton. But the part that I get to read is, one of them, is the following, which goes by the name of the Dunning-Kruger

effect in psychology. And it goes like this. Gallo writes, as Segredo says, this vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. for anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished would recognize that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing and I think it's so cool because he's like basically saying like the more you know the more you realize how little you know but you also can have this false impression of your own abilities so yeah he is and he's just an amazing writer. He talks about the value of money and what people trade. He was kind of a stoic, and he

had this kind of Zen quality to him, too. He was, of course, not without as many foibles. But you're right, going through this. So how did you choose 1608? Why not? I was thinking it would be me. In my book, I talk about him in 1610 after the, after Cedarius Nuncius is published. But why did you choose that particular period? I should be, first of all, particularly clear that as a work of history, cosmological co-ons is, you know, what's the polite word, nonsense. It's, you know, based on, it includes historical figures, and I've tried to use real historical figures and a little bit of a sense of what was going on in these different places at this time. But it's also got a genie, you know, and a vast conspiracy across the multiverse.

So it's not to be taken as a historically true document. So I wanted to roughly, in terms of Galileo, pick a time where, you know, that would include the coming across the telescope. There's one co-on that talks about, you know, thinking about telescopes and microscopes. And, you know, I tried to make the experiments with falling objects, roughly contemporaneous with when they were supposed to be. But, you know, I'm not a historian, and I'm not a historian. going to, I'm not going to represent that anyone should read it as an accurate historical document. It's really sort of to be read as a disclaimer noted. Disclaimer note. Don't worry.

Yeah. The physics, I tried very hard to make exactly right. But the history, yeah, I will, if historians read it, I can only apologize. So, but I found it, yeah, just just completely delightful. But the Zen master that you mentioned, Anthony, that was a real figure. I'm just not familiar with that aspect of Zen Buddhist. Well, Dogen didn't appear in this book because I put it all in the 17th century. So he was earlier. There's some quotes by him. The 17th century coincides with the kind of the period in Japan, the Edo period with the Shoguns and samurai and all that sort of thing.

So it was interesting there. there was a book on my my father's bookshelf, The Unfettered Mind. So the Unfettered Mind is a book by this sort of swordsman and Zen Master that was sitting on my bookshelf as a kid. And I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house that had, you know, I had a father who wasn't physicist or a scientist, but he had a deep abiding kind of lay interest in it. So his bookshelf was chalk full of Paul Davies and Michi Okaku and all kinds of entrancing books about how weird the world is. But it also included some Eastern books and one that I remembered is the unfettered mind. So I was delighted to come across that this was exactly the time period where the author of that book lived. So this is, it's always fascinating when you

see just like with Galileo, something, you know, you put it off your bookshelf and find that there was this living, breathing person back there that wrote these words and that are coming to you. It's kind of a magic thing that you can reach across history like that and really make contact with someone. But he was at this time. And so I sort of picked interesting historical figures and tried to weave them into the narrative of that sort of archetypal journey from West-East also. I think there's that sense of the, you know, I don't want to be demeaning to the West here, obviously. This is just, it's also a journey sort of from youth to maturity as it goes on because the, the protagonist sort of leaves Italy as a youth and arrives in Japan as a middle age person after having traveled the whole world. So hopefully they've accumulated a little bit of wisdom.

So there's a little bit of that sense as well. Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit now as we move away from the book about your research in cosmology. And actually, you know, the last kind of stepping stone from the book will be, you know, there's kind of a beautiful passage. You talk about inflation, you talk about the steady state theory and many other kinds of explorations of modern cosmology in the 20th century. and what we know now. And there's a passage where you talk about inflation and the, you know, eternal kind of chaotic inflation of Linday and others. And you say that in a certain sense, we find in doing so that you get the big bang, you know, kind of stitched into the steady state.

In that, you kind of make it. So can you expound upon that a little bit more? And then I'd love to talk to you about, you may not recognize this room, but this is the office once held by the late great Jeffrey Burbage. And Jeff inhabited this office and was not a big fan of the Big Bang, as you know. And actually, you did some of the most recent work that was quoted in my book on ways you could salvage the Big Bang. Sorry, you could salvage the steady state model of Jeffrey Burbage. But can you first tell us, what do you mean by, you know, stitch the Big Bang into the

steady state or, you know, maybe even vice versa. It could work just as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so what was beautiful about the steady state theory as a, you know, so just to backtrack a little bit, there were two kind of rival theories that were in the cosmological world in the 50s and 60s and a little bit the 70s. The Big Bang model where the universe started in some hot, dense, early state a finite amount of time ago and has expanded since then. And the so-called steady state.

And the steady state similarly had an expansion, but it had an additional property that the universe was and always will be more or less the same at all times. So the steady state, although the universe evolves locally, globally it's kind of always the same. And what was really appealing, and I thought beautiful about this theory, is that the Big Bang theory is based on what Einstein called the cosmological principle, which is that there isn't a space. special place in the universe that everywhere in the universe is kind of the same as everywhere else. There isn't a center. There isn't a, oh, look, this is the top of the universe or anything like that. Everywhere is statistically speaking, more or less the same. And if you go on a large scale, it looks more or less the same. And the steady state just extended this time. They said there's not just no special place or direction in the universe, but there's no special time in the

universe. Every time is more or less the same. So it's a kind of more symmetric, more organized in a sense more principled version of the universe. Slight defect of this theory was that it was just wrong. Observational, it does not appear to be a case. So there are things that are evolving that we can see. And, you know, this was true in the 70s and 80s, but it's super true now. There's just simply no way you can make a steady state-like idea work for the observed universe. And so we kind of vacillated Big Bang, Steady State, Big Bang, Steady State,

and Big Bang resoundingly triumphed in the sense that, the observable universe appears to follow the Big Bang theory. But this really interesting thing happened, I think, which is that the theory of inflation, which was devised essentially as an explanation for the early conditions of the Big Bang theory, why do these universe have these particular properties at this early time, that it is hot and more or less uniform and dense and expanding with just the right level of fluctuations in it? Why does it have those properties? the inflation was devised as a way to explain those properties based on some fairly simple set of physics and processes.

And it does so quite beautifully. But and so it was thought of as sort of this little fix that you would stick into the big bang. Like there was a messy kind of universe that was a big bangish stick in inflation. It fixes everything up. And the universe is nice and very big bang, uniform, isotropic expanding, doing all. the right things. Sometimes when you change just a little bit of something, you find that it has much bigger implications than you thought. And what has happened with inflation is that it was discovered fairly early on and developed ever since then, that inflation very much has a life

of its own. The very properties that allow it to fix the Big Bang also give it these semi-magical properties of being able to bring into being a tremendous amount of space time and matter to fill it. So the particular properties of the substance that has to drive inflation, the inflaton field, is that it essentially creates more space. It creates this anti-gravity force that blows the universal part. But as it blows apart, it doesn't get any less dense. So you create more space, but also just the same amount of, energy filling that space. And so it's this feels like cheating kind of process. There are ways in

which it's not cheating that you can sort of talk about, but it feels like cheating. It creates this gigantic space more or less out of this tiny little bit. But this process is very hard to stop. So once it gets started, it's very hard to stop the universe from inflating and blowing up and creating more and more space and time. And so what people discovered early on was that if the physics is right for it, and it often is, what you'll find is that it doesn't stop. It only stops locally in some little place, and that looks like a Big Bang universe like we see. But elsewhere, inflation just goes on and on forever, never ends. This is called eternal inflation.

And once you admit that possibility, or once you sort of postulate a theory that has that property to it, then the large-scale picture of the universe becomes much more like the steady state, because this inflationary process that goes on forever, you can show that what that actually looks like is that the universe is more or less the same at all places and more or less the same at all times on very large scale. So it's a revival of the steady state. The eternal inflation is a steady state picture in which here and there little big bangs kind of go off where inflation stops and a big bang cosmology begins.

And so I just find it fascinating that we, this vacillation between, you know, Newton thought that the universe was infinite and, you know, infinitely old, infinite age, infinite in size. Then we replaced it with a big bang, and then there was a steady state. And now we have this crazy combination of the two where locally it looks like a big bang, but globally, it could be this very big state picture. So it's an amazing thing where, again, you think you've got it all worked out. Oh, the Big Bang, it's right. Universe is 13.8 billion years old. We understand it all. But then you realize, well, okay, that might be just this tiny, tiny little spec in a vastly bigger and more complicated background.

That's very delightful to hear it from the man himself who has, I believe, the honor of the actual description being attributed to. you in the Encyclopedia Britannica, is that not correct? That you have described the multiverse. That sounds more impressive than it is. I think it's true that Encyclopedia Britannica, when they had run through everyone else, landed on me to write the entry for multiverse. I used to get these things like, you have been selected to appear in who's who among American individuals or something.

And if you pay the 5999-99, you can appear in the next edition. So I was a sucker that said yes to this. He said yes. An article about the multiple. A collection, hypothetical collection. So that's what I want to get into. So potentially diverse observable universes, each of which would comprise everything that is experimentally accessible by a connected community of observers.

And you go on a little bit. I want to ask you, when we hear about that and we hear about the string landscape, I am going to be having a conversation quasi-debate with an intelligent designer who is an intelligent intelligent designer. His name is Stephen Meyer. He wrote a book called Darwin's Doubt and another one called The Signature in the Cell. And he's got a new book called Return of the God Hypothesis in which he does battle with Lawrence Krauss and others over some of the necessary but perhaps insufficient descriptions of fine-tuning that there is in modern cosmology and modern molecular biology, et cetera, et cetera. But he also goes through the string landscape and talks a lot about that

and necessary conditions for string theory to produce a multiverse-like entity. I want to ask you something that I've never gotten a great answer to. So we often hear, and you describe this in the book, too, that it might be possible in such a multiverse to get any value you like, any of the physical constants, which in some sense might alleviate the so-called anthropic principle paradox, which is a type of koan, I suppose. But in other cases, it might make it even more complex because the sheer number of universes that could exist, according to, you know, string theory, 10 to the 500, 10 to the 1,000. And you go through this and you go through some of some of the objections that Penrose himself.

had with entropy when you describe entropy in the book. But I want to ask you a question. I often hear that we'll have different laws of physics in each one of the string landscape models or maybe even in each of the multiverses. So I have two questions. One is, why is it that just changing the vacuum, you know, the VEV, the vacuum expectation value in a string theory, Calibia manifold? How does that change the laws of physics? In other words, would there be five, you know, fundamental forces? Would there be 100, whether it be one. That's question number one, and you could choose to answer it or not. And then question number two is, why stop there? In other words, why only the laws of physics? Why not the laws of mathematics? Why would anything be the same in any of these universes

that are completely different entities from the one that we inhabit? So first, why does changing the vacuum value of the energy of a configuration called the Calibium? Why does that lead to different laws of physics? Yeah. So what's less, left out of that sentence is a few words. So what they really mean are it will lead to a different set of low energy effective laws of particle physics. And this is very important because they, the assumption is that the two sort of pillars of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, as they might be combined in a string theory in this picture, they're unchanged. So there's still this, in this sort of paradigm or kind of way of thinking,

there's still this kind of platonic idea that there's some fundamental laws of physics that are mathematical and form. They exist sort of transcending physical reality in some sense. They're the same everywhere and in all times and everything. And those are, you know, string theory, which includes quantum mechanic, string theory, which is sort of based on quantum mechanics and includes general relativity, but then also includes these other sort of local, lesser forces like electromagnetism.

So that's an important distinction that some of the laws of physics are held to be the same everywhere and at all times, and in this sort of transcended sense. And other ones are thought of as kind of local conditions, much like the, you know, the laws of hydrodynamics sort of work. Well, there would be, there's some particular, you know, rules of hydrodynamics that function in this room that are particular to the setting of this room and elsewhere, you know, the laws might be similar,

but there'd be different conditions. There might be more different gases involved. There might be, you know, some different initial, some different boundary conditions of a window open or whatever. they're more local things. So the, excuse me. So the

way that story works is that as you said, there's this string theory and there are these, this is a bit of a long story, but to make it very short, it was shown actually not that long after Einstein's general relativity

that if you had extra spatial dimensions, the behavior of fields in those extraspaceal dimensions, when you confine yourself to less dimensions, so if you had a five-dimensional space, or space time, rather, four dimensions of space and one of time, if you confine yourself to three dimensions, for one reason or the other, like the extra dimension is really small, or you can't get to it, or for some reason you can't access that other dimension. So you just get to experience physics in the three spatial dimensions that we have, that there will still be a sort of manifestation of that extra dimension

as fields that are in our space that have properties and dynamics. So what they showed in particular was that if you had five-dimensional space time and general relativity, you could get from that four-dimensional general relativity, three-spatial one-time dimension plus electromagnetism. It just kind of came for free, where the field that the electromagnetic field essentially is another name for this extra hidden dimension, in a sense. This was by Kaluza and Klein. And the idea of string theory is that it's this on steroids,

that all of the stuff that we call electromagnetism and the strong and weak force and the symmetries that they enjoy are all really properties of these hidden extra dimensions. And so if you change the properties of this hidden dimensions, which can physically happen from in different places and different times, then you change the properties of the effective physics that you see in our pedestrian small three plus one dimensional universe. And so we say, oh, look, there's two versions of electromagnicism, or there's no electromagnetism, or, you know, there's an extra strong force that behaves differently or whatever, they emerge from those extra dimensions in just the same way that electromagnetism does in the collude decline theory, and there's no reason that those can't vary from place to place,

while at the same time in relativity, again, and quantum mechanics are the same everywhere in this picture. So then that would explain why the laws of mathematics wouldn't change, or laws of logic, or could you envision multiverses where even, you know, 2 plus 2 equals 5? Yeah, I think that's a fairly different question. I think you can, it's certainly the case that the sort of multiverse is that there are many different versions of the multiverse, right? There's the one that I just described, the string theory inflationary one. There's the quantum mechanics one for believers in the many worlds version of quantum mechanics. And in that one, all the laws of physics are essentially the same, and it's just different branches of this wave function.

function, then people have entertained sort of more, even diverse multiverses in which the question that I believe Stephen Hawking asked, there's a particular set of laws of physics. Why does reality breathe life into this set of laws of physics and make a physical world that is governed by them, but not these other ones? That's an interesting question. And one answer to that question is that, you know, that's not what happened, that all of the sets of equations have life breathed into them. And they all exist in the same way that ours does. So that's a point of view that, you know, Max Tagmark and some others have taken that every set of physical laws that exists with every, presumably every set of boundary conditions that there could be are correspond to a real physical universe in just the same way that, you know, the ones that we seem. to experience do. And I think that's an interesting and sort of self-consistent answer to the question of

why one particular set of laws of physics are the laws of physics, are real, you know, get to govern a universe, why are they so lucky, you know, and all these other sets of laws of physics don't get to govern anything. So I think that, you know, that's an interesting idea that's very hard, you know, it's not one that I personally believe, but again, you know, belief is a you say 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 ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

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. It's not, it's one of the things that I, you know, if someone says that's crazy, I will defend how it's not crazy. If someone says, that's true, I will defend how that's totally crazy.

So it's one of those things that I think the right response to it is, yeah, that's crazy. but it could be true. I don't know. And there are a lot of those things. It's funny because I have a guest coming out in a couple of weeks who has caused me to reevaluate my views of Stephen Hawking. He wrote a book called The Hawking Hawking. It's a critical biography of Stephen Hawking. And actually, I had finished reading a brief history of time. I started reading it in 1989. I finished reading it in 2021. And it wasn't only because it's, it was, some parts of it are a little bit dense. But actually, that was the obstacle in the beginning. And then by the time I was done with it and there was a, you know, full professor at UC San Diego,

I fully understood it and it was parts trivial. But there are parts within it where he talks about work that he did with our other colleague in the middle of the state, Jim Hardle, about the Hawking Hardle, No Boundary proposal. And I started to realize he was an excellent writer. Actually, the book has almost no complaints from me about it because I really love his writing and his character and the things that he says. But, you know, and upon reading it as a mature person, I found it very suspicious, the things that he did,

especially even in the revised third edition, I think, is the one I read. from 2016. So this is after Bicep 2. This is after, you know, many things. And he really made the case in that book. There were two, you know, real purposes for a God in a universe. And one was to create the, you know, originate the universe, what role for a creator if time didn't have a beginning? And that was the notion of the no boundary proposal, which is the basis of a brief history of time, which I only realized as a, you know, fully tenured professor. And then the other purpose for God would be to instantiate the laws of nature. And he claims that was provided in the grand design by M theory. And I started thinking about this, like, neither one of those has, you know,

any observational support, at least right now. And it's very troubling to think that, you know, He really, in one hand, and the no boundary proposes, you know, he basically says, well, if you make time imaginary, do what we physicists call make a wick rotation. You can transform away all the time-like properties of time and make it a spatial dimension that will be like a dimension on a sphere. It has no boundary. It may be compactified, but it has no boundary. And he even says in it, this is just a mathematical trick. And later it's like, now you see, we don't need a beginning of time. So what is for a creation? And if we can get the laws of nature, we'll know the mind of God. I mean, that was one of the first times he said that. Yeah. And I just found it a little disingenuous that he would do such a thing when he knew for sure that, that, you know, it really wasn't so solidified, even the hawking hard. I don't know how many people really put faith in that, in that no boundary proposal,

other than an interesting way to solve the Wheeler-Dowit equation, perhaps. Yeah. But I want to get into, because you are, you gave an incredibly popular. popular talk at the SETI Institute about bubble universes and all. Has your thought process evolved, you know, since your earlier days when you made really fundamental contributions to not only our understanding, but kind of popularizing these bubble universes that go on without end. I really think of you when I think about that. Have you evolved in any way? I mean, as Bicep affected you, as, you know, other branches of physical, or are you as sanguine as ever, so to speak?

Well, I think if you're asking about how have I evolved in terms of like how probable I think it is that inflation is true or that eternal inflation is true or something like that, I would say fairly similar to how I've always felt. Inflation seems like a good and relatively unrivaled explanation for how the Big Bang has the properties that it does. and eternal inflation seems to me like a, if not inevitable, quite natural thing to happen with inflation. And so I think both of those are, to me, just as likely as they ever were. It certainly would have been nice to see evidence of, you know, colliding bubble universes in the microwave background and prove that that was happening or at least get evidence for it. But even when I was thinking about those questions, I figured that that was very low probability that we would be so lucky to see those.

So I think it's, so it's been frustrating in the sense that some things that could have happened that would have made things a lot more interesting and exciting. Haven't, you know, we haven't discovered gravitational waves from inflation. We haven't discovered supersymmetry or anything else of interest in colliders. We haven't discovered colliding bubble universes or other defects. We haven't discovered anything wrong, you know, with the standard model of cosmology. in the microwave background radiation that we can really point to, which is super frustrating. But all of those things were at least a little bit hopeful.

Some of them were more hopeful than others. There was certainly a higher probability we were going to see gravitational waves than colliding bubble universes. But there are plenty of versions, as you know, of inflation where you don't see gravitational waves, right? And so we've been unlucky, I would say, relative to how, you know, we could have been luckier. But there hasn't been anything in the sort of progression of the experiments that have led me to say, well, we've got something terribly wrong or like we're misguided in this whole picture,

just that frustratingly it's a bit harder and going to take a longer than we had hoped to pin some of these things down. I would say, though, that my my excitement about figuring certain things out has shifted a little bit. So when I was first studying physics, you know, in college, if I had been able to skip the thermodynamics course, I would have enjoyed that. Or statistical mechanics, it seemed like the most boring subject.

Like, yeah, there are lots of particles instead of a few. so what? And it just seemed like a mishmash of different ideas, and it kind of was useful for some things I could admit that, but it didn't seem really that exciting intellectually. And that's something I've really changed in. So I've spent the last five years or so really thinking about statistical mechanics and its foundations and these questions, and that goes a little bit farther back about the arrow of time and cosmological boundary conditions, all of which are wrapped up in this big interesting

and information theory, all of which are connected with each other, and it become much, much more fascinating to me. And so I think my interests have changed in what I find personally, like, compelling as questions to investigate, has changed. But I don't think my beliefs about things like inflation or the multiverse have changed that much. Now, in terms of... Okay, go ahead. Sorry. No, no, keep going. In terms of hawking, you know, I think I've always been very frustrated with this idea that, you know, creating the universe from nothing in the way that they talk about it with a Hartle Hawking or Valenkin with this tunneling wave function or any of the other versions of kind of creating the universe from nothing, I've always felt, and I think

they admit this, if you press them on it, that it's totally cheating, right? The nothing is a very particular meaning of nothing, but it includes the laws of physics and, you know, a Hamiltonian. Hilbert spaces and all the mathematics. It's all there. It's a particular nothing, which is like a universe of zero size. You know, you sort of look at the universe in the zero size limit and you call that nothing, but it's really not at all. Right.

So I think it's important to the question of kind of why there is something rather than nothing is just, you know, those studies address it a little bit in the cosmological context, but they really leave the meat of that question very much untouched. I would say. Yeah, it is sort of unsatisfying, but then again, you know, co-ons are not meant to necessarily be a delicious repasts. So in the final, you know, a few minutes that we have, you have another like 10 minutes, Anthony? Or you have a pretty hard out, but I can't resist.

This is so delightful for me. I want to ask you a simple question. What causes time? No, I'm just kidding. That is a colon. in itself. I want to bring us back to some of your papers that you did in the late 90s. Actually,

there were just solo papers that you wrote. And some of them appear in my book. And they involve kind of what it would take to... Dust. Your favorite subject. That's right. Yes, the villain of my book. The gin of my book is sort of dust. But

when I think about those papers, you were kind of doing something radical, which is to, you know, perhaps try to reconcile the the standard lore is that, oh, after Panzae Wilson, the Big Bang won, and Quasi-Steady State was over, and of course, nothing could be further from the truth. And in fact, you know, the inhabitant of my office, the former inhabitant, Jeff Verbage, went to his grave, believing that the Big Bang was false and total rubbish. Worse than that, or better than that,

I spoke to Giant Narlocar on the podcast two or three months ago, along with his wife, who's an eminent mathematician, and we had a wonderful time. And he still publishes books, you know, fundamental problems in cosmology. And, you know, it's sort of, I think it comes down to an uncomfortability, a discomfort rather with singularities, with beginnings of time. And, you know, it's not at all clear that the Big Bang solution was really as dispositive as most people think. And I pointed out in my book, the words Big Bang don't appear in the companion paper to Penzias and Wilson. It was, they only discussed that was by Dickie, Bob Dickie and Peebles and Roland Wilkinson. And I'm going to have on my advisor, who was one of your former teachers, Peter Timby,

is he was a guest on the podcast that's in an episode that's coming out soon. But anyway, we talked about Dickie and what he really felt about the Big Bang and that paper. And again, it mentions a cyclic universe. It doesn't mention the Big Bang at all. And it's not like they didn't know about it. So, you know, when people say, oh, you know, these guys are fools, Hoyle and Burbage and Narla Kar, I don't, you know, I'm much more sympathetic to them.

And I kind of see these echoes going on, you know, right now with my friend Paul Steinhard, Neil Turak and others, you know, are maintaining kind of versions of cyclic or bouncing cosmologies. And they're often ridiculed or, you know, as outsiders and don't they know how successful inflation is. But I think you point out a lot of these things, the fine-tuning problems, the entropy problems. What would you say? I asked Sean Carroll, you know, over lunch once when I was interviewing him a while a long time ago. I said, what are the odds that God exist?

He said, less than a half a percent. I said, okay, what are the odds that the multiverse exist? And he said, 50-50. So, you know, you just said, like, you're disappointed or it is disappointed. We haven't collided with another universe. I mean, the odds of that are pretty, pretty low. And, you know, I want you to be happy and not depressed if this doesn't happen in the future. So, you know, when we think about this, how much of it is wrapped up in our need to want to believe a particular type of story, you know, kind of sociology, which you do get into in the book. Like, how much of physics is really sociology? Well, I'm not sure. There's two separate questions, I think, there. One is, you know, why, there's a question of why, you know, a small minority of physicists continue to believe something when it seems so difficult to believe at this point. And I think there's, there's a fascinating recurring theme where

I would say there's a sort of mainstream that believes a version of physics or of cosmology a little bit more strongly than they ought to given the evidence. And then there's another set of people who say, you're believing that a little more strongly than you ought to, given the evidence. What about this possibility? Okay. And then there's a vicious fight where everybody circles the wagons and identifies themselves with this belief, which is always a tricky thing to do.

But the nice thing about science is that as you progress, one of those things actually does turn out to be right and true and sort of evidence keeps accumulating for it. And that community of people who are doubting it shrinks and shrinks. But I think it's great that they don't entirely go away because it's always useful to have people who are sort of playing the gabfly and pointing out that the evidence for things is not quite so secure as you think it is. And so I think that happened with the Big Bang in the steady state. And what I studied in the late 90s as a grad student, the Cold Big Bang model. So when I came across that, you know, I figured this is not likely to be true, right? It's probably true that all these people with the Hot Big Bang model are right. But they're kind of a little bit overconfident, given what the evidence actually is.

Let me see how hard is it to make this Cold Big Bang model. model work? Like, what really would it take? Is it so crazy? What does the evidence look like? And I think putting that was a great exercise for me to understand both how hard it is to, you know, develop a whole cosmology and have it all fit together, but also how strong the evidence was in some places and how not so strong it was in other places. So once you get off the bandwagon and look at a theory from the outside, you, I think, discover, yeah, those pieces of it really are very secure, and well, these are a little bit more iffy. So I think it's very useful to have people around who will play that role and who will take that outside perspective and point out

where the weaknesses actually are. But I also think that, you know, as a practicing physicist, there's a point where things just get boring. So the Cold Big Bang model got boring for me, you know, after spending a while on it because it just wasn't fun anymore to try to like massage things into making sense when they didn't quite fit with the data. The same thing I think happened with modified gravity. There was a nice idea that maybe, you know, in 80s, that maybe what we call dark matter is just a change in gravity at very low accelerations or large distances or something. Not a crazy idea at all. when Einstein's, you know, the first manifestation of general relativity showed up as this procession of the perihelion of Mercury and people started to invent different, you know, clouds and asteroid belts and stuff that would account for that. They called, you know, dark matter, but it was a modification of gravity.

Not a crazy idea that what we call dark matter is a modification of gravity. And it was an interesting idea in the 80s and a little bit in the 90s and it just got steadily less and less interesting. as more and more data from all sorts of directions just was perfectly beautifully consistent with dark matter and not with modified gravity. So yes, you can still concoct very complicated, multi-component arcane versions of gravity that could sort of explain dark matter in some phenomena,

but it's just not fun anymore, right? And I think there's, you know, it's not so much, there's this saying that you know you have to wait for the old generation to die off you know physics progresses one funeral at a time exactly i don't think it's quite like that i think it's you know people get bored with with thinking about things that don't seem to be true and then there's a few holdouts you know and it might take a funeral for them but but i think in all it's a fairly healthy thing and i think honestly something similar is happening in strength theory. I think people are streaming out of the field at some level because it may be true,

but it's just, it's gotten a little boring to keep coming up with these beautiful theories and mathematics and working things out, but not having the feedback process that gives you more clues as to what's going on. So the, you know, the string theory community is branching off into lots of fun, interesting directions in terms of thinking about the, you know, black holes and information theory and condensed matter physics and all these different things. but the idea of just let's figure out a theory that gives us the electron mass from fundamental considerations, you know, people have tried it and it's not that it's exactly failed, it's that it kind of isn't that fun anymore to do. So that, I think it's not the case, I think it's the case that I can't remember exactly how you posed your question, you know, how much physics is so,

I think there certainly is a lot of sociology and the practice of physics and, you know, creation of these communities and bickering with each other and things that are fashionable for a while and more fashionable than they ought to be. But it's also really gratifying, I think, that in the sweep of time, the physics community, like other scientific communities, do seem to converge on things that they agree more and more on and seem to be more and more true. They really do explain better. they really do work better. You come up with new phenomena and they still fit that new theory,

not the old one. So the whole process, I think, is a really beautiful thing that we've devised, you know, going back to Galileo. He couldn't have known, probably, how amazing a thing it was that he invented, this consensus truth-finding practice that has led us over these 400 years to the place that we are. It really does work. And it's an amazing thing. And there are lots of criticisms you can make of science and lots of the ways that it goes wrong, but I think we have to keep in mind what an extraordinary enterprise it is. Yeah, and of course, you know, Galileo was not without his fault. He believed until, well, his dying day that certain things about the universe were completely different than the way that we know them are to be now. I mean, I don't know

if you know what the original title of this book was, Anthony. This is kind of a test to see if you've subscribe to the podcast yet, I hope you will. So this is the dialogue, of course. So the original title, just to save you, the trouble, was on the flux and reflux of tides in the earth's, rivers, oceans, and ferns. I don't know if you have any ferns up there, but we don't have any ferns over here. But the point being that he thought that the most dispositive piece of evidence for the Copernican universe was the sloshing of water that was caused by the combined motion of

revolution and rotation. Of course, we know that's completely wrong. He also believed that the comets were in the Earth's atmosphere, but certainly that notion of confirmation bias. Now, look, he was right. The Earth does go around the sun. That was completely wrong information for it. Anyway, here's some buzzing.

I've got to go. I know you've got to go. Do you have like two more minutes or should we wrap it up? I'll give you two more and then I'll feel very guilty to the prospective grad students who are probably waiting for me in another. Maybe that's my ploy to get them to come here. Okay, I want to ask you, actually, I'll just ask you two questions. One is,

what would you put in your ethical will? An ethical will is a wisdom will. It's a type of piece of wisdom that you want to bequeath to your ideological errors, not necessarily monetary to your biological errors. What do you like to give most? Let's see. Yeah, I I, that's a difficult question. I would say that, that the, I would probably want to impart upon the younger set of them, perhaps, that, that the questions really are the fun part, not the answers. Awesome.

That's beautiful. The last question I ask, oh, my guess, is kind of a version of Feynman's cataclysm question, except in this case, since I'm the co-director of the Autosy Clark Center for Human Imagination, I used the monolith in 2001, a space odyssey, some time capsule that lasts for a billion years. And so Feynman was asked once, what would you put that encapsulates all of scientific knowledge if civilization were to be destroyed that contains the most information in the fewest words, kind of a co-an of his own, and he said it was the atomic hypothesis. What would you put in?

What discovery have you made in your really eminence? career. I'm so, you know, I can't be proud of you, but I'm so impressed by you. You're kind of like this old guard of physics that's somehow fallen into this my generation. But I want to ask you, what would you put that encapsulates the wonder of knowledge of science that you've discovered by yourself or the combined talent of all the scientists in history that have led to this point? Boy, you have hard questions. speaking as a co-on asking, come on.

I would I think I would say and this is this is not so much a summary of the way physics is now, but I think more of an injunction of the the

way it is in certain ways and the way it ought to be. I think physics is to a surprising degree constituted to make the world safe for observers and about observers. And that sounds totally contradictory and against what you would think about physics. But I think to think about the universe is both objective and constituted so that it makes, sense and has a consistent story to every observer in it, when you manage to reconcile those, you have something of interest. Well, that has officially blown my mind, my brain, and makes me want to get you one of these dolls now. This is a Carl Sagan doll. Is that a Carl Sagan? Where do you get

these things? Do you make them? No, I have a team of graduate students where, no, it's a place called the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild. You can get them yourself. But you deserve one, but you echoed something earlier where he said, you know, it's amazing to read something. And Carl Sagan said, books are proof that humans can work magic because over the centuries, a long-dead writer can be speaking to you. I like to say a podcast is proof that humans can work magic because we can see you, we can hear from you, and we can learn from you. And Anthony, I want to wish you all the best up the road in northern part of California. We love what you do. We hope to come back. We didn't get to talk about FQXI.

we didn't get to talk about future of life, all that fun stuff. Go attract some graduate students to become banana slugs. We love you and wish you a wonderful rest of your quarter, et cetera. Thanks very much. It was just a tremendous pleasure to be here. And thanks so much for doing the service that you're doing and making this show to bring all of this fun to lots of people. It's my pleasure.

Bye, Anthony. Bewell. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. 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 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. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th.

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