Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Are scientists welfare queens in lab coats?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Just before we begin today's episode with the inimitable Shelley Wright, my colleague here at UC San Diego, I want to share a couple of reflections that I had from my conversation last week's podcast with Avi Loeb and my friend Eric Weinstein. And it's kind of remarkable for me because Eric was one of the first guests I had on the podcast when it started in earnest in 2020 during the plan pandemic, however you want to call it. And he's been a frequent guest, or he was. if we can guess for the subsequent three years that followed, and then something changed, something happened either in our relationship or in our ability to get together and record a podcast,

Starting point is 00:00:41 even though we got together many times for other occasions, including multiple trips to Italy and many dinners in Los Angeles at very delightful kosher restaurants throughout that fair city before it was subsequently scorched this past year, and something had changed. it wasn't exactly clear what had happened in the last two years since I had him on for a dedicated episode. And that was actually a two-part episode. And you can find that in the back catalog with one part with Daniel Green, another professor, colleague of mine here at UC San Diego. And then a solo episode of Eric and myself covering many topics. And it was about a year into the Ukraine invasion by Putin. And it was about a year before the election in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:01:29 And so we covered a lot of things, but it was many, many, many years coming between the episodes. And since that time, I had had the opportunity myself to go on several prominent podcasts, including Joe Rogan later on in 2023, actually episode 2023 of the Joe Rogan experience, easy to remember. And subsequently with all sorts of folks like Andrew Huberman and as well as with Stephen Bartlett and Jordan Peterson, and many other conversations that I was able to have. And Eric, in some sense, was my podcast guru in many ways before going on with Lex Friedman in 2021. That interview, you know, was sort of prompted, not directly connected to Eric, but it prompted in some ways due to the connections that Eric and I had been able to facilitate together.

Starting point is 00:02:18 Obviously, Eric knew Lex long before I did, but we became friends and we have a nice relationship as well. And in the past two years, since Eric was on, the world has changed so much in both subtle and seismic ways. In the realm of science, however, one can really argue that very little has changed, at least in the ways that seem to matter most to people like Eric and Avi Lope and myself. And that's why this discussion with Eric and Avi was less an interview of a reckoning, a reckoning with the state of physics, the nature of scientific institutions, including peer review, where Eric and I have had sharp disagreements. And the unsettling question of whether or not progress itself has been deliberately stalled or impeded by the very institutions that are supposed to uphold it,

Starting point is 00:03:00 institutions such as the CDC, the NIH, etc. Actually, thanks to Eric, through Eric and through his connections, I was able to meet Dr. Jay Bratatiria, who's the proposed head of the NIH in the Trump administration. I wouldn't have happened without Eric and getting to know him, and Jay's become a very dear friend and trusted confidant. And as you know, Eric has long argued that theoretical physics has been, as he put it, and there are interviews soft sunsetted. That is, its trajectory has been subtly but decisively redirected away from the breakthroughs that once defined what physics is all about. And this is not the hard type of suppression of a Galilee or a runo facing an inquisition and a fiery demise, but something, in my

Starting point is 00:03:44 sense, altogether more insidious. The slow bureaucratic asphyxiation of ideas that really do threaten the status quo. We have seemed to reach us all, at least in theoretical physics and experimental physics, projects like the Science Observatory are making incredible leaps and strides, and I'll be updating you on that shortly. We've just established the first light data from the large aperture 20-foot diameter telescope in Chile on an 18,000 foot mountain top that we basically built for the express purposes of exploring the early universe. It's quite magical. Our sister telescopes to the south, the Vier Rubin Observatory is coming online with an amazing a camera and many other projects as well. So in experimental and observational science,

Starting point is 00:04:25 nothing could be further from the truth than to say that there's been a lack of progress. And sometimes Eric focuses mainly on the theoretical, rather than the experimental or observational triumphs that have occurred in the last 50 years. But nevertheless, his thesis is compelling, and it resonates with many, a deep sense of unease that the golden age of theoretical physics, which began in the early 20th century and lasted over 100 years, or maybe slightly less than 100 years, some put the cutoff point at 1984 as the discussion with the anomaly cancellation in string theory is sort of as according to Eric Marks sort of the end. I don't actually agree with that. I think there is tremendous accomplishments in theoretical physics still going on,

Starting point is 00:05:04 but you cannot help to admit that the 20th century, which saw the discovery of general relativity, special relativity, quantum mechanics, the standard model of particle physics, a center model of cosmology, the unraveling of the atom, the exploration of, the solar system and beyond. But in those decades, something has really shifted. The questions have remained, and the low-hanging fruit has been stagnated. So why is that? Have all the low-hanging fruits been truly picked? Is stagnation really our destiny, or is it simply that we reach the limits of the human minds intellectual capacity? That the fundamental nature of reality is more intractable than we imagined is certainly something we have to contemplate. And it may be that our

Starting point is 00:05:49 AI overlords come to our rescue and launch us into a new age, a new golden age, a second revolution. Among many fronts, I'm using AI all the time in my research, and it's been transformative. But is it going to lead to the breakthroughs that provide new physical insights into the laws of nature, provide grand unified theories, theories of everything? It's not at all clear that that's possible, as I've commented many times on many podcasts with many of our great guests from Jan Lecun to Terry Sandowski and many other experts in artificial intelligence. I'm dubious about that. So is there another psychological component that's at play, an academic ecosystem that we could improve upon, allowing us, rather, to foster the next Einstein, before academia weeds

Starting point is 00:06:37 them out in a tapestry of DEI and required classes on how best to hate America, as many institutions do. And Eric, of course, is not one to mince words and his targets during this conversation that we had that I write about in my Monday Magic mailing list. I hope you all subscribe to it. Just go to Briankeen.com slash list. We can sign up there. If you have a dot edu email address and he live in the U.S., I will send you a meteorite. We heard him mention Michi Okaku, Brian Green, Lenny Suskin. These are all people that, for one reason or another, Eric, believes have a lot to answer for, for shaping the public perception while offering little of substance and incentivizing a risk aversion over a revolution. And so, as always with him, there was a brutal honesty, but also deep frustration,

Starting point is 00:07:24 I think, and it may be wholly justified. Now, Avi Loeb, on the other hand, is refreshing in that he's a pragmatist. He took a different approach. He's one of the few voices in academia who's actively pursuing ideas utilizing his privilege of having tenure, and in fact being completely free academically to pursue objects flying through our solar system like Omuamua, other anomalies, and the larger question of whether or not extraterrestrial intelligence is already interacting with us on Earth. And that's this episode of The Into the Impossible with Shelley Wright.

Starting point is 00:07:57 You'll hear me talk about Avi, and I talked about Shelley with Avi. So it's a nice symbiosis to follow this somewhat link to the audio essay is my want, but we always put a timestamp so you can skip ahead if you don't want to listen to this, get to the good stuff with Shelley. But Eric sees institutional rot as a near-fatal condition. Avi, perhaps I do as well, seems to believe that the patient is science itself, and that patient is still capable of a dramatic recovery given the right treatment. But what struck me most about the conversation was not the disagreements, nor even the specific critiques of string theory, quantum gravity, Anthony Fauci,

Starting point is 00:08:32 the bureaucratic machinery of academia, it was the question of credibility. Science as an institution once held an unassailable, authority. It was the domain of rigorous inquiry, a falsifiability, of theories tested against the cold reality of the cosmos. But today, trust in science has been eroded, not only by external political forces, but by its own internal contradictions. The pandemic made these explicit. Science was no longer a process, became a brand, an ideological cudgel wielded with absolute certainty, even the face of its own uncertainties. And even hearkening back to my friend J. Bratari, he was threatened and in fact the victim of a conspiracy between Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins

Starting point is 00:09:14 to obtain what they called a devastating takedown in public of him, J. Badacharya, a fringe epidemiologist. Well, now the tables have turned, and of course he's not a vindictive person, and I look forward to him running the NIH, hopefully swiftly and soon, and providing for transformative changes to our health care system and to the delivery of health to the public. And so that public who should be always skeptical of institutions and demand not fealty, not obedience, but rather understanding. And we are our own worst enemies, because the less that we communicate with you, the less we make it seem that the ivory tower walls are actually paper in nature, easily penetrated, that the emergence of figures like those of Eric Weinstein and many-time past guest and upcoming future guests would be

Starting point is 00:10:02 Hassanfelder, Garrett Leesie, Stephen Wolfram, many others that aren't part of the orthodoxy, each of whom, who has in his or her way positioned themselves as dissenters from the mainstream. This speaks to a titanic shift in the public's perception and interaction with science. So the question is whether or not the schism is repairable. Eric seems to believe that the damage is near total, that the institutions of science have become so self-referential, so solipsistic, so risk-reverse that the only solution is to burn it all down and start over. You were ninjas and scientific lab coat dress. We gave you technology and what is your effing problem?

Starting point is 00:10:38 We should be paid, according to Eric, far beyond the level of a hedge fund manager. From whom I don't know and from where Eric does not say. Avi, by contrast, sees a path forward through data, through public engagement, through a new kind of curiosity-driven science that doesn't begin with the answer already in hand. What about me? I find myself wondering whether the conversation we had the first, at least in two years with Eric, was itself a kind of intellectual soft sunset, a moment of reckoning, yes, but also a reflection of a deeper inertia, one that will persist long after the microphones have been turned off.

Starting point is 00:11:12 And perhaps the true test of science is not whether we can produce another breakthrough on the scale of relativity, but whether or not we even have the will to try and dare to do these great things again. I remain hopeful, but I am also for the first time in a long while, deeply uncertain. And with that, rather depressing note, I bring you a march, more optimistic conversation with my good friend and respected colleague, Shelley Wright, who's seeking answers, seeking someone at the other line of an extraterrestrial phone call. Enjoy.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Are scientists welfare queens in lab coats?

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