Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Avi Loeb + Eric Weinstein: UAPs, Academic Research, & Truth – Part 2 of 2 (#235)

Episode Date: June 26, 2022

Join Brian Keating and his friends Eric Weinstein and Harvard's Avi Loeb for an update on the Galileo Project, NASA's recent formation of a government panel investigating UAP/UFOs and more. Resources here: NASA to Set Up Independent Study on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-to-... Eric Weinstein's Website https://ericweinstein.org Download the first-ever audiobook by Galileo https://BrianKeating.com/dialogue NASA is embarking on a RISKY mission to investigate UAPs https://www.axios.com/2022/06/14/nasa... Galileo Project home: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galil... NASA is putting together a research team to study UFOs https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/9/231... China Says It May Have Detected Signals From Alien Civilizations https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl... Avi and the interstellar meteorite: https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/bad-as... Avi Loeb: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/imitation... Avi Loeb On scientific legacies: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-bliss... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sky is not classified. Let's just figure it out ourselves. You know, why do we need to wait and listen? And I don't have an issue with government. They can do whatever they want. But as a scientist, you know, for millions of dollars, I can build equipment that will give me the answer. Welcome everybody to part two of a special conversation between my friends, Professor Avi Lobb of Harvard University at Harvard graduate, PhD physicist, Dr. Eric Weinstein, a member of Avi's Galileo Project, discussing this fascinating. new creation by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, legitimating the study perhaps for the first time in the NASA kind of pantheon of topics

that they do so uniquely well. And I point out, NASA's got pretty much the strongest brand on Earth in terms of what it represents and what people think about the value of NASA and the cost of NASA. If you ask someone, how much budget of your tax dollars does NASA get? They take it's like $1,000. NASA's budget is like $20 billion. very small compared to the huge impact that it makes. For something less than, say, you know, about the price of Twitter now, not when Elon made the bid for it, but it's then worth, I don't know, 20 billion called that. NASA does so much. And now it's inculcated this project to do in a similar way what Avi had started off to call and collect and construct new tools, methods, observations,

hardware, to observe the sky, not looking for the astronomical objects that he does during the day, but for phenomena, unexplained phenomena, unidentified phenomenon. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode. As I said, in part one, I don't ask for much. I'll only ask you for two things. If you like these conversations, please leave a rating on whatever app you're listening to this on. Just leave a star. One to five.

Prefer five, obviously. But if you have some feedback, leave a one. And let me know what, what you want me to do? Who you'd like to see more of, which you like to see less of? Do you like these live conversations? Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel. We can see Avi and Eric in conversation. And that's a Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube.

And subscribe to my mailing list. Brian Keating.com slash list. And it'll be entered to win something that's extraterrestrial, not of this earth. And that is a fragment or some space dust, some space schmuts from a solar system, not far from here. A fragment of a meteorite or some dust particulates. And I will send it to you. If you live in the USA. I can't ship out of the USA very easily.

But I welcome your subscription to the mailing list no matter what. We have exciting interviews coming up on the podcast, Bill Phillips, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize. We have a first non-physicist Nobel Prize winner coming on, An Economist coming on not too long from now, and many other exciting developments. So please do subscribe the mailing list to keep a prize and appraised of all that. I send out just two emails a month that are kind of previews of what's to come. I love hearing from you. You can catch my interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on their StarTalk podcast.

Don't miss my Alex Friedman interview. Lex's podcast and tell them that you want to have me back. And I'm hopefully going to be invited on both of those shows, as well as my friend Arvin Ash runs an amazing YouTube channel. Look for that episode coming soon. But for now, go deep, deep into the unexplained phenomena that is perhaps lurking within our very backyard. Is that dramatic enough?

Enjoy this episode of the Into the Impossible Podcast, Avi Lope, Eric Weinstein, united together and a discussion of all things unexplained. Enjoy everybody. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud-bay doors, please help. I'm talking with my friends, Dr. Eric Weinstein, proprietor of the portal podcast, and general raconteur-intero, advisor, friend, and mentor to many. Graduate of Harvard, which we'll get into in just a bit, and the Frank Baird professor at

Harvard, former longest serving chair, if I'm not wrong, of Harvard's renowned astronomy department, author of number one bestselling book, Extraterrestrial Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard. And I am your humble podcast host, Brian Keating, proprietor of the Into the Impossible podcast, where I make videos and short form and long form interviews like this, but also short form explainers. I've yet to do one about, you know, how we would actually collect data from this. But Avi, I wanted to ask you, first of all, do you want to respond to the outrageous accusation that? I mean, could you be proven wrong? Could almost, is there anything conceivable that I could, how would and how would I do it?

How would I do it more importantly? It's very simple. I'm really surprised that you're asking this because remember this image from Osiris Rex, this mission that landed on the asteroid Benu, okay? And it will bring a sample of the material that this asteroid was made off to Earth next year. So it was clear from the image when it landed that it's a rock. It was obvious, okay? I would never argue that this is not a rock because it looks like a rock.

Now what did my colleagues suggest for Omoa Muamua? They suggested it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before because a rock of the type that we had seen before cannot explain all the anomalies. So they suggested maybe it's a hydrogen iceberg, a chunk of frozen hydrogen. This is Omoa, you're speaking about not O'Sahua. No, Omoa, and they suggested maybe Omoa is a frozen hydrogen. and then we don't see the cometary tail because hydrogen is transparent.

And I did a calculation that was published where we showed that actually it would get evaporated very quickly through interstellar space. So it cannot be a hydrogen. But let's imagine it is, okay, then the suggestion was, okay, well, it's not a hydrogen iceberg, maybe it's a nitrogen iceberg that was chipped off a planet like Pluto.

And the problem is there is not enough solid nitrogen. But let's leave that aside. There is not enough solid nitrogen to explain a population of this magnet. But let's just say, okay, maybe it's a nitrogen iceberg. Again, something we've never seen before. And the third possibility was a dust bunny, a cloud of dust particles, 100 times less dense than air,

so that it gets pushed by reflecting sunlight without any cometary tale. And I say these are the leading possibilities that the mainstream of astronomers suggested. And you asked me to say, you know, what would convince me that? It's very simple. You send something like Osiris Rex.

If it flies through the object, then it's a dust bunny. Because a cloud of dust particles, a hundred times less dense in air, is so fluffy, you can pass through it. Now, if it's a hydrogen iceberg or nitrogen iceberg, when you land on it, it's obvious. I'm willing to bet that it's neither of these three. Now you ask me, what could it be?

I say, I don't know, but maybe it is artificial in origin. That's all I'm saying. Maybe it's a leaflet from another civilization that was thin and straight, and there is a message on it. I don't know what it is. We can only imagine. But my point is we can find out easily by going there. Okay. That's my point.

And my objective is to find out the answer. And I don't care if I'm wrong or not. What I care about is people saying it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before. case closed, forget about it, discussion closed, and ridiculing the other option when it's not ruled out. Brian, let me ask you a question. Why drag this discussion to have us constantly talk about this group of people that we shouldn't really be letting guide the discussion? In other words, you're sort of saying, just to give you the chance to respond. My feeling is, when did these people get the credibility to tell people what they're- Hold on, hold on, hold on. It's not these people.

It's me. So when Avi was on the podcast to discuss, Muamu in January 2021. I said to him, Avi, you know, you know some billionaires. And I didn't know about Galileo project at that point. Now I know he knows more billionaires. And so I'm going to be extra nice in my gift basket to you this coming fall. But I said, Avi, put your money where your mouth is. Have your friend who sponsored the breakthrough prize.

Have him, Yuri Milner. Have him, instead of directing cell phone cameras to Proxima Century B, send those sensors to Omuamua or something equivalent to it. And you said to me, I mean, hold on, hold on, Eric, hold on, hold on. Avi said to me, no, it's okay because Vera Rubin Observatory, which I agree, will have the capability. We should see hundreds of these things. But I said, Avi, there are things in science as we know that are three sigma, four sigma, so they should only occur by fluke one out of every five million times. And we know they happen much more often.

What if a Muamu is kind of the opposite of that? What if it's a one, the one chunk of interstellar message in a bottle? We can miss it if you don't apply funding and rockets and so forth to it. So I'm going to give you a chance to respond. But the amazing thing is that we do have funding. So these multibillionaires came to the porch of my home, funded the Galileo project. Just a week ago, I said we need funding for the expedition to Papua and Nugini.

I just said that we need the funding. Within a week, I got half a million dollars. Now, I tell you, as department chair of the astronomy department at Harvard, we've been trying for a decade to raise similar funds to the giant Magellan Telethelian telemark. scope. Right. Okay. And here I didn't do any fundraising. People came to me and said, that's inspiring. We like the vision. We enjoyed your book. So I'm telling you, the public cares about it. The government cares about it. Wealthy individuals care about it. I did not entice them. They came to me and said, here is the money. No strings attached. How can you explain that?

Many of my colleagues work extremely hard to break those funds or get committees in at NSF or NASA, give them even a small fraction of those funds. They just come to me. Over the past decade, I was fully funded by the private sector. And that allows me to be free in my thinking. And I think that is the way of the future. Because what happens in federal funding agencies very often is that they follow the advice of committees

that are populated by mainstream scientists. Those colleagues that ridicule deviations from the beaten path. And as a result, you don't get people going in directions that are not conservative. So I think that the current funding system is flowed. Brian, let me just try to get back to what I said that started this. Avi is in a very enviable position as one of the most visible and successful scientists in this area. He's sitting at Harvard. He's got an enormous number of publications, very high H index, et cetera, et cetera,

a chaired professor. And what if somebody came out of the University of Kentucky and said the same sorts of things that Avi was saying? And you're says, well, if you're so sure of that, why don't you send a probe? You know, and this gets really tiresome and really irritating. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong, even when the hive is. buzz in. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not

subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. The problem has to do with, I don't want to base these discussions any longer on an anchor of this backbiting hating community where we have to answer these questions. Well, how would you answer this and how would you answer that? The polite answer is the adults are talking and you're not running the conversation.

So we have to get back to an understanding that Avi may be fully funded and Avi may be in a position to be fully funded. And I think that that's great. But pushing everybody to release an NFT or cozy up to a billionaire is not practical for science in general.

And I'm going to stand up for the of us that said we had a relationship with the federal government or the federal government more or less knew when to leave us alone and it knew how to protect people for their careers. Our private universities are not private. They're all federally funded. They may claim to be private, but they're all getting huge amounts of money through overhead and indirect recovery, etc., etc. We have a relationship to defend because we produce a public good that is inexhaustible and inexcusutable. And quite honestly, I'm not a giving up on the government just because we've had an explosion of kind of centrist popularity contest

thinking in science. We need to get back to the point where somebody with a good idea from the University of Kentucky who knows no billionaires has a very good chance of getting funded if it flies straight in the face of somebody at Princeton. And whether or not the faculty at Stanford or the the University of Chicago is upset by this is irrelevant. The key question is where there are good ideas, do we have smart people with slush funds who can throw money that is not directed by consensus or peer review or popularity contests or reputational concerns? When I'm asking you from the into the impossible podcast is, can we allow the journalistic

groups that say, is NASA putting its reputation at stake? question mark, can we give them the week, the year, the decade off and actually conduct scientific discussions amongst ourselves without constantly being referenced to these people? Because this is a pretty serious issue. And I'm perfectly happy to find out that there's not a single shred of evidence of any extraterrestrial visitation, but that there's been an enormous campaign to hide our spy planes and our stealth technology, which took on this form. Whatever it is, whatever it is, the plea. is, can you stop asking questions of the form? How would you respond to the person who just

wrote an article who said the following thing? And the answer is F off. That's how I'd respond. Science is being done. And we can't constantly reference ourselves to some journalists who didn't know what they were talking about on deadline who actually can't solve a partial differential authority. But Eric, it's not just an obvious, you know, certainly reciprocate this sentiment. It's not just the journalist. It's the SETI community. It's the other scientist. It's authors of books about, you know, from scientific perspective that have interviewed Avi, it's astrobiologist. Who should, who would be left? What?

We've created a world where everyone has to guard her or his reputation constantly in order to stay one more year in the good graces of this communalist system that figures out who can breathe and whose oxygen gets shut off. So the point is, is that those colleagues are worth much less than colleagues of 60 years ago. And the fact is that in the hunger games that we've created, I'm much less interested what the person down the hall thinks about this work or that work. What I'm most interested in is which scientists have the ability to say, I may have screwed up. I'm not 100% sure. Here are the things that would change my mind. And I'm least interested

in the scientists who say, ooh, that's out there. That's spicy. That's weird. Those people need to be ejected. What I'm going to say is that inclusion has been much trumpeted, but exclusion is just as important. Who we exclude from the conversation is critical to the progress of science. And I'm trying to say that there are voices sneaking into this Q&A, that I'm eager to exclude, not because I believe that they're dissident voices who must be heard and that I want to step

on them. What I'm instead suggesting is that trying to murder ideas in their inchoate infancy is absolutely antithetical to science. And what we need to be doing is making sure that I'm here to level the playing field in part. And we need to step up and say that certain people, myself not included, were early on this. Certain people, myself included, got some bad information, went after people not understanding what the current situation was.

And as somebody who got this topic completely wrong, it's important that we talk to people who switch their minds and who can say I screwed up rather than people who seem to always have their finger in the air and always seem to know exactly what the current prevailing ideas are. And that's what I'm suggesting. I don't think that our colleagues are as important now as they used to be because they're all on life support and it can be turned off and we all know it and they all know. Well, Eric, you know, I have to respond just because you are, you know, kind of painting me as,

and from the perspective of, you know, someone who's attacking without actually capturing what I'm doing. What I'm doing is a process that we call annealing that your friend, Nicholas Teleb would call anti-fragility, right? The more scientific scrutiny that Avi's claims are my claims in science or your claims withstand, the better. It actually makes, makes, I don't think that. No, no, no, no. No, no, no. It hinges on the word scrutiny and critique. What I'm trying to say is that we have to jealously defend the gatekeeping of what constitutes critique. And what I'm claiming is absolutely Avi needs to be critiqued. But I go back to Paul Dirac. Paul Dirac made a very clear point,

which is you have to make sure that ideas are not subject to the most rigorous experiment agreement with experiment criteria too early. And in part, it's like infant industries. We have to protect new ideas like maybe this is an artificial entrant, not because that's a great idea. I have no opinion. Avi could be completely wrong about a muo-a-moo. I've got zero dogs in that fight. What I am saying is that it takes incredible courage right now to say something like that. Of course. Okay, but to then claim that these, the critiques are something that you need to subject. This isn't anti-fragility. It's like saying we don't need a bilipid layer for the cell because all the organelles should, you know, withstand full contact with the environment. Bullshit.

What you need is, is a bilipid layer with some very careful gates to regulate what gets in and what gets out. And I don't want to give the community that, is taking an easy pot shot here or there the same status as the careful community who says, I think you blew something in equation seven. Let me let Avi. Yeah, go ahead. You studied the Galileo, right? Yes, I did.

Yes, my hero. Do you think he would have been, so wouldn't you agree that he would have been canceled on social media today? He would have been canceled many times, and he would have been canceled for his scientific ideas, in part, but also his political ideas, right? He got a lot of things wrong as well as being brilliant, right? As all scientists do. But my point is we can't let society control the ideas we have. We should allow evidence to guide us.

And some people are wrong. And it's a learning experience. So my point is it's not a personal contest. It's not showing that we are smart. Nature is smarter than all of us. That's why I think if we ever find clear evidence for a smarter kid, on the block, it would bring us to our senses, because we keep competing with each other, just like kids in the kindergarten, you know, playing in the sandbox. And then suppose the kids

look away and there is a car passing by, you know, it shows them the world is much bigger, yet there is something much more sophisticated going out there. And why would we fight with each other about who is slightly more intelligent, who solved a problem in extra dimensions that we don't know exist, rather than just look around and pay attention to the evidence that looks intriguing? that is the natural thing to do. And for some reason, it's being abandoned these days. Abandoned because people prefer virtual realities. It's sort of like being high on drugs and preferring a reality that gives you pleasure on a reality that is the actual one that we share. Yeah. Well, science is a painstaking process. You don't get the instantaneous dopamine hits of

thumbs up and, oh, sick burn. And this is, you know, Avi got taken down in front of this crowd and Eric said this to Brian and defenestrated him. But, but, but, The point is I wouldn't be having this conversation if I wasn't deeply interested in and putting my scientific bonafides, you know, in your service, as I did for the past year with my minuscule and very minor contributions, whatever I did. But the point is, you know, when I think about collecting data and the process of it, I hear it said that, you know, everything should be made, you know, public. We should FOIA the hell of the government. But on the other hand, I also think, like, people, if you can't get scientists to do it, it may mean that they're not interested and they're not truly curious

the way Galileo or Einstein was, but it may be that they have used whatever scientific acumen they have to triage the problems that they're going to be involved in, and this one doesn't rise to the threshold of being interested. And that's not a criticism.

I'm just saying that's an explanation. Okay, I'm a scientist and I'm interested in it. Yep. Point proven. Okay, so I prefer to go in a path that was not taken the way Robert Frost phrased it in his poem.

For him, it was the thing that made a difference in his life. For me, it's the ability as a physicist to find law-hanging fruit because nobody walked that path, and there might be something really obvious that we will find. So my point is, I'm a scientist, and why would that be an issue to someone if the Galileo project is funded by the private sector? Why would that even raise an eyebrow? That everyone should be happy about it.

But Eric's not saying that. Eric's saying it shouldn't have to be. It should be funded by the public, which I agree with. It should be publicly funded. But I also think that Eric's saying maybe something I don't agree with, which is that it shouldn't be privately funded. We shouldn't have to rely on private. And you, in fact, are relying perhaps on this NFT scenario. And I would like to hear that because it is the first time I think it's been tried at.

Eric, you're mocking me. I don't like that. What is the smirk for, Eric? No. No, it's not, it's not. Look, what we're. talking about here has a history and the history for example in gravitation there was a prize offered by what appeared to be a lunatic named babson and the gravity research foundation for a fair

amount of money back in the day um for a prize critiquing gravity and nobody in the physics community wanted to touch it up until bryce de witt wrote an essay won the money and suddenly everybody wanted the money because brys de witt had crossed the threshold so that So the question of whether people find this interesting or not interesting, you only get to ask that once money is available to actually look at the project and no reputational damage is available. And I guarantee you, Brian, that if ridiculous amounts of money and wonderful conferences and flying people first class was available and all the top people at the Institute for Advanced Study piled in and de-risked it in terms of reputation, I guarantee you this top. would find a huge number of scientists who say, I think this is the most interesting problem in the world, who right now would say, yeah, little green men, hard pass, no thanks.

So what I am trying to say is we all know, the Gravity Research Prize is a perfect example of how human scientists are when it comes to their reputations because reputation is survival. And to pretend like that's not going on just to say, well, your colleagues don't necessarily agree with you. agree with you. It's like, well, let's find out whether the colleagues agree. If we put a large amount of money and we desigmatize it, I will make you a bet that an enormous number of colleagues

suddenly find this incredibly fascinating. How could we do that, Avi? I mean, Eric and I've talked, and I don't expect you to have listened to every single episode of the podcast. In the past, Eric and I have talked about, you know, this, this true truth that society owes physicists. They owe us a lot. We created a transistor. We created a laser. We created trillions of dollars. the internet. And so, but how do you monetize that ex post facto? It's not so easy as when you have the escrow account, you know, and you're waiting for your deposit to clear, right? So how do we do something, you know, ahead of time to fund science like this, especially specular? Actually, let's step away. Let me just ask you a question. I'll be stepping away from aliens, anything to do

with it. Let's just say, we want to fund basic research, which you and I do, Eric does, how do we do that, using before the fact contract with the government or with some of the, you know, other public sector funds so that we don't get hosed again like we do with the transistor, the laser, the, the internet, and also telecommunication. How do we do that? Well, there is a path and it involves a shortcut. So in other words, if you discover something that people have passion for, that people care about and that could be revolutionary, then it will turn minds of a lot of people at once. And in the context of what we were discussing before, if I go on an expedition to Papua Anugini and I scoop the ocean floor with a sled and a magnet, and I bring up a piece

of equipment that looks like iPhone 100. Okay? And what I mean by that is something that you cannot really reverse engineer, but it does miracles in your hands when you press some buttons. Okay, suppose it happens, you know, just a futuristic, I don't like science fiction, but I'm giving you an example of something that could happen because we are going to the ocean and are going to scoop the fragment. So suppose we happen to find it, you know, whether it exists or not is part of reality. And it's just a fishing expedition and we don't know what fish we will find. So this is an example where you do the experiment and if you find it, it changes everything. Then, everyone in the world will talk about it, fund it. The scientific community will jump up and down and say, of course, we knew that. We always said that. In the 60s, someone wrote a paper about something like that.

It's actually not new and this person was just a fisherman that found it. It's not important that this person found it. It was discussed in the 60 and of course we all... Now, the reason I say that is there was a congressman that made anti-gay statements for me. many years. And then when he left Congress, he confessed that he was gay. And to me, that's a clear illustration of human nature where people that really want to discuss the subject, they can ridicule it just by looking around and seeing that other people are ridiculing it. And unfortunately, you know, in academia, it's very prevalent. So the way to

change that is to find something that will be obvious. and change everything. And of course it's not easy. You know, we would most likely find fragments of an iron meteorite, not of a... But at any event, you should try. And the only way not to find it is by not searching. And that's my fundamental point, that if you have a prejudice and you say, this is too speculative, I don't want to even deal with it, you will never discover something that you didn't expect. Even if it lies on the ocean floor, there is this gadget there, you will never go and search for it, and you will feel your life. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to remain ignorant.

So let me ask you, Avi. Assume that you go to Papua New Guinea, you get huge funding from all of these billionaires who are crowding your... I'm very worried about your billionaire problem on your porch. I have another one tomorrow. Tomorrow. Fantastic.

We'll send Orkin. Sounds like you have an infestation. So the question is, assume you find nothing, or in fact, what you find is so boring and uninteresting as to tell you that you completely screwed up and that there was nothing to be found. How do you feel the day after?

Oh, no, if you think about life, we spend so much effort in directions that do not prove fruitful. Even if you are trying, suppose you want to marry someone, a spouse, and you have to go through many blind dates that turn out quite badly, okay? And if you look at scientific record, of very accomplished scientists, most of the time, you know, they write papers that are not

very consequential. And so you're just trying to find the one case that will make a huge difference. And it's difficult. Life is difficult. If it was easy, then everyone would have it. So the point is, without trying, without going on dates, you will obviously not marry anyone, okay? And you have to give yourself a chance to be wrong. And the way to do it is just like a kid. It's a learning experience. We should behave like kids. Scientists should be open-minded, curious, rather than protecting their ego, protecting their image so that they can, because it's not about prizes. Think about it. All these awards and prizes that we get are completely meaningless. What matters is the intellectual content of what we find. And I would much rather find this iPhone 100 than win the Nobel Prize for

some for the fact that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. And obviously because of the intellectual content of the meaning that it will have to humanity. Okay, and assume for the moment just to take your date analogy, did you go on a blind date and you're not really connecting and you find out the person is into the occult and not the right person for you. Do you immediately demand all your money back or do you say, look, if I'm going to go on a few dates, I expect that I'm going to pay for a lot of of dinners that lead nowhere. Well, yeah, that's exactly what happened with the large Hadron Collider.

Aside from the Higgs, the mission was to find supersymmetry in the natural parameter space that everyone recommended. We haven't found supersymmetry. Did anyone commit suicide as a result? No, we just said, okay, well, maybe it's around the corner. Maybe it's a higher energy. Or maybe isn't it great that we found that low energy supersymmetry isn't present because we could have written an endless number of articles on low energy.

super symmetry at the Electro Week scale. And without actually having an accelerate, we wouldn't know. I mean, I was just at this conference where the person said, here are all the models we've ruled out. Here's the one model that remains. And it was amazing to look at parameter space. And, you know, at a certain level, if you keep hearing about some gal that you should really go on a date with because she's looking for the same things you are,

and you find out that, in fact, it's not a workable situation. You've paid for dinner, but you've learned something valuable. You don't have to keep listening. Hey, you really need to find out what's going on with Susan these days. Exactly. You learn no matter what. We gain knowledge as a result of getting more evidence. The only way not to gain knowledge is to behave like experts.

Because they say our past knowledge is all that we need. There is nothing else. If we studied rocks in the past, everything in the sky is rocks. That's it. It must be natural. And then the last question, Avi, just to do this. What do you think the most persuasive scientific critiques that you're worrying about of your own projects and your own theories are, as opposed to which ones play well or seem to be damning? Like, in other words, what is it that gets through to you that you're worrying about at night?

Because I really want people to understand that trying to get rid of silliness isn't trying to get rid of critique, it's a question of you really have to focus on what is germane, what it's collegial, and what is constructive. So what is it that you're worried about with extraterrestrial technology and probes and visitors that you might have most wrong here? Yeah. So I'll give you a specific example in the case of a Muamua. The most unusual anomaly was that apparently it exhibited an excess acceleration away from the sun, excess push away from the sun by such some mysterious force because we didn't see it evaporating. There was no rocket effect.

And what worried me the most is that the measurement of the trajectory was wrong, was off. And so together with my postdoc, John Forbes, we really looked really carefully into the data, what could be errors that they didn't account for. And that was after we wrote the paper with Schmuel Biali, where we suggested maybe it's an artificial object, a very thin object pushed by reflecting sunlight. So what worried me is that the measurement is wrong. And we went through this with my postdoc for several months to check that the conclusions that were drawn from the data were correct and we confirmed it.

But this is an example where a situation where there seemed to be an anomaly, but it's actually in the way the data was analyzed and not in the properties of the future. objects and I constantly worry about this and I could be wrong you know I was wrong in in some other cases in my scientific career and but that's part of my learning experience I'm I'm not afraid of being wrong and I think if you don't dare to collect more data you will never figure out what's behind anomalies my biggest fear is that I'm being propagandized by a disinformation campaign that was constructed by the government to keep sort of certain things secret and I have no hard data but I have mountains of indirect evidence.

And so I'm worried that in fact there is no there there there at a scientific level, but there will be a there at a government trust and disinformation level. So that's like one of my biggest concern. Yeah. I'm talking about objects that were discovered by astronomers. No, no, no. You were talking about a different issue. I'm just saying, but I've never said anything one way or the other about a muamou

or anything like that. Right. But one thing I should advise you, Eric, is don't worry too much about government. Here we're dealing with nature, okay? So government is completely secondary. They cannot change what nature gives us, okay? And I give much more respect to nature than to government because nature obeys according to physics, a universal set of laws.

Government does not. So guys, I want to pivot in the remaining time we all have, hopefully, to another sub- subject with your permission. And that's, um, that's an issue of that Avi is written very, uh, poetically and lovingly about. Uh, and it involves academic, um, academia, but specifically scientific family. I want to refer people to the in the show notes down there. When you, when you go down there and you take your thumb and you click the like button, uh, if you want to see these guys back on this podcast or people like that in this conversation, um, when you're down there, you'll see a link to Avi's second medium post. And it's about academia. And it's the joys

of an academic family. Avi, what prompted you to write this lovely touching article? And Eric hasn't seen it, perhaps, but I want to discuss on what academia could be, what it hasn't been maybe for the past decades and where it could be with things like we've talked about, with NFTs, with DAOs, with AI and other acrony. So, Avi, take it away. What does this article's intention? Well, last week, my former students in postdocs, about 60 of them organized a conference to celebrate my 60th birthday. It was a scientific conference, but during the coffee breaks and at the banquet, many of them came over to me to tell me for the first time that I made a big impact on their lives.

And that was a big revelation. And the biggest reward that I ever received, or you can call it an award in a sense, because I always tried to help young people, people. And when I was department chair, I was always on the side of the faculty. If there was an issue with the higher administration, I fought for the faculty. And the same deal with students and postdocs that were mine, I always sided with them and tried to help them because I very much sympathized with their vulnerability. And so during the banquet, for example, last week, many of them stood up and mentioned stories.

And, you know, some of these brought tears to my eyes. I simply forgot how much I helped some of them and they brought it up. And it was very moving to me. Now, we also had a soccer match between the postdocs and the faculty. And I should say the faculty won two zero. And I was fortunate to score one of the goals, but the good news is that the postdocs will become faculty in the coming years.

And all together, people told me after this conference that it was one of the most unusual conferences they ever attended because it did feel like an academic family where like-minded people, my students and postdocs that think, you know, just like me, since I sort of trained them in this way, they are curious about a wide range of topics and they never spoke to each other each of them knew me from the interaction with me and not they did not interact among themselves so for them it was

really the first family meeting and you know in a way if something bad happens to me in my morning jog if a car runs over me every every morning when i i jog at 5 a.m so that there isn't much risk but it's possible that the car would run over me now i have the sort of piece of of mind that my academic DNA will be preserved in this very, how should I say, vibrant group of innovative scholars that are sort of my academic children. And there is a lot of joy in recognizing that some bliss, I would say. And being in Martha's Vineyard all of last week in their company was probably the best week of my life. And it's very different. You have to understand, and it's very different from conferences where, you know, that are specialized on a specific topic.

Here it was more the theme of the way I do my science that was translated into the careers of so many people that have a common thread, which is let's be driven by curiosity, let's forget about the nonsense of trying to prove that we are smart. And everyone was conversing in a very collegial fashion. So, you know, that was, and I mentioned that in my. medium essay that anyone is interested yeah it's linked down below Eric you and I have talked before about academia and in particular Harvard and I don't think that it's a secret that Harvard kind of has an outsized impact on the culture of academia it's our oldest institution I believe next to the second best Ivy League which is Brown University

where I got my but but Avi when we look at it we think about what these institutions mean you and I do the same thing and I'm convinced Eric should have done this, but he decided to go off in a different direction. But as professors, we stand in front of a piece of rock and we scrape on it with another piece of rock called chalk. And we basically are just up there, this age on the stage in front of people. For the first time, and I think history, as far as I know, I taught a cosmology class this quarter that I used demonstrations and experiments in. I did experiments in thermodynamics. I did experiments in acoustic waves, teach CMB acoustic oscillations. I did spectroscopy. I did all

sorts of fun stuff, Geiger counter, heavy water. But even that, you know, I can't really hurt my arm patting myself on the back. So it wasn't that way. What can we do about academia? Eric, especially I want to get from your opinion, you have reached millions of people with very vivid displays and I put a link to the portal and your webpage down below. How can we reform education? How can we cancel, not cancel Harvard, but how can we reform this institution? It's a thousand years old since the first university in Bologna, Italy, we've basically not changed at all. And I think it's overdue for a change. Eric, first you, then Avi. More or less, I think we had things pretty well in hand until we lost our discipline,

hope, and funding. So my feeling about this is that in order to restore this, we're going to have to have some huge wins that come from people who cannot be subsumed in this sort of sweeping critique that has crashed over academics. That somehow academics is the most bigoted, exclusive, you know, toxicly male environment. Lots of these things have some truth to them. But there was also a lot of things that happened that were miraculous, wonderful. cultures like Isidore Robbie's lab at Columbia that allowed people who were barred from universities at that level to come and do scientific work where more or less there has to be a scientific underground, an underground railroad to smuggle good ideas, good people, the money they need,

the support they need. You know, I heard about Avi's conference celebrating a 60th birthday. Happy birthday, they professor lobe. But the thing that really made me sad was that as an orphan, as a guy who did not have an advisor, I can tell you that there's a different romance towards being on your own and there's a romance towards being part of a worldview. And I think that the people like Avi who try to make sure that their students survive were no nonsense when it comes to the research, who make sure that they have a legacy are really important. And I think Harvard in particular is the pivot point. Harvard is both the best and worst place in the entire academic universe.

It gets incredible people. It gets, it's incredibly tolerant of all sorts of crazy ideas, and it's incredibly brutal backstabbing behind the scenes back-of-house nonsense at the same time. And so in a certain sense, what we have to do is to recognize that the most important part of academics is to restore some concept of professional ethics so that people have the freedom to share their ideas, that they know that they're going to have an ability

to feed their family the next day, that they have to uphold professional ethics or they're out because we cannot afford an even small number of relatively smart people to destroy the entire thing by infecting it with snark and Twitter culture, as we've seen. seen with journalism. So I think that roughly speaking, we need to have some huge wins. The huge wins need to come from individuals, not groups. Those individuals need to be communally minded. They

need to say very clearly that we need more resources. We need to shut down weaker PhD programs. We need to focus on research and not teaching because it's very invoked to think that a university is primarily focused on teaching. A research university is focused primarily on research and allows for teaching to happen. And there's a reason. If you want to go to a college, you need to go to a college. But part of the problem is that a lot of things that made our great research universities, fantastic institutions, don't play well to 20, 22 years.

And those of us who believe in the mission of a university and its own diversity, equity, and inclusion program called merit need to stand up vocally and say, certain people need to leave, certain programs need to. be shut down, more money needs to be found, we need to stop lying that everything has to do with groups and not individuals. Power laws are everywhere. And we've got to be more courageous standing up for ourselves and not wilt every time somebody calls you a white supremacist for just saying the obvious truth. If I may bring up several other aspects that need improvement, there is a lot of room for improvement, I must say, coming from within academia.

Harvard's president, Baccault, announced that he will step down a year from now, and I was asked by the Crimson, what do I think is a good future for Harvard? And I thought, I said that it has been 70 years since James Conant was the last scientist who served as Harvard's president, and that shows. And nowadays, society is very much driven by science and technology. And my point is it doesn't mean that we should abandon the humanities. In fact, there is a huge role for the humanities to be playing in the modern technological age. For example, lots of ethical questions that AI system, social media bring to the front.

And philosophers and ethicists have a very important role in shaping the future of society. But it needs to be about the future and not about the past. I mean, of course we can study what aims. ancient Greeks said, but they never had the gadgets that we have. So we need to bring up new philosophical ideas to bear with the new reality that we live through. And so that's the future that the university should aspire to promote. And therefore, the next president needs to be a scientist. Now, I don't think they would listen to my advice. They haven't listened last time around. But that is my sincere hope that, you know, science and technologies will lead the way. And

the basic message of science is sharing of knowledge and cooperation. And science does not adhere to national borders. And we are all part of the human species and the knowledge that we acquire through science should be shared. And these are very noble ideas in this age of isolation and separation and fighting each other and wars and so forth. You know, the message of the science brings like let's work together and make a better future for ourselves just to give you another example asra Klein on his New York Times podcast a few days ago was spent 15 minutes trying to answer a question the following question should I decide not to have children because of the implications to climate change

that was the question and to me the answer you know it would have taken me a few seconds to answer that question but he spent 15 minutes and here is my answer you know the future is within the realm of our scientific accomplishments we can this make policy based on our scientific understanding we can decide how to live our planet and go to space and not risk the future of humanity by a single point catastrophe here on earth based on science and technology. And so my point is we should have as many kids as we want, the more the better, and then let them shape a better future using science, you know. And these could be our biological kids or they could be our technological kids, you know, using

AI systems to help us because they will become smarter than us in the future. So I am much more in favor of replacing Darwin's principle of survival of the fittest with survival of the optimist. You have to be an optimist so that the future will be much more promising. If you decide not to have kids, it's as if you decided you prefer death over life. Right. And, you know, Albert Camus in his essay, the myth of Sisypus, the first sentence there says the biggest question in philosophy is whether life is worth living or we commit suicide. You know, and that's the biggest question in philosophy. I say if you expand that to humanity as a whole, to our civilization, the biggest question is whether humanity is worth longevity.

you know, surviving longer forever. And this is the most important question in the context of science, not in the context of philosophy, but in the context of- No, I agree. I actually think it's even deeper than that. And just to point out, you know, there's a saying, the optimist builds the plane, but the pessimist builds the parachute. It's appropriate to talk about this on the eve of the eve of Father's Day, of course. And it doesn't take, as you said, it doesn't take children. We don't all have to be fathers or mothers or parental units of unspecified gender. we could also be ideological and thought leaders, thought mentors, men and women. But I want to ask you, it's something obvious that Eric and I have spoken a lot about

is the lack of diversification of the portfolio of those that speak about, like Elon Musk, who we both have affection for and admiration for in a lot of ways, but see criticism of as well. But Eric, you know, one of the listeners asking a question where I take questions on my community page of my YouTube channel is, you know, why are we so kind of all in one basket, putting our eggs in all in one basket? How do you react to Elon Musk's approach to, you know, let's become interplanetary, let's go to one other planet, let's double our planets in our portfolio management. What do you think about Elon Musk? I've never asked you, Avi. What's your, you know, analysis of his approach? First of all, I wanted to say that another thing missing in academia that I didn't have a chance

to mention is diversity of ideas. Okay. And we touched about. about it before, but basically the idea of tenure is all about allowing people to have job security so that they can promote ideas that are not along the beaten path, okay? And unfortunately, it's not being used. When people get tenure, they become lazy and they don't do much. They become dead wood very often. So it's being abused. This privilege is really an amazing privilege. I mean, we don't get paid a lot in academia, but we do have the privilege of job security. and we should take advantage of it. We should explore ideas that are not conventional.

And that's another thing that needs to change in academia. Now, coming back to Elon Musk, of course, there are major hurdles. For example, if you go to the surface of Mars, you will be bombarded by cosmic rays. And your body would not survive for more than a year or a few years. That needs to be solved. And one way is to go down underground, you know, in a cave and they live there. or there needs to be special infrastructure built to protect the people over there.

And also people on travel there. You don't want, I mean, you don't want to send people to their death. And so those practical concerns were not attended to in a very public way, in a very science oriented. So I really think we should solve the health risks that the people will face when going long term to Mars. Otherwise, I think, by the way, I don't think humans are really the future of humanity. Okay. I think the future of humanity is some very advanced form of autonomous robots with artificial intelligence.

I do believe that. And I'm proud of our technological kids because, you know, they will be able to survive much better. You know, why would some random processes on the surface of earth in a soup of chemicals make the, best possible outcome you know that to me it sounds like while we got to this point but we have a lot of faults you know if we look at human history clearly humans have a lot of faults and perhaps we can build the system that will be better than humans and I'm looking forward for the first AI scientists you know because they will not be driven by their ego if they see an object that looks like a rocket booster and they will not call it a rock I want to ask you about

that, Avi. I'm sorry to interrupt Eric. I'm going to give you a chance. I'm going to give you a requisite 30 seconds to respond. But Avi, I want to push back with love and cavode and respect. Okay. So this guy here, do you know what he said his happiest thought was, Avi? You know, I'm sure you know what he said his happiest thought was, right? Well, I can't say that he, in free fall, you experience no gravitational field. Let's, let's unpack an AI Einstein, AE, A-E, A-I-E. How does such a thing know about free fall? Like, what does it? that even mean? And second of all, what does happiness mean to such? In other words, are you really serious? Do you think AI physicists are around the corner or is that kind of wishful thinking?

No, I think you can imagine a system that will basically digest data provided to it by instruments directly. So the instruments will send the data to the AI system that will analyze it and try to figure out what's going on. And it's the job of a scientist right now. It looks like, you know, a miracle but in principle, you know, it could be done by a machine. I don't think humans are necessarily designed for that purpose. You know, we were gatherers and hunters. We were not scientists to start with. So our brain is not necessarily optimized for the purpose of being a scientist.

And I have no problem getting pride from a system that outperforms us. I don't have a, you know, that doesn't, you know, give a blow to my ego in any way. In fact, I would be extremely happy if I knew that, We can build a system that corrects the faults of humans. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set

for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price in valid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Okay, so Eric, stepping back from the AI stuff to any of the topics that I rudely interrupted you over. No, no, no, no, no. By the way, with three Jews on a podcast, I'm surprised that I'm the only one interrupting either one of the two of you.

So you guys are clearly much better bred and influenced by our wants. Just imagine the number of opinions that we have right now. And it is getting close to Shabbat. I don't want to interfere with Avi's Shabbat, but I do want to thank you guys. Wait, wait, wait, I didn't say anything. No, I know, but go on. Okay, go on. By the way, you know if three Jews are on an island, you know how many synagogues you need for that?

For them? Four. You need four. Yeah, because you need one that their foot would never step in. Eric. Okay, so where were we? The AI physicists. Look, I'm partial to humans and I'm actually partial to egos.

I mean, all sorts of things that I like, everybody's decided are terrible. I like humans. I like egos. I'm glad I agree with both of you that we should have children and that Ezra should probably remove himself and leave the rest of us alone in the gene pool. Look, we're in dire circumstances. What we're looking for is an analog of the neutron. And the neutron changed everything because it allowed chain reactions and that ushered in the atomic age,

or the semiconductor changed everything, or the World Wide Web that came out of CERN. These are things that changed everything, whether it's radio frequency communications. We're looking for something that obviates the needs for rockets. Rockets are sort of embarrassing in 2022 because there's not that much that can be reached. So, you know, it's like buying a huge boat for a small lake. There's just not that many places you can go. So my feeling about this is we have to reacquaint ourselves with the possible. We've been living so long under Einstein and Boer that we've forgotten that their limitations may not be our limitations if we can crack a puzzle.

And the Neutron was 1932. So it's within living memory. What we need to do is to reacquaint ourselves with the idea that finding a single new field or new way of looking at spacetime or some adjustment to this order that has settled in, and it's now almost 50 years old, is necessary for us to dream again. And nobody dreams about finding, you know, Gilligan's Island was about an uncharted desert Isle. It would be very weird to think about an uncharted desert isle in 2022, because we've mapped the Earth, but we haven't mapped the heavens. So I think it's really

important to recognize that I fully support my friend Avi on his quest for the AI intelligences and the post-human discoverers. But I'm actually really optimistic that the next theories might have new possibilities for us humans, laden with ego though we may be, for us to survive each other. And I really believe that at some point, Elon is going to get past his fascination with SpaceX rockets and using Mars as the sales job and recognize that he stumbled onto a very correct paradigm, which is that we are in dire straits. If we don't get diversification, those humans are never going to build Avi's

next level AI scientists. And I would really like to see ego come back in, people to be hyper motivated to put in 100 hour weeks chasing dreams and to try to acquaint us with the cosmos that we may be able to visit. And part of the problem is the instant you talk like this, the conversation has been pre-hijacked. People immediately think you mean Mars because Elon has said that we're going to to survive because we're going to decamp to Mars, which is not really a realistic proposition via rockets. And then the next part of it is, oh, you must be talking about faster than light travel al-cubieri warp drives or wormholes, because those are the only things that Einstein would allow you to use to dream about the cosmos. The idea of saying post-Einstein, that I

accept Einstein for who he is and what he did, but he is not the last word. And there would probably not be a Schwartzschild singularity nor a Friedman-Robbertson-Walker singularity if his theory was complete. It's probably merely effective. And that is the challenge of our times to get out of the straitjacket. So the thing that really attracts me to Avi's program in part is if there's a one in 10,000 chance that we might find a technology that makes use of science that we don't know yet, that's really worth doing because it's not a paradigm that has ever occurred to us to get a technology beyond human.

The only analog of this is biology where you have a blind watchmaker and the theory of selection means that there are pathways and pathways beyond pathways in a cell that do things that we don't understand. So the principle of natural selection has done a marvelous job engineering technologies we can only dream about. But the idea that something might have engineered probes and vehicles to visit us is an enticement to thinking about a cosmos that can be visited and certainly not by rockets, for those of us, with humans, families, and egos who I'm huge fans of and remain so to this day. Yeah, and I completely agree with Eric that Albert Einstein was not the smartest scientist that ever lived since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. There must have been a smart scientist on an exoplanet a billion years ago and the civilization that benefited from the wisdom

of that scientist must have launched probes that would have reached us by now. Well, guys, I am grateful for you, giant enormous intellects for a Weinstein, if not an Einstein, and for a lobe that is a cranial lobe and a lobe that I love speaking to. Guys, I got into this podcasting because, you know, my day-to-day job, I'm building experiments. I'm looking not for interstellar meteorites, but I'm trying to remove the imprint of cosmic dust from my C&B experiments. Before we depart for this particular occasion, I want to ask each of you if you have anything that you want to mention, advertise, besides your Bitcoin rig, Eric. But Avi, where can people find you? What are you most interested in?

Is there anything else that we should discuss on this particular episode? Well, I have a listing of my opinion essays that you can find on my website at Harvard University. And every few days, I write a new one and you can follow up on the latest developments. And with me, what you see is what you get. So just trust me. And if we find something exciting, you will know about it. Eric, how about you? Everyone's curious what you're up to.

Well, I mean, I've been to some extent very much focused on physics recently, talking to colleagues and going to meetings and things. What I'm most alarmed by is that we get in touch with the desperation of the current moment with Putin and Ukraine, recognize that we're no longer kidding around, and that it's not safe to continue in this idiom, even if we probably survive. this particular misadventure, it's really important that we drive more people towards science and make sure that when they get there, they've got great lives ahead of them as opposed to this madness of having them eke out a living and constantly apologizing for everything interesting so that they can stay in the good graces. I would look at the 2014 article that I wrote called M-Therry String Theory is the only.

only game in town to the question of what scientific idea is ready for retirement. And there's also an article about Einstein's revenge, which had to do with the idea that people who wanted to quantize gravity ended up instead geometrizing the quantum. And after listening to what is now currently considered cutting edge physics theory, I want to just point out that a lot of people are leaving for quantum computation, trying to do quantum computers, trying to do machine learning. We've got to keep the excitement going. A generation or two has failed at theoretical physics, and it's time for voices that we haven't heard and new people entering the field to be given free reign, in particularly not constantly dogged by the

quantum field theory crowd. I've come to the conclusion that quantum field theory is maybe our most powerful theory, but we don't understand it well enough to allow it to select for good new ideas. And I think what we have to do is we have to recognize that we are in a desperate search for new ideas beyond Einstein. They will ultimately have to conform to experiment and make sense of quantum field theory, which works very well. But we're going to have to look to make physics in particular exciting, and we can't back off it. Not everything is equally exciting. Fundamental physics is the only thing that I know of that is a reasonable hope of getting us out of the problem that fundamental physics originally got us into. So I think that this alien stuff is really

important, even if I think it's relatively unlikely that it's going to do what I hope it could do for us. We're going to have to find every possible way of breaking out of Einstein's prison. So organizing the Einsteinian prison break, I think should be all of our top priorities at the moment because we're in pretty dire straits, but we're definitely a group worth saving. That's where I am. That's where I'm at. Let's put them in jail behind bars made of Oumuua Mua skin. Guys, this has been a treat. I've had over 2,000 people in the room at one time.

But really, what you guys mean in your openness, in your articulation of some of the most complex topics that can exist. And some of the most perilous politically and otherwise, I think it's really important. Avi, I just want to say one thing. you said maybe the next president should be a scientist. And I was thinking, halivai, it should be for the president of the United States as well. Wouldn't that be nice? Or it could be a disaster. Who knows?

I mean, those movies that you've seen, you know, with the, anyway. So for me, I want to express my gratitude. I'm Brian Keating, host of the Into the Impossible Podcast, as well as Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube, where I do videos from an experimental perspective because these brainiacs, like Eric, like Avi, and like many of the colleagues I've had on. are theoreticians, and I think they're incredibly brilliant, but I think the experimentalists need to get a little bit of attention every now and then. So that's my unique angle.

Boys, it's been fun. Avi Yomoled al-Aid Semei, Shabat Shabat Shalom, and Eric, it's so good to see you, as it always is. And I hope you guys will come back maybe at the end of the summer. We'll get some clarity what's going on with these government panels and so forth, and we'll be able to discuss the real scientific issues. Any sufficiently advanced technology? is indistinguishable from magic. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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