Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Keating Interviews Richard Panek about The Trouble With Gravity (#032)

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

   Books mentioned: The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet  Empiricism, heavens and earth, gravity in history, god, religion, and politics, a thrilling tour guide from ancient concepts to the very present.  The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum  The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality  Richard Panek is most recently the author of The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet, published in July 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His previous book, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, received the Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Antarctic Artists & Writers grant from the National Science Foundation, and a Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His own books have been translated into sixteen languages, while his collaboration with Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, was a New York Times best-seller and the recipient of the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 2013. He also co-wrote the giant-format 3D museum movie ROBOTS [[CUT: 3D]], a National Geographic production. He has been a monthly columnist for Natural History magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Times. Two of his previous books also cover the history of science for non-specialist readers, Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens (Viking, 1998), and The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes (Viking, 2004). Education MFA in Fiction, University of Iowa BS in Journalism, Northwestern University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, two. Well, it's a great pleasure to welcome Richard Panic on the program, on The Into the Impossible podcast, which is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego. So, Richard, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the Center for Human Imagination, but it's sort of the place where you would feel right at home because we, We really explore the interstices between science, arts, writing, science fiction, science fact. And really, in many ways, all thanks to sort of the visionary pathway set by our founding namesake, Sir Arthur C. Clark, who was, of course, a polymath, who capable of exploring deep conversations and the predictions about the future to actually creating scientific concepts.

and obviously science fiction as well. It's hard to believe we're almost 19 years past the 2001 Space Odyssey, which inspired many of us to think both about space exploration and to think about the universe around us. So I like to begin first with a question to you, as someone who's written many books ranging from books written with your co-author, Temple Grandin, all the way to the books written by yourself alone about physics and astrophysics in particular and gravity and cosmology. What inspires you as an author, as a writer, to get

into science? You're not a scientist by background. What inspired you to take that sort of leap into very, I think, both neuroscience as well as in the physical sciences. What made you take that leap and were you scared at first? Great question. Yes, I was scared at first. As you said, I don't have a background in science. And an editor used to approach me in the mid-90s about, did I want to write a book about this or a book about that?

She liked my writing, I guess. And I turned her down several times, even though I wanted to write a book. I just felt that there was no match there. I mean, I don't know if you remember. the Republican governor of New York, George Pataki, but she asked me if I wanted to ghost write his memoir. I was like, no, no, no, no. And she asked me once if I wanted to write a book about the telescope, and I was kind of like, no, no, no, no, because I knew nothing about it. I had no background in science. And I, and she said, you know, I said to her, I said, you know, the thought

of researching a piece of technology for seven years and 500 footnotes. And she said, no, no, no, Think of it as an essay. Take a month. So I took a month, and I read up on it, and I thought, oh, this is really about history and philosophy. That's fascinating. And I can get the college education. I was too stupid to enjoy, to appreciate at the time. And I wouldn't have any college loans either.

So that's, so that was right. So that's how I got into it. And it just, you know, it just fell on my lap and I, and I just haven't looked back. And that was, you know, that was more than 20 years ago. Wow. And it's nice to know for, you know, for Governor Cuomo that you might still be available, perhaps, to help him ghost write a biography and perhaps. If it didn't work for Pataki, who knows it could work for Cuomo. So I really enjoyed your book.

You were kind enough to send it to me for free. and you still owe me a signature. You're going to give me that to me someday. I'm in person. But I like it so much I bought an audiobook because I wanted to hear sort of the narrative story told because it's really an adventure story. And I like to just in full disclosure, I like to point out to my listeners, when does it, you know, when is it okay to buy a book in Kindle?

When is it okay to buy a book in audio form? Like, will you be missing anything? And I think in this book, there are no illustration. So for those of us who like to listen to audiobooks, they won't miss out on any. any illustrations as some books have. Not all books have to have it. And it really is an adventure story. So I think it lends itself both, you know, to Kindle, but certainly to the audiobook format that I listened to it in originally and then went back to read over several passages in the hardcover. So it's, and my style, when I talk to authors such as yourself, I don't like to really

talk too much about the book itself. I don't like it when authors are forced to divulge the contents of the book and really undercut, you know, what is our bread and butter, how we make our living for some of us, right? So we'll talk about some of the themes of the book, but I want the listeners to really get into it. The one thing I do want to point out is I love the organization of the book. It's very logically structured. And what I like about it is that each of the chapters begins with the word gravity.

And the, you know, it's really, although the subject is the trouble with. gravity, I thought it was sort of, in some sense, you know, a natural sequel, if you will, to the 4% universe, which you wrote back in 2011, in that book is about the 4% of the universe that we're sort of familiar with, namely the protons, neutrons, you know, croutons that we are all made of, some more than others. And in the case of gravity, gravity has this mysterious nature, which it interacts, as you describe, in a visceral, physical sense. One of your chapters is gravity and our bones, very evocative, and the nature of how we encounter gravity. But it is immaterial. It's immaterial. The force of gravity is immaterial. And you describe the

latest current thinking on it. And less readers be left both, you know, really not well, I would say not worn, not forewarned, we really don't come away with an answer as to what is gravity. And I think that's what's so great about the book and its title. It's not saying, what is gravity? There are a lot of books out about, you know, what is the nature of reality, what is, you know, what is the nature of the origin of the universe? And I think fundamentally, the question that I grappled with contained to read this book, and the honesty is very refreshing, that we don't know, and even the greatest minds, what made them so great, like Einstein, as you describe it, what made him so great is that he knew what he did not know. And he knew he got

close to things. They delighted him. They gave him the greatest thrills of his life, as he said, but he still didn't have a notion of the essence. I want to ask you, after writing the 4% universe and after writing the trouble with gravity, do you feel like all of science is basically unknown and that we don't really have a visceral, we'll never have the visceral sense that our classical minds want to have? Or did you come away with the hope

that perhaps we could understand one of the four forces or some of the aspects of physics or cosmology and actually have a true understanding that we'd say we understand it. Do you think that that's something you come away with? Or do you think it's still as great a mystery as ever, both, both matter and energy in the form and gravity? Well, first of all, I want to go back to what you were saying about the book being upfront about that we don't know where gravity is. And that was important to me. And I put it in the introduction so that readers wouldn't keep going through and saying, okay, now we're going to find out.

And I love that, and this is also a way of answering you. major question. I love the idea of not knowing things. So I was very attracted to dark matter and dark energy in 4% universe because it just blew my mind that we didn't know what most of the universe was made of and that all the astronomy we'd been doing forever was based on an incorrect assumption, a natural assumption, but an incorrect one. And then when I realized that we don't know what gravity is, I thought, well, there's something there too. because we don't, we just, you know, we take it for granted. And, you know, and with good reason, you know, with good reason, we thought that astronomy was the,

was the science of the visible universe, because what else were we going to think? And the same thing with gravity. And I found a lot in researching the book that when I would tell people, you know, we don't know what gravity is, people who weren't scientists would say, well, what do you mean? we do know what it is. If I let go of this thing, it'll fall and so on. But when I would say to physicists, they would say, yeah, that's right. We don't know what it is.

And I just love that disconnect between what our common assumptions are and what's really out there. So do I think you're asking? Do I think that we're ever going to know what dark matter, dark energy, and gravity are? your question? Yeah. Do you think we're on, like, there is a hope for that? I mean, I guess there's always a hope, but is there a chance that we would understand it? Well, I think there's probably a better chance with dark matter. If they discover, for instance, the axon, which is one of the candidate hypothetical particles. If they discover that, then,

okay, we know what dark matter is. Dark energy is a different kind of beast. It's, it doesn't, It doesn't match with quantum mechanics. It's one of those areas where general relativity and quantum mechanics don't meet. So that's much more challenging. And gravity, you know, I guess it's kind of contingent on whether they find the quantum equivalent. Again, we're into the quantum world. They find the quantum equivalent particle, which, you know, has been provisionally called the graviton, but it hasn't fallen out of the observations at the Large Hadron Collider, for instance.

Yeah, yeah, I had a conversation a few weeks ago into the Impossible podcast with Dr. Sean Carroll of Caltech, who of course has a recent book called Something Deeply Hidden, which is also a quote from Albert Einstein, about the nature of reality and so-called many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and listeners can find links to that on our various website and places where we'll find our podcast. But ultimately, what Sean is taking the approach of is really not trying to take gravity and quantize it, as we did with electromagnetism,

but really find gravity within quantum mechanics itself. So find the origin of what we perceive as gravitational force and gravitational energy and so forth, associated with gravitational properties by looking at the nature, the fundamental nature of what quantum mechanics is and how we are able to really, in some sense, in his interpretation, you know, find venues or aspects of entropy of connections to, you know, black hole physics, etc. that really could cause gravity to emerge from quantum mechanics rather than the other way around. So it's not at all clear to people like Sean, and I'm agnostic on this, but it's not all clear to people like Sean, like if we'll ever be able to quantize it.

But I guess getting back to my earlier question, which you mostly answered, but, you know, in part, it's, let's say we do quantize gravity. And we have a good explanation for, we have a good quantum theory of electrodynamics. In fact, that's called quantum electrodynamics. And in some sense, it's the paradigm for all different attempts to quantify. the forces of nature. And the other three forces do have quantum field theoretic descriptions. But would you say, in your opinion, I mean, do we really understand them? Because we can say there is a photon, do we understand electromagnetism even more? I recall a story that Richard Feynman told in one of his, he's the only guy I know who can write multiple autobiographies. And one of them, he said, you know, after he won the Nobel Prize for a QED, Quantum Electrodynamics, you talked to his father,

who's just a simple, you know, scientifically literate but not an expert there in New York, not far from wherever you are, I believe. And he said to his father said to him, so son, you know, now you won the Nobel Prize and everything. You know, can you explain something to me when an electron makes a transition from a higher energy orbital to a lower energy orbital, it emits a photon. And Feynman said, that's right. And then his dad said something to the effect of, so was the photon stored inside the

electron all this time. And Feynman said, I didn't know, and I said I didn't know. And his dad looked at him with a look of dismay and disapproval and disappointment, the likes of which he had never seen. You know, he held his son up as his great gene. And he couldn't answer the most simple question. So are we destined always to really lack the either the linguistic skills or the ability as humans? Are we asking the wrong question to really say, do we understand gravity? As it is a big thesis of your book. I'm glad to hear you asking the question because that's the kind of question I wanted readers to come away from the book with, you know, to be challenging these fundamental, you know, these fundamental questions, to be asking them and challenging the fundamental assumptions. And reading the book, I do feel like you're, and you've, you have this, I haven't read all of your other books, but I come away with a sense of you sort of being a tour guide. And literally in the book, in some of my favorite episodes, you take us to. Italy, you take us around the world, you take us into these intimate conversations with scientists and

lay people, and even historical figures going back in time and imagining kind of conversations. And I see this as a tour guide, and I maybe was thinking as I was coming away from the book, feeling that just like a tour guide, you can't make me understand Italian just because you take me to, you know, the coast of Italy, but you can give me the flavor of it. And I feel like you did, you do give the flavor not only of, you know, kind of a tourist, but even for professionals such as myself who do wrestle with it and you interview many eminent, eminent physicist in the book, what does it really mean to understand? And what does it say it mean to know? You act as this consummate tour guide. And I think that's what impels the reader along in this journey.

And I think, you know, just personally, I don't want to insert things into your words, but that we can't, we want to know. When we say we want to know, what we really, mean is we want to have a classical understanding of things. Like we can't understand quantum mechanics because we're not at the level of, you know, 10 to the minus 13, you know, millimeter centimeters. But similarly, so we want to have a classic and our classical intuition fails us. Ironically, gravity is the theory perhaps we have the greatest access to classical experimentation. In fact, the way that you got into this field or into this book was through doing an experiment in gravity, so to speak, where you encountered gravity.

We normally think of it as the weakest forces, and you literally fell over in a bookstore, as you recount, and that encounter with gravity, and in a bookstore, I can't help but think that those are, I don't think you hit your head. I think you, this encounter really impelled you to want to learn more. But I think, ironically, we have this classical understanding of gravity that couldn't be better, as you talk about in the book, we don't need quantum gravity to send an Apollo spacecraft

or Orion spacecraft to the moon. So I think maybe it's like, as Sean is saying, you know, we're trying to get quantized gravity, but maybe we should look for the, you know, gravity within quantum mechanics. Maybe we're trying to understand gravity, but we should look for, you know, the gravitational understanding and our experience of classical everyday life. Nils Bohr, who wrote a lot about the philosophy of science, really. I mean, he had several collections of essays out, and over the years, they got progressively more philosophical. And he was of the opinion that because we came of age intellectually in a classical environment,

our language and our brains didn't develop to understand quantum, And so we just might not be able to go back to your question. Like, can we understand it? Maybe the answer is no, because that's just not the way that we operate. And we don't have the language for it. Did you encounter, so you've written, you know, and again, you're such an intellectually peripatetic author and intellectual. I mean, you've written this book with Temple Grandin, who's one of the foremost, you know,

kind of public figures who is, who I believe she has autism or has been dealing with that. So you wrote a book called The Autistic Brain with her. And, you know, I wonder if you came across throughout the, you know, explorations either in the 4% universe or in the trouble with gravity. Did you come across, you know, this notion to want, my understanding, which is very limited of autism, is that there is oftentimes a frustration and inability to perceive the sense of self, the theory of identity, both by people who have autism of other people, the theory of others, of self-perception, but also of others to perceive them. And I wonder, in your encounters, at least with scientists, are there commonalities between, you know, the two kind of very physics-heavy books or not, no, there's no equations, but in terms of the phenomena that you're describing and the autistic brain, Are there commonalities between some of the scientific characteristics of a great scientist and folks like Temple and others?

Or are there commonalities in the way that they interact with the world that you see? Or am I off base there? Matt, I mean, I don't think that I've encountered amongst scientists. I don't think I've encountered, you know, spectrum, you know, whatever you want to call it, autism, being on the spectrum. any more than I encounter it in other fields, other parts of life. I mean, you know, yeah, I mean, you meet people and you go, okay, yeah, that's probably, you know, that might explain some things, but, but no, on the whole, no, sorry. And in the interest of, you know, kind of understanding the process by which you go through and

writing your book. So this is, so you wrote that book with, with Temple, Temple Grandin. What is that process like of working with a co-author versus working by yourself? I have very limited experience compared to you. And I think a lot of times our listeners are interested in the creative process of revealing either scientific or cultural or creative pursuits. How did you experience those two different paths to writing books? Well, you know, when I when I write about science, because I don't have a background in science, I try to use that ignorance on my part to, in a positive way, because I feel like if I can educate myself about something,

then I might be able to explain it to the reader in such a way that the reader might understand. I mean, that I would have understood it before I started thinking about whatever the topic is. And I tell my students, my writing students, I tell them to think about nonfiction as inviting the reader to stand with you, kind of shoulder to shoulder, and you go exploring together. So in my own work, I see myself standing with the scientists

and asking really basic questions, and then you get answers, and then it leads you down more complicated paths. And that's the model that I try to follow in my book, and structuring the book. And so with Temple, the same principle operated. I felt like, okay, I'm going to stand with her and understand this, whatever the process is. And then I did, you know, research on my own and used that as part of the narrative as well, you know, researching the history of the diagnosis, for instance. And, you know, raising some, again, historical.

and philosophical questions about that. And in those sections of the book, I mean, that was me kind of, you know, inviting the reader to stand along with me. But I got there by standing along with Temple, just as I do with some of the, you know, the writers or the scientists who I, you know, I mean, especially in the 4% universe, which was really a contemporary history of the discovery of these two phenomena, as well as the cosmic microwave background, and just talking to the people who did the work and saying,

okay, walk me through it. What happened then? What were you thinking? What did you want to know? What did you find out? Did that surprise you? What questions did it raise? And, you know, just by taking it down to this really fundamental, basic level,

I find that you can create a story out of these discoveries and the same thing with Temple. Excellent. Thanks for that. We'll come back just at the very end to one creative question that I like to ask all my podcast guests. But I want to talk a little bit about, again, I want folks to read the book, buy the book,

buy many copies, makes a great, depending on when you hear this, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, present or Valentine's Day present, or maybe even New Year's Eve, if we're quick. The Trouble with Gravity by Richard Panic, who are interviewing today, it's gotten fabulous reviews, Kirkus. It was selected as one of symmetry magazines, books of the year of 2019, which is rather outstanding because everybody else on the list is basically a professional physicist or, you

know, a well, experienced scientist who is a popular riser of science. So congratulations on that. Thank you. So in the quest to understand gravity, which you pointed out something, you know, which I always love to do a little bits of trivia. And in my book, you know, one of the things I hear the most about is I didn't know that the word lens came from the lentil beans shape. And then I thought about your book and really not knowing that Newton, you know, was sort of coining this term gravity in a sense that hadn't been coined before. and it has the connotation of the grave, right? So one of the wonderful things about the book is a historical, you know,

I called it, you know, in my notes on the book, you know, a brief history of gravity. But it's not only etymological. It's sort of, you know, ontological. You're exploring how has it been actually perceived, but also how has it been experienced? So I, and I love the fact that you start, you really start from a very heavily religious perspective. You talk a lot about, you know, in the context of Jesus and even in the Old Testament, how is this experience? And I was curious because I don't know much.

I heard an interview a podcast with you not too long ago. And I recall that you were raised Catholic, Bingsey, I think Catholic. And so can you tell us more about your pathway through faith? And if that, did that have an influence? There's a good, you know, chapter or two that deals with that, not as an overarching. you know, kind of overbearing way, I should say. But really, in a almost a historical narrative of how these people conceived of, what is up there, heaven, hell, Dante. You know, you're one of the few writers who can bring up Dante and then, you know, throw on all these popular cultural references.

So anyway, getting back to the original first part of the question. Yeah, dealing with, how is the, does religion play a role in this book or in your life personally? are? No, not in my, not in my life so much. I'm a very lapsed Catholic. I was raised Catholic, but long, long, lapsed. But, you know, certainly there's that influence in me, that curiosity about religion. What I found in researching the book is that I started looking at creation myths. So I'm dealing, when I'm dealing with religion, when I'm dealing with, you know, Catholicism and things, I'm still looking at them for me. in the context of mythology, what are the stories we tell ourselves about our relationship to the universe?

And we do that through, sometimes through religion and mythology. And I started looking at creation myths. And on my own, I just kept reading them thinking about how does this relate to gravity? Because you use the phrase, you know, up there. And I use that heavily in the book, the difference between up there and down here. And that wouldn't occur to us unless we were wedded to one of those two areas. And in researching creation myths, I found that in almost every case, actually in every case that I came across, they all begin with the separation of Earth and Sky. And it dawned on me that we wouldn't be making that separation unless we identified.

with one of those two areas, and we saw them as distinct. And then the area up there is mysterious. So we give it special qualities, and we call them, you know, gods on the mountains or in the clouds or whatever. And then we attribute certain other qualities to what is familiar to us and what is mundane. And mundane comes from the Latin mundanus of the earth. Right there, that right.

And the grave. Did you say that? Yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So yes. So gravitas, heaviness, gravity. They all have the same associations. So I found, and then I came across a quote from this scholar,

from the mid-20th century, who is, I guess, one of the leading scholars on creation myths. And I quote this in the book. He says that he calls that division between sky and earth, the primeval pair. And I thought, wow, okay. So it occurred to me, and I pursued it, and eventually I found this validation for this idea that I had. So you can see how in the creation midst, the beginnings of religion, it's already there. How we see our relationship to the universe is out here. And we aspire to up there. And also, you know, I took away the, you know, this connection, this, these dichotomies that you

start the book off with. I'll just read the beginning because it does start with the same, you know, basic prologue as the most famous book with the highest book sales. I always say, I just want 1% of God's book sales. You say, in the beginning were the heavens and the earth. You can look it up. Then came light and dark, and with them day and night. Soon followed the beasts of the earth and the foul of the air. What wasn't in the beginning, at least not explicitly,

was whatever was creating this division, still that whatever was implicit in those binary distinctions, that whatever defined with the exactness of a razor, the most fundamental divide of all, the horizon, and the horizon becomes a sort of character, but also the binary dichotomies up down, you know, and then we see, you know, sky, earth, and these, and in the beginnings, you know, and then that makes you think about the end, right? So there are all these dichotomies discussed in the book. And I think it is sort of interesting. We even have it, you know, in popular language. We talk about, you know, falling in love. And what are these emotions that you talk about those as well. And what's very charming in the book, is you don't shy away from really saying that there was a relevancy. I mean, obviously the Bible's not a science book, but really, you know, by starting it off with some sort of a notion of

foundation of divisions up here, down there, it certainly inculcated a curiosity in people. And as you say in the book, you know, if there was beginning, this concept of the end, and what that meant to folks like Dante and now the end, is it a theological end? Is it a physical place within the earth and then all the way up through to the scientific expletors of gravity, starting with Galileo, who plays a huge role in your book, as well as my book, and Newton, who is a really interesting character because he kind of combined those religious and the scientific sensibilities in a way that few before him or after him have. But it's so interesting to look at all the great characters that you think about,

the greatest thinkers in history, and they all confronted gravity. And here we are today, still confronting it, maybe with more precise test. And I think it's a wonderful way to think about it. One of the things that spoke to me as well was that you mentioned not only the scientific and cultural aspects of gravity, but the political aspects, which was sort of a surprise to me. But then reading the book, you talk about John Locke and his influence on on the founding fathers of America. I don't know. Can you say a few words about that?

That was a unique thesis that I had not really heard explored before. And I want to come back to that after I hear. How did you find out about that? What was the role that, you know, gravity plays in the founding of our country, so to speak? Okay. Well, about 20 years ago, I had a book, the telescope book that I referred to earlier. The book on the telescope was called Seeing and Believing. And in researching that book, I saw that, okay,

the invention of the telescope, which then Galileo takes and converts into a scientific instrument and opens up, you know, all sorts of new understandings of the universe, that that was the moment, that was the first instrument that extended one of the human senses, okay, extends the sense of sight. And it put the ability to investigate the universe into the hand. of the person who was doing the investigating. So it was, in that sense, it was a democratic, small D, democratic invention, in that it removed or transferred some of the power

from the distant king or pope or God or whatever and gave it to you, because now you could hold it in your hand and you could see for yourself. And you didn't have to take somebody else's word for it. and you could repeat what other people saw. So this was, you know, it was the beginning of the scientific method, right, in the way that we think about science. And that, in researching the book on the telescope,

I saw that this democratic principle, then, you know, it just, it kind of laid out logically that if you have this instrument in your hand, then you have more power, and the power shifts, and it, you know, as I said, and eventually it leads to some of the things that I quote in this book. So I've been thinking about this for, you know, for a couple of decades. And it leads to some of the, you know, the observations in this book where the founding, the founders of democracy were, we're thinking about, you know, what are the implications of the scientific method and how do we know, you know, are the stories in the Bible, which were assumed to be literally true, the New Testament stories, were they actually true?

And I mentioned in the book that Thomas Jefferson cut out, he took the New Testament of the Gospels and the New Testament, and he cut out all of the miracles and published that as the story. Jefferson Bible, right? Right. So, you know, this is very much on their minds, you know, and giving, you know, giving the power to the people. Yeah. So I came across an interesting connection to that as well over the summer. I forget what really prompted it.

But I was looking at the works of Euclid. And throughout the works of Euclid, he talks about sort of certain. propositions being self-evident. And in other words, I think, I think there aren't so many things in Euclidean geometry that you can say are self-evident, but once he establishes some things, he then goes and says by extension, you know, if this property holds, this holds true by axioms of logic, you know, that parallel lines don't need or things like that. And then later, of course, Newton in the Principia picks that up as well, and he has the exact same language, you know, basically copying from Euclid and says that such and such is self-reliacist.

evident as well. And then of course folks like Thomas Jefferson, you find the exact same language coming into the Declaration of Independence and so forth and the self-evidentiary nature of things, which is really, you know, not exactly, you know, part and parcel of the scientific method, right? You have to say, well, that's self-evident because, you know, some people that might to me. You know, if you have a heavier object, it seemed self-evident for millennia that they would fall faster than a lighter object. But of course, that's not true. I think, you know, I had a question as I'm reading it and I'm thinking about this conversation that we're going to have. So if it's true that things are self-evident and that's a way to prove things, or at least

motivate certain assumptions being provable, then you know, and you talk about this in the book, how Einstein took Euclidean geometry and really threw it away and established, well, with the help of Lovicevsky and others, geometers, which you recount the story I didn't know, which is that he really didn't care so much about Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry early in his life, and then it became the basis of the theory of general relativity. First, can you say something about what does it mean non-Euclidean geometry? And then I'll ask the question about, well, if Euclid's wrong, then is anything really said to be self-evident. But first, can you say a little bit about Einstein and his encounters with

non-Euclidean geometry? How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. Sure. Well, you just mentioned Euclid's example of parallel lines always meet. Well, in non-Euclidean geometry, you can have a curved surface. I mean, you know, you look at a balloon

or a ball. This has lines of longitude on it, lines of latitude on it, and they meet at the poles, but they're parallel at the equator, right? That's one example. That's not exactly what Einstein used it for, but yes. Right, but he needed it for thinking about

curvature in space, in space time. And so And that is the sort of modern, you know, as we teach it in our cosmology classes, we talk about different possibilities for the so-called curvature of the universe, which would be manifest really only on its largest possible scales. I don't know if you know, but I wrote a book on Einstein and Freud about 15 years ago called The Invisible Century, and it's about how they change the way that we see science

and the way we think about, the invisible and or the non-tangible. And so I wrote a fair amount about general relativity in there and how he, how Einstein needed to incorporate non-Euclidean geometry and that. But I can't, I wouldn't pretend that I understand it fully. Right. In fact, I had to, for this book, I had to really confront general relativity in a different, you know, much more rigorous way. that was difficult. So one of the things that one comes away with after reading the book is that, you know, sort of the lay person will assume that even if they don't know what gravity is, some scientist knows what it is. But it seems like the greater the scientists, the more perplexed and baffled they are with gravity and how to reconcile its, you know, apparent simplicity, you know, inverse square law is something.

you can teach to, you know, fourth graders. But that, you know, really understanding its essence requires so much more. And you make the point repeatedly that the grade of the scientists, sort of the greater their acknowledgement of what they didn't know up until the very day when you encountered Kip Thorne. So maybe you can relate that story as well. Right. So Kip Thorne was one of the people, one of the people behind the Ligo experiment that wound

of detecting gravitational waves for the first time. Prediction that was kind of embedded in Einstein's equations, but nobody had observed them. And so Kip was one of the people who put that experiment together that took decades to get rolling. And I asked him once, I was on the phone with him for something unrelated to this. And I just thought, okay, I'll ask him when I'm asking everybody else.

So what is that? gravity and and he said well that's a meaningless question and that really became part of the impetus for this book I'm I recount that anecdote in the introduction to the book the preface and and I found myself thinking about that question a lot as I wrote the book and asking myself well what did I even mean by that you know what do you mean by what is gravity this goes back to the to the discussion we having at the beginning of this of this conversation about you know how do you how do you define things what is the meaning of something um so i had to really think hard about what i was what i must have thought

i was asking him yeah yeah so yeah it's interesting you know it's a meaningless question but like a lot of meaningless questions i mean famously uh stephen hawking was said to have said you know asking what happened before the Big Bang is as nonsensical as asking what's north of the North Pole. Of course, every kid will tell you it's Santa Claus. But in reality, the notion of these very simple questions that are simple to ask, but maybe impossible to answer. I'm not sure, you know, if I agree with Kip on that note, I think it's incredibly meaningful.

It's just we may lack, as I said, yeah, as we discussed earlier, We may lack the vocabulary and the articulation to really explain it. But what is the detection of gravitational waves, if not the really crowning achievement of a theory that was predicted 100 plus years ago by Albert Einstein? And the consequences of which took so long and so much painstaking energy by KIP and the team of over 1,000 people on LIGO and is still going on to this very day. this quest to understand the universe and see it in the same way that the Galileo did. Of course, as you point out, you know, Galileo democratized the telescope, although he was pretty very secretive about it. He didn't actually even allow Kepler to use the telescopes that he had built himself because he wanted to keep his monopoly going. And likewise, I don't think that they'll be,

you know, you'll be able to get a $25 LIGO, a replica, or not replica, an actual working LIGO, you know, on Amazon anytime soon. But we always talk about my late colleague here at UC San Diego, and Professor Hans Parr, used to say that he was a European, a Dutchman, worked with Leon Letterman and others in discovering many fundamental particles that we know about today. And he said that, in his opinion, general relativity was the culmination of Western civilization.

And really to understand it, to communicate it, all the meta-skills, plus all very, the actual physical skills and actually going into the detection of gravitational waves, which are really the last remaining piece of confirmation needed to, you know, to prove to the extent that you can prove a scientific theory. And I think it's, it is wonderful to think about, well, what do people, what do scientists do? I think we contribute to culture. And so one of the ways that I like to wrap up each podcast that I have is to ask a guest,

that's a question that is, you know, I've asked this to literally probably 50 people have been on the show. And that's about creativity. Because a lot of times we don't think about, we think about writers, we think about artists as creative and actors. We don't think about scientists as creative. And I wonder, you know, in your profession, you're not a scientist professionally, but I'd say, you know, you've got pretty good street cred, you know, after writing all these wonderful books on science and instruments of science. and the personalities within it, you have way more than a layperson's exposure to it. But even outside of that, in your craft, in your field, you teach writing and so forth.

But can you teach creativity? Can you teach humans to be imaginative as our center here? You see San Diego's Center for Human Imagination is named after Sir Arthur C. Clark. Is that something that, in your opinion, can you teach creativity? And if so, how would you go about doing so? Well, you know, the course that I teach at Johns Hopkins, I was invited to give a talk there a few years ago. And after the talk, the person who was running the program came up and asked if I would be interested in designing a course. And over the years, I've been teaching it out for six or seven years in the spring semester.

It's called Science as Narrative. And I, over the course of teaching it, I've found that the scientific method, method and writing narrative are very similar. And that's really the major point of the class. Very briefly, the scientist and the narrator basically asked three questions. It is, what do I know? What do I want to know? And what do I learn is usually some of what you wanted to know.

but then there's a surprise in there. There's other information. And then you go back to the beginning and say, okay, now what do I know? Now what do I want to learn, et cetera? And that's how writers keep you engaged in a narrative throughout the book. Think about a movie.

Every second of a movie is taking you a little bit farther along and creating more anticipation. Part of the art of writing is to create that curiosity in the reader and create the anticipation then rewarded, but not quite, not all the way until the end of the project. And the same thing is true of scientists. They were asking themselves that question, what do I know, what do I want to know, what do I learn? And so it is, I think, a very creative endeavor because you're trying to figure out how am I going to get answers out of the universe.

And how do I change my thinking so that I know that I'm asking the right questions? and being aware of when you get the surprising answer. And, you know, I mean, here we've been talking about dark matter and dark energy. Neither of them was predicted. Now we're talking about gravity. You know, we don't know what it is. People aren't aware of that. You know, again and again, there are the surprises in science.

And I think that you need to have, you know, a creative mind. I mean, I think that Einstein wrote about, this a lot that we that you that you need to be able to have that intuition to be able to see something I forget who it was I think it might have been Faraday who saw an electrical event occurring in his mind before he ran the experiment yeah Einstein with his thought experiments right you know I mean, these are, yeah. I was talking with Adam Reese recently,

who won the Nobel for his participation in the discovery of the evidence for dark energy. And he was, and he started using a metaphor. And I remembered years ago I was at, I deliberately wanted to go behind the scenes at a press conference and see how the press conference has created, how the media is created. And I went down to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. And I sat with Adam before the beginning of the press conference.

And he was trying to describe something. I mean, he was using a metaphor. And then during the press conference, which was an audio conference, it was a dial-in conference. So there were just the people from the institute sitting around the table and fielding these questions and so on. And Adam threw out a couple of metaphors in the course of the discussion. And as soon as the press conference was over, as soon as they cut the audio, everybody talked about which metaphors worked. So it's very much a creative endeavor, I think.

Indeed, yeah. Well, I want to leave audiences with that cliffhanger, and I use that word advisedly. And those of you who read Richard's phenomenal book, The Trouble with Gravity, will know why I left it with that word cliffhanger, because actually every chapter really impels you to read more. And it's the sign of a wonderful. And I explain the origin the first time that that's a character and novel is hanging from a cliff. That's what I'm a hinting at, but now you're spoilt. Okay, fine. All right, we'll edit that out. No, it's fine. Yeah, I did delight in that description as well. Richard, thank you so much for sharing your valuable time with us, and we'll let you know when this comes out. And it's been a pleasure talking to you, and I hope we can meet in person someday so I can get your signature on this hard copy.

And thank you for sending your book with the bit of galactic dust in it. Oh, yes. That's a piece of space dust brought low by gravity. Yes, that's right. Exactly. Well, thank you so much, Richard. Happy holidays, happy 2020. And looking forward to talking to you again. Oh, thanks. You too. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.