Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Craig Callender: A Graphic History of Time ​(#196)

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Craig Callendar is a Professor of Philosophy, and Founding Faculty of, and Co-Director of, the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego in the Department of Philosophy. He is also on the Freedom and Responsibility in Science Committee of the International Science Council, Paris; and Founding Faculty at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego; Faculty, The John Bell Institute, Hvar, Croatia. From 1996-2000 I worked in the Department of Philosophy, Logic & Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. I obtained my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1997. His main area of research and teaching is the philosophy of science, with special emphasis on physics, time, and the environment. His book What Makes Time Special? (Oxford University Press, 2017) won the 2018 Lakatos Award. Here are some book reviews: Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Review, Metascience, BJPS, NDPR. He's also won two Chancellor's Associates Excellence Awards, the 2018-19 Award in Research and the 2007-8 Award in Graduate Teaching. Audible is hands-down my favorite platform for consuming podcasts, fiction and nonfiction books! With an Audible membership, you can download titles and listen offline, anytime, anywhere. The Audible app is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. Audible members don’t have to worry about using their credits right away. You can keep your credits for up to a year—and use them to binge on a whole series if you’d like! And if you’re not loving your selection, you can simply swap it for another. Start your free 30-day trial today:  Audible.com/impossible or text “impossible” to 500-500 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:32 What made you write a graphic novel? 00:03:15 How do you explain the relative psychological flow of time? 00:06:35 What is your "world-line"? Your background? 00:13:06 How did Carl Popper and his demarcation / falsifiability criteria become so accepted? 00:18:50 How can we make philosophy more important to science? 00:23:55 What is the role of ethics in science? Why do you teach ethics at a "STEM" school? The genesis of the Center of Practical Ethics at UC San Diego. 00:27:00 What is the practical side of scientific ethics? 00:30:10 Kurt Gödel's universe and space-time solutions 00:42:50 Why are we so concerned with theories of everything and cosmogenesis? 00:47:15 Why are singularities so important? 00:52:40 Is there a unifying theory of time? 01:02:50 What is a "block" universe? 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Please contact [e-mail] to learn more about sponsoring Into the Impossible. Credits: Edited by Catherine Alderette Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to all you fellow travelers in the multiverse of minds that I'm connecting together on the Into the Impossible podcast. It's a treat to be with you, and this is an awesome time to be a cosmologist. There's so much cool stuff coming. And sometimes we forget to really pay homage or homage, no, I think it's homage, to the field that underlies all of science and natural laws. And that is philosophy. And so today it's a great thrill to have not only a philosopher, but one of my colleagues at UC San Diego, a friend, Craig Callender, who's a professor of philosophy and does a great deal to inspire the very, very currency of the imagination economy, and that's curiosity. So today's episode is going to focus on his thoughts based on his book, a graphic guide, which is not graphic

in the risque sense, but it's a graphic guide about time. And it's really delightful kind of a graphic novel comic book with real serious topics about all the fun and interesting themes we explore on The Into the Impossible podcast. And this was a particular treat because we did it in person right here in UC San Diego in my office. That was really fun. And life is getting back to normal. Nature is healing. And so you're going to learn a lot about his approach to thinking about time, some very interesting models of the universe in which time may not behave the way it does in our universe. And interestingly enough, some of those are held by some of the greatest minds in human history and philosophy, people like Kurt Gödel, who we speak about quite often. And many other people as well that you'll

learn about in today's episode. So there's some really fun tidbits that you'll take away in this show. And it's just a delight to have a real, honestly goodness philosopher on the show. Let me know what you think. If you want to hear more of these in-person interviews, more interviews about the basics of rational thinking, of time, of the underlying philosophy behind the laws of nature. I think you'll like this episode. And give me some feedback. There's not too many ways to do it. If you do listen, you can find this on Audible, you can find this on iTunes, and you can leave reviews in both of those places.

I'm sure you could do it other ways. And don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube. channel, Dr. Brian Keating, where you'll see a video of this interview with a lot of really, really cool background, B-roll footage, and a footage of us getting together and just hang out as two scholars are want-to-do, absent some libations, because this was early in the day when we did this interview. So give me your feedback. I love reading your reviews. Here's a recent one I got on iTunes from someone named Tell It Like It Is, Chris. Thank you, Brian, for presenting these fascinating, stimulating, and mind-expanding interviews with such a diverse range of the thinkers

and doers of our time. See, time. As an interested layman, I feel privileged to listen in on our thoughts and ideas. Brian's enthusiasm for new and exciting ideas is infectious. And I hope it is, although infectious doesn't always have the greatest connotation these days, but now that many of us are fully vaccinated and getting back to normal, hopefully this is infectiousness in the best possible sense. So if you want to help me out, you share the podcast with your friends. Give me a rating or review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts rather. Remember, you have to follow the podcast now. Apple changed as they are mercurially want to do. So you have to actually go to the podcast, search my name, Brian Keating, click on the three dots at the top near the three dots.

There's a plus sign that'll subscribe it. You can do auto downloading and then scroll down. And you can leave a rating and review. I really appreciate we're up to 300. and six, up from 100, just a year ago. It's phenomenal. We're expanding faster than the universe and my waistline, and both of those are expanding rapidly. So now sit back, relax, and enjoy this journey into The Impossible with my friend and colleague, Professor Time himself, Craig Callender, enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is interstitial from magic. It is a great thrill to have my colleague and friend, Craig Callender, of the Department of philosophy at UC San Diego and the director of the Institute for Practical Ethics. Is that correct?

Is that the correct title for it? That's correct. Wow. Well, you're joining us on the end of the Impossible podcast at the end of February. We are both vaccinated, at least partially vaccinated, and COVID-free in case our boss, Pridip Koshla or Gavin Newsom might be watching. Who knows? He sometimes tunes in, I know for sure. But it's a great thrill to have you here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's wonderful to be here. Yeah, we've interacted for at least the last 10 years on various thesis committees and other affairs. And today we're going to be talking about a book that I've had been reading for several years because it's so much fun to read and reread. And that's a time, a graphic novel.

I believe that's the title of that book. And then you have another book that we'll talk about as well. So the first question I have for you is, what made you think was a tenure that allowed you the freedom to write a graphic novel? Our graphic novels considered serious academic fair. Oh, that's a good question. And one, the answer you'll relate to. Yeah, so I was living in London, and we had just bought a house, my first house, and we had just had our first child.

And I thought, well, I can't really get any work done with the brand new baby in the house. But the baby would go to sleep like from two to four in the afternoon every day. And I thought, well, I'll write this cartoon book because I can't really do any kind of real research. And also, you know, I thought, you know, I work so much on time. If I need to go to a library or look up stuff, then it's already getting too hard for a cartoon book. And so I was able to just punch the thing out during nap time for the first, you know, month or two of my first one's existence. And now he's all grown up, right? he's about to start college or is in college?

Yeah, he just graduated. Wow, he just graduated. Wow, that is true what they say. Time does fly. Although I say, and you're the perfect person to ask this up, I think that time is super relative in that various increments of time fly, but other aspects of time drag on. And if you remember back to the days when he was in diapers or whatever,

sometimes you would like, as the other cartoon novel called Go the F to Suss. sleep mentions that sometimes you just want him to go to bed and that period between, you know, dinnertime, bath time, story time, bedtime, falling asleep, getting up, wanting water, take, that drags on. And yet then you turn around and you're like, he's a graduate student. Like, how is it a psychological hour of time? How is that relative? It would seem that you could have at most one thermodynamic error. We'll talk about one cosmic era of time. It's not like there's multiple ones of those or are there? Yeah, there are many arrows.

And regarding the psychological experience of time, when we talk about time flowing fast or slow or that, I mean, there's so many variables going on. And then one of the big ones, of course, is whether it's something that has been encoded in memory and it's a kind of retrospective judgment, or is it one, you know, about ongoing moments.

And, you know, so this is something that's very familiar to many of us who are fortunate, enough to just have the pandemic be such that we are stuck at home and in the same routine. We think, you know, how could it be Friday again already? It just went by like that. And of course, then we're doing a kind of retrospective judgment over the week. Basically nothing happened compared to the previous week. And so if you think of each tick of the psychological clock as being a kind of measuring salient events,

there weren't that many. so there weren't that many top ticks. So it feels like it's going really fast. On the other hand, in the moment, it might be feeling going really slowly. It might seem to drag on. And so it depends on what's going on. Of course, for other people in the pandemic,

if you're a nurse at a hospital or something, it might be a very, very different experience. I'd always say, you know, when it comes to the psychological how long, the psychological feeling of duration, as far as I can see,

it varies with every single variable it's ever been measured. Have you just had orange juice? Have you had coffee, alcohol, mind-altering drugs? All of those things change your sense of duration. And of course, you know,

there's no one better to talk about the peregrinations in time than Einstein, who is a character in the book, in the graphic novel, as well as Galileo. And then furthermore, we're going to talk about Kurt Gödel as well, because little known, we know about his incompleteness theorem. And we know, in my mind, at least people in physics,

you often hear about like someone so has physics envy, or a field has physics envy, you know, recapitulating Freud's penis envy or what have you. And but people say, oh, if so-and-so field has physics envy. But I think physics has math envy and maybe math has philosophy envy. So I want to start off in that provocative vein. The fact that we can't really prove something in physics, I mean, you're free to please disabuse me from wrong, but I feel like we don't prove things correct in physics. We can prove things wrong in physics.

We can falsify things as Popper provided this demarcation hypothesis. But on the other hand, we can't prove things as well as a mathematician can prove something. And I think now is sort of needed more than ever the clarification of what science is and what pseudoscience is and what it is not. And I wonder if you can sort of talk from a philosopher's point of view, but also I see you as a very physics-adjacent philosopher, a very deep training. Maybe before we move into that, I'm sorry to be so jumping around in time and space, but you inspire me. First, tell us what is your background exactly? How long have you been here? Where were you before here?

What's your world line, as you talk about in the book? What's your past light cone look like? Okay. That's a very unlikely world line, I think. Yeah, so I was, so neither of my parents, you know, went to college. And so I'm not sort of coming up in like where academia was sort of a thing I would think of doing. And I was supposed to be a printer. So my great-grandfather, grandfather and father were all printers.

And so, you know, just do a little bit of induction on that and all the mail calendars were printers. It seemed clear what I was going to do. But then this thing got invented and became popular called the computer. And the print industry did not seem to be such a great industry to go into anymore. You know, this kind of skilled labor that was special to printing was then not going to be valued as much because you could do something almost as good for so much cheaper with the computer. And so then, you know, given that background, seemed like I should be either a doctor or a lawyer. This then I started off in biology and chemistry.

But boy, once I hit college, there was so many interesting things. I just bounced around from one major to another. So I almost became a math major, but I almost became a art major. I did become a psychology major for a brief, brief moment. Where were you a student? Providence College. So they gave me a, yeah, so they gave me a scholarship. ship, which is nice.

Yeah. And, yeah. And then... Rhode Island also. I'm from Rhode Island. Oh, which part? Providence. So I was in Brown.

Yeah. So, yeah, we probably overlapped at one point or another, maybe on a home visit or something like that. Yeah, Brown's wonderful. Yeah. So it was Providence. Brom is the gem. And so you went from there.

Yeah, so then I, but I always had, you know, yeah, so I would get, my uncle would give me, they would give certificates to the Brown University of bookstore. Mm-hmm. And I was always reading. It's a great book story. And my mother is still, but especially back then, obsessed with science fiction. And so I would read a lot of that, too, because there's a lot of that in the house.

And so this always kind of put me in this more kind of philosophy of physics trajectory. And then I went to Rutgers University, which was one of the best places to go. It still is in philosophy. and they happened to have all these great philosophers of physics there. And so I just thought, and then I went, so yeah, so what really triggered things then to go into philosophy of physics was, I went to a popular talk by David Merman, where he was explaining Bell's theorem,

doing one of those kind of simple coloring theorems, so anybody could understand it. Right. And I walked out of that lecture, and I just couldn't believe it. And I thought, well, if you're interested in philosophy and metaphysics in the world, old. Here's this experiment that is like really experimental metaphysics. It's so interesting. I basically dropped everything and then started just reading quantum mechanics, reading it,

reading it. It happens to be in a place where it, you know, where it was just fantastic. I mean, all these great people, not just at Rutgers, but Princeton in New York, who work in this area. And so it was really just really super lucky that I was able to be there and do that. And then after that, did you have to, what's typical in philosophy is a postdoc? What was your thesis, by the way? What was the title of your thesis?

Explaining Times Arrow. Okay. All right. So it was about... A lot of it was about quantum mechanics in Times Arrow. And philosophy, well, it's changing a little bit the discipline now where there are more postdocs and things like that.

But back then, it was crueler or kinder, depending on how you look at it. You're either going to, if you work, especially if you worked, that a kind of niche field like philosophy of physics, you're probably either going to go to some really, you know, a resource school because a Swallowabwe Arts College doesn't need a philosophy physics.

Or you're going to work at McDonald's. And so it's your choice. One of the other, and since there weren't any postdocs, you found out fast. Right. And so I was lucky, you know, so you mentioned Popper. And so, you know, Popper died, I think, in 94. And in 96, I took a job at the London School of Economics and had that center for philosophy of science.

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While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Yeah, and then at some point I got sick of the rain and came here. So I've been here for over 20 years. Oh, wow. So you're a longer timer than myself. I got here at 2004. And I became aware of you not too long after that, actually, coming and being in some

committees and I met our colleague David Meyer and others through you. And of course you have a gift for not only researching and mentorship in this field, but also in terms of leadership and authorship, which I think is an important part of what we do as scientists and as public servants in a sense and kind of demystifying science and distinguishing it from science and pseudoscience. And I was excited to learn of your upcoming course, which I may sit in on. I've done that before some of our fellow faculty. As I mentioned, you're my first UCSD, you're not my first UCSD fellow professor, my first non-relative UCSD professor. So there's been some nepotism. I'm hoping to have our chancellor and other people come on the show. But it's always a treat to do things in person.

And I was saying beforehand, you know, or earlier in this conversation, you know, we kind of have this envy of mathematicians, at least some of us in physics, because at least there's the bounds of what can be proven. And actually things can be proven. You can prove for a MET's last theorem, right? You can prove the Pythagorean theorem, but you can't prove that Einstein is right to arbitrary inaccuracy. So I think that we use Popper as kind of a substitute for Gertl. And I wonder if you could kind of distinguish for me or tell me if I'm wrong in that sense. As scientists, we kind of rely so much on Popper's falsification, demarcation, and maybe you can explain what that is, that we lose side of the fact that even Popper didn't fully support demarcation and falsification as

the sine qua non of what science is. So how did he get to be so elevated? How did Popper get to this exalted level where people will say things like string theory and things are not only not correct. They're bad for science. The bad science, they might as well be pseudoscience. Yeah, so it's kind of funny because Popper is, you know,

what you go to for demarcation. So you want to separate the good science from the bad, good theory from bad theory. Popper was of course a creature of his time. You know, you had in philosophy, all this kind of, you know, Hegel and all this stuff, which is very hard to make sense of, you don't even know if it's making sense sometimes. But then also he saw not Marxism so much the economic side, but the sort of Marxist theory, dialectical materialism, like you, and Freud.

All of this is nonsense. And then, you know, came up with a, you know, this demarcation criteria and of falsifiability. And of course, for him, you know, Einstein's, the Eddington experiment in 1919 for, you know, vindicating, confirming Einstein's, you know, the bending of light around the sun. This was amazing, you know, because that was a bold, risky hypothesis, right? It was not a given that that was going to turn out that way. And he thought, you know, you look at that and then you look at.

Freud and you notice astrology, right. Stology. But anyway, yeah, so Popper's super famous for this. No philosopher of science likes the demarcation criterion from Popper.

We all can't stand it. And it's kind of funny that it gets used so much in the outside world. But then the philosophy of science, we don't use it at all. You know, it's very problematic, you know, because you can think of well, first is the

a bull or falsifiable. What makes it, you know, not just unfa false, not false, but unfalsifiable. You know, in some sense you could make any theory falsifiable or unfalsifiable

if you teach you with them. Also, you can think of a lot of things, yeah, so like string theory as it's coming up, well, it's not it's not, it's not, you can't directly subject it to empirical confirmation But on the other hand, the goal was to do that.

And so is it unfalsifiable or not? Also, you can think of things, you know, astrology is just false. Right. But it's not, but, yeah. So it's therefore science, right? Yeah, I have a big problem with that as well. So it's not very good. Or the earth is flat.

Okay, that's my theory. Okay, I can falsify it with simple measurements. Therefore, it's scientific. Yeah. So it's not a very good criterion. And so now I think, you know, there's sort of, I don't really know exactly, but, you know, I think most philosophers of science think that there's like kind of set of things that you look for in a theory.

And, you know, they, you know, they might be, you know, how unified they are, how much, how fruitful they are, how predictive they are. And you know, allow for tolerances and all those things. And there's some sort of rough metric we use when we do this. I think there's a kind of more like picture I get, I think you get more from history and not so much philosophy where they really think of it is more like just at a time is our stamp of disapproval on that. Right. And that changes with time through history. So it's sort of fashion that so we use it as just a kind of insult, you know, blah.

Right. Popper said, which is an appeal to authority, which we don't hold. Yeah, so Popper didn't like... So they would then interpret Popper's thing is basically that Popper didn't like Freud. Right. And so, you know, but if you had this kind of multi-criterealist thing,

you'd say, well, Freud's theory didn't actually wasn't successful in predicting anything. It didn't, you know, failed in all sorts of different ways. Flexible. Flexible. Yeah. So there's like these kind of signs of, when you think of really cheesy,

pseudoscience, you know, then you can see this kind of overly flexible. It's going to accommodate anything. What I always like to point out is, you know, Popper hated, he hated astrology, or, you know, this is the thing, he hated Freud, as he just said, or he was against Freud, he was against astrology, he was against dialectic, materialist, and then Marxism. And then if you go to, like, most countries on, there are far more Marxist socialist countries on Earth than there are capitalist democracies on Earth. There are far more, you know, psychologists in the world, practicing dream interpretation, all the things he hated.

And you can find much more ink in your, you know, Sunday newspaper about astrology than astronomy. And so it's like even Popper has been falsified by this. The durability of the subject. Yeah. So, but again, yeah, I mean, we're kind of, you know, peering out of this dark cave and looking after we see these shadows and trying to make sense of the world. Do you think that there's a value? I mean, we often hear pejoratives about philosophy, about, you know, philosophy of science, you know, people varying degrees of the old canard that, you know, science needs philosophers,

the way that, you know, birds need or nautologists or something like that. But, you know, I find philosophy to be so rich and so, and just so enjoyable. And I feel that to not teach it or, you know, even worse, to be pejorative insulting towards it, I think we do our physics students of this service. What do you think about this? How can we make it more, besides buying a lot? your books and using them in our classes. But in reality, how can we dispel this rumor that philosophy is not useful?

Imagine if birds were equipped with knowledge of ornithology. I mean, they would really have it made. If they knew their own behavior patterns and all of that, they would really just kill it. Right. So, yeah, I think philosophy is really important. And in particular when it comes to physics, because I think what has happened, it's weird and unfortunate, I think.

And I'm not a sociologist. I don't know if this picture is exactly right. But if you look at, you know, you look at some of the grades in physics from, you know, so Boltzman, Maxwell, Einstein, all these people, they read a lot of philosophy. You know, so Einstein talks about, you know, Hume, David Hume,

inspired them. Galileo and Descartes. They were allowed, right? They loved in our contemporaneous. And so you've had, this was hugely important. And then you go, but it was part of, a lot of philosophy is part of the German

training. And a lot of the theoretical physicists were German. Now, you know, you go to, now fast forward to after the war, now America is an ascendancy in the sciences. You have the government putting a ton of money into the sciences. Who's not popular? The Germans. And then you have people who are like some of the greatest philosophers I think have ever existed going around saying they don't like philosophy,

like Feynman. So Feynman is philosophically gifted. But he would again and again say he doesn't like philosophy as he's basically doing it. Right. And then you have, you know, like Hawking in his last book, he starts off with, you know, philosophy is dead. And then the whole book is basically a, uh, some philosophy of science. Right. He's got this kind of multi-picture, you know, given up on a grand unified theory and this kind of multi-picture thing.

It's all philosophy of science. Yeah. But he doesn't know his philosophy of science, and he says he hates philosophy. Yeah, disparages the thing that he's actually engaging in. And so you have this kind of, you know, shut up and calculate attitude happen, coinciding with this sort of sociological pressures,

but then also about the rise of grants and all that as well, where it's harder to get a grant for. Yeah, what Einstein has got a grant for is either of his relativity, either special or general relativity, you know, probably not. Right. You would have gotten it for his quantum mechanical misgivings, I'm sure, because those turned out not to be fruitful. Yeah, and so I see the other sides.

I see the people who are leaving physics. I mean, almost by definition, I end up seeing the people who are leaving physics. They start off in physics and then they are not satisfied that they don't get to talk about, you know, what, you know, what quantum mechanics means and different interpretations and detail in quantum mechanics and that. So, I mean, to, I don't get, I don't get refugees from cosmology or astrophysics. Not too much because it's philosophical, right? I mean, sometimes it's meta. Yeah, because we, you know, as Hoyle used to say, you know, all these cosmologists, you know, we're in love with the Big Bang. because it satisfies their philosophical needs or their theological needs to believe in Genesis account of creation.

But I did find a more ancient kind of upgrading of philosophy in Galileo's Cedarius Nunchius, where he talks about the telescope, which he was using at the time to, in his claim, resolve all this stars in the Milky Way, the glow of the Milky Way's milkeness into individual stars. and he says, thus we have proven with visible, via visible certainty, these issues that have for so many generations vexed philosophers. He's saying, like, you guys could speculate that one use of the telescope will prove to you that it's right. And I point out in my book, losing that about Prize. He was actually wrong about that.

It was confirmation bias. And we can't resolve all the milkiness of the Milky Way into stars, but no matter how big your telescope is, despite what Galileo said, because it's not made of stars. it's glowing dust, the villain of my book, as I gave you a little grain of earlier today. And so, you know, I think it has an historical precedent. But the fact that I was feel like by not observing it or not, you know, learning from philosophers and philosophers of all kinds that we're, you know, we're kind of doing a disservice to our scientists. But, you know, it's so much to teach them.

It's like, do we require that they have a course in this? one thing I'm curious about is ethics, because I've never taken a course or something in ethics. And you are the director of the Center for Practical Ethics. First of all, what is a scientifically inclined in a person who wrote a very physically kind of thesis and has written books, great detail in physics as you have? Where does ethics come into play? And what makes you, how many hats can you possibly wear? Yeah. Well, that's a question I ask myself all the time. Yeah, so I would say, you know, so sometimes I joke that, you know, it was a midlife crisis. But that's not really true because, you know, so I've taught environmental ethics for 20 years or more.

So I've always had this kind of teaching interest. And I guess I just thought of it as kind of, you know, returning some of what I've been given, where, you know, all you're worried about is empty space times. like, you know, if I'm just interested in vacuum space times with no people or problems or planets or particles or anything in them, then, you know, it's nice at the undergraduate level to be doing something more than only that. But, and then the opportunity really rose, you know, came, came to me to where I saw, I was department chair and I saw, you know, here we are, UC San Diego. I forget where we are, the six biggest recipient of research aid in the, the, country. People don't appreciate this, but people hearing your podcast should know. I mean,

UCSD is rivals any school in terms of its research output. But we don't have really that much ethics. And it was very much a STEM school. And if you think of all the kind of innovation and that happens here, a lot of it, you know, has great promise and it's just amazing. On the other hand, you know, some of it comes with some perils as well. And so we're sort of, by not dealing with some of it in-house, we're sort of externalizing and outsourcing that our social responsibility. Right. And so, yeah, I went around campus giving these kind of talks, talking about, you know, so we were founded by, I could have dinner with them once when I first came with Herb York. And, you know, he worked in the Manhattan Project. Right. But then he's worked on nuclear deterrent.

the rest of the book about that. Polarvel discovers climate change. Then he comes back from Harvard and becomes a professor of social policy, trying to think of things, ways to deal with it. And so we have this great, in our DNA, this great history of these great scientists finding these amazing, you know, making this amazing discoveries and innovation, but then also trying to deal with the social repercussions. And so I thought this was a good.

message and it sort of sold and we've got this institute and we've been trying to develop that institute and then as I've been doing that so maybe the same has happened with you at the science fiction center and in this podcast you know if you spend a certain amount of time on something then you get drawn into it and so now I've started working a little bit more in practical so now my research and teaching sides have blurred a bit and so now I'm starting to work a little bit more in practical ethics. In terms of the meaning of that phrase, practical ethics, is it that application to the research side of what UCSD does,

or is it categorical imperatives and kind of bigger picture things? We're trying to make it more practical and sense of connecting to science that's done on campus. It doesn't have to be done on campus. Sure. Often it is. So for instance, you know, we've had a great. partnership with the biologists working on gene drives. So gene drives are a way of modifying, genetically modifying an organism.

Not like old-fashioned stuff. We just modify the individual. It either passes the trade on or it doesn't. This one, you can force it to pass it on. So it unleashes this kind of genetic chain reaction, irreversible chain reaction. So it can be used for amazing things. So they're working on making it so that milk. mosquitoes can't transmit malaria.

And then all the children won't be able to do that. And they would just keep going and keep going. It would be amazingly efficient. In principle, it would never work this way, but in principle, you could drop one mosquito in an affected area in Africa and all the mosquitoes eventually would be sterilized or

unable to transmit it anyway. Of course, that's the ideal So, you know, that won't really work. But of course, you know, this will change the, have ecological repercussions. What is the long-term consequences of having this kind of genetic technology out there in nature? So we have, you know, partnerships with them and we will look at sort of all of different ethical aspects of that. It could be all sorts of things, you know, autonomous cars, brain organoids, all sorts of things.

Yeah, that kind of stuff we're working on in the Arthur Zee Clark Center for human imagination. And so getting back to some of these figures that I have finger puppets up, we're working on yours as a calendar, finger puppet as well. But one of the characters is Kurt Gödel, who spends an awful lot of time in the book, at least, talking about his universe. And I want to, because it is, is relatively unfamiliar to many of the listeners out there who know the kind of, you know, Friedman Robertson Walker, you know, kind of description, LaMaitra, Big Bang, but this type of universe, which is very special that Gertil thought about, is very much not in vogue, maybe for good reason. But I want to explore some of the different space times that you do talk about. sterile, though they may be, like these mosquitoes, hopefully, will eventually be sterile.

I've always wondered, you know, what is the purpose of the mosquito? If you can figure out, what is there a mosquito? Turns out there's a book written about it. It's called like Apex Predators or something, because people ask, what animal in Africa has killed the most human beings? And it's like, the hippo, you know, the tiger? No, it's the mosquito. And the guy goes through like some of the ways that the mosquito changed history, including in the Revolutionary War

when apparently the swamps and eastern seaboard or whatever of America were riven with mosquitoes and the British had less immunity to malaria or something or they didn't have quite I don't know the details but apparently the mosquito played a role in the

victory by the colonists against the British Empire. I know this book. I haven't read it yet. Yeah. It's a very fascinating because everything that, yeah, there could be these downstream effects. You talk a lot in your book in the graphic novel about time travel, you know, can you go back and, you know, and kill the dinosaurs, you know, before the asteroid or give him a space program before the asteroid hits or

or go back and kill your grandfather before he meets your grandmother. And so all those, all these kind of paradoxes, but I want to focus a little bit more first on the top level, on the cosmological side of things, because a lot of my audience is interested in that. Can you explain a little bit about Gertl's universe, why it was important, why he allegedly on his deathbed, asked his attendee or whoever was there, what about the universe? Did they find it to be rotating? This is a story that I've read actually in a book about Gertl. So people still do write books about this rotating universe.

So what's the appeal of it? What was the idea behind it? Yeah, so, Gertl was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and he lived near Einstein, and they would walk home together. And so Gertl was not a physicist. But he was the greatest logician of all time. In fact, before the girdling completeness theorem, which is the greatest theorem in logic of all time,

he was already the greatest logician of all time. And then he did that. So he's like got extra. Anyway, so what I'm trying to say is he's really, really smart. So he's, you know, talking to Einstein. He was too smart for his own good, right? Because he tried to get, he talked to Einstein when he's becoming a citizen, allegedly said there's a contradiction.

And again, I say it's constitution, logical inconsistency. And Einstein said, ah, keep that to yourself. Yeah, you know, until after. But anyway, yeah, go on. So he was talking to Einstein about cosmology in space time. Yeah, and then he discovered a solution. And, you know, it's very, you know, if you, I don't know how many of your, you know, listeners know, I mean, Einstein's field equation is very, you know, it looks so pretty, you know, science is so pretty and beautiful and elegant.

And, you know, because you've got basic, you know, G equals 8 pi t. You think, oh, that's beautiful. Really, it's, you know, I don't know what, like a 600, 100-something partial, couple partial different equations. So if you solve it, you know, you get your name after it. And he came up with this solution, which I think is possibly the coolest solution in terms of, because it has great cool consequences of what you can do. So in particular, you could time travel from any point to any other point in Gurgle space time.

But what's cool about it is it doesn't happen from any kind of cheesy math trips. So like you could take, you know, if you took a piece of paper, you said, let this be space time. You know, this part is time, this part of space. And then I roll it and I attach these two. Then you can say, well, I could just time travel by going around like that. That's cheesy because you did this kind of. cut and paste. Worm holes.

But now the girl's space time is, it's topologically Euclidean. So there's nothing. Holes. It's simply connected. Yeah, so there's no holes or anything like that. Copy cup. Genus number is zero, right?

It's even temporally orientable, which means that at every single event, you could draw a little arrow and have a consistent arrow drawing everywhere. To the future or in space? The vector is time-like. And so, yeah, so even on a closed time-like, curve, you could still draw arrows consistently around that curve. Unlike a Mobius strip, which is not orientable.

Exactly. And so it doesn't have any kind of shenanigans like the Mobius strip or that. And yet, there it is. So it's got two things that are really weird. So one is that you could try to travel from any point to any other point. And so, yeah, the universe looks like all the matter is rotating around you. and it looks that way from every single direction

and what this does is it sort of tips the you know as you go out from any point it's going to seem like to you and the when you're looking at the picture of it you know the the the light cones are going to be

seem like they're tipping over and that's going to and as you go outward if you accelerate you'll be able to spiral around and go back and say visit your birth the other really weird thing. And I think this is what he thought was actually the weirdest thing about it,

was that because all the light cones tip over, you can't draw a global instantaneous slice of time. So if you say, well, I want my slice of time to be entirely space-like, an instant of time should be all space-like, there is no global such slice. As you start to extend it out, it becomes a time light because of the light building's tipping over into it. And so if you tried to stay in space like, you can't do it. So you can't then think, this really disturbed them.

I think more than the time travel, because you can't then think of the universe as sort of unfolding in some kind of, you know, tense. Yeah. Whereas like in the other, you know, in the more famous cosmological models, you know, like Friedman-Robertson-Walker, you know, it's still relativistic. And so you could have, you know, different observers, you know,

measuring time differently and all that. But you could, you know, you could, you know, pick particular, well, they usually use these, you know, co-moving coordinates and pick a particular frame. But anyway, the point is, you could pick a cosmic. time and then think of the universe as evolving according to that cosmic time. But you just can't do that. There's no cosmic time in legible space time. And there's no expansion either. No. And yeah, so it's not our space time. Sure, no. As you said, you know, to, just for the listener that may not be conversant with this, as you said earlier, you know, you solve the Einstein's equation in almost any context and you get your name on it. And many people have tried to do it. And

And there's very few that have their names on these models. So to come up with anyone, you know, let alone one that comports with, you know, cosmology, you know, reasonable observations in cosmology is a triumph, you know, mathematically. I guess the question that, you know, I have is, you know, did he believe in it? Because it was before the really dispositive evidence of, you know, expansion that Hubble and his collaboration. And actually, Hubble's early data were incredibly, you know, coarse and not this positive, right, until the 30s, 40s, 50s, that got better and better. And even until the, you know, 50s and 60s, people had arguments with the Big Bang.

It wasn't even the universe was expanding, was not taken seriously, including by the inhabitant, former inhabitant of this office, Jeffrey Burbage, who with his colleague, Fred Hoyle, they went to their graves believing in the, in the falsity of the Big Bang model and the, and the truth of the quasi-steady state. So it wasn't nearly as accepted even when Gertel was alive. Did he believe it or did he think, oh, it's really cool for a logician to make, you know, get his name on a... I don't think he believed it, although I think there were attempts to tinker with it to make it a little more, you know, possible, that it might be possible in some way to accommodate the data. But he had this really curious argument.

And, you know, philosophers have puzzled about this argument for a long time. is he says there's this girdle universe you know his solution it's a solution to the laws of nature the Einstein field equations and then he says that that showed that time in our world which is not the girdle world

is ideal and by ideal I think he means you know just a fiction of our due to us not due to the world and so then now you look at this argument and you think, what is the argument

exactly here? This is very puzzling. And some people would point out, they'd say, you can't go from, you know, there's a possible, this possible world to a fact about this world. You know, so there's a possible world where there are unicorns. That doesn't mean there are unicorns here. And to this, and some people

point this out, and then I think, well, this is crazy because we're talking about the world's grace logician. Right. So he didn't make it elementary logic mistake. That's clearly not what's going on. And so I think what he thought is that what he called this lapse of time, you know, in what you refer to as tense,

I think he thought that was essential to time. And that there was a world that obeyed our laws but didn't have that time. Then meant that here, too, it might not be that, you know, that that's not a feature of time even here. So the T is still the T. Right. And the T in the girl universe is still the T in the, you know, whatever universe we're

in some kind of freed money and thing. And so if it didn't have laps there, it's not lapsing here. And so it must just be that we sort attribute the lapse to it. It's not fundamental. It's not fundamental. Interesting. but we don't really know exactly what the argument was. It'd be cool to work out if it were.

Because the implication is, yeah, it's sort of the time is emergent or fictional or maybe not intrinsically fundamental, you know, part of elementary reality. And you see a lot of these things that come out, you know, had Carlo Rovelli on my podcast, which the episode will be out before this one, most likely. I had Roger Penrose on three or four times. Here's his book, Cycles of Time, where he has this ultra-revelli. alternative model, which has the universe, never really experiencing the Big Bang or the inflationary epoch that many cosmologists, the dominant kind of prevailing model right now, although it seems to lack decisive evidence. We may be in this Popperian, you know, no man's land where we can't falsify inflation because it could have happened, but without enough energy to produce waves of gravity that my colleagues and I can detect. On the other hand, it could be that some alternative cosmology took place, but they don't make any falsifiable predictions, such as Roger's model.

You wouldn't observe gravitational waves because there is no inflationary field to nucleate these quantum quantum of gravity. I want to ask you a question that I keep asking, and you mention it in the book as well. But I asked Roger and I asked people like Lenny Suskind and Frank Wilcheck, we kind of use at least to me a circular, type of logic, which is to say that, you know, we need to understand and have a quantum theory of gravity because we don't understand the physics in extremely strong, you know, quantum physics and extremely strong gravitational scenarios, such as at the singular, near the singularity of a black hole, and such as at the origin of time or the Big Bang, as we might say. And I point out that both of those regimes are unverifiable or inaccessible. We can't get any information out from a

singularity. We can get some notion of things on the event horizon of Blackhall, but no more. Hawking and Penrose's singularity theorems basically show that you're never going to be able to get back to absolute zero in time if it indeed exists. And Roger doesn't even believe there's an absolute zero of time. He believes in a cyclic cycle of aeons. So why are we so concerned? with this theory of everything involving quantizing gravity, if the only two regimes in which we can observe it would be unobservable or where it becomes applicable, rather, on observable. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I hope that there would be some regime where it's observable, and I would expect it to be,

actually in cosmology, that's the biggest lab. That's the biggest lab. And so it's running these natural experiments that we can't run. And so I would hope that some of these things would, so they seem really, really, really, really. So we're going to measure, you know,

so the electrons have mass. There should be a gravitational effect, you know, inside the tiniest, you know, and just hydrogen, making some sort of little, we should be able to make a little gravitational corrections for whatever's going on there. And then inside,

you know, and then when things clump, you know, when a star clumps up really, really tight, and there should be, there's got to be quantum effects that at a certain scale.

And so we know that there is some physics that we don't know that must operate in these cases, I think. So I think that's where we're, kind of safe, are there, are there, but those two cases as you just point out, those two cases are cases where we're not going to ever observe. But it could be that there's, you know, I don't know if, I mean, there might be something hootstrapy about this, but if we think a different, so, so there's some work in different interpretations of quantum mechanics.

So Roger Penrose has stuff like this where suppose you put in like a realistic collapse mechanism so the quantum wave function collapsed and you have a very specific sort of trigger for what does that. That might show itself in, you know, well, who knows? It would be more questions for you.

You know, what does it show itself in the fluctuations does it show itself extended over time through the universe. So some of those theories will depart from they'll make predictions that are actually non-standard that you could actually test. Maybe rule out or that. Yeah, so when I think about that, first of all, yeah,

so I don't answer any questions on my own podcast. I'm just kidding, that's my prerogative. Actually, was interviewed by Barry Barrow. for my own podcast two weeks ago at his house in Los Angeles, which is kind of a treat. So I was answering his questions about why I'm so bitter and so forth about not winning the Nobel fries, but that's for another subject. Stay tuned for that special episode. But thinking about that, you know, in just a little bit more depth, this concept of a singularity is intimately connected with both the Black Hole and potentially with the Big Bang. And of course,

even observing these waves of gravity via their imprint on the causing microwave back. backgrounds, B mode polarization, technically wouldn't take us back to T equals zero. It would be, you know, a thousand plank times or something. It would be significantly after in plank units, the origin of time or the singularity itself. My question, you know, is kind of what maybe it's philosophical, but I almost see a zeno's paradox like effect where we have no examples of something in the universe that is a singularity is infinite. Because in order for saying to be infinite, as you remember from your kids, you tell them, I love you, infinity.

I love you infinity plus one. Infinity minus one would have to be the temperature of the universe, one plank time after the origin of the universe, and infinity minus, but infinity minus one is infinity. So these questions of singularities are kind of perplexing in that

we kind of are led to believe that they exist by extrapolation from our current time, but, you know, predictions about the future, as Yogi Berra said, are very uncertain and it's hard to make them, but even predictions about the past when they involve singularities, since we have no singularity evidence of any quantity that is infinite, why do we think, you know, why do we put so much stock in the existence of singularities philosophies?

Yeah. Well, they're very disturbing because you don't know, well, hey, you don't know what they are. I mean, even in general relativity, when we talk about singularity, well, the singularity theorems just show that, you know, all the world lines run at, you know, are incomplete, right? So they don't actually show there's like a whole. So there's three notions of singularity, right? So this incomplete notion, you know, so GD6, what's called GD6 incompleteness. Yeah. Then there's this sort of idea of kind of curvature blow up. Mm-hmm. Where then there's your infinity, you know, so now the curvature close up. And then you get this idea of like a hole

like a little point has been blocked out like a kind of open open sewer cap in space time where you just been walking and then not a coordinate singularity, actual singularity right, mail on cover and not replaced. Yeah, and then what's, I don't know, it's kind of interesting.

I think that, you know, in a, in the kind of geometry that you do classical physics, those notions coincide. And then you go to So in relativity, you use what's called a pseudo-Ramionian geometry, and then those notions come apart. So we sort of think of the incompleteness as maybe it's like an indicator or a symptom of the other things, but we don't really know.

So what the heck is a singularity at all anyway? And then why is it, you know, everyone says, well, general relativity sows the seeds of its own demise by predicting these singularities. Then you think, well, why? Why is that so bad, actually, if it does have this incompleteness? I mean, who guys says that we get to decide how the number should be? Quantum physics traffic's in there, right? Normalization, you know, bare mass, dressed masks,

those are all corrections to the formal infinities that arose from considering, you know, cool, um, effects at infinitesimal distances. I mean, maybe, I mean, I'm just, you know, thinking aloud here, but, I mean, maybe the reason we don't like it is because all the places we singularities elsewhere in physics, we don't really believe in them. We think of them as part of the representation of the physics. So, like, the example I like is, you know, of a water drop coming out of your faucet. And, you know, when you model it physically, the water drop never breaks.

You know, it just sort of gets, it gets like infinitely thin. Tenuous. And then what you have to do is with your mind, bringing some scissors and cut it. But we know real water drops do for. Right. And so there's something. 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.

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You know, there's a mismatch there between the mathematical representation and the reality. And so we have no problem bringing out our mental scissors and sniffing. Right. Right. And it's nothing, you know, computers can't... Yeah, speaking of water, you should enjoy some.

Yeah, I mean, computers can't handle it. We have, you know, not a number. We have a thing that seems like the human... in mind is the unique entity that we know that can conceive of infinity and in fact multiple levels as you know of infinity. There's different degrees of infinity. As my kids will point out when they say, you should have said, you love me infinity plus one, then they'll say infinity square, then I'll say all at zero. But they, you know, I got some annoyingly precocious kids. But the, you know, kind of this thing that is so baffling, I think is so resilient to

understanding is what makes time so interesting. I mean, there's so many books about time. I just reread a brief history of time by Stephen Hawking. And I read it first when I was 16 or 17. You probably were excited by it when it came out. I didn't understand it. And I remember going to see and hear Stephen Hawking speak in 95 at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in London.

And that was back when he could still respond in quasi real time using his finger and his eyes. And someone asked him, you know, Professor Honging, why'd you write this book? Nobody understands it. It's rumored that people have never even completed it, even you, from cover to cover. Why'd you write this book? And he replied, and that, you know, that the kind of iconic voice of his, if such a thing can be said, you know, because my daughter needed to go to college. And I had Leonard Mladenow on the podcast about a month ago, and he was talking in all seriousness,

he and I about, you know, the need for Hawking to have a basic corporate function that he needed to support his medical care. He needed to support his kids, his ex-wife, his, you know, whatever it has met up. And it was a real need for him. But in that book, the last sentence I was tweeting about this yesterday, you know, the last sentence in that book is, you know, if we could, you know, finally come up with a origin story for, you know, how time begins, something like that, then we would glimpse the mind of God. And it kind of brings up, you know, this next question.

First of all, why are physicists so, you know, in love with talking about God particles, the mind of God, God not playing dice, but we won't get into that matter. We're such an atheistically inclined body of humans. But I want to ask you, in the context of time, we have so many different interpretations, Carlo Revelli, Roger Penrose, can they all be right? I mean, can they all be seeing the same aspects of the elephant than just describing it differently? Or to what extent is there a theory of time? Yeah, I think

I think there could be some winners and some losers here I mean whether we could ever know who is who I don't know but the to me I divided into basically two sorts of people you know so what's coming on I think and what makes time so fascinating and why there's so many books and all of this is because well I think it is with up there with consciousness

is one of the last great mysteries And why is it such a mystery? Physics has a time variable in it. Physics is one of our best theories. It's, you know, we just put a, you know, a, another rover on Mars. Helicopter land is unbelievable. It's one of the, and that, in all of those,

in all of that theory required a time variable, right? And so that's all indirect confirmation for the way. physics considers time. Newtonian time at that, right? Yeah. And... I mean, relativity to get the Mars. But I think what makes it so interesting is because, you know,

our experience of time is just so, so divorced from this. And so just like with a problem of consciousness, you know, you could look at, you know, all you want of brain scans and you're not going to see anything. You know, you're not... And they're going to dig around on the mind and then find a little you there. Homonculus, there. Among the most of us.

And so with time, you have this massive, you know, you've got this idea of this flowing now. And, you know, so you divide the world into past, present, the future, and then this present moves. And also you endow the past and the future with different things. You think the past is fixed and settled. The future is open. You know, so where I, you know, there's no knob I can, I can, I can,

toggle that's going to change where I was born. There's a lot of buttons I can press that change where I die. And so you have these massive differences. But now you look over at physics and you don't see any of that stuff. I don't see the past and future. I don't see a distinguished present. And I don't see differences between the past and future.

And so you have this gap. And then, I mean, that's where I had this kind of, I was working on all these kind of physicsy topics earlier in my career. And then when I came here, we were so good in cognitive science, and there were all these people working on time perception and that. I got talking to them, and all of a sudden I realized, you know, that there's not a good theory of how, you know, it seems crazy to me still, that you don't have a good theory of how, you know,

the interaction between physical time and sort of human time. and so physicists you'll have all these make side comments every now and then so like in Brian Green's book he'll talk about memory and have a kind of proto theory of how this works seems perfectly fine to me

but basically they say but all that flowing stuff it's an illusion so what they're doing is they're taking the problem they're taking off the desk of the physicist they're putting on the desk of the psychologist by saying it's an illusion but then the psychologist doesn't know it's on their desk. Right, the cogicide.

And so then it comes to the, you know, the philosophers are on the floor. And so we get to whatever falls off the desk with desk. So then I had this idea of, you know, trying to explain this and really do it kind of a bit rigorously. And so this is not in my cartoon book, but in the other book. And the kind of picture I have is, you know, I'm wondering, we've got this critter who's going around, let's say, in a relativistic world. So physics is right about time. But they model time in this kind of tense flowing way.

Why would they do that? And so what I try to show is that it would make sense in such a world, even if the world isn't like that. Given the environment, given the thermonemic arrow, given the kind of challenges that we as organisms face. And so the way I think of it is So I thought of it a little bit more like on the model of color. So you don't think of fundamental, you know, hydrogen, what color is it?

You don't think of a fundamental world is colored. You know that it has to do with, you know, the type of creature you are and the relationship you have with it. So it's not just physics, it's not just the surface reflectance profile. It's also, you know, how many types of, how many rods and cones do I have and what type? What type of creature am I? And then that opens up a kind of, once you start thinking about this way,

it opens up a fascinating avenue to explore that is still being explored, which is, you know, why did that, why does that creature have that, that rod and cone structure? Well, you know, now look at the colors of the fruits and stuff like this, what type of fruits does it eat? And then, but then, of course, now the evolutionary story is very complicated because maybe the fruits developed that way because there were creatures to eat them. But then you can think about the same kind of thing with time now where you think,

well, so I do think of, you know, some events are simultaneous and some not. Think of these two snaps. Bob Garash, I think, in his book says that in your reference frame, You have to do the snaps within one billionth of a second to get them space-like related to each other. Because they're foot apart. Anyway, so one is after the other, most likely, but I'm still judging them as some of them as simultaneous and some not. Why? Doing this with audio and visual matching.

And then I started looking at the different people who do it differently. So there's a retired pilot in England who had a small lesion in his brain and he will, I forget which way it goes. You say hi to him. He'll see your lips move and then hear you. Or maybe he'll hear you first and then see the lips move. But an observable gap. It's like 250 milliseconds difference, which is rough.

like halfway, you know, a major league pitcher when they pitch, it's sort of like halfway across, halfway down plate. It's just completely conscious and observable. And so you have, so, and then it turns out that, you know, he's sort of an outlier,

but not really because every single, any two people, it seems, have statistically significant differences and what things they bind together are simultaneous. So you and I in this room, we could label all the events and if they're happening fast enough. You and I would differ. We would differ on a whole bunch of things. So if I said, you know, Brian, what's simultaneous with that snap?

And you had to write that list down and I did it. We would have different lists. Some people are more accurate in terms of absolute global time, I'm sure. Yeah. It's like musical ability. Like I have no musical ability or language ability or something else. We probably all have different abilities, yeah. And actually music is particularly interesting.

interesting with this because you know you will habituate your you know so if you are playing the organ at kings uh kings college cambridge you know the the lag between you pressing the button and the actual noise is huge but you will gradually erase that lag and it will seem simultaneous to you oh okay so there's all that kind of thing going on and yet we don't notice any of it right right because when i do the snap, the noise is actually made by my finger hits here. But there are people who are sound firsters and light firsters, depending on others that are touch. And so some of them might hear the noise when it's there.

Others is when it's been sitting there for a while. But it's simply crazy to think that it wasn't this snap that caused you to hear that noise. Right. And so you don't have disagreement. It's so there's wild, massive hidden disagreement, but massive agreement about what things happen now. But, you know, if we change the relative velocities of things that we were, you know, had to deal with

and all this stuff, if you had like time dilation in your face, where you were meeting people? Yeah. Then, you know, would we have come up with this kind of flowing now picture? And then I started to actually also think by animals and stuff. You know, so, you know, seals, they spend so much time underwater. The speed of sound is so different underwater than above. How do they sink?

Their audio and visual drafts. When they're moving, you know, their hoof, you know, the signals up, the nerves are pretty slow. I forget the speed, but they're not super fast. It's going to go all the way up to the head, all the way back. 19 feet times 2. 18 feet. It's the book I joke about, the giraffe maybe has not only a long neck but along now. That's great. Well, the last couple of minutes before, at least I have to go and take the time to go pick up kids' carpool.

There's this notion that I hear a lot about, and I can't tell if it's ultimately trivial or if there's something really rich that's just being lost in my obtuse self. And that's this notion of a block universe. What is that? Is it relevant? Is it just a convenient way of thinking about it as kind of a God's perspective if such a thing could be conceived of? So, yeah, what is this block universe that people, it seems to be involved now to the extent that such a thing can be? Yeah.

So in philosophy, they think of this two, they think of there's roughly two types of theory, this kind of tense theory where you've got this kind of moving now. And tense, not physically tense, but past tense, present tense. Right. And then if you remove all the tense, then what you've got is a block. So you can think of it this way.

Like if you, you know, if you come across, you know, you're wandering around on the campus lost, you see one of these maps. And so the block universe is like the map. The tense theory is like the map with the red dot. You know, that says you are here now. Right. And so this is the, So that's the spatial version of this.

And so a lot of people say physics implies the block universe because there's no red dot. Physics doesn't give you a red dot. And then somebody like me then thinks, well, the red dot is sort of formed by all the relationships. There's not really an extra thing in the world. That's the red dot.

It's just, you know, your consciousness is at that location. And then it seems like, because it seems like you're the be all and end all, you think that that's special, but there's nothing really special. That said, so this is this debate between the blockers and the non-blockers. I actually have a kind of minority view in philosophy, whereas I think the two views are the same. So I think the re-descriptions are the same thing unless you deliberately make them different.

So that is, you know, when I say, you know, so the block universe will, you know, the blocker will say, you know, dinosaurs, they exist. They just exist, you know, just like things exist, just spatially distant from you, but you can't see them. The things that exist,

simply distant from you, they exist. They're all there on the block. The dinosaurs are there. But it's earlier, but that there is earlier than the moment of utterance when we're speaking right now. Now the tensor, they think, well, no, the only thing that exists is the present, but now they've got a problem because there used to be those dinosaurs.

So then they have to say something about those dinosaurs, because those dinosaurs aren't, they're not just like a fiction, like Allison Wonderland or something that, you know, they used to be here. And so now they have to say something. Whenever they say that thing, you can then translate that into the block. It exists.

So I think you can translate back and forth without loss. Does that mean they're the same theory? Who knows, it's hard to say when there's two representations of the same thing versus two different representations. But if the two representations

don't do any work, either can do any work that the other one doesn't, that it inclines me to think that they really the same. And so to me, I think it's this huge fuss for a hundred years since McTaggart, this famous philosopher in 1908 worth this paper, then this huge fuss fighting over this, and I think it's all... What's a do about... What's a do about nothing. It's more than a dream about it in your philosophy. Yeah, because I think if you had that tense view, it doesn't actually explain your experience. in any way.

Right. And so if it doesn't do any explanatory work, then I don't really, but they often say it does, but it doesn't. And so if it doesn't, then I don't see why I want to bother fighting about it. It's a logical purpose to it. Yeah. Yeah. Great.

Well, that cleared up something for me and just want to remark how much I'm looking forward to taking your class either in person or remotely on pseudoscience. I can surely provide you with many examples of how I practice pseudoscience. So quite frequently, after I buy my lottery, can get my palm red and get my horoscope red. I will have plenty of fodder for you, Craig Callender, director of the Center of Practical Ethics here at UC San Diego, a treasured colleague. And I think, though not the first UCSD professor on this, first philosopher on the podcast. So I want to commend you for that, yes. And I have some parting gifts for you,

including finger puppets and space dust. So Greg, thank you so much. I hope we can do a part two someday in the future if such a thing could be said to exist. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is in the still shipping from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews.

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