Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Dan Hooper discusses his book At The Edge of Time (#028)

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

At The Edge of Time Dan Hooper is a senior scientist and the head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). He is also Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Dr. Hooper received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was later a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and the David Schramm Fellow at Fermilab. Dr. Hooper’s research focuses on the interface between particle physics and cosmology, covering topics such as dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry, neutrinos, extra dimensions, and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. He has authored more than 200 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and he has given an even larger number of technical talks at scientific conferences and university seminars and colloquia. Dr. Hooper is the author of three books written for nonscientists: Dark Cosmos: In Search of Our Universe’s Missing Mass and Energy, Nature’s Blueprint: Supersymmetry and the Search for a Unified Theory of Matter and Force, and At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Our Universe’s First Seconds. He has also written for popular magazines such as Astronomy, Sky & Telescope, and New Scientist. He gives many public lectures and is frequently called on by the media to comment on science news. Dr. Hooper’s television appearances include Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman and Space’s Deepest Secrets, and he has been interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday. Professor Hooper also teaches through The Great Courses As the new field of astro-particle physics rapidly develops, we are witnessing an exciting time in the history of science. In addition to the progress being made in the traditional areas of experimental particle physics (accelerator experiments), exciting developments are also taking place in the use of astrophysical experiments to study elementary particles. The most striking example of this success is the measurement of the neutrino masses and mixing angles that have been made over the last decade. Many of the questions asked by particle physicists are difficult to address with collider experiments and are being explored ever increasingly by astrophysicists. These efforts include the development of particle dark matter searches, ultra-high energy cosmic rays detectors, gamma-ray telescopes and high-energy neutrino telescopes. Professor Hooper’s research is focused primarily, although not entirely, on studying and exploring particle physics beyond the Standard Model using astrophysics. Other books mentioned in this program: Losing The Nobel Prize by Brian Keating Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carol Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg 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. It's a pleasure to welcome Dr. Dan Hooper from Fermilab in Chicago Land area to The Into the Impossible Podcast, which is a podcast as part of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. And some exciting news we were just recently picked up for distribution using the UC University of California. TV network. So this video may appear eventually on a UC channel near you, which has a huge audience of basically millions of people. And it's, of course, available to the whole internet. So that covers a few dozen people, I'm sure. But it's a pleasure to welcome Dan. Dan has a new book called

At the Edge of Time. He's on a book tour right now. It happens to find him in the same time zone as us, but not in the back of this name state. And I thought we would begin with a little introduction to you know who you are what you do how you spend your time and the kind of work that you do exceptionally so in terms of bringing science and education to the public so dan tell us about yourself how did you how did you get here what's your world line from our outfit to today well it's a long and open-ended question but um some a particle physicist turned astrophysicist i never thought i'd be an astrophysicist but that kind of happened by accident um i split my time between fermil Lab in the University of Chicago. And I work on things like dark matter and cosmic rays, neutrinos, and things like this.

In terms of outreach and education, stuff like that, one of my favorite parts of my job is the teaching end. I really enjoy being in the classroom. I kind of take every opportunity I can to do that. This book, the new book, is my third book, so I've been doing this for a while. But I'm particularly excited about this one. I've spent more time with this one than I've spent with the others. And I think maybe this is a good way to reach a wide audience about the sort of work that you and I do and bringing the awe and wonder of the universe to many people as we can. I'm curious how you got started in particle physics and then it sounds like you kind of accidentally were led by your curiosity, imagination, things.

that we care about and we'll discuss. How did you get interested in just physics and science, generally speaking, when you were a kid? What was that like that past? Well, it didn't happen when I was a kid. I know most of our colleagues, they have a story about, you know, in kindergarten, they decided they wanted to be the specific subfield of scientists that they are now and all these things. I have nothing like that. I grew up in the very rural Minnesota.

that. Not only did I not think I wanted to be a scientist. I don't think I'd any idea what it meant to be a scientist. I just had no encounters or experience with that. I took normal science classes in junior high and high school, but I didn't find them very exciting. You know, physics was rolling things down inclined planes. It wasn't, you know, the cool stuff. And then I go to college, not for science. I intended to be a music student. And I got kind of disillusioned with that, tried a bunch of other things, and eventually wound up taking a modern physics class and falling in love with it. So in that one quarter, I learn about relativity, a little bit about it anyway. I learned a little bit about quantum mechanics. And these were the two most interesting things I'd ever heard about in my life. I knew that from the very beginning there. And I suddenly became a good student because I cared for the first time. And I worked hard and aggressively, and I just kept looking at these sorts of cool, counterintuitive science physics things from as many angles as I could.

Next thing you know, I'm in grad school trying to study particle physics. And like you said, my curiosity and imagination keep pulling me towards the cosmos. The next thing you know, I'm an astrophysicist and a cosmologist along with particle physics. and curious as to whether you completely disconnected your love of music do you still play music I have friends in Chicago that are in

you know choruses and it's all sorts of orchestras and there's no shortage of aesthetic activities for you in Chicago land so tell me did you were you playing an instrument do you still play an instrument so I mean I play quite a few instruments but the one that I really play is guitar I taught myself to play when I was 15 or so.

And it got pretty good. Been in bands throughout my whole life, other than a couple of months here and there. For the last 10 years, I played in a soul band in Chicago called the congregation if you're up in the Chicago area and check us out. Or for that matter, just use the internet. There's that too.

Yeah. So, yeah, music's always been a big part of my life, but it's a very different part of my life than science. I go out of my way, not to think scientifically about music. I don't want to know how it works or why it works.

I want to feel it, not think it. And I enjoy using that other part of my brain. Yeah, I always forget which brain side I use or not. I know it's only, you know, I aspire to someday use 10% of my brain like they say people do. And not knowing much

about music, you know, the only instrument I play is the iPhone. but our mutual friend, you know, Sean Carroll is a big jazz aficionado. Our mutual friend, Stephen Alexander, is a professional jazz musician. And, you know, there is Mark Kaminkowski and other theorists. I don't know what it is, the theorist in jazz music or soul music, but it seems to be a... Is Mark a musician?

Mark is not a musician as far as I know, but he's a great aficionado of jazz. Okay. All right. And, yeah, so there definitely seems to be something. I mean, getting back, look, Fagoras, the great ancient. and the Greeks and the Stoics, et cetera, I love to, they ruminate on the relationship between physics and music or math and music. I feel like a lot of times it's a little overblown, and like you said, you know, sometimes you just want to listen to the music and not think about the music. So, but it's often been said, there's a book called Range, it's a new book where they do a study, of course, on, you know, people that have achieved great heights in all different endeavors, ranging from arts and science to,

you know, politics, et cetera. And they look at, well, what were the hobbies of these men and women? What do they do? And they find the most successful, you know, very strong correlation between success in a field, whether that's, you know, my least favorite thing, the Nobel Prize, or, you know, Pulitzer Prizes, or, you know, conductors in major symphonies, that they all have hobbies and they have enthusiasm that extend beyond that. And the social scientists wrote this book, Range, I'm blanking on his name, might be Eisenstein, I forget. Anyway, he claims that using the kind of full connectome of your brain is what really the breadth of knowledge is what allows you to see new connection.

So obviously, you're not like thinking about that when you're, you know, writing down the new dark matter candidate or appraising a result from the experimental community. But it's certainly not lost on me how many people have these kinds of passions that at first glance seem, you know, orthogonal. But perhaps, you know, I had this interest for you, stimulated it. Well, I think there's another important thing, at least in my experience, which is having, I have a very obsessive personality. When I get into something, I get really into something, which helps me to get good at it. So for the same reason that when I was teaching myself guitar, I would play for six or eight hours a day, most days.

That later translated into me doing an awful lot of physics. and I think both things helped me to get good at that. That trait helped me get good at both of those things. So one thing that we look at in terms of the artistic connection between science and the greater human imagination is, of course, science fiction. We are affiliated and bear the name of Sir Arthur C. Clark, who is obviously only a first-rate science fiction author, but he contributed to a lot of innovative concepts and technology and in science.

and, you know, for us the kind of gateway drug, for many of us, science fiction and introduction to great writers in the past. And, you know, your book at the edge of time, now available from Princeton University Press, I believe, right? They, you have an impressive roster of people that have given you blurbs on the back of your book, ranging from Sean Carroll to my friend and yours, Katie Freeze, Anne Whiteson, and of course myself, and what I said in this book, and I really believe, and I'm grateful I had a chance to read it, I said where Weinberg, Stephen Weinberg's first three minutes left off, Hoopers at the edge of time picks up.

A riveting tour of modern cosmology told by one of its saviest guides. Hooper's book takes on a journey from our universe's formerly inscrutable past, mesmerizing possible scenarios in its far future. A fascinating story that is to be savored. And I do see your book is kind of picking up where Weinberg. Berg's book left off, which is, you know, obviously high praise, but I think it's, Weinberg's an outstanding writer and a communicator. One of my favorites.

Yeah. And so I'm curious as to like, what were your influences? You know, as I say, Weinberg, you know, clearly is in this tradition that you're in. What were the influences that, you know, in your life and may not only be scientific, or might be science fiction or other. Can you tell us about, you know, who are the mentors and people that you look to in the past? USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance.

With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. So I'm a, you know, eager reader. I read a ton and most of it's nonfiction, but, you know, quite a bit of fiction slips in there too. some of my favorite books in my college years were popular physics books. Back then, I was a really big fan of Paul Davies, for example.

He wrote a lot of books on these things. And John Gribben, people like Michi Okaku and, you know, Leon Letterman. I read all these things back then, Hawking, Kip Thorne. And I think I read Weinberg a bit later. That was a little bit later. these days there are a lot of our colleagues writing really good popular science. And I read a lot of this. A lot of our colleagues don't read popular science because they think they know all the science that's contained in it.

I read it, though, for how it's communicated. Because I think we can become better communicators by seeing how it's done well. I enjoyed your book, for example. I enjoy, you know, Sean Carroll, you mentioned. I enjoy his writing a great deal. I just read some stuff from Jan 11 that I think is really first-rate, really exceptional work. I have Joe Dunkley's Cosmology book on my shelf. I haven't quite read it yet, but it's right up there.

It's on my very short to-do list. But then I really like reading nonfiction that isn't physics-oriented, whether that be biology stuff or economics or social science. History I find to be written in a really different format, so I don't know that I learn a lot about writing from that. But social science and not necessarily physical science, I really find, helps my writing to get deep into that stuff. So the aspect of your writing and the story, it's sort of, you know, it's sort of journalistic in that you, you know, you're able to weep together a story that really does take us back, you know, to before what was what was previously hidden, I think, in the writings. There really wasn't a book that filled in these gaps

with enough technical, you know, apologies to my vegan friend, but, you know, meat on the bone, satisfy, you know, like I often will read science, popular science trade books, as they're called, because I can blow through them really quickly because, you know, I'm reading Sean's now or listening to Sean's book. I'm going to interview him for the podcast in a couple of weeks. And yeah, I'm just like fast forward. I mean, I love Sean and he's a great writer. But, you know, I know what the double-slit experiment is. And he's, I like, and he gave me great advice. You know, when I was writing my book, I'm like, you know, do I have the energy to regurgitate, you know, the Big Bang nucleosynthesis argument, you know, and like he already did it. You know,

do I have to be said, he told me great advice. He's like, you, you can tell it the way that you want to tell it. In other words, you can tell it through your eyes, not that I get to pick my own facts and say, you know, that hydrogen formed, you know, a billion years ago instead of, you know, 13 billion years ago. But I get to tell the, you know, highlight the important aspects through my lens, which was covered by dust, obviously. And I wanted, you know, originally to call my book a brief history of dust. But I don't think that would be really, really possible. But what spoke to me is that you, you bring a really advanced subject, you know,

kind of, you know, the notion of barring on a sim. and readers, you know, I want readers to read the book because these are very advanced topics, but the advanced topics are like the analog to what we want to teach versus what we have to teach. So you mentioned like the inclined plane. So you and I have had to teach the inclined plane that's part of, you know, how we get our salary, right? But on the other hand, we love to teach our brilliant young students or taking cosmology or particle physics because that's close to the boundary of what we ourselves are learning about. And there's no better way or teaching about. There's no better way to learn something than to teach it, and you know that all too well.

And what I love about your book is that you don't shy away from things like these really, you know, I mean, compared to the price of, you know, sliced bread, it's not that important on a daily basis. But, you know, the barian asymmetry, the origin of these mysterious things that may indicate very weighty things, the arrow of time, the composition of the universe, the deep, you know, future of the universe. So I wondered if you could not, you know, I hate it when authors are asked, you know, can you summarize your entire book so that nobody has to buy the book? Yeah, I want people to read this book because I think it's, it was a really fast read for me. And it wasn't because I knew everything in it, quite the contrary. It was very interesting to hear, you know, from a perspective of somebody who wasn't, isn't a native astrophysicist, as you're saying. But, you know, what struck you about astrophysics that caused you to make a pivot, you know, in Silicon Valley speak? into becoming not only a top flight performer or practitioner of astrophysics, but to really be able to break it down to the public. What drove you in that direction?

So as a particle physicist, there are really kind of two routes you can take, as a particle theorist, I should say. You can take what we call the top-down road, where you maybe study something like string theory and try to deduce how the universe must work from some sort of grand principle. And usually this involves a lot of mathematics. I mean, all of our work involves a lot of mathematics, but this is even more mathematics. And very rarely does this stuff directly connect with experiments.

I learned pretty early in grad school. That's not what I wanted to do. I like knowing that in three years there's going to be an experiment that tells me if this paper I'm writing is right or wrong. And usually it's wrong. Okay, but I like knowing how we're going to get closer to the right answer. And in string theory, it's not obvious that we know that. On the other hand, you can do particle physics from the bottom up where you say,

okay, well, here's a bunch of things we've measured. Some things we don't understand about those measurements are the following. Let's try to work out theories or models or something that can explain those problems. and figure out what experiments we will do or should do to find out if that's right. That's much more my kind of MO. That suits my personality quite well. But when I was a grad student, LEP had just finished up. Lepp was the Electropositron Collider at CERN at the time.

They were just finishing. And the Large Hadron Collider wasn't going to turn on for quite a long time. So there wasn't a lot of collider physics that was going to happen in the short interim. So I start thinking about other ways to study particle physics, and in particular ways to study particle physics using the cosmos. So my first project along these lines was talking about how dark matter particles might get captured in the sun, where they would annihilate with each other, they interact and destroy each other, converting themselves into neutrinos. And then we could detect those neutrinos with big telescopes. I was thinking of the Ice Cube experiments at that time.

And I got pretty deep into that. I learned a lot and got excited about it. And then another Dark Matter project. And then another Dark Matter project. And then some neutrino astronomy projects. And then some Gamerae telescope projects. And pretty soon I looked around to my surprise, I'd become an astrophysicist. It was not my plan at all.

But given the time and place, it was the right move. to do. And now I spend maybe half my time just thinking about the early universe, which is a great thing to be doing right now with stage three and stage four C&B experiments and gravitational waves and all these very exciting things going on telling us about the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. I can't help but to be pulled in that direction. Can you explain to the audience, why should it be that these fundamental particles, the smallest things that exist, how they could have any relationship to the entire universe? Well, I mean, the short answer is the universe is made of elementary particles.

And if we specifically are talking about the early universe, as you go backwards in time, the universe was hotter and denser, and the dynamics of hot, dense things are described by elementary particles. So if we go to the core of the sun, we find a bunch of protons and electrons and plasma, those protons are undergoing nuclear fusion. These are laws of physics that following that you wouldn't know about if you hadn't done particle physics kind of experiments. And if you go to even hotter environments, it's not just things like protons and electrons,

but things like corks and gluons, the kind of particles we study at the large Hadron Collider. In fact, the kind of collisions we study between protons and the Large Hadron Collider tell us a great deal about what the universe was like a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, when it was full of all the particles that we studied at the Large Haddon Collider. And the way we know about the laws of physics that dictated those early moments of our universe's history, we basically know that because we carry out experiments in particle accelerator environments like Large Hadron Collider Collider. Right, yeah, the universe as an accelerator, you brought that up or you mentioned that. And I think that's something that surprises folks,

because, you know, it may only be possible to build an accelerator at most on Earth that has the circumference of the Earth. But then after that, you have to start thinking other sorts of designs. But then, as you say, looking back into the early universe, it was essentially a giant particle collider. The fact that these wispy, most minuscule particles, in the case of neutrinos that you mentioned earlier, that they could perhaps have something to do with the structure of the entire cosmos, which is the largest thing we can possibly ever observe. And so I think that is a fascinating thing. I often, you know, a lot of your book talks about dark matter,

and it's not surprising for a particle astrophysicist. What, as a human being, you know, just sitting around the bar here thinking about it, I mean, what is your level of disappointment or are you not disappointed? know, that say new physics is very difficult to seem to reveal in that, you know, we really, the discovery of the Higgs was a monumental discovery. But I think, you know, physicists expected and promoted and hyped up a lot more possibilities than were actually discovered. And I think so, too, with the dark matter searches that my colleagues here at UCSD and yours in Chicago and elsewhere are doing, have yet failed to really identify. Are we looking? Are we looking?

looking in the wrong place, I often say, you know, to look for the, to look for, you know, your lost keys, you have to look where the light is. But in this case, you know, we should, you know, perhaps we need to pivot the way that we're thinking about, reevaluate the way that we're thinking about dark matter. So just personally, you know, on just a gut level, are you disappointed? Are you hopeful? Are you both? How do you react to the, to the lacuna that we have seemingly to identify in terms of what we previously expected? Well, yeah, of course I'm disappointed. Like, if you asked me 10 or 15 years ago, I would have given you a very enthusiastic pitch

about how Dark Matter's discovery is inevitable. And I would have been happy to take a bet that we would have discovered the nature of Dark Matter by now. And I would have lost that bet. In fact, I did make bets like that. And I have lost all. But luckily, you work at a very prestigious private school. Yeah.

The government. They weren't high stakes. that's mostly they had to do it on or even when there was something else. But yeah, I mean, lots of us were really surprised, not just about dark matter, but the lack of new physics being discovered at Large Hadron Collider surprised a lot of us. There were some people who said, you know, more pessimistic things, but most of us in the community were pretty sure that when the Large Hadron Collider was going to discover maybe super-symmetric particles or something else that would address what we call a hierarchy problem or other things.

But there was a lot of optimism, even an expectation that by now we would have discovered all sorts of new particles. When it comes to dark matter, I mean, the arguments we had were based on what kind of particle we thought would have been produced in the Big Bang and the right quantity to make up the dark matter. And we kind of use some arguments, which, okay, they're not bulletproof, but they were suggestive saying that the kinds of particles that would make up the dark matter would be the sort of particles that we could build these underground detectors and go and look for them and we should have seen them by now, and yet they're not there. The experiments have been awesome. Like, they performed spectacularly well, but no signals have appeared. So in light of that, we're kind of thinking in different ways. I think you used this analogy before, but instead of looking under the lamp post for our keys, we're getting flashlights out and looking in different places or finding new ways to look in different places,

testing models and theories that maybe we had thought of before, but weren't our high priority back then. But yeah, we're casting a much wider net than we used to. and I guess I'm still cautiously optimistic that this is a problem we can solve. But right now, I'm not as optimistic as about to say, the next five years as I would have been if you asked me 10 years ago. That's fair enough, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I do feel like there is a tendency to kind of overpromise. And we do it in our field too, as experimentalists, of what we're going to be able to achieve.

and it's not, you know, dishonest. It's really what we're, you know, it's our goal. It's what we're striving to accomplish. We talk ourselves into it, right? Yeah. Yeah. The confirmation bias, there's the sum cost fallacy. I mean, people, the funniest thing is that people think, you know, scientists are, you know, bias-free

and have no prejudices whatsoever, you know, but a cursory look at, you know, most- we try. Yeah, we do. Yeah, it's a kind of wishful self-hageography. But I do think, you know, just getting. back into the meat of the book, you know, that really spoke to me was how you really are weaving a story that is, by its nature, it's unfinishable in that we will not have, you know, so you let the appetite very well. But we, you know, at the, at the culmination of it, I find,

you know, a left with, there's a sense of wonder and, you know, what we, what we are knowing. I think Archibald, John Archibald Wheeler said, you know, kind of like science is this island and you expand the island into this ocean of ignorance. And as you do that, the island gets bigger, but the boundary of ignorance gets bigger too. It just gets bigger a little bit slower. It's a slower power. But I think, you know, the book, you know, and it's a positive thing, but it's disappointing because it really shows, you know, how little we know. And looking back into Weinberg's book 40 years ago now, and again, yours is so comparable to it in many ways, you know, on one hand, it's depressing, but on the other hand, it's kind of exciting to live in a time.

You know, historians look back at Copernicus and Galilee, oh, they didn't even know about, you know, universal gravitation. But they were able to describe things. They weren't discontent with what they knew. They knew there was probably stuff they didn't know, but it wasn't like as relevant, I think, to their daily practice of being a scientist. Now we have all these known unknowns. And really, I think your book highlights these things that we know are. true, we know there's a barrier and I see how many that there are neutrinos, we know that there's dark ground, we know

that there's dark energy, we know the universe is evolved, but you know the why questions, and I think that that's a very tough thing to do and you do it well and give the reader a sense of hope, but also that the scale of the challenge is monumental. And I wonder as experimentalists, we're kind of singularly focused, we're designing, we're looking at, you know, forecasting, modeling, simulating, systematics.

As a theorist, on a practical level, what is your day-to-day, what are you doing, what are you thinking about nowadays? I mean, the book obviously takes an enormous heroic amount of effort.

What are you devoting your energy towards now? Is it exploring deeper the topics that are at the edge of time or is it something completely new and pivoting yet again? Let me, some of each.

I have a personality that likes to take something, really dive deep into it, and then three months, later be done with it and think about something totally different. So, I mean, just today, I had a couple of meetings with my collaborators on a couple of projects, so I'll tell you what today was like. Yeah.

In one of those, we're talking about classes of dark matter models that could explain this thing called the Galactic Center Gamera Access. This was a signal I discovered 10 years ago. And it might be from dark matter particles. We don't know. And we are in a very concrete way working out which models can explain this data along with some other data. It's a very concrete, very bottom-up, very almost pragmatic paper. And then the other one that we're working on, different people, different collaborators,

we are imagining what the early universe might have been like if there had been an era where the entire universe was dominated not by matter and radiation, but by black holes. This is kind of the opposite for me. This is the other extreme. This is super speculative, super far field. But it turns out that it leads to a bunch of kind of cool observational consequences that we can test. And we're working out how these black holes would have evolved, how they would accrete matter, how they would radiate in the way that Stephen Hawking described, what kind of gravitational waves would be produced.

We're even considering that they might have produced a background, in an observable background of gravitons, which, I mean, it's not very often that we get to use graviton in real science. That's almost like such a far, such a difficult thing to ever measure. Just for your,

for your viewers, a graviton would be, is the hypothetical particle that carries the effects of gravity through space and time, the quantized version of that. And, you know, most physicists think that the thing probably exists,

but, you know, it's virtually impossible to ever measure one. So this is pretty far afield stuff. He said that about the cosmic neutrino background. In the book? Did I say that? No, no, no, I'm joking. I'm saying they said it was impossible to detect the cosmic group. Ah, they did. Okay. And it still is. Well, we can see it so that we can detect it in the CMB, right? Well, you know that, of course. But yeah, to detect those particles.

Correct detection, right. Yes. When I was a grad student, I made a bet with one of the other grad students I went to a summer school with that in 50 years, we would detect the neutrinos in the college of neutrino background. I still think that's a good bet. Can we make a bet? You know, I got some action. I got to get in on this hooper action. Offer me one, man.

I've got to put my kids in grad school, you know? You have to make a lot of bets with me to do that. It's not a lot of money. Especially UC. Well, great. Well, were you done with that particular story, Dan? Or do you want to follow up on that? No, no.

That's where I wanted to get. Okay, great. So I know you're super busy. You've got book tours, and I really appreciate it of your time. I want to close with a question that I ask all people. We've had artists, poets, science fiction authors. We have a great tradition here at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in terms of the amount and prolific.

nature of the artists and authors and scientists that we work with, I always like to ask these visitors on the podcast, guests on the podcast, the same question. I want to ask it to you now, and that has to do with the nature of imagination, of human imagination. And we hear a lot, and you've, you know, tangentially thought about this, you know, spoken about this online, at least on Twitter I've seen, but, you know, the notion of consciousness, the notion of imagination, the notion of creativity. Are those things that, you know, someone like you, who's breached, you know, many different fields and unified them together in writing, in teaching, and in scientific creativity? Can you teach those things? In your opinion,

do you feel, and if so, how do you go about curating, cultivating the next generation of, you know, Renaissance men and women if it's even possible in your opinion? So first, do you think it's possible and second you know if so how so let's separate the question into the so i'm not sure that it is in principle teachable or vulnerable um i see no reason why it wouldn't be it's it's a task like any other and um are i'm convinced the human brain is just a very sophisticated and complex machine um if you can if the human brain can do it then you can teach or or build a machine that can do it. Therefore, our brains can get better at it.

But B, just because I think I'm confident in principle it can be done, I don't know how to go about doing it effectively. I have not found with the grad students I've advised, for example, that I can have a meaningful impact on their personality or kind of way that they approach research. I can teach them scientific facts. I can teach them how to write paper more clear. I can do things like this, but I can't teach them to come up with new and creative ideas.

Sometimes it happens. Sometimes they just end up being able to do that. And sometimes they don't. I haven't personally been able to find any special sauce that enables me to do that. Maybe somebody who knows a lot more about teaching, which or psychology for that matter, could. but not me. If you have any tips, I'll gladly take them. Well, I always find it ironic that, you know, as professors, as you know,

basically get thrown in front of, you know, a bunch of students, and they never really teach us how to teach. They never teach us about the process of learning. And recently I started becoming on the process of becoming a flight instructor to, you know, supplement the modest income I get here at the state university, at these universities here in California. I'm just kidding. I'm compensated fairly.

And I find it very interesting and almost ironic that the federal government spends so much more time. Imagine an organization like the IRS that has a booklet and huge, huge booklet about the psychology of pedagogy and the Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all sorts of things. I never knew my 16 years of being a professor

never once. Now maybe I missed out on it. I know we have resources here. I know you have resources there. But it's certainly not the case that that seems to be emphasized, at least in the promotion process. And you're really kind of gauged on your papers, your grad students, your mentorship on a one-on-one-one level, but not really on the gross process of as a gross motor skill, so to speak, of pedagogy.

So I don't have any secret sauce there, although I am learning a little bit about that. And maybe I can report back, you know, once I get my first couple of students that's solo in an airplane. That might be scary to some people out there thinking about that. Well, I want to be conscious of your time. I really appreciate you joining us here on Into the Impossible, a podcast of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.

And just to give you a chance to do a couple of plugs. The plug zone is open for you. Tell people out on the Internet where they can find you and where you're going to be in three-dimensional world in the next couple weeks and how to follow you. Well, you can find Twitter. My handles Dan Hooper Astro. I'm going to be finishing up this part of my book tour this week.

And next week, I think it's on Thursday. I'll be at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago. And then there's some other things in 2020 schedule. and I just encourage everybody to check out the book at the edge of time, exploring the mysteries of our universes for seconds, and let me know what you think. I'm easy to find on the Internet, so I welcome all constructive criticism or comments.

Great, and yeah, compliments are never to be turned away. Well, Dan, thank you so much, both for your conversation and your wonderful new book, and I definitely encourage folks to look for it. I will leave the links to it and to you and the description for the podcast and the YouTube videos. So thank you so much for joining us, Dan. Enjoy the rest of your tour.

Thanks, Brian. I really appreciate it. Thanks for that chance. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Goodbye.