Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Do We Need New Laws of Physics to Explain the Origins of Life? Brian Keating & Lee Cronin

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Do we need new laws of physics to explain the origins of life?  I had an amazing discussion about this with the one and only Lee Cronin on Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal. We talked about life, consciousness, physics, chemistry, assembly theory, the Drake equation, and more!  Lee Cronin is a chemist and the Regius Chair of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on synthetic life forms, the self-assembly of molecules, and the origin of life. He’s also a leading expert in the field of digital chemistry, pushing the boundaries of chemistry using advanced robotics and AI.  Curt Jaimungal is the host of the popular podcast and YouTube channel "Theories of Everything," known for exploring theoretical physics, consciousness, Ai, and God in a technically rigorous manner.  Tune in! — Key Takeaways:  00:00:00 Intro  00:00:43 My opening statements  00:04:07 Lee’s opening statements 00:09:26 Why defining "life" is difficult 00:19:50 Disagreements on the origin of life 00:31:51 Is the definition of entropy wrong?  00:50:45 Order that doesn’t involve entropy 00:56:22 Abundance of life in the universe 01:10:36 An answer to the Fermi Paradox 01:19:17 Assembly theory explained 01:36:32 Searching for UFOs 01:50:14 Lee's gripes against the Galileo Project and Avi Loeb 02:08:27 Audience questions  02:15:39 Should UAP data be given to scientists?  02:25:56 Do we need new laws for life? — Additional resources:  ➡️ Follow Lee Cronin:  ✖️ Twitter: https://x.com/leecronin/  💻 Website: https://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/  ➡️ Check out Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal:  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w  💻 Website: https://www.curtjaimungal.org/  — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We can debate about things that we know for sure aren't alive, and we can debate about things that we could all say are alive. There may be a deep and maybe unassailable interplay between the notion of the conscious being that's defining life and the order and structure by which he or she ascribes that feature to be indicative of a biological process. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors.

How about you both start with your opening statements? Brian, you can go first. Okay, well, first of all, I'm wishing that this will be a nice, clean, toe-to-to-to battle, that we won't resort to any bloodshed like our last confrontation with now. Lee has been on my channel. He's a gracious gentleman. I enjoyed having him on. I refer people to check out that conversation.

He's given a TED talk that was sure. surely inspirational that came out 10 years ago on my 40th birthday. So you guys can do some quick math. And Lee hasn't changed a bit. I've got some gray beard hairs, as you can see. But the reason I suggest, Kurt said, you know, you can have any guest, you know, to have a theolocation, which is appropriate for gods like us in man form. And I said, there's no one I want to go toe to toe with more than my good friend Lee Cronin, because I have tremendous respect. for his intellect, for his character, for the fact that he's an experimentalist. He's a chemist, not a physicist, but he, that's okay. Some of my best friends are chemist. And he does experimental

work. And that's very rare, Kerr, as you know, you have theories in your name of your podcast. We hear a lot more from the theorists. We hear from Mitch Yo Kaku, from our buddy Eric Weinstein, from our buddies, you know, Brian Green and all the like. But we rarely get to hear from experimentalist. So one of the niches I like to hopefully fill in is, is to bring an experimentalist standpoint to it, which is first and foremost driven by evidence. And I'm hoping that today, if Lee agrees, that we'll kind of take a tour through what we know about the universe, what we know we don't know about the universe, specifically restricted to life, which is Lee's domain, much more than mine. But I want to bring an experimental observational astrophysics perspective to things.

and even touch upon the things that inspired me as a 12-year-old kid to get my first telescope, which is the biggest question I think there is. Even though I study the origin of the universe, I still think the question of the origin and evolution of life and the existence of technological life would change humanity more than anything else, except for the fact that I don't think there's anyone else out there. So I'm going to take a contrarian point of you. Not a skeptic. I don't like the role of skeptic.

I think that's kind of overblown and hyperbolic. and people, you don't want to invite too many skeptics to, you know, to a fun birthday party. But I want to play the role of somebody who would like nothing better than for aliens, for UFOs, for UAPs to all be harbingers of unexplored civilizations that are going to be hopefully benevolent. And yet, I'm coming from a perspective of moderation of my excitement so that I don't get too overblown and too optimistic. And I hope that we can have a very spirited discussion.

And as I said, there's no one I'd rather have this friendly, bloodthirsty debate with than Professor Lee Cronin, who's a giant in his field and has already accomplished a tremendous amount. And yet we differ. And hopefully by the end, we should have a rubric by which we can apprise for the audience how much we have learned from each other. If I changed my mind, if Lee changes his mind. So maybe after Lee's introduction, we'll have kind of a.

a framing, you know, the rules of the fight, like Kurt, you'll be in the middle of the ring, and we'll go toe to toe to toe. With that, turn it over to my buddy Lee. Lee, thanks, Brian. Is that okay? Were you, Kurt? Yes, please go. So, yeah, I mean, this is, I was really looking forward to this because Brian and I both share the rule of scientific law that we kind of like data and we like experiments and we like theory. And I've listened to Brian debate a lot. And he's very he's much more polite and patient than I am. So I have a lot of respects. I really have to read between the lines. And I've been involved in some debates where people just want to catch me out. And I, and I'm no doubt Brian's been in the same place. So I would say today is probably almost

going to be too congenial. But I think that's really important because we're both open-minded, but we're optimistic about different things. Now, as a chemist, I have a very intuitive feel for the way chemistry works on planet Earth, the rate at which molecules are made and destroyed. And I'm fascinated by biology. And actually, I mean, I describe myself a full disclosure. I'm really an experimental theorist in a way. I'm not, I don't think I have the analytical brain to be a good theorist, but I'm really good at coming up with the experiments to develop the theory, and I'll explain a little bit better, it seems a bit weird. But I do agree with Brian. I'm very skeptical about making declarations. I don't know if I can put a number

on, and I was on the computer on the back alien life or not. I wrote a paper a few years ago, which is called quantifying the origins of life on a planetary scale. And I'll talk about the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox and the chemistry. But let's let and I also want to make this about what Brian is doing very well, is saying, hey, I don't, I don't know. Well, I'm not, I won't paraphrase too much because I think he's much more qualified to give his own point of view, given his here. So there is this kind of gap in his intuition.

and I'm going to try and fill that and say, well, look, I know how easy chemistry is. I know how odd life is. And I want to make a couple of statements. The first thing is we don't really know what life is. And I don't mean in some kind of weird kind of whether we are, you know, projections from an astral plane. We're clearly material. I'm kind of a materialist, but to kind of cheat on one of a copy of what Penrose said in a podcast said, I'm a materialist, but I just don't know what the matter is, right?

And I think that's kind of important to understand that. So that's one point. The other point is I would appeal to this out at the beginning. I would say there's lots of gaps in my kind of feeling of how the universe works. So physicists typically have, I think, not have three or four things that I find confusing, that they conflate to kind of think that life is odd. The first of all is the origin of the universe. how did the universe get started?

You'll hear time in time again for the second law, that is that things get more disordered over time, we have more order at the beginning. So I say, hey, where does that order come from? And Brian is really well qualified to explain that. And I'm hoping that by him explaining some of the positions I find confusing, I'll be able to explain some of the positions he finds confusing. We might even find ourselves agreeing,

which is not a very good blood sport. But let's not prejudge our agreement, because there's lots of disagreement. So physicists think that there needs to be an order at the beginning of the universe. So I find that confusing. And the second law for me is baked into the way I do chemistry. So I get this chemistry, all these complex molecules, and they turn into life. And hey, presto, we get there. Well, actually, it's not like that.

We don't know what it is. The other gap is that we talk about this thing called entropy. And we also talk about what we call causation and kind of the emergence of information intention. And so in my opening statement, I would just like to say there were significant gaps in physics, which help us, which were precludes us from really even understanding why the universe is here. So I both sympathize with Brian's view, but I also would like to go, you know, straight back at you and say, could we could, understanding the origin of life, which I'm not so interested in, I want to understand how life forms as a phenomena. It might even actually help us understand

what the universe is. And so my real intuition is that life is as easy as start and a fusion reaction in the sky. And there are fusion reactions starting all the time, stars giving birth and stars dying. And we need to think statistically in that way to start to reframe the argument. Now, does all life term into intelligent life, we can debate that and talk about it. But I would say that in my opening argument, I think I see no barrier for why life can't be. common. There seems to be no law or no gotcha in terms of resource. But I do concede, we don't know what life is. But I also would kind of say, you know, we don't really know where the second law comes from, that time seems to be optional in our universe. And we have all this jiggery-pokery

with a second law and how things happen. And with that, I will close my opening statement. All right. Let's agree on some definitions or let's get them out of the way. So perhaps Lee, why don't you define, I know this is highly contentious, but why don't you define what life is? And if you can't define it, then why can't you define it? And then also intelligence. So life and intelligence. And then Brian, add to that or tear it down. Yeah, please tear it down. So there's more definitions of life than there are life forms on earth thinking about it, which which will give you some. But I'll give you the standard. standard NASA definition, and I'll give you a slightly easier one, which will also blow your mind. So NASA kind of got a committee and got a lot of really smart people together and really, you know, said, well, okay, look, what are we kind of looking for? And I'm going to get this wrong because I don't know it by wrote, but it's roughly saying that life is a self-reproducing or sustaining evolutionary chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. I think of almost

got it in a line. And there's a lot of things in there because it's saying has to be self-sustaining. There's replication and there's Darwinian evolution. There's kind of a lot of terms. And the thing for that is you have to then get almost like the legislature out to say, you know, do you qualify to be a life form? You know, are you replicating? Okay, maybe. Are you metabolizing? And then you get people saying, oh, but fire. Fire kind of does that. Why is fire not alive? And you get all trapped into circles and people say, oh, viruses, are they alive? So I'm going to give you the kind of cronin definition, but actually is probably more like the Walker definition or the Crohnan Walker definition. And I'm collaborating with a colleague in ASU, Sarah Walker, who really

has inspired a lot of this. And we kind of, we've been developing a theory, but I'll come to that later. What I'm going to say, and this is for the people listening, that living systems, I don't know what they are exactly. They're kind of like a bit, although they're material, there's some weird stuff. But what do living systems uniquely do? There no other systems do. They create complex objects, okay, in abundance that couldn't form randomly. So be it this 3D printer, Tesserac, which I made on my 3D printer, this nice phoenix solar watch, which are little lights coming on at the back, so it's all function. And my mouse and my, my, my, my, my body and the complex objects that they just couldn't randomly form.

Now we can define complexity in a minute, but I'm going to give you kind of one other thing. This thing, kind of says that this is alive, and it kind of is, we shall blow your mind. This is alive, or this is evidence of life. And then people say, ah, a virus is alive. And the answer is yes. viruses are produced by evolutionary systems with biology and that viruses could not exist without the chain of events which connects all of us right back to that origin of life on earth. So I guess I'm saying NASA definition for some of the efficinados, you know, replication,

metabolism, Darwinian evolution. But I would say, okay, that's really hard. Tickbox, tick box. why not look for things that do complex things that we wouldn't expect. And so that's life to one degree. Then intelligence kind of builds on that because clearly this was not evolved in the desert. This required human beings to invent, you know, lithography, a cheering machine, electricity. I mean, I am so proud of humanity. It might say I'm a bit like, a bit kind of, you know, weird, but how much creativity went into making this silly little watch.

There's a solar cell in here. There are LEDs. There's a microprocessor. There's lithographic defined memory. And there's refined titanium. I was feeling rich when I bought this. I wanted a light watch on my list. There's all this cool stuff that we've done.

And this clearly is evidence. And I'm going to use this term. And I don't like using it. But I'm going to use it in the way that I mean it. And I'm sure Brian and you will cut me down if you think I'm being ambiguous. This is a result of intelligent. design. And what I mean, a human being building abstractions in their head, were able to leap beyond the confines of evolution, able to think about stuff and conceptualize, not having to die trying

it out, and they made the watch. So all the way back, definition of life, evolution, chemistry, NASA, my definition, stuff, things that make complex things you couldn't, in abundance with lots a copy numbers that you wouldn't find ordinarily, say on the moon, on the Mars. And intelligent life can make objects that are even more intricate. So you have three epochs. You have the random epoch, just laws of physics doing their cool stuff. The biological epoch, the distribution of objects in that narrows a bit and then technology and intelligence produces a delta function.

The number of transistors in here that have no variation, almost perfect is staggering. And that's kind of long-winded, but I think I just wanted to get that out because it's quite precise, and we'll get people watching and listening to think really like, oh my gosh, this cup is evidence of billion years of life

because of no potter, no discovery of no clay, no cup. Just imagine how many, this lineage, this trajectory, this object. This is actually made in Beijing. There's some lovely pictures on here. This is evidence of billions of years of progress. I'll stop there.

Brian, what are your comments on that? Well, you know, of course, with a definition as maybe one could say flexible as all that could, you know, be said to entail, of course, there's, there's, it's hard to disagree. I was preferring to think about things, you know, there was a decision you both are not of the United States in origin. But there was a famous Supreme Court case in the 50s, I think, where the court was asked to describe what is pornographic. And the upshot was that you know it when you see it. And I think, you know, we can, we can kind of, you know, debate about things that we know for sure aren't alive. And we can debate about things that we could all say are alive. And I think leads onto something that there may be a deep and maybe unassailable interplay between the notion of the conscious being that's defining life and the order and structure by which he or she ascribes that feature to, be indicative of a biological process. Normally, what I hear is, well, life, it depends. And even what is consciousness? It depends. And as you know, Kurt, there are people that believe, you know, the quarks in the cup that Lee was holding up are a lot or have consciousness in a pan-psychist

format. I don't know if Lee believes that or not, but I would suspect not. Yeah, he's shaking his head. So what I think is important is that we all sort of can recognize the boundary cases. as not or yes, certainly affirming to be of life. And it's kind of like, you know, these debates about, you know, like think about abortion. Abortion is really controversial here in America. Nobody would say before your parents met each other that you were an organism, you were a baby. And nobody would say after, you know, 10 months out of the womb that you're not a living being. So it's in the, it's in the superposition, the Schrodinger state where it can be, is it alive?

That's where the ambiguity comes in. And the human brain, as Lee knows, and you know, too, Kurt, hates ambiguity. We force patterns on top of things. The ambiguity bias is a well-known psychological affair. So the question is not are the edge cases alive, but are the, you know, how do we how do we parse and split with granularity that's sufficient to provide the satisfaction morally and intellectually that we're actually making progress? So I like that Lee began, you know, originally he mentioned the Drake equation and we should actually go through that and what that entails, because I think in that realm, my field, not me specifically,

I don't study the origin of life or technology, et cetera, it has brought the most to bear the field of astrophysics. Again, not what I do, but that many terms in the Drake equation have been reduced in their uncertainty has come from astrophysics, not from chemistry, not from biology, et cetera, you know, from discoveries that have been made by my colleagues, not by me again. So I think what's important is that we all can first agree on the baseline definitions on the pitch, which is that, you know, living things, we have some vague notion of what living things are. And I think the only thing I was a little discouraged in what Lee said originally was he doesn't want to talk about the origin of life. And I feel like all these things are

kind of interrelated. There are classic chicken or egg type problems, you know, and I think life chemistry, et cetera, has has a great deal to say. And I'm, I'm, I'm, doubly surprised because in Lee's phenomenal TED Talk from 2011, September 9th, 2011, my 40th birthday, he goes on and tells Chris Anderson in front of a live audience that within two years he's going to be able to make life in his laboratory. And I don't think necessarily that you would claim that to be a successful bet at this point, Lee, but I'd love to know what is, and I'm not criticizing you, merely bringing up the fact that there is a tendency mostly in my field. to have things like the God equation, the God particle, the mind of God and the God

equation, all these things, the hype that we have in the field of cosmology, Kurt, is unparalleled. And I worry that if we don't avoid that in kind of the essence of describing the origin of life, evolution of life, aliens, UFOs, all the things we're going to talk about today, I hope we will, because it's so fascinating and has driven me since I was a kid. Nevertheless, there is a tendency and a propensity for us to believe what we want to I believe, and maybe put things in the file drawer that we find discrepant. And so I would just say, I think it is important that we talk about the origin of life. I think that's a crucial question.

And I think there's no one better on earth to talk to than Lee. I'm sure there are many better people to talk to. Let's unpack it. The unpack it. So, yeah, the TED Talk. I really enjoyed doing the TED Talk. I was the first stop at the TED Global that year, the first stop and the start of origins. I actually meant what I meant, and what I said in.

forward. It sounds like a cop-out politician, you know, Boris Johnson's like I didn't know as a party. So what I was trying to make is two important points. The number one is that I think the origin of life is fast. And once I've worked out how to set up the engine, building a evolutionary engine, it will take a couple of years. I stand by that. And it has been two years. It's been 10 years. But in the 10 years, I've had to design a programming language for chemistry in lab and find the money. And when I went to get money from people and I said, hey, guys, do you want to invest in the origin of life? Their eyes glaze over.

And they sometimes said, okay, do you want to invest in drug discovery? They went, oh, yeah, good. So what I've been doing over the years is actually building this technology. Now, it exists in the lab, and I'm super excited. Now, I made a major error, many major errors. I mean, I completely concede. I wasn't overhyping saying, you can watch a video. I was generally like, I wasn't expected that question.

I was like, I don't know. Two years, why not? That's cool. Let's go. But there's a really important point. At that point, I had an intuition about what to look for. But I didn't really have an experiment. Okay.

I didn't have a theory. I didn't have a model. And I didn't have a threshold. And I was like, can I swear on air? I was like, yeah. What do you mean by threshold? You didn't have a threshold. I'll come to that in a second.

So I was like, holy shit. I have nothing. Right? And then you think, then I looked at CERN and how they did it. So NASA couldn't find the origin of life. Sorry, alien that the life dependent on it because they're like, oh, is it green? Is it a microtube? Is it phosphine?

Is it actually, to be fair, NASA didn't say anything about phosphine. We'll come to that. But inspired by the machine that was the LHC, they have one of the best press officers ever, they had the standard model. It's a beautiful model. They had a theory, some. which gave rise to the standard model. They were able to simulate the standard model,

work out what energy range in which to find the Higgs. So then had an experiment. Build a collider, go to 138.5GV. You have a better memory for this as I do, but there, find a peak, get it 11 Sigma, Higgs, job done, you've got it. So what I was going to say is to reassure Brian or to make him decide, we're not just going for the origin of life.

we're going for the phenomena that produces life in general. Think of it like when you look up in the sky. Let's just imagine that we, I don't know, it's a few hundred thousand years from now and humans had emerged slightly later and they look up in the sky and all they see is the sun. They don't see any other stars.

What they would be obsessing about the origin of the sun. How did it come? There's fusion. Where were those hydrogen atoms? Those damn hydrogen atoms. How did it happen? And then fusion came. But now we look up and say there's a sun, that's cool.

And they go over there, there's a sun. Look, one's just died. One has started. One has died. So what I'm trying to say is, of course I'm studying the origin of life. But I'm not just studying the origin of life. I'm understanding the emergence of life in general so I can do statistics. And all I can do in my lab is build the experiment.

So now I like, okay, I need to build a life generator. So I need to build a simulator of planet Earth, have a load of pots, load of warm ponds, programming language, pumps and valves, doing all the chemistry for, you know, but I don't have a planet or 200 million years. I have some grad students, brilliant grad students, 25 of them, and four years. So then I'm multiplexing it. So I've got a kind of theory, which is unreasonable complexity. That's my theory. My model is to go and then generate networks of molecules that will produce that unreasonable complexity. I then have a friend. Which I can talk about, which is I published a paper last year, an alien meter that kind of works for life. And I now should go run it. And I, you know, I mean, I've done this as timestamped as 2020. We're getting older all the time. But I will let you know. I will tweet when the experiment is ready to start. And I'm going to connect my complexity to Twitter. And it's just going to talk right there. The chemistry comes out, it just be random. And what you need to do is look at that Twitter account. And when it starts writing or when it's going to connect to

that you see patterns in the tweets, you'll know a life form has emerged in Glasgow. So, yes, we are doing Origin of Life, but I want to frame it more broadly. And I also think that I would like to kind of just suggest that, you know, it is quick. So the two years I promised to the TED Talk is correct. And as Brian knows from doing big experiments, political and all sorts of things, which two years are the most important? That's right. They always say, you know, X experiment, our X discovery is 10 years from now, and it will always be so. But Lee, let me, you know, I love you and I'm going to keep harping on that fact. So nature's under no obligation to, you know, fulfill things on our grant schedules, on our, on our, you know, biological clocks, which is a kosher form of clock as far as I'm concerned. But, but I want to take you back to 1854 when a fellow Scotsman, a brilliant lad, just like, yourself, sir. And he was working away. And he discovered these four laws that are eponymously named at the Maxwell equations. And James Clerk was working away. And he discovered that. And he said,

these imply and impute the laws of electromagnetic radiation. And how can they propagate through the seeming void that separates us from the sun from all these objects that Lee's already described? Well, it must be the luminiferous ether, the vitreous, the virtuous electromagnetic, ether. And he said, well, how does that work? And he went through it. And he had this system of vortices, gears, pulleys, and ropes and so forth on a microscopic level, which is totally laughable. So now imagine Lee, Twitter existed back then. Or how about if Twitter existed when Darwin wrote his letter to, was it Huxley, Leo, correct me, about the warm little pond. And he said, oh, it's an if. And it's a very big if. And what if, you know, there was a Twitter, you know,

bot connected to Darwin's warm little pond 1840s, 1850s? Or what if Miller Yuri? By the way, Yuri was Stanley was, was, uh, Lee, uh, Yuri who was Harold Yuri, rather, who was at UC San Diego, a mile from my office here. And he, our chemistry departments named Yuri Hall. And he worked with his grad student, Stanley Miller. And they came up with this famous Miller-Ury experiment, which sounds an awful lot, except for the existence of a, of a computing machine next to it, 1951.

And, uh, and you could have turned it on and, and, maybe connected it to a touring machine that could then tweet. And that would then, you know, here we are. Here's the, here's the prototype of life coming out. And it's now it's doing something complex, organized, reducing of entropy, collecting information and providing surprise. I think that's important. And it'd be totally far off from the way we actually believe.

And correct me if I'm wrongly. But I'm going to be bold because Kurt's paying us, you know, handsomely, to be aggressive. And I'm going to say, I don't think we've made any progress in, This type of field of Miller, Yuri, Darwinian, warm little pools since those original conjectures, I think they've been shown to be wrong, not scientific fraud, but there's no evidence that those chemicals, even if they could be provided and sterilized little beakers that I get at my chemistry stockroom and you get in your chemistry stock room with pipettes that are cleaned and connected to an autoclave, that even so they can reproduce actual living organisms.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm ready for the arrows. No, I mean, look, so I'm, I don't want to, so I'm stuck here. As a chemist, I mean, chemists have made an incredible achievement since the time of Miller-Yeary, right? I think the problem is, let me, yeah, so the experiments that Miller-Uri did was a bit like you doing the Bicep One project in 1950. and the technology wasn't there. We kind of understood polarization. We understand about light.

We didn't know anything about the microwave background. So they were kind of, they were kind of visionary in that they had a hint that life existed. Oh, sure. Whereas, you know, the physicists were like, there's no, you know, there's no big bang. There's just a steady state model and all this stuff. So they were kind of headed a physicist at that time.

And so what they did, they were a victim at their own naivity of simplification. And so, and so the progress that was made there, is they just said, okay, we'll just take some very basic molecules and put them in a flask and heat them. So the middle of your experiment is literally a big bell jar with a cycle or circuit where you've got a heater, and you have some water, methane, hydrogen, ammonia, okay? And these are the elements you need for most amino acids, which will have carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, oxygen. Some have sulfur in it, but let's leave those out here.

They didn't put any sulfur in. And so what they showed was something that I love mathematics. I'm a much better kind of a computer scientist and mathematician than I am a kind of historical chemist. So for me, when someone says, oh, here's some glycine, glycine is the simplest amino acid. Conventorily, it's easy to get. It's like maybe flicking three or four heads in a row with a coin flip. Okay. So, and they did this with a lot of amino acids. And so the chemists kind of, they made this. And it was still remarkable because, whoa, these simple things can make amino acids. amino acids are in proteins, is there a link? Well, of course there's a link insofar as the

atoms in that jar can find their way into amino acids. But we know that life isn't about amino acids. Life is something different, right? And so I don't think they've failed. I think that chemists have been asked to develop a philosophy or to develop an ontology that just didn't exist. And I think that that, so I, you know, and I think the chemists are doing brilliant things. Now, what's happened in the 50 years? Well, have gone on and cured disease and made interesting molecules. And we all know that. I'm not here to defend them. But the analysis has got better. But Lee, aren't you guys still now with things like the RNA world, which we have to discuss? I mean, isn't it just redux this, this, you know,

redux reaction now? What was the Miller-Uri amino acid? Now, oh, now we know the secret is RNA. So I would say, within every field, so I'm going to try and do this as delicately as possible, with every field, you have a field that gets stuck, and the origin of life chemists are really interested in commentatorial chemistry, the easiest route to X, Y, and Z. And they see a series of smoking guns. And the thing is, I'm sure that Brian and I readily agree that RNA is not the answer to the origin of life. But I think I have an understanding of the underlying theoretical framework. And that's what I'm going to push Brian on in just one moment.

So life has little to do with the actual specific molecules. It's a bit like saying, I can only make a motor car that's, you know, I don't know, let's take a BMW. I discover a BMW or then I discover a Tesla, right? You know, let's say there's the origin of automobiles on planet out there. And it's, you know, there's no space for Tesla. It's just BMW or there's no space for a BMW is just Tesla. There's only one way of doing it. Or Kurt's Lamborghini or Kurtz Lamborghini.

My son is into Ferrari. It's like dad is like Ferrari all the way. He's getting a midlife crisis at age 10. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Hilton, for the stay. There's not one way of solving that chemical problem. And what I'm here to reassure Brian on is like, whoa, chemistry is special. Like, it's not. The problem that chemists have is that they are playing around in the mess in their middle. So here, let me just frame the whole discipline. My ambition in my lifetime is not only to get to solve the origin of life. and make artificial life and find aliens.

Those three things are needed, I think, together, because not one of them is going to be acceptable, I think. And also, as the alien discussion is going in our popular culture right now, and this is something that Sarah Walker has pointed out to me many times. It's really interesting that people are excited about aliens. And I kind of disagree with Brian a little bit, where he says, oh, if people just find an alien life form, they won't care. They will, but it needs to be framed properly,

because people want to know, they want meaning. So going back to this origin of life and why is it wrong? Well, physicists deal with low memory systems, right? That's why we call them low memory systems. Physicists themselves are very high memory individuals, right? They have to be good at mathematics and modeling and so on. Low memory systems. That means that a few equations can broadly show you how things work.

Not precisely. Then you go into chemistry, and chemistry is a bit messy. here. There's lots more compounds we made, more commentable explosion. But again, chemists, alchemists, whatever, we can make new materials, molecules, and so on. Then you get to biology, and that's a medium memory. When you get to biology, you have all this contingency and evolution, Cambrian explosion, there are legs popping up everywhere, eyes everywhere, things calm down. You get to where we are on Earth with dinosaurs. The chance of it comes. A dinosaur goes extinct. mammals run around and suddenly we have human beings building iPhones and YouTube and

whatever. And I think that the memory in those increases like dramatically. We can't even conceive. Because physics has not, and we say it's all physics fault, right? I'm in defense of the chemist, physics doesn't understand entropy. It's wrong. The definition of entropy is wrong. sadly, this is really huge, Kurt. So Lee has a very provocative unorthodox and not necessarily accepted within physics. It doesn't mean it's wrong, but I think we should put a pin in that and definitely want to your audience needs to hear his perspective and they hopefully will want to hear my rebuttal too. But, but Lee, I don't want to interrupt you.

Is this related to assembly theory or is it different? Yeah, yeah. It's about assembly theory. I'm unsure how a definition can be wrong. What do you mean by the definition of entropy is wrong? that entropy is trying to capture something and the definition doesn't capture that. Let's define entropy for a second. And so it's not the definition isn't wrong.

It's what we need to, the whole concept is wrong. It's highly, it's like these are career-ending words, right? There would be all the thermodynamicsists out there canceling me. But because thermodynamics are pretty cool guys and they're like the stats, they're not going to cancel me. They might take pity on me and teach me some statistical mechanics. So what do I mean? So if you, what is entry-first? Entropy very loosely is a measure of disorder.

So and what we say in general, I take a section to that. Sorry? I don't think that's the case. Do you think that's the case, Brian, that it's a measure of disorder? Sure it is, yeah. I know that's colloquially what it is. No, no.

So if you want to calculate the entropy of something, you look at the state, you look at the actual state versus the microstate versus the number of possible states, look at the fraction of those. And basically, when you look at the endrope, entropy, the value, it tells you how much disorder you have. The lower the number, the lower the disorder, the more order. The higher the number, the higher the disorder, the higher the number of arrangements. That is the precise definition of entropy. It goes from the molecular level, the atomic level, all the way up to the macro level. Well, Kurt, I should say that John Bonnoyman said,

nobody understands entropy. So if you ever discover something, call it entropy. There's like what, Lee, eight different Shannon entropy, Von Neumann entropy. I know how you're using it. I don't fundamentally disagree, Kurt. I don't disagree with that. The tricky part, Lee, and I'd like some clarification is that when people use the word order, we have a certain meaning in our everyday life, in our vernacular. But then when we use the word entropy, it has a specific meaning that isn't necessarily tied to order, though it's correlated with it. And you can see this with a copy. No, no, no. We have to, let's go back, because Brian will back me up here. The entropy that's used in information theory is not correct, right? It is a, it is a colloquialism. It is not anchored in

physical reality. What is anchored in physical reality, is the basic idea, the idea of a heat engine. Okay, so I want to talk about the heat engine. So basically what the thermodynamics is realized, if you want to get maximum efficiency out of your heat engine, you maximize the temperature difference between the two parts, right? And then you can extract. Sorry?

That's a carnal efficiency, right? Exactly. And so Brian is agreeing to me because it's right. It's how it works right there. Now, Boltzman came along and he realized that he could derive the existence of molecules of atoms, from this approach. It's like ab initio.

It was amazing, right? So you could infer that these molecules are moving around and they have these energies associated with them and they could be added up and they would give you what you measure, right? By experiments. Now, that's out there. What I'm saying here is human beings create the boundary conditions of the engine. We build the engine.

We do work. We interact on the boundary conditions to make things happen. And then we label the beginning and the end. And the way we label things, we label things in such a way as an observer that we kind of stack the deck. So we always see the entropy change. So let's pause there because that's quite a deep thing. We have to dig down and Brian will attack it in a good way because it needs clarification. Now let's go to information and entropy.

This is where things get confusing. Shannon wanted to qualify the amount of noise in a channel if we're speaking, right? And he wanted to think about the number of possible states. How surprising is it if I get this bit, do I get that bit, right? And what Shannon was able to do is come up with a very nice mathematical formalism. They look very similar to entropy, okay, on a channel. But people misunderstood and said that everything is a communication channel. But no, Shannon says there has to be an encoder and a decoder,

and then Shannon information can be used. only under those circumstances. No encoder, no decoder, no Shannon information. Okay? That's what I mean. So I really wanted to take that very carefully and define those to the best of my ability.

And I'm very happy for Brian to correct anything because he's a better teacher than I am. And I think on this, we broadly agree what the definition of energy is. And I think just for Kurt and for the audience, who's incredibly erudite, second only to the end of the impossible podcast audience in terms of erudition,

brilliance and alacrity of brainpower. No, I'm just kidding. there's a podcast that Brian hosts for those who are watching called Into the Impossible, and I recommend you check that out. I'll leave a link in the description. And Kurt is my, he is my thesis advisor and all things in YouTube. He's really helped me tremendously, and I have gratitude for him. So Lee is eminently correct here. I think this is, absolutely something that we can orient towards. And that only highlights, again, this very delightful and delicious. You have to understand, Kurt. Me and Lee share one thing in

common. The curiosity depends on us being mystified, stymied, and perhaps even deceived by nature at certain times. Our job is to not deceive ourselves or other people to get money, attention, fame, etc. But in these contexts, when you have ambiguity, again, Lee mentioned a lot of topics in that definition, which is eminently correct, insofar as we all agree on things like temperature, we agree on basics like the microstate, what constitutes microstates, distributions, and fundamentally, if we agree on time. And Lee has some very, very, again, delightful, delicious, you know, possibly delusional, but wonderful ideas about time and its functionality.

But let's connect. Let's keep going back to what Lee said, which I think is brilliant and controversial. He said, physicists do not understand entropy, which implies concomitantly with that, I think Lee, you'll agree, that we don't understand time. Because time and a temperature, I think you could say we might understand, but that's intimately connected to molecules, right? You don't have temperature of a single quark, right? That's not substantive to talk about. So chemistry comes in, and I think I would disagree that, you know, chemists have a superior understanding. I think they have insight that physicists do not appreciate, and Lee's 100% correct.

We don't appreciate this molecular story. And I'll just correct. One thing that Lee said, I don't think Boltzman fundamentally, you know, prove the existence of molecules. I think that was Einstein later with Brownian motion, which was concomitant with Boltzman and Maxwell's earlier statistical mechanics. But let's just take this back to Lee's controversial statement, which is that to understand time and to understand entropy, we really need to understand chemistry because they're all fundamentally pivoting on a very singular hinge, which is a chemical definition or a practical working definition of entropy, which Lee posits comes from. chemistry exclusively correctly. Yeah, and I think to, I mean, so going back to Boltzmann and the proof of atoms, Boltzmann proved, I mean, you can add it on what Einstein did, that basically, that molecules are little microstates, basically, and that microwave, so that's a good correction.

We must get these corrections, right. So going on with entropy, so what I was saying to you, Kurt, is that when you look at a process, you say, oh, this whole process has occurred, the entropy of the universe has increased, right? It's like some kind of law. And I keep saying to people, what is the basis for that law? And this is really tricky.

So we get into a circular argument. People say, well, of course, if we do the statistics, what we do is we count everything up in their, in their, and put them in, you know, how much energy you have, how many of you, you know. And then we then sum it up and we look at the entropy. We calculate their number.

And then we look at the change. So we look at after, before and after and we look at the difference there. Now the problem is with respect to what are we labelling? And so what I'm saying is that entropy as a term is useful if you're a God looking down on your universe and you see the system and you see the surroundings. If you're doing that, you're good. I'm not saying that everyone using entropy is insane.

I'm saying entropy relies on coarse graining and coarse graining removes causation. So this is the problem because entropy basically says, everyone says there's no causation in the universe we don't need it. There's a second law. And I'm saying, no, there is no second law. The second law does not need to exist if you allow causation to exist. And it removes the number of uncertainty. So my universe requires no second law, no order at the beginning.

It only requires causation and the physical law. we already know. So I removed- And that is critical. Let me just, you know, because Lee is a delightful ability. I wonder if he is part-member of the tribal families because

he talks with his hands and he's just so brilliant in his in his single-mindedness of discourse, but I have to put a pause. So Lee is also pushing back on something. That's very controversial. And he has tremendous, Kurt.

Again, Kurt, I know you wanted to have blood on the floor of the mat by round five. I think we're probably in round three. It's going to get there. We're going to get bloody. But one bloody good thing that Lee has said exclusively courageously, I think only on my podcast interview with him, was that chemistry has, quote, an intelligent design problem. So what, and Lee takes on these intelligent designers, which I've had on my show and I don't mind

and Lee's debated them and it's, it's kosher in my mind to talk to such people, Stephen C. Meyer, James Tours, but fundamentally he has courage, Lee has courage in that he is admitting there is a lack, a lacuna in our understanding of science, which we, we are comfortable with because we are making progress towards an understanding that hopefully would not involve God. But hopefully, if it does involve God, chemist, physicists around the world could be open-minded enough to accept and change their priors based on that. Now, what he said is fundamentally important two minutes ago. He said he doesn't require a second law. Now, why is the second law so problematic for chemist who reject the intelligent design hypothesis,

which obviously Lee does? And that is that because without some low-ordered state, which can get into my field of cosmology. How did inflation, had the Big Bang unfurl if there was no pre-existing universe, a pre-existing collapsing state, perhaps? How do you establish a low entropy state of the universe for it to grow to today's facetity of information, of complexity, of chaos, of entropy by 10 to the, what, 100 orders of magnitude that Penrose has pointed out in the 80s already? This is a huge challenge to cosmology. How do you get to high entropy today? If you didn't start with low entropy in the beginning, people like David Albert and others have postulate something called the past hypothesis, which is basically by Fiat, some entity instantiates

as zero entropy or low entropy state. I don't, I think that's kind of touching on almost intelligent design-like features. But Lee's self-consistent, if not correct, I'm saying he is self-consistent. If he can avoid the second law's validity uniformly universally, then he precludes and excludes a need for some designer. And I just wonder, Lee, is that driven by some desire to eliminate a godhead, or is this fundamentally just an element of a self-consistent theory of the early universe that leads to the chemistry, time, for sundity that we just described? I mean, I was thinking about this today, actually, because I was listening to something you were saying.

And no, I've always really had an intuition for time that was different to everyone else's. And I remember my physics teaching when I was at high school, who used to work at CERN. And I was just saying this thing called Time. And she said, no, you don't understand time is nothing. It's just the ability to watch interaction things to happen. It is if you have to distribute energy, you have time. And I was just like, let's just, and for all these years, I've just, for me, it just felt wrong. And I kind of ignored it.

And when I came back in, in that I'm a very open-minded chemist in that, for me, chemistry is a way of interacting in the universe to ask questions. And when I look around and I can see that you have sand on a, beach that is inorganic, made of silicates. There might be biological stuff in there, but you've got inorganic stuff. And then you can see a blade of grass where there's a molecular machine in there that's assembling, taking light, taking CO2 and respiring. You can't help thinking there must be some incredible force of nature that we're misunderstanding. Now, I don't mean like a force of gravity, but I will introduce, and this is what assembly theory quantifies, that physicists should give us a bit of causation. The physicists have taken causation out of everything in physics.

So they have to magically invoke it, which is why we have this free will problem now, because we've got really smart people saying, I don't have free will because I live in a deterministic universe. And then you're just like, well, what are we doing this? And I may as well just run around naked on the YouTube channel because it's already pre-designed. And nobody acts like they have no free will. I mean, that's the thing. It's like if you meet somebody who truly believes that they have no free will and acts upon it, that person should be referred to.

I think it doesn't Sam Harris claim, but anyway, I'm digressing a bit. So what I mean is that you have this thing that, you have this thing that. that for me, the missing force, if you like, or the missing phenomena that we are missing by removing it, by having entropy, cheat number one, having order at the beginning of the universe, cheat number two, and having emergent time and emergent causation, cheat three and four, is that we're ignoring the fact that when you've got a universe just full of objects, let's call them just atoms, right, and some energy, and you start, to break symmetry, that that symmetry can select. And there's this thing called selection. And you don't

need biology for selection. You don't need, I don't worry, there's no panpsychism here. There is just the environment can start to be the shepherd for the sheep, if you like, and then the sheep can become the shepherd. And they switch between the two, and you get complex behavior frozen in. Now, this is the point that random events are random, but they are absolutely monumental in the trajectory. So what I mean is you go to a billiard table and you just start moving the balls around, the state that you'll have number of bounces later will be precisely controlled by your initial conditions and some variations. Start with different initial conditions, put in different energy, you'll get to a different place. Now imagine that the

system is able to record that memory of what happened before. That basically, physics turns into chemistry through bond formation and complex commentary explosion. And then that process is enhanced when biology is invented by matter. And you're able to remember what happened to you at high, high dimensionality. And that is what that causation from quarks to quacks, right? We can have a quote on that. I call it from rocks to rock mononoff.

Yeah, that's a much better, you're much better at this than I am, Brian. But you go from this kind of non-causal system to a causal system that then act on itself. So there's two levels. You get to biology and you get causation trapped in evolution. But then when evolution produces objects that can act on themselves, we can genetically engineer ourselves. We can play with the climate. We can play with the soil. We can play with technology.

You get this explosion of further complexity. And that's how it works. And I think that the universe is literally teeming with these. engines of causation. And it doesn't need to be, we can come to a Drake occasion and golly like Earth. You know, the fact is there's life everywhere. The sad thing is we probably won't be able to recognize it other than if we use assembly theory. But that's obviously my bias, right? And the problem I have as a theorist here is I invented a theory in civil experiments. And what my challenge is to disprove my own theory with, and the problem with a discipline I'm in is the

chemists won't even engage with it to start with, and it's taking them a very long time. I have a different, I'm sorry, Kurt, to interrupt. Go ahead. It's better if I don't say anything. Okay. It means it's going well. Okay. Although I do have a quick question. Yeah. It's for Lee and for you, Brian, what's a definition of order that doesn't involve entropy? Because if you're saying low entropy is order, well, then that sounds like a definition of order, yet the word order was used prior to the word entropy being invented. So this is really tough. So you've asked a really smart. So I'll take a stab at it and Brian will as well.

You can define information in terms of your certainty about what's going to happen. So if I take a coin, right, and I say I'm going to flip my coin and I have no idea. I have no prior. I have nothing to suggest that it's a weighted coin. I will assign a prior that I'm going to give 50% head or tails and I'll collect data and I'll update. So that update constitutes some information. And that is the same type of thing you want to have a look at in order. Order is a really odd thing.

Because order is about registry. And so I would say that order happens when you have no constraints. Let's say, and you allow things to cool down. So let's just take your phase transition. You take some water vapor and you allow that water vapor to kind of precipitate and grow an ice crystal. Okay. And if you allow that to happen very slowly, the order. will arise from the fact the molecules in that ice crystal, the water molecules,

will take the correct low energy configuration to make a nice tetrahedral symmetry, and then you'll get no defects in there, and you'll produce this perfect object. That just happens because the laws of physics give you that. So order arises when you have no, the constraints are minimal. That's kind of a really nice definition of order. and it's hard because lots of people argue and they bring in, it's all anthropomorphic, you know, my kid's bedroom is not ordered. You will claim it is, right?

But, you know, so that's, and then you then frame it in these entropic and information arguments. But you say, hey, what is information? Information is about uncertainty. What is entropy? Entropy is about disorder. So the one way I'm looking at is causation or information for me is almost the inverse of entropy. So when I burn something, I know how much entropy has changed. So if I burn a book, in principle, or I take a book to the event her at a black hole, right?

You're going to get all the information back out as hawking radiation. I won't be, I count it, but I should be able to work out what it's roughly going to be. So it tells me what I've lost. It's never told me what I have. And that's why I'm pushing so hard on this is entropy is almost like the inverse. It tells me that I lost stuff. It can never tell me what I had. Yeah, I would very much agree with that. I would only add on just another example. Think of a pendulum clock, a grandfather clock with a pendulum swinging back and forth in vacuum. You can use that to tell time. And actually, I think it's the minimal clock. Lee works a lot of minimal systems and systems that exhibit features of the very most simple basics and essence of the phenomenon, not simple in terms of like dumb, but simple in terms of elementary and important. So you can have this clock swinging back and forth.

And you can use it to tell time, i.e. describe order. But if and only if you define the direction of the arrow of time, right? Because a pendulum is time translation symmetric. If I didn't tell you where it started, I swung the plum bomb out over here and let it go, you wouldn't know the absolute origin of time. But you could still count time in a parametric relative way. You could say so many cycles of the pendulum later, and you could say that's in the forward. But if the universe were, you know, arranged differently, the laws of physics work for Newtonians. physics in the absence of heat and so forth work the other way. So yes, so Lee's right, you imply some constraint and then you can do stuff without imposing this interplay between entropy, time, and order, but only if you supply at least a minimum bit of information, i.e. what was the initial condition? But to get back to Lee's point, I think this will go back to our rubric that we established in the ground rules, you know, when Lee and I were nose to nose at the beginning and Kurt was like pushing us and we were like, you know, at the very beginning of the fight, you know, we should have some explanation of what our priors are and how we could change our minds.

So one thing that Leah has said just now, and it said to me on my podcast, Ann has said in many of his wonderful debates, and again, I give him credit for his courage, this is so rare that you have a public-facing scientist at the highest level, Regius professor at the UK, which is like appointed by the queen. So I think he has to like taste test all our food to make sure she doesn't die. like Martin Reese, he tells the queen her horoscope as the royal astronomer. Lee is like that level in his profession. So let me say that again, prefacing with respect. Lee has basically claimed that life is abundant. And so to me, in the universe. And he's gone so far as to make a life detection machine,

which after his Twitter bot in the warm Darwinian pool registers, you know, I'm setting up my Twitter like Jack did 20 years ago, after that, he's going to also, you know, provide the signal coming in from the universe autonomously generated based on fundamental mathematical principles connected to computational devices, turning machines. But that is predicated on this bias. I call you out. I use the B word, Lee. You are biased that there is a life is plentable throughout the universe. And I have to say, you know, with the Drake equation, which we can write down and I give it to my undergraduate students and Lee knows it backwards and forwards.

The most important thing in any equation, Lee, correct me if I'm wrong, is not that you get the answer. It's how you account for your uncertainties, your statistical uncertainties, which are easy to calculate, and your systematic uncertainties, which are very, very difficult. I use this example in a talk I gave in the belly of the beast, guys. I went to the SETI Institute, which we can talk about later. I gave a talk and said, what if you apply the Drake equation to the San Diego Zoo, where I am?

And you said, how many people are in the San Diego Zoo, right? now. And I go through the calculation. I come out with a number and it's like 8,000. And that's great. Except when I do the error bars, if I account for each one of the terms that goes into the Drake equation for the San Diego Zoo and feel free to estimate, an example of a Fermi type problem, if you don't include the error bars, it's meaningless. It's worthless. So I believe that Lee should say that there's 100%, you know, that life is abundant, but I want to know his error bars. And I want to know how can he go about reducing those error bars. In other words, disproving himself, rather than confirming that life is abundant necessarily,

what are the potential pitfalls, traps, biases, confirmation, and otherwise, that this abundance detector that you have developed and promoted has any degree of credulity right now that there's 100%, as you said, there's 100% chance. I'm closer to 0% chance of life in the universe. Again, no one would like to believe it more than me, especially intelligent aliens that could teach us the laws of physics of the 25th century right now so I can win that Nobel Prize finally.

But I want to know, I'll leave. I'm with you. Let me unpack this. Let me qualify it because I think, I mean, we're violently agreeing. So my intuition, the way I understand how chemistry works is I think there's life everywhere. I didn't quite say 100%. Brian is kind of. I have you on record saying 100%.

I know, no, no, that's fine. It's fine. I'm happy to stand by. I think it's great. It's like you're really putting me there and, you know, going me in the corner and just throwing the punches. And I would say that it is, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, wouldn't say I'm biased. I'm optimistic. But if you were to say, Lee, how much evidence do you

have for life else in the universe other than Earth? Zero. I have zero evidence. But I would, you know, I could kind of say to Brian, you know, how, hey, Brian, let's set, let's set fire to something, right? Like, I don't know, some carbon. How much evidence do you have for carbon being on fire and oxygen in the universe? And he might, probably wouldn't, probably wouldn't have any, right? But he knows it happens on Earth and knows how simple it is. And you could probably go, yeah, I could probably imagine some carbon being on fire somewhere. Kelvin used to think the sun was powered with coal, right? But when you did the math, you just worked out and had an energy. So totally, I have no evidence. There's life elsewhere in the universe. Zero. There's some hints there might have been

life on Mars. There's some hints that there might be some interesting stuff on Venus. We're excited about going to Europa and Enceladus, right? So just to be clear for everyone listening, zero. I have zero evidence. Does that mean that I'm somehow life religious? No, no, no, no. What I'm saying is chemistry is so easy, so quick, and there are so many missing gaps. What is the likelihood here? Is the likelihood that life is just vanishing it hard? Or is it that we don't actually know how we store information in chemical systems when evolution works? Because I do agree that there's probably life in the universe because life is a very, I'm using life as a very broad catch-all term for the following. I'm saying that when there is selection,

there will eventually be some kind of evolution and that evolution will normally give rise at some point in time to a lucre and that luca will go on. And Brian is absolutely right. There's lots of fragile links in that. And we just don't know. The point about the Drake equation, however, is this. The Drake equation is not a law. is not really equation. It's a kind of made up thing. It's a heuristic. But I do think that Brian and I should sit down and say, okay, how many stars, how many planets,

what fraction of the planets are even, you know, my motto here is let's allow any planet where bonds are allowed, covalent bonds, because covalent bonds, let's just allow life on all, let's allow all of those to be lifeline. So then, you know, when I say, where there's bond, there's hope. So you're just looking at it's important because as current. always points out, you know, you want to have these no-go theorems, right? Kurt, this is something that's a fixture on your channel. You've been paying attention, Brian. Yeah, and I'm stipulating to you, Lee. I'm willing to change my mind that there is no

no-go theorem. You know, so in other words, the probability is greater than zero. And I should never say zero and I didn't say zero. I said, I think it's closer to zero. But I agree with you. Bonds, the proclivity of bonds and the vicinity of carbon to make bonds and so forth, I would say there's lots of evidence of chemical reaction. I mean, we have examples of amino acids at high redshift that we can detect in quasar absorption features. And we know chemistry takes place in distant objects. But, you know, this point is well taken. Yeah.

And I continue to push back and say, you know, I mean, my conviction is more out of my kind of my humbleness, really, because the Earth isn't that special. It's a rock in the solar system. We've got some carbon. We've got some oxygen. Yeah, people say, oh, it's lucky that we have a clean up, the Jupiter could clean up everything for us and all this. I don't know.

We don't know what time. Life emerged on Earth in 100 million years. It might be lucky for us that we have intelligent life. And I'm very happy to say, you know, I say to UFO believers all time. The chances that an intelligent life form has sent a UFO to Earth is like, I mean, it's not zero, but there are other explanations, right? I mean, there's other things we can do. I mean, I know Eric Weinstein at the moment has gone a bit kind of UFO, you know,

let's think about it. But I think he's doing it for not to be. be disruptive, not disingenuous, and to get people, to take people's temperature. But coming back to this, I would say, I have seen no no-go theorems for why life shouldn't exist elsewhere. And given I'm an internal optimist, I'll say, well, look, there should be, it should be everywhere. But what I'm super excited about is I have a, I'm willing to make a wager. Brian is still young. I'm even younger. Not that much. But in the next decade or two, we're going to go to Enceladus in Europa and Titan. And I'm willing to bet that if we do find any evidence of life on these

objects, they will be totally different to life on Earth because I've had a completely different history. There is no relationship. Whereas we might find life on Mars. If we haven't put life on Mars by mistake, we might find evidence of primitive life on Mars that going to Earth and seeded Earth. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, but that puts things back. That's just changing the Earth. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, life on Earth and Lys on Mars are luckily to be coupled. That's not, that's nothing. If we go to Mars and we find Earth like life, I'll be happy for a day and I'll watch the Nobel Prize as will be given, but I'm like, that hasn't told me anything new. As a scientist, I want to discover something new. If I went to Enceladus, I found life form based on

something that isn't RNA, that would be it for me. That would just be like the most amazing event in the universe. Why? well, if I could find different life on Celadus, I could start to frame the likelihood of alien life in our local group. Okay. I could think about how we could look at making new technologies based on living systems on Earth and really even more important. And in fact, I almost have the same passion that Brian has for understanding the origin of the universe for this, is that if we can make life on earth and understand the origin of life, we might be able to start to accept that life on earth that we have right now in our ecosystem is very precious. And is a thing. And we need to think about framing this living artifact, this cultural, you know, jewel that we need to keep to be as persistent for as long as possible and to be. create maximum flourishing for our little moral kind of work part in the universe.

So I think almost the way, if, you know, there are two films I watch. No, I'm talking about, there's two films that came out the same year. One called Ad Astra, which was the most depressing, the Brian Keating movie. You know, you're just as good looking as Brad Pitt, you know, and all that. So, and then, you know, and there is another film called Cosmos, which was a low-budget UK movie, which I like. And you should watch them, because one, basically, they're both about, should we find life? and one finds life, very optimistic, comes to Earth and says we're here, and the other one is

miserable, there's no life anywhere. And for me, I think the difference between us is I'm an optimist because I understand my chemistry and I'm a chemist. You're an optimist in your field. You understand that. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to borrow a bit of your intuition and I'm trying to lend you a bit of mind and see if we can change each other's mind from that point of view. But you're absolutely right. I have no evidence, but I have no reason why it can't happen. There is nothing magic about life on earth. Yeah. Well, I wonder if we could have a no-go theorem if you would agree.

And then perhaps that would make our generous host, generous, good-looking and just with a delightful aroma. Although I've never met him in person. Kurt's one of my best friends that I've never met in person. I hope to rectify that in the very near future. You too, Lee. But you brought up Eric. You brought up. So I find that there is sort of a wish fulfillment.

in many of these things, including in this huge and deservedly so excitement over JWST. I mean, I basically heard people portraying one of the science cases for JWST tantamount to, well, we're going to see like cities on exoplanet, you know, like, no, you're not. You're going to see like spectral lines. And often Eric has talked about data and collecting data. And it's our data. The Hubble Space Telescope is our data. Like, well, it's data, but like take the Hubble Deep Field.

I love mentioning this topic. So the Hubble Deep field is data, but actually we don't use it, the data, the image for anything. It's a screensaver, I call it the cosmic screensaver, cosmic wallpaper. And that's all the image itself is the data is within it. So if there's a UFO floating around in there, that is not the same as what astronomers call the type of evidence that we associate with data. Stuff that we can be quantitative and analyze spectral time domain, multi-waterfall display. You know, we can do a ton of stuff with actual, with the photon information, not just, the image information, the picture information. Now, mentioning this, there are concerns about what the

implication would be. And so I'm curious to know why if life is so abundant and then you sprinkle in some Darwinian evolution, why isn't, you know, technological life abundant and why isn't it more plausible than not? It seems like you're saying you're kind of a life maximalist, but a UFO minimalist. So tell me, how can you rectify those two things? because it would seem to me, unless there's a no-go theorem against it, that maybe there is more hope. I get around that by saying, I don't think life exists elsewhere besides the Earth.

And if it does, it's from the Earth via pan-spermic processes. But tell me, what could potentially forbid life from evolving technologically? Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to say a couple things. So I think, if you want to go to assembly through, we'll do that in a minute. So I think it's quite important this story. But let me answer Brian's question. So I think, you know, there's a Scooby-Doo.

you know, always the villain says, you pesty-pest, pesky kids. I'm going to say, the reason why we can't see technological life is you pesky physicists, because the universe is really big, and things are accelerating away. And it's, you know, and sadly, you know, I'd love to understand more about the way the universe is and the speed of light and get around. But the fact is, there seems to be little indication that we can have wormholes and break the speed of light. and, you know, designing.

As a quick clarification, I'm sorry to interject, Lee, then when you say that life is abundant in the universe, are you not referring to the observable universe? Sure, I think it's abundant in the observable universe and we'll learn how to find it. And I think actually, frustratingly, we probably will find techno signatures, you know, hints of them. And not just hints, hints that Brian and I will look at the data,

will look at the uncertainty, the error bars. Your point is taken. I haven't forgotten it. It's a very good point, Brian. And we will then go, well, the balance is fact here is like we will be, it is possible remotely to get data, squeeze down those areas. And no, for sure there's alien technological life elsewhere in the universe. We could do it. And don't let NASA and other people say it's not.

We can do it. We can detect the Higgs boson. If we can look at the cosmic microwave background, we will be our fine technological signatures. But we need a better theory, which I am trying to introduce. It might not be the right one, but I've got a feeling it's going that direction. But to answer the question of where all the technology is, there's a number of answers to that. But I want to say something quite profound. If time really is a thing, and let's say time is a commodity, and at the beginning of our local universe, where the laws are.

Now, I'm going to define time. And this is going to be like, I mean, I'm not a very good singer, but this is going to be like Brian hearing a really bad singer and he's like breaking physics. but here I'll try. At the origin of the universe, there was some kind of singularity, which basically we seem to be, we were kind of one quantumly connected, one particle, let's say.

And through that causal aperture, the size of the electron, you know, the charge to mass ratio of the electron, the gravitational for all the forces would produce, all that was produced there, right, in that single point.

Because people say the laws and all the constants, The constants are just contingencies, right? And so we have that. And then from that process, that point in time where the universe expanded, and I think, again, Brian has the history of the universe down. Like, I think if I remember, I'm studying you that all the hydrogen in the universe was made in the first 20 minutes or something, which is just a mind-blowing kind of fact. And it's true.

Or other than the Big Bang Theory TV show. Exactly. That's great. So now you've got this stuff, right, in time. Now, the reason is the clock is ticking. Now, at that time, you don't have enough states in the universe to actually produce life. It's kind of cool. Basically, you actually, the thirdly paradox, and I'm saying, I have to qualify this because I'm stealing this idea. I agree with it from Sarah Walker.

So, you know, I'm not very good. Well, I should be clear. I should steal more ideas. But she's convinced me. And I also think it's true. It's natural consequence of essentially. assembly theory, the Fermi paradox is not about the fact that we don't see the aliens. We're looking back in time.

And at that time, the universe didn't have the ability to produce technology. So it's like a Fermi filter. Think for a second. It's like, oh, shit. We're looking back in time. The universe didn't have the ability to produce technology at that time. We have to look in a different way. Actually, I'll push back again, just to say that there was an epoch in the universe where you

didn't need a hard rocky planet to sustain room temperature liquid water. And that was a time about, you know, eight billion years ago when the universe curt was at the temperature above zero degrees Celsius, which is, you know, about 50 degrees warmer than it is in Toronto or Glasgow. I'm just trying to make you guys jealous. You'll visit me here in San Diego in January and that sometime. So the universe could have liquid water for millions, billions of years until it become frozen water. And so actually, no, there's a reverse filter. There's sort of a SIDS. No, no, no, no. That's that, I have to push back. That's quite nice, but I'm saying something very profound in terms of the, the number of states available. I don't care how much water is available. Who cares? What I care about is a commentatorial state space. Remember, I'm not a chemist here. I'm mathematician, but states. So you know, but Kurt, but Kurt, the amount, I'm going to have Sarah on my show next week, but, but I don't know, I'll ask her about this.

But the, I mean, is a galaxy, is one galaxy sufficient a state space to create technological life? Obviously, this is what we're, this is what I think, I think the answer is no, right? And I, what we, let's just keep going with this arguing. There's, let's just make a conjecture. I don't know, right? But isn't it interesting? You've got a smaller volume in the universe. Time is the things.

You're not going back and forwards. So you have to, um, there's this cause. chain of events. I don't know how delicate. It plays into your argument really nicely. What sequence of events have to happen in the first 20 minutes, the next 200 million years, the next two billion years to prepare the universe to be able to metabolize elements, fusion, right, produce objects that can then have enough structure, enough surface area for selection to occur over a period of time. You might need stability of a few hundred million years. with a certain gravitational force.

But let's not add that on. I'm just saying, hey, wouldn't it be cool if the thermo paradox is actually just evidence the universe had not yet had enough causal history to produce life?

We popped up as soon as it could. So we should go, oh, okay, let's now, I'll say, let's just make this very simple for ourselves and say life in the universe kind of started to emerge when life, let's say there's nothing special about Earth, happened quickly.

so life was possible in the universe about four billion years ago. And so what we now do is we reframe our observations and we look around. I'm just making this up. So new idea I had to date. Thanks to Sarah's idea and Brian's question. Did you come up with the metabolized elements? Because that's a cool line. I'm going to steal that.

Yeah, yeah, I just made up. I wouldn't steal it from Sarah. I would steal it from you. No, no, no. You could steal that from me. I just made it up just now. And so you've kind of got this idea that basically you're creating this infrastructure for causation that allows you to go a bit further.

And so what happens? I don't know. I mean, if only we had an astronomer who understood how to look back here, like, if you redrew the line, said, right, we're going to now restrict ourselves looking for a four billion year old light cone. And we look at the exoplanets of other objects. How does that reframe the search for life or intelligence? So, I mean, there's lots of ideas there.

So the conjecture is there is a filter that is just the universe wasn't capable of producing life until a particular time. now it is then technology and then how does that go on and that plays into redoing our error bars in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the in the paradox and in the the drake equation and also i hide my only shield brian is i don't see anything magic on earth so probably possible elsewhere because okay so that's a great point let me interject because you're it's difficult to interject without interrupting i'm sorry lee no no it's all good It's your podcast.

You beat us in. Come on. Yeah, okay, great. You use many ands. And so I'm not sure if the sentence is complete or if it's run on. And I don't want to seem rude. Okay, so Brian, you just made a great point. What is an example of some other phenomenon that happens on Earth that doesn't occur

elsewhere in the universe? So water waves, maybe one. Well, there's maybe water waves and mountains, atmosphere. Okay, so given that, it sounds like there's nothing special about Earth's life. So why are you isolating Earth's life? as saying, well, that's unique. On example. If these, you know, it's like they want to have their, you know,

primordial soup and eat it too. You know, they want to say it's ubiquitous. These processes are generic and yet not seeing it. You know, it's more than just a Fermi paradox. And I will push back on Sarah gently with respect because I love her work. But, but the fact is, you know, those are almost borderline, you know, kind of ideas that I hear from intelligent designers, too, you know, which is that the laws of physics, the state space of the laws of physics,

the constants of nature, the mass of the electron, the fine structure constant, all the things you talked about are implied, those can be conflated with some kind of low entropy state instantiated by a designer. I don't want to talk about that, except to say that I don't think that pushes the, that filter is very fine grain. And I will talk to her about it. But I do want to say that, again, generically speaking, these processes are ubiquitous. So therefore, the non-observation, like that should go into the, the Fermi paradox. Not that the universe is large, that these processes are, you know, we just detected, you know, we've detected heliocysmological effects on other stars. We've detected the existence

of, you know, what we think are continental, you know, patterns. So tectonic, you know, potential potentiality for tectonic activity, which we do believe, some believe are, but all this kind of pushes things back. Like one of my big gripes against the SETI Institute, which I know and love and I've had Jill Tarter and Seth Stastak and I've donated to them and I've spoken there. But, you know, I started to get a little bit suspicious when a couple of years ago they started shifting away from the, you know, existence of life technosignatures to extremophiles here on earth. I don't think that necessarily answers or gets to the heart of the question, certainly not of extraterrestrial intelligence to know some smoky, deep smoker has, you know, has bacteria,

cyanogenic bacteria or prokaryotic type, whatever. that's interesting, but it's not aligned with ETI. That's what I care about. I mean, let's cut the BS. What we really care about is making contact, as Eric says, you know, if you could short circuit and get to the laws of the 25th century and get to the other side, maybe we would pass the great filter, you know, as it's been called and protect ourselves. And I happen to think that might be wishful thinking, but I commend Eric for working on,

you know, a theory to perhaps unlock some of these, some of these portals, as he calls it. But nevertheless, I think, again, is there, you know, is there a rubric that you and I could agree on or disagree on? And I think the audience would like to know, are there, in other words, if you hear, you know, there's been a credible account, Lou Elizondo, past guests on Kurt Show, you know, has claimed, you know, really very, very high credence levels in the existence of extraterrestrials capable of technologically navigating across our galaxy. Correct me if I'm. misstating or overstating. The basic point, as a physicist, cares about. And that is, you know, non-God bless you, Lee, non-God bless you, or whatever, Darwin bless you. Darwin bless you. When you sneeze, I have to say that. But he's making this, so can we, by laws of chemistry, physics, assembly, whatever, can we say, no, we actually shouldn't have the, you know, credulity that Lee, that, that Luis has. And instead, we should, he should update his priors based on these following chemical, physical, mathematical laws.

Is there a way that we can do that for this? I think so. I think there's a way to do this. Let me just answer a little bit, and then I'll explain assembly theory. So I think what I think is likely to happen if, I mean, I don't know. I mean, like I have no,

I'm a curious. I think it's likely that if life exists in the solar system, some chemical life, I'm optimistic that we'll go and find some evidence with some, you know, sending dragonfly to Titan, and the mass spectrometer on it. We're going to hopefully go to Europe and so on.

We're going to hopefully do origin of life on Earth. And when I succeed but don't get the Nobel Prize, I can write my other book. You know, I can get Brian to do a forward in it and all that because the chemists hate it. And what we're likely to do, I think, is we should be looking for technological technosignatures. You know, I mean, I think that the exoplanet,

we're going to detect an exoplanet of oxygen on it and so we've found life. And that's just going to be baloney. So that's that I agree with Brian. So let me just tell you. briefly what assembly theory is because assembly theory is actually a kind of a cool way of actually doing entropy but without labeling. And it's just about, as a chemist, I realized years ago that there are molecules on earth that are just weird, right? Weird molecules,

like really complex. And so let's just take a molecule that is used a lot called taxol. Taxol is made by the Pacific U-Tree. It's a meta, it's a secondary metabolite, which means it's made by protein interaction proteins in the cell and that molecule is really special because it's very good at killing vascularization of cancer tumors so people get that and they they they use it as an anti-cancer drug now to make this molecule it's like got 62 carbon atoms you know load of oxygen atom with nitrogen and so on in this pattern and this molecule has a molecular weight of about something like this. Someone will go and check it now.

It's a wrong molecular weight. It's like, I'll Google it whilst them say. But it's a big molecular weight. And it's a fingerprint. And the way that molecule works is the way the commentary of chemistry works. That molecule is beautiful. It's like a Rembrandt, right? It's in its features.

But chemists can make loads of it. So you can make literally 10 to the 23, 6.022 times 10 to the 23. And that's one mole. So you have one mole of 10. tax, so that's 10 to the 23 identical copies, and that's made in biology on Earth, human beings can make it in the lab. But if Brian and I did the math together and we said, right, well, look at that molecule, we'll work out, what is the probability that that molecule could form randomly in a plasma in the universe? It's basically one in a like countless in 10 to 100, right,

maybe more. That's just for one molecule. So if you find a detectable amount, you're like, oh my God, this is like the biggest coincidence ever. So that's where assembly theory was born. And I realized that there's lots of molecules on Earth that pass the great filter. They are made by biology. And I realize they can make a detection system that detects molecules that are above that threshold of complexity. And that when you do random milleriori and random stuff, get meteorites and look at the organic chemistry, they are well. way below that filter. They have an assembly number.

And what assembly theory does is it says, like, take your molecule, put it on a graph, what is the shortest route you can get from your atoms to that target? The shortest possible route, how many steps, right? So it's a bit like you take the word abracadabra. If you were to make, if you got A, B, you know, C, R, A. How many steps would you need to make the word abracadabra? Well, you can do it in a much number, the number of letters in the word, because you can reuse some parts.

And so my conjecture is that assembly theory says, it finds where there's memory, a contingency in a chain. So it looks for lossless compressibility. That's kind of cool, right? It's a bit like information theory, compression, Shannon, la, la, la, la. But it's just like what is the short's route to get there? Because, like Brian, as an experiment list,

the data is more important than my feelings. That's right. And so, you know, it's like, so I need to know. You just sounded like Ben Shapiro for a second. Yeah, I love Ben Shapiro. And so it's really important that we understand that because it's pervasive, right, where people just think that, and chemists think that complex molecules, this is where the chemists, they're beginning to change their view.

And what I'm trying to say is that the chemists don't, because they take it for granted, that there's complex chemistry. I'm saying, hey, guys, it's not just RNA that's important. ATP is important. That's my joke, Lee. I say, you know, in economics, you know, past performance is no guarantee of future results. It's like, we have past performance evidence here on Earth, but that's no guarantee. So assembly theory, what it does, it allows you, given a complex molecule, you can work out the likelihood it formed by chance.

And that I think is fairly irrefutable, although publishing that paper last year took me six goes, right? I sent it to nature. Why do you think that is? well because I sent to nature I almost got in right sent to nature

I got three reports back two said wow one said can't be right so I wrote back and so the nature

what do we do and I said well we can ask the referee why can't be right so he said oh do that then and the referee

we said the referee why can't it be right and the referee said in the second round because it's impossible we're like okay this is like I kid you not

right this is a conversation we had with the editor I said, but here's a data. Are you saying we fabricated the data? And the referee just said, it's impossible. And we went in this loop. And what actually happened is one of the referees fabricated a data from a paper to assert that we couldn't be right.

That's how desperate they were. I got the evidence, right, come back. They said in this paper, it says that complexity is important, is already present in outer space, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the editor read it, went, oh, reject again. And when I pointed to the editor that the referee took the word complex mixtures have been found in space and changed it to complex molecules because they were so believing that complex molecules are a free lunch. I then went to the fifth round to review and the editor by this point

was like, just like, go away. We're not publishing. I said, no, I believe in the rule of peer review. I'm answering all your points. This is important. It's important. It's important. importantly change people's views of complexity because Brian is on a really good side where you're saying, hey, I want the data. I know that nothing is for free. And the chemist in the middle saying, everything is for free. Complexity happens. And I'm in the middle saying, no, I can count it and quantify it. And here it is. What actually happened? It was rejected, right? Because of, I won't go into it. I'm no one to complain. I'm a very lucky scientist. I love doing the science. I just feel bad for the research group. But I got it published. I published it in Nature Communication.

And that paper was downloaded 27,000 times in five months because we presented the theory, the mass spec, and all the evidence we had a load of meteorites. We even got Scottish whiskey. We proved that Scottish whiskey is evidence of life because there's complexity in the peak, right? We show it works. So we know we can fingerprint life on Earth and molecules.

But we realize something more, that assembly theory is about just something about molecules. It's about every time you have a step on your path, on that you make a decision. Let's say you go down the street and you say, I'm going to go left today. You go left. You say, right, I'm going to go left again. Then I'm going to go right. I'm going to go left and right. And you find yourself in the very particular spot. That contingency is printed on your history, right? There's a lot of mathematics on that. And we find that this is the assembly theory that we generate. And I haven't spoken to Brian about it because Sarah and I'm just finishing the paper.

And oh, my God, it works. And what do I mean by that? I mean that I can take a kilogram of sand and calculate the assembly. of that kilogram of sand, and I can calculate, take a kilogram of ecoli and calculate the assembly. Assembly is a number like entropy. Entropy tells you the causal power of the object. And of course, the causal power of a kilogram of e coli is vastly higher than the kilogram of sand, because the sand can do nothing. So what about the assembly of Rule 38, Wolfram's, you know, Rule. Well, you'll hear about this in a few weeks, maybe, but the problem with that is,

that is again a label system. So Rule 38 doesn't exist outside of a von Neumann machine and graph paper and observer putting in the rules in. So yeah, so there's, so the problem is it, and physicists get stuck with things that give complexity that aren't really complexity. It's just games with numbers. And I think that I've got a little bit of work to do with that.

And I think the Wolfram's ideas here are pretty cool. I think they're not, the problem is with Wolfram, he traps himself in a line of thought and doesn't talk to anyone and think he's the lost genius. A bit like Eric actually and no one will talk to him. We'll talk to him. In fact, he's got a lot of good ideas that might actually be right. I've had not only have I talked to him and I've talked to Eric, I've talked to him and Eric at the same time. I'd love to take part of that conversation because I maybe can bang their heads together. But we digress.

Assembly theory tells you about causation. It's now measurable. And that's why I'm excited because we're going to start to roll this out. were in inanimate objects and it will help physics. I think Newton screwed physics because Newton, Newton, and there's a hell of a thing to say. I'm British, right? I love Newton. There's all our coins and on our notes and everything.

But Leibniz understood assembly theory. And I've been reading philosophy for the last few weeks. If you read the monodology from Leibniz, you'll see that he understood assembly theory and that objects have souls. This cup has a soul. and you're like, you can, it's legal on or pancy. I can say, no, no, the soul is not in the cup, but it's in the causal structure of the person that made it,

who made it, who made it, who made it. This cup is a fantastically improbable object that cannot have existed at a long line of cup makers. That's where the soul of the cup is. Okay, let's let Brian respond to what you've said. Well, you know, I think, I mean, it's unassailable to say that, you know, complexity begets complexity. And again, that Lee will take.

on intelligent designers with one fist, but he'll also, you know, take on chemists with the other and say, look, we have to address, you know, as, as, you know, Roger Penrose calls the mastodon in the room, which is, you know, this surprising, you know, feature about the universe that we can comprehend it. We tend to impose, you know, consciousness upon it and our definitions are contingent upon our causal history and how we were assembled, you know, and I think the ultimate theory of everything when it comes to what leaves working on will have to involve the observer, which will undoubtedly then finally force him to get into fundamentals of quantum mechanics, which I don't think he can call chemistry. I'm okay with you calling, you know, entropy and

thermodynamics chemistry, but I think, you know, the elementary foundations of quantum mechanics has a stretch to call it. I've always wanted to be a physicist. It's okay. Okay, yeah, me too, but, you know, I laps and became an astrophysicist. But I think, you know, when we talk about how, you know, this, this can be used to kind of, as I say, be quantitative, how we can get something out of it, deliver some value to the audience. Certainly these are, and the more flexible we are, I think, the more can be understood, but maybe to even narrow down and come back to the original definition of things. I think to have a taxonomy, you know, what is it that the name is not the thing? There's some principle like that, right? And so, so yes, describing things

that are complex and have originators in a mind that on the one hand is beautiful, it's elegant, it's simple. And again, in a praiseworthy fashion, not in a childless fashion. On the other hand, I do think we have to then confront the ultimate question of, you know, does there have to be some mind at work behind the cup, behind the 747, behind the DNA code? And I think we've agreed not to really get into this notion, but I think at some level, we just get to this eventual chicken or egg and this Motten Bailey, you know, retreat. And I guess, you know, I think, I think the ultimate, you know, the ultimate benefit of this approach is, is that it gives a plausible scenario for life to arise from inanimate objects. That's, that's an ultimate, or it's a way to quantify when

something is animate, let's just say, or was created by something animate. And I'm I think, you know, to look at how we can do better and maybe go further into which I think is really important, you know, is life abundant and technological. I think Kurt's audience appreciates that. And I think, you know, we haven't spoken so much about that. Maybe we can talk about that. You know, how and what could we glean from the search as a search, you know, and where are we going, Cuavadis, you know, where are we going with the search? Is it important as a good use of of chemist time, of physicist time, et cetera, to look at these reported unexplained phenomena. Can that tell us something? Is this something that interests you and me? And maybe, you know,

Kurt can lead us in that path. And kind of, yeah, really, I mean, we're at a very interesting, you know, point in time. And a lot of it has to do with people that Kurt's had on the show and that I've tried to have on my podcast as well. And I think that, you know, kind of the abiogenesis argument is, is, you know, you've eloquently described it. I think, you know, if we look maybe as Kurt as an impartial observer, maybe we could say, like, where are you, Kurt, in this discussion? Because I think you're a proxy for your erudite audience. How do we, how are you feeling about the prospects of the ultimate question, life from non-life? And then we can talk about universe from non-universe.

We can talk about consciousness from inanimate matter. And then we can talk about technological matter from conscious matter. But where are you sitting right now, Kurt? If we use Lee's definition of life, which is what begets some high assembly number, then it sounds like it's almost like pan-psychism, pan-lifism, because it's a circular definition of life where, okay, well, what would have produced that? Well, then we get down to the atoms, which produce and so on, so on. So it sounds like life is abundant if we use the definition that life is what produces life.

Let me qualify one second. No, so what I'm saying is you have random events that basically, increasing causal power. And there's a phase transition to life, right? Life doesn't just appear magically, right? We've already, there is, but there's a causation in the universe, right? The universe does do some stuff before life. There's a phase transition because then evolution can do stuff, like, which is just

you can, and what can, and we, there is a meaning to this, which we can come to. It's not panpsychism. I totally refute, well, no, let's be friendly to the panpsychist because there are interesting things there, but I think there's a mischaracterization. The pan-psychists want something there, but I would argue they want causation, and they're missing out on causation. So there's causations there, and then there's biology, and then there's technology. So I don't think it's circular, but I think you're really right to push on it, because I think your listeners, your viewers will be like, well, come on it. What do I mean? I mean, rocks can, through their

random interactions, can have memories, and those memories just randomly will. be trapped in a causal chain, which will allow certain other processes to occur. It's not magic. It's contingent. Tell me if I'm understanding it correctly. It sounds like in your model, life is not binary. It's not alive or dead. It's actually a continuous spectrum. And if that's the case, then what I'm saying, that there is no zero to life. There's no zero. I think life is a kind of island, right? This is why we have difficult pinning it down the physics. It's like, Is my cup alive? No. Was my cup produced by life? Yes. Am I alive? Yes, I think so. You know, so this kind of is a movable feast. In the way, in the same way, consciousness is kind of, we have more, so agency,

we have maximum agency in our bodies right now. But Newton is still exerting agency over all of us because of what he did, that life form. And it's kind of cool. So yes, you're absolutely right. I think life is kind of a continuum and there's a phase transition to you have, there is really a lot of causal power and you get something special with that. That phase transition is an intuition at this point. Is it formalized? We're formalizing it and doing experiments. And I think that exactly there's a Nobel Prize there.

There's a Nobel Prize there. I mean, they're like everywhere. Let me talk about UFOs, if that's all right. Let me just ask one more question. Sure. If you have an assembly theory and computation and all these wonderful things, could you have a BS detector? I mean, could you say, you know, now,

now you feed in some, some left-handed DNA? I think that's the non-stereoicomer that doesn't occur in life that we know about. So look what I found, you know. Would this then tell you that there are some trickery and some jiggery-pokery, as you say? I mean, could it tell that this is not? And is that instantiated by you, Lee?

Did you put in, if you see a left-handed DNA helix, that you know the guy's a fraud, you know, tell me, how does that, how would that be? It's a sneaky way of asking about the lab leak theory. Well, actually, it's not cheeky. It's actually entirely appropriate. So, but maybe we don't need to go down there. Yeah, please, I want to stay monetized. Okay, good.

I use assembly theory, a very crude version, to show some plagiarism. So because plagiarism is the ultimate. kind of, you know, commendation, right? And when Melina Trump gave her presentation to the Republican Convention, she used a speech, which was the same as Michelle Obama's speech. And it was like, they look the same. And I was like, oh, wow, let's take all the subjects of the sentences, and I broke them down. And with assembly theory, it would be like, you know, on number one, I talked about my, you know, my, my country.

And number two, I talked about my childhood. Number three, I talked about my dog. Number three, you know, you went through, you went, wow, by the time I got to 14 and a match, I knew that that was plagiarism, right? Because the chances of that not being was like, you know, 14 factorial or something, right? So it was kind of cool. I was like, yeah, so you can use it as a BS detector. And yes, you can use it to look for genetic material and look for motifs that are repeating.

And then you can see what engineering, has been done and what evolution has done. And it should be possible to get that because entropy core screens it all out, assembly reassembles it. Okay. So now the next question will dovetail into what Kurt was just about to ask, which is, could there be an analog of assembly theory to apply to unidentified aerial phenomena? Kurt, is that okay to ask? Sure. I'd also like to explain, re-explain, if you don't mind myself to the audience. And then you can correct my explanation of assembly theory because it's extremely important. So Lee Cron, and has a number, it's almost like Kalmogorov complexity. So those of you who know what that is,

there are different forms of putting a number to a piece of information to see how complex it is. And what you have in Lee's theory is you have elements that you consider to be atomic. So you can consider those to be axioms. And then you have certain rules of inference. Now those rules of inference are like the laws of physics, though this can also be applied to mathematics. And that's why I think it's extremely interesting because you can quantify how difficult a formula is to prove. Anyway, So you have atoms and then you have rules of inference. And then you wonder, what is the minimum amount of steps to get from the axioms to the stated formula?

So for example, the word candy, if we consider the letters of the alphabet to be atomic, then the word candies, complexity is five. So you think, well, that makes sense. It's five letters. Yeah, because step one, you pull a C out, step two, you pull an A out. But the word pom-poms, which is seven letters is complexity of five because you P, okay, you pull a P out, that's step one, pull an O out, pull an M out. Then you need to put another P, but great.

have the word palm already created. So that's that step is taken care of by simply duplicating the palm. So then we have another step for the S. So then that's five in total. Now is that a correct summation? Okay. Yeah, yeah, you're hired. Great. You're great. Okay. And the reason this is extremely fascinating is because you can use certain instruments like mass spectrometry, potentially to assess the complexity of far away molecules. And then you can see, well, look, H2O maybe has a complexity of four. I don't know. no, maybe five, whatever. It doesn't matter. Two, hydrogen, one oxygen. But a simple protein may have 400 steps, a simple protein. And thus, if you can quantify by looking through a telescope,

the complexity of something far away, then perhaps you can say, well, it was produced by life. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. I can tell you something quick at below your mind. Don't have to use a mass spec, and use infrared. So I came up with a brinal like this, a non-gravitational lensing complexity cloak. What the fuck is that? Well, sorry for swearing. So you know black holes, a black holes, but if you could make an object that would basically, so in the infrared, infrared radiation gets absorbed at specific lines, well, all radiation gets specific lines. But I came up the way of making molecules to store binary code of them because I want to leave a message for some aliens when the humanity is about to end, it's put it in the atmosphere. And what you could do is you have these

lot, if you're able to say, right, I've got all this spectrum and I want to cover all of it, I'm going to design a molecule absorbs here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. and I'll make it super light, there might be objects in the universe that are non-gravitating lens in complexity cloaks because they're light and they can absorb all that energy across and just re-radiate it some other way or be used. So it's like a, it's kind of like a Dyson sphere, but it's cooler because it's basically really dark over everything. And what am I saying? The reason I was saying is to you, Kurt, not only was your explanation spot on, you're talking about mass spec, but you could also use infrared spectroscopy and a telescope to go and look for

not just life, but technology that basically is showing itself in the infrared and UV and maybe x-ray, whatever. Okay, great. Now, onto the UFO question. Brian, when you say that scientists have an incentive to find life in the universe and incentives via Nobel Prize and money, et cetera, I don't buy that per se. I think they have an incentive to find a certain form. of life in the universe, but not life in general. And the reason is that life in general borders on what is considered to be woo or paranormal. For example, if you were to study UFOs and say, is there credibility to these reports, that's almost not done besides a few individuals like Kevin Canuth, for example,

because I think almost none of us, I don't think any of us are actually pursuing the truth, including myself, which is why I don't like when people say, this channel is for truth seekers. almost none of us care about the truth per se, because the truth can be extremely hard. So we care about it in a certain bounded fashion. So we also care about our reputations. We care about not sounding like these insensate, deserabrit rednecks, which is what the people in the academy generally think of those who consider the UFO reports to be real. They generally consider them to, and let's be honest, they consider them to be cooks. And I think that academics generally care much more about either sounding intelligence or not appearing to be inane more than they care about the truth.

per se. And so it's extremely bounded by their, by their place in a social hierarchy, by their place among their peers. They don't want to be ostracides. It's anathema to analyze UFO reports. So that's why I say, I don't buy when you say that, well, we have an extreme incentive to find life in the universe, a certain type of life, I agree. Yeah. Well, I think, I think largely that is accurate, although I will say in my defense, you know, I did join the Galileo project with our mutual for Annavi-Lob, specifically for this reason, not as a researcher, but has a member of the external oversight board. Because I actually don't think they need my help as an observational astronomer. I'm pretty good, but, you know, Harvard is not exactly hurting for money. And, you know, they can

certainly raise funding, especially when you have the, you know, former chairman, the longest serving chairman in Harvard's history in the astronomy department at the helm, who's, you know, Joe Rogan's appearance blew up the internet and has, has, you know, number five bestseller last year in the New York Times. So I don't think they need my help, you know, kind of necessarily doing the research. I do think they can always use help holding them to account. And, you know, if I told this to Avi, you know, I wouldn't have called it the Galileo project. I think it's dangerous when, you know, astronomers begin by, you know, kind of bringing up the names like Bruno and Galileo and persecuted figures in history.

I think that's a fraught perilous endeavor. And I think I would be even that is sort of a between. be lying a bias. In other words, his, his claim is that just like Galileo suffered from the inability of the powers that be, the funding agencies of this time, the Venetian Doge and Senate and other agencies to at first look through in the Catholic Church later on to look through his telescope and see for themselves as if that would have proven anything. I mean, just looking through a telescope proves nothing. It's the connection of the human mind and the formulation of a hypothesis and evidentiary data that could disconfirm his hypothesis.

You know, Galileo had many blunders, Kurt. I'm pleased and privileged to be working with Jim Gates, Carlo Revelli, Frank Wilcheck, Fabiola Giannati, and my good friend from graduate school, Luccio Piccerillo, on the first ever audiobook version of any of Galileo's book. Oh, that's interesting. And I also didn't know that that was the genesis of the word Galileo in the project. I thought it just meant I'm going to be looking out like Galileo looked at.

No, no. I mean, I think the project's really dangerous. I'd like to kind of push back on you. I mean, not push back. I'd like to reassure you. I mean, I can't speak for Brian. Just a second. Just a second. Lee. I was so sorry. I'm so sorry. I just want Brian to finish because I interrupted him. And then, and then leave. Kurt's used to me interrupt. Punch him. But so we're translating Galileo's book. We have the rights to the first ever audio book for Galileo with a forward by Einstein and that's read by Frank Wilcheck. the Nobel Prize in 2004 and Jim Gates. So what does it say? It says Galileo wrote the definitive treatise on the scientific method on what you're supposed to do with evidence, et cetera, et cetera. And yet in that very book, he makes a catastrophic confirmation blunder at the very end

on day four. It's a trialogue between these three characters on one of them, Carlo Revelli's another one and my friend Lucio's the other. And we go about and we're trying to disprove Galileo's character, Salviati, is trying to disprove the earth-centered notion of the universe that's held by Simplicio, the simpleton, who is espousing the words of the Pope, that the earth is the center of the universe. And then I'm playing Sagredo, the kind of knowledgeable layperson who is interpreting between them. And Galai is a phenomenal writer, but he goes through and describes these things in such loving

detail that even I become convinced when he goes about and says that the times on the earth are proof that the earth is going around the sun. That's complete boulder dash. We know that's not correct. And it would take Newton to do it. And his argument is very simple and persuasive. It uses data. It would have gotten accepted by nature probably if nature had existed, not like, you know,

Lee's travails. But his argument is that you've got this, you know, you've got this object that's going around the sun. Here's the sun over here. And here we've got tides on the earth. And as it goes around the sun, it orbits and the tide slashes around. And that's what we have. It's totally wrong.

the tides are caused by the lunar gravitational force, the tidal force quadrolar moment of the lunar gravitational force field, nothing to do with our motion around the sun, really. And yet, it's incredibly persuasive. And so if you took the lessons of absolute objective history and you say, like, should we have listened to Galileo? No, you'd throw out that book. You throw it out.

You'd say it's nonsense. Even though he brings up relativity for the first time in human history, the notion of relative motion does not affect the laws of nature, which we now call a ransom variance. These are foundational things. And yet the summary of the book is totally wrong. The conclusion of the book is totally misproven. And he didn't use the best evidence in hand.

So look for that coming soon, hopefully on Galileo's birthday in February. But this is all to say when it comes to when it comes to Avi's project, Avi Loeb's project, I think they need oversight more than they need my insight, which is to say that I think the first reaction that we have to have is skepticism because we do want to believe. I think if we all go back to our 12-year-old boys, when we were 12-year-old boys, forget about funding and and I'm going to lose my, my, my status as a chair professor or Lee's going to lose. No, we're just little boys. And we're playing with that little pebble on the beach, like Ninton said. And we're looking for a shinier pebble. If we were to discover that,

I mean, it raises the hair in the back of my neck, that there was extraterrestrial intelligence. First life, you know, I have my misgivings. I've talked to Lee about that. We'll talk about that. But just about slime mold on the planet and celadus is on the moon and celibus. I don't think that will make as big an impact as Lee does, but let's leave that aside. Let's just talk about UFOs. I don't want to believe. I want to have evidence. And I think if you bury your head in the sand, you won't get evidence.

So I have to say, and I hope this is true of Avi, too, that we are kind of the boy, the 12-year-old boys sitting on the bed, not being able to fall asleep at night, looking up at the stars. We do want to know the truth. But we want to have evidence for it as mature men, as scientists at this very moment. So anyway, Lee, you were going to say you've got some problems with the project. And I'm happy, again, I don't speak for them. I'm on their external advisory committee.

I think it's important to do. But I am predisposed. It's like the bets that Stephen Hawking used to make with Kip Thorne. He would bet against hawking radiation ever being validated. And so that if he lost the bet, you know, he'd have the thrill of intellectual superiority of being correct. So what say you, Lee? It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees, Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Yeah, I mean, it's no big deal.

I think I've got a lot of sympathy for Kurt's position or kind of worry about where we are, as scientists, look for the UFOs. But I think that, I know Avi very well, he's great, but he's playing a very strange game here, I would like to say. He's kind of saying, oh, the scientific establishment is not ready for this. I'm a genuine contarian, and I'm just going to basically come up with these things on being ignored. No, he's just making stuff up, right? Like what is he making up?

What is he making up? A Theolokution with Leon Cronin and Avi Lowe is about to be booked. We got a plan. Yeah. So what I mean by he's making stuff up, he's making up a false argument about that people are kind of, you know, when it comes to this interstellar object that came through. And he was just, he was saying why it could be alien space junk. Sure. It could be all sorts of things.

But we were trying to understand what the characteristics of trajectory were telling us. So he's kind of making up stories. which are fine. I don't mean he's fabricating stuff. I mean he's saying a narrative. And I'm wondering, why is he making that narrative? What does he have to gain other than some kind of, you know, fame and notoriety and I'm going to be downtrodden by the establishment? Because if I suddenly said to Brian, hey, Brian, we've just found wormholes. I saw it over there. Look, wormhole over there, wormhole over there. And then Brian says, Lee, you haven't got any wormholes. You just make, you know, you haven't got any date. And I'll be like, you're just beating me up, big professor, you know.

And I think it's a bit like this. So what I'm really glad that Brian is kind of borderline ad homonymly. I have to point that out. I mean, I love Avi. I fight with Avi. But that seems like impuging his, impuging his character almost. You can disassociate yourself from it. What I'm trying to say to so it's not clipped out of context is that I like the idea of searching.

But I, there is this. So what I'm trying to say, there's this cultural vibe going on right now. Our culture is changing. People are asking questions. what are these things that the Pentagon has released? What is the probability of us, this happening? And I'm saying that we don't, we could play together. I would love to help Avi be successful.

It doesn't, I don't think it's the, I don't think the establishment is against him. I don't think even I'm in the establishing nor Brian. We genuinely want to know. And I do agree with you that there is some, we are putting, we could put our careers on the line if we get it wrong. But actually in science, you have become better, the more you're wrong. But what I'm saying here is Abby's adopting an extreme viewpoint where he may not allow himself to be wrong.

And it's not an ad homin. I'm not saying he's even bad. I'm not saying he's doing anything dishonest. I'm saying he's making a narrative. Well, let's be precise. So I had him on my show and it was a wonderful episode. And this is long before I decided to join. And I said, Avi, I don't believe that you believe this is real.

That this, Omuamua is an extraterrush. And he said, why, but I am. And I said, because if you did, you happen to have access to a resource that's highly complex, has a lot of, has a lot of assembly behind it called Yuri Milner, who is a Russian billionaire.

And he's showered upon you, the potential as a leader of the breakthrough Star Shot Prize, one of the leaders, this tremendous resource. So instead of sending, you know, 10 to the 4th cell phone cameras

to Proxima Century B, why don't you send one of them at, you know, not even half the speed of life, not even 10% of the speed of it. Just, you know, 3, 4% of the speed of it. and catch up to a muamu.

And you know what he said? He said, no, no, we don't need to do that because when Ruben Telescope, which is the Vera Ruben Observatory in Chile, which is going to be a phenomenal instrument, it's designed,

its original name was the large-scale synoptic survey telescope to survey the whole sky with a huge cadence, very quickly, looking for objects that are anomalous, that could do it. And he says that's one of the dream machines for discovering. We already discovered one of them using Pan Stars on Hawaii. So we're going to discover millions of these things. I said, well, Avi, you know, I don't know if you know about this, but, you know, like, you know, sometimes, you know, things happen only once.

You know, there's an end of one problem that we talk about. And what if this, yeah, what if they are abundant and what if there are forces that conspire against in our solar system, just particular, not to the cosmos, to our solar system? Maybe the lunar, you know, so, tidal, solar, whatever, whatever it is. And it makes these objects very, very unlikely to ever be seen again, even though they're abundant. Wouldn't you want to catch up to the only one with all the resources you have? and he was sort of agnostic about it. That gave me some pause, and that's one of the things I'm going to push back on

as an external advisor. But I would, you know, and I love you, Lee, but I don't think he's doing it for fame. I mean, he has an ego that's well known. He has trouble controlling, you know, sometimes his passions for what he does. I think he's doing an incredible, valuable service. But I just want to talk about from the perspective

as an observational astronomer. Can observational astronomers provide information in the way that you've been using about this phenomenon. In other words, we survey the sky in all wavelength bands, 24-7 around the earth from Antarctica, where I've been twice for two months of my life, and to the North Pole to space.

Now we've got JWST. What would it convince a believer to give up the expectations? In other words, Carl Sagan said, lack of evidence is not evidence of absence or absence of evidence. So we can't, but we also have to admit we have conserved resources in finite time, which is the most prominent of all resources. Let me just come in quickly. So I completely agree with all characters, right? And I know is great. All I'm trying to say is I want him to help, I want him to succeed. So exactly,

I think my, the only thing I would comment is say, how can we help you? Let's help you do this, right? Whatever you think the narratives are, capturing the day. I do think we have a responsibility, though, and it's not at Honman. It is kind of a bit way in this polarization in the time of COVID, elections, we do have a responsibility for correctly framing the arguments. We're not leading people down the guard up the garden path. That's the only point of getting at. I mean being too optimistic or being too high salesmen. Exactly. Exactly. That's all I mean. Nothing else. Everything else is good. So what I would say to Avi is like how can we help you? What I would say to Kurt is like, what do you think science, science, mainstream science is doing

enough of you're finding frustrating because, you know, I'm a cheap scientist in the regard that I want to know why I'm in the universe, I want to know why I'm here, I want to have meaning. If there are aliens out there, I want to know. It's not just the right type of alien, any will do me,

any evidence. And I... We have to talk about that. Getting meaning from science and meaning from life in the universe. That might have to be a part two, Kurt. But anyway,

yeah, I know we both want, we want evidence, right? We don't want to just, you know, just marginally. And we only have finite amount of time and intellectual time.

But don't forget, you know, our forgetting curve, you know, is peaking. I can tell you from experience in a few years, you're going to have trouble remembering your kids' names. And, you know, hopefully, you know, that'll stop. But we only have so much time for attention, to pay attention to things of great import to us.

So I, you know, I guess the subject is, what else should we be doing? We being astronomers. Avi's not going to build, you know, a large Hadron Collider squared, you know, look for interdimensional aliens, you know, manipulating wormholes to get here, right? He's an astronomer. He's a theorist, by the way.

He's not an observer. So I think he needs help. I think having you involved, you know, from that perspective. But then how do we translate the signatures from assembly from, you know, can be take? How do we translate that into an actionable metric that will allow us to reduce our uncertainty getting back to a rubric at the beginning of this conversation? Well, let me ask one direct thing. I think we can do this with image data and time series data. And one of the things that would be very interesting is like, if you take any good,

an image on this dimensionality. And let's say, I mean, Kurt, you've got assembly in one second. It's brilliant, right? You can apply the same thing to two-dimensional images and also time series images. Of course, you have to define your axioms precisely. Like when you're looking at how this image can be created. It's very rare you see like a straight edge in nature. It just doesn't happen.

Yeah. And so I think that's right. And what I would say, Kurt, quickly is I've looked at these Pentagon images. I spoke to someone who was responsible for releasing some of them. And I was like, are you just trying to basically, are you just, were you bored one day or did you need more funding or something? Why did you do it? And they were like, no, actually, we genuinely think public paid for this data in a way

and we're just throwing it out there. So when I try to get out of them, what they thought, they wouldn't tell me. So what do you think of these images? I mean, you must have, I've looked at them. I've listened to people on podcasts, on Joe Rogan's podcast and in particular, and looked at the data. And there's all this mischaracterization of different people looking at different data sets and saying things like there's this object that I think, Brian, you've talked about,

this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, uh, this, this, uh, this, this, this, uh, that went from supposedly, you know, um, very high up to 50 feet off the ocean in like a second. Um, what do, what do you, what do you think of it? Do you think it's compelling or, or you, are you frustrated about the quality or, what is your opinion? I think it's sad that. people hold these as as evidence of UFOs because I don't think they are necessarily. I think that they're extremely poor evidence. And what about sightings? What about what about eyewitness? That's why all of it has to be looked at. So when someone, if someone is to tell me that Bigfoot exists and I

ask for footage and then they show me some pixelated video, I don't think that that's great evidence for Bigfoot. Now that in tandem with a variety of stories from people who we would think of as credible in any other situation that in tandem with, let's say, a rape trial, we would send someone to jail based on two or three witness testimonies. And yet we have a team of people who are extremely credible who testify to the strangeness of this phenomenon. And then we don't, we think, well, perhaps their eyes are misleading them. Well, I don't think that's reasonable. So I think it's strange. I don't find any single one of the videos to be compelling. I find the set of videos to be somewhat compelling that there's something strange happening, but I find the total set of

I'm putting evidence in scare quotes here, evidence of UFOs to be interesting. And I also don't believe that we want to believe in UFOs. I know that you said that, Brian, I know, well, I want to believe in, I want to have evidence. Yeah, yeah. Well, you also mentioned that we have this need to believe in external life. And I don't think that's true. For me personally, I hope that all of what's happening with UFOs is false. Well, Lee said something, sorry, Kurt. Well, I'm just afraid of the implications. And I think that anyone who seriously thinks about this perhaps should be, because it may indicate that we're not at the top of the food chain, it may mean that we don't mean what we think we mean in terms of our place in the universe, our purpose even. I feel the same way about the prospects of hell.

I don't want to believe in hell. Not that I do. But I don't want to believe in it. In some ways, I don't want to believe in God. In some ways, I find comfort in that consciousness ends. So there's so many beliefs that people say, well, people have a need to believe in God. people have a need to believe in UFOs. Some do. Some don't. And I think that if you seriously thought about UFOs, perhaps you would want to believe that they don't exist. When I say UFOs,

I mean, obviously UFOs exist. The alien life that's supposedly behind it is what I'm referring to. Well, I think that exemplifies why you're one of the best in the business, Kurt, and what you do on this channel, and that you have this, you know, kind of humility, epistemological humility. But you also have tenacity, and that is a rare combination. I think, you know, one nice place maybe to wrap up. And, you know, Lee is often, I claim in a good sense, you know, my belief fundamentally is that no one's an atheist. Everyone has a religion, you know, for some, even that don't go to, you know, church or synagogue. You know, that religion, as I documented in my first book, losing the Nobel Prize, it is often the Nobel Prize.

And this is kind of a kosher idol, you know, that it doesn't cause that much harm. Yeah, funding decisions are made on it, and, you know, Lee's mentioned it more times than I have today. And it's obviously, you know, top of mind for many scientists. And Zygazin, hopefully he would win it. I don't have anything against the people that win it. I've interviewed a dozen of them on my show. But on the other hand, you know, even lack of a religion, secularism, I think that there is a religion of scientism, which is that science can provide meaning. And I'd like to push back on that.

I'd like to explore what Lee and you think, Kurt, about this very notion. In other words, the word science in Greek means knowledge. It doesn't mean wisdom. You know, sapien means wisdom. You know, one who knows that he knows sapienism. I talked about this to Lex Friedman on the podcast. It just came out. And look forward, by the way, to Lee Cronin, who inspired me, you know, to get connected to Lex again.

You know, Lex hosted Lee before me. And Lee helped me prepare a lot for my episode because he was on Lex's show. And he'll hopefully have that episode out soon too. might have been allegedly. We never know. I can't wait to see that one. But, you know, I talked about this, you know, that I don't get any meaning from science. I think science is intrinsically inherently.

You know, we may have curiosity. And the motto of my channel is ABC, always be curious. But curiosity and wisdom don't necessarily go together. And I documented many times, you know, Nobel laureates that were Nazis, you know, and had great knowledge and used their knowledge of chemicals and, you know, forefathers, you know, Fritz Haber, you know, Lee could tell you way more about it. Yeah, it's evil. You know, and he was a Jew and his, and his, his, his, uh, his, his, his, uh, his, his,

is Eccan B eventually led to the gassing of many of his own family members. So anyway, don't look to science for wisdom. So if you can't look at it for wisdom, why do we look to it for meaning? So Lee, uh, I can, I can give you a quick answer, but maybe Kurt, it's your show, whether you want to go first. Yeah, yeah. Here's what I suggest. I suggest that we take a bathroom break and that Brian, you check with your wife,

see if it's okay, if you keep talking for a little while longer. and Lee with whoever you have to speak to as well, because there are some audience questions. He has to talk to the queen. There are some audience questions we haven't gotten to. Oh, yeah. And I'd like to get to those. All right. Yeah, yeah.

I've got a 25 minutes. This just did. My wife says 25 more minutes. I'll take a two minute break. Yeah, yeah. And also quickly, before we go. So, Lee, do you have anything to promote? I'll make this transition smooth once we edit this.

Do you? Like a podcast channel or something? No, I'm, I'm, I promote. You're on a clubhouse a lot. I mean, what am I promoting? I think that I just want people to kind of ask more questions in an unframed way and know that they can get framed,

you know. I have a, for me, we'll talk about when we come back from break, but I genuinely love not knowing and then finding a little dent and then getting something. Yeah. It's like climbing a hill.

Okay. The answer is no. He doesn't have anything to promote, but you should go and look at it. I need to go to the toilet as well. Yeah, because I want to just promote right now and then let's go to the washroom so people can click on this. So Brian has losing the Nobel Prize as a book. You also have Into the Impossible, which is a book as well as a podcast and the links are in the description.

I have purchased both of them. Additionally, Brian, your interview with Lex Friedman just came out either today or yesterday. So that's fresh. And Lee, you have a TED Talk. And I believe an upcoming Lex Friedman podcast interview, hopefully. Allegedly, I'm not saying anything. Brian's build a bit. On Lex's podcast, we have, Lex has an image of me and Lee talking on my podcast.

So it's definitely coming out. People who are watching, just click on those links and look up Lee and Brian's work. See you soon. Yeah. Back in a minute. You should know that releasing in just a couple hours is the Stefan Alexander interview. And that one, we talk about matrix models and string theory. It's super interesting.

Look forward to that. It's premiering in about three hours. Stefan Alexander, coincidentally, or perhaps not coincidentally, is one of Brian Keating's best friends, if not his best friend. So are you at home or are you at the office? This is my home office. Oh, wow. In fact, in the corner there, that is a cellular automata running in 3D in my LED cube. That's interesting.

In fact, it's Conway's Game of Life. You've incorrectly implemented boundary conditions because I'm rubbish at that. Interesting. Okay. My lab is moving. So we're in Glasgow. I'm in the chemistry department, which is a lovely old building,

but it's not quite fit for purpose. And I'm moving my team onto a new floor. And we've got all these fume hoods all kitted out with all the digital camera history kit. So the dream experiment I wanted to build 10 years ago will be constructed in March. And we have the assembly meter. So you never know.

by April 2024 we might have the answer or an answer but yeah so I've been doing a lot of work at home obviously with COVID we're all been trapped but now COVID is almost hopefully

cross whatever unless unless the person who wrote COVID I'm joking has updated the firmware I saw that on so it's like there's lots of jokes at the moment about that you know the problem I was listening to some of your jokes

jokes, Brian. But was it someone about the problem of Omicron if we don't solve it now? You know what comes after Omicron? He's pie and that just goes on forever. That's hilarious. Who said that? Oh, it was on a, it was on a podcast. I heard a UK political podcast called The Bunker. So all the load of left wingers, we're sad about Brexit. I mean, I'm sad about Brexit, but no politics here. Okay, so let's get to some audience questions. Also, well, another time, we can talk about free will in time. We started off with that, and I'm so interesting.

We can solve time, consciousness and free will in one easy podcast. Okay, well, briefly, Lee, when you said that time is fundamental, I don't know if you actually said that, but when you, you were talking about intropic time is what we normally think of as physicists as precipitating the arrow of time. And you're saying that, well, that may be the wrong way of going about it. So are your views more aligned with Lee because Lee believes time to be fundamental? Briefly, Lee, if you don't mind. Sorry, Lee as in Lee Smolin. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah.

Well, so I first met Lee Smolin and I told him my theory at times. Oh, that's my theory. And I'm like, wow, our names are both Lee. Yeah. So mine is slightly more dramatic in that, remember, I'm a professional idiot, Regis idiot. And what I mean by that is that I don't get confined by discipline boundaries. So it was, when I first told Sarah my theory of time, she was just like, this is just can't be true.

You know, this is just, but all I'm saying is that there is no such thing as space. There is time. And time creates space, right, in some mechanism that we don't really understand. And that breaks in everything we need. I tried to argue with Sean Carroll about this, but he didn't even argue. He said, no, you're just wrong. I was like, why? He said, well, my theory is better.

Time can go forward and backwards. And I'm like, that breaks causality. So time is primal. Time creates space. And there is a finite amount of time that has existed in our current universe, right? That doesn't mean there aren't things outside our universe. And it works a bit like that. And that's why assembly helps us quantify that through.

Assembly is almost like looks at the degree of asymmetry since the beginning of time that's recorded. But I can budge on some of it, but that's it in two or three sentences. Yeah, we'll talk about that. will perhaps have another podcast. And so people who are watching, if you have questions for Brian and or Lee, leave them below. Okay, Brian, do you have any quick comments on the nature of time before we get to the questions from the audience? Well, I think, you know, a time again is one of these things that, you know, we kind of know it when we see it. It's like, you know, what does it feel like to be a bat, you know, Nagel's question? You know, it's always just like, we don't know.

and I find it sort of interpretable in the sense of we know it when we feel it, we know it when we see it, we have biological clocks returning grayer and grayer. Kurt doesn't know that yet,

but someday he will, we take comfort that his diminution and beauty will only, only catch up to our side. Well, you look like Buzz Lightyear, man. That's a huge compliment. Someone in the Lex comment said that.

And I thought, man, that's exactly right. And you're an astronomer as well. And we're a great looking guy. Yeah. I remember when I saw you know, I'm like, this is a good looking guy. I don't want to be in the same podcast.

Lee. You're a good looking guy too, Brian. Yeah, thank you very much. But that means he lives in a bubble. You know, doesn't your power, more you're a powerful looking guy, Brian. I'd say that.

Thank you. I do have a strong aroma. Well, I'd rather be, but okay, never mind. So it's time, you know,

I talked about this with Frank Wilcheck on my Into the Impossible podcast. I said, what is time? You know, just like I asked Lee, what is life? You know,

I asked other people, hoping to have Philip Gough on. I'll ask him, what is consciousness? You know, it's like we know it when we see it. Frank said to me, Wilczak said, you know, time is what clock's measured. All right, thanks a lot. You know, but anything can be a clock. So I think that's interesting is to pursue the path that Lee has pursued, you know, what is the simplest, you know, chemical that can form with, with inspiration, with direction towards evolutionary purposes. And he has simulations that you can see in his TED talk about. It's brilliant. I think there's an experiment done at NIST, and I'm going to have Nicole Halpern Younger.

on who's a brilliant scientist at Nist in Maryland. And she has a new book called Quantum Steampunk, which is really delightful, kind of in the vein of a Roger Penrose emperor's new mind, in which she talks about, you know, what is the world's simplest clock? And on my channel, I make explainer videos. And one I did is what is time and how can you understand time by making the world's simplest clock? And what is a clock something that ticks? Okay, well, what is something that takes? Well, it has quantum states. And I think the revolution that would be interesting for another podcast. Maybe Lee and Kurt will come on my podcast.

Maybe with Avi Loeb, we can have a knockdown, drag out a conversation. Lee Smolin, just get everybody in there, Mosh Pit, is to talk about, well, what are the quantum implications?

You know, there's quantum thermodynamics that's coming to the front, things like Silard entropy and stuff that Lee knows about that I'm just learning about. I think these are all really fruitful. And I wonder how that could feed into things that Lee is working on. But yeah, for now maybe you want to,

talk about meaning from science or do you want to talk to audience questions. I want to make sure that we answer all the audience questions. Yeah, yeah, let's get to the audience. So this one comes from sneaky toaster. Question. That was my kids. That was my first choice for my middle child's mental name. So the question is Eric Weinstein and others are advocating for the irrefutable data the government has on UAPs, UFOs to be released to the science community. Should the science community be granted access? Well, I've pushed back with respect to Eric. I've told them on Clubhouse chats on my pipe. You know, what do you mean?

Like the data, like data is the data of the Hubble deep field. Like if there are aliens, you know, in the universe, then, you know, there's 10 to the fifth or 10 to the fourth galaxies in the Hubble ultra deep field. Then, you know, there's probably an awful lot of aliens in there, you know, go for it. But, but I wonder, you know, is that really true? If there's data, again, the Hubble deep field tells you exactly one thing as far as I can tell. maybe it tells you a little bit more. It allows you to estimate with about 50% uncertainty. And again,

the issue is not the error is not the value that is measured, the mantissa. You know, it is the error bars. That's where the science comes in. I can measure something. I could go into Lee's lab and make some chemical reactions. And,

you know, I'd probably make H.O.2 or, you know, whatever. I'd screw up everything. I joke that when I did biology, I would dissect the frog. The frog would live.

I'm terrible at these wet sciences. But the error bars, that's where the. scientist comes out. And I think, unless you tell me what is your way of doing what's called a blind analysis, here's an example. With my telescopes, I measure data. I measure data from the big bang, the origin of the universe, the origin of the elements called the cosmic microwave background radiation. If I make an observation of the polarization looking for waves of gravity that could indicate the presence of an early exponential phase of inflationary expansion,

which is, you know, surely could garner many, many accolades and satiate our knowledge of perhaps all of the conjectures about things called the multiverse. Well, if I do that and I make a claim, I have to show that that data is immune from dust. But I also have to show that the data I got on Tuesday is the same as the data I got on the Wednesday. And that the data I got when the telescope was slewing to the left at four degrees per second is the same as the one that slew to the right at four degrees per second. That's a critical. Sorry, I'm going to start to interrupt. I want to frame something here because this is almost getting what I was saying about Avey earlier and also what Eric is saying is that when he says show us the data,

it's almost like this like he's kind of invoking some kind of conspiracy and stuff and there's all these, you know, middle green men. And what Brian is just so really precisely is I know, what we want to know is that this spot on earth at this time when this was happening, what was happening, show us, show us, So we've got a comparable data set, a control. Sorry to interrupt you, Brian, but I think it's really important that we, because we're both eye to eye on this.

Yeah. The point is that you have to tell me ahead of time. When I do an analysis, we have to show in a blind analysis what the error bar will get for a variety of different scenarios. Until you tell me, I might give you data, but until you tell me, and actually we don't even do it

because it's a tremendous amount of work for us to process data in a way that another person could come in to understand calibration, flat fielding, spectral line, flat dark currents, all the things that go into just imaging. And imaging is simple compared to measuring the CMB, just in terms of like these detectors have been around 40 years longer than the type of detectors that I'm working with.

I'm not saying it's easier or harder globally or more important. But the bottom line is, I have to, my student has to tell me how she's going to analyze the data and how she's going to assess the final error bar long before we unblind and let her see the result. So tell me, how could you mistakenly interpret in the image, which I don't think is really as probative as spectral data or radar data, whatever. But let's just stipulate it is.

Tell me how you're going to interpret to guard against, as Feynman said, you fooling yourself and you, everyone I'm looking at you out there, you are the easiest person to fool. I'm happy to share data and I'll advocate for you about getting data out of the Galileo project. However, you have to do some legwork too. You can't say, oh, they're hiding it from me, therefore they're hiding something from every, no. Tell me what you're going to do with it. Tell me how you're going to prove yourself wrong.

and so that I will say to you, you are my fellow scientist, even though you may not have a PhD. Okay. This was a live chat question. Someone wants to know Lee, Tom Poliska, Tom Poleski asks. Lee, why hasn't your SETI experiment with spectrograph in the infrared been done by anyone yet? Because I happen to have a big mouth and all the stuff happening in the lab, I always talk about it, but the paper's almost finished. And when people said to me, you couldn't possibly get assembly. number out of mass spec data and we did.

But we can do it with a thing called NMR, nuclear magnetic resonance and infrared, and we've just done it and we've proved it works. So I very much hope that once we get this out there, that we will put out enough data and the algorithm required for people to start the next square. And indeed, there are people who are going to be getting spectroscopy, spectroscopic data from out of the solar system

what I want to try this with. But we need to be cautious because the resolution is really so poor. There's a limited amount of things we can do. But my dream would be to put a spectrometer, an infrared spectrometer in orbit above Venus. There's a lot of maybe one in orbit, maybe in Titan, and we could do exactly that experiment. So it's a really good point. And literally, assembly theory was kind of invented last year. We published the paper, the experiment in the mass spec paper in May.

We've been working on several theory papers and more experimental paper. is coming. So yeah, it's really literally hot off the press. So it's not made up, it works, but I just need to literally get it into a preprint, in the publication. And I'm talking to various organizations that may or may not have lots of money and may or may not have lots of maybe private and public that are planning missions. And I'm advocating very strongly for us to do that. Send a telescope that can do infrared spectroscopy all around the solar system and map the assembliness of everything. Okay, this question comes from

Vissen Kausman, this is to both of you, ask all of your materialist guests to give one single example of something outside of consciousness. I think there are great difficulties in doing that simply because we are the ghost in the machine that is

defining, A, what consciousness is, what are experiences, what is materialistic or not. I should say that, you know, I'm much more, much less materialistic than I assume Lee is, I know what Lee is. I don't know so much about Kurt, but I'd love to know more. In that, there are, what I usually talk about is, you know, are there, is there

permission to believe? Not, not the proof. I said this on Lexus Pocket. Like, I don't care if I believe in God. You know, like, is God need me? Does God care about Brian Keating? Who gives a cry? You know, maybe, maybe if God believes in me, you know, if God exists.

But the question of whether or not you, I'm a behaviorist. So I think that people manifest how they behave, the underlying consciousness that they are internalized, that they have internalized, is manifest externally by their behaviors. So I look to things like religion in a very practical sense. Can this give community? Can this give a purpose? Can this without necessarily accepting the reality as provable in a scientific context? I don't think. you can't prove or disprove. And I give upbraid my religious friends too. I say, if you don't learn science, you're basically just, you know, kind of living in this bubble. If you don't learn, because science may actually bolster your faith. As I said, you know, Lexus podcast, I've said

other places, you know, what if the fact that we can perceive an infinite spectrum of colors, an infinite diversity of life, an infinite number of tastes and, you know, dimensionality of what could be otherwise. And the fact that the universe is extravagant is potentially a clue, a symbol, a talisman. I'm not saying it's proof, of course, because I don't think there can be proof. But I think those are sort of non-materialistic. But again, it's materialistic and a reduction in sense because I do believe that you can practice it for your own benefit. You can glean wisdom from it. You can glean experience, community, charity, things that improve you, stoicism. You know, I'm one of the few people.

I read the Christian Bible every day and the Jewish Bible every day. I read the Stoics, the ancient Greeks, the Romans. These are things that I think broaden your mind, whether you believe it has to be true or not. So I'm more of a pragmatist, I would say, in terms of what consciousness things could not be explainable via science. I'm going to ask it one more time simply. So can you point to something that exists outside consciousness? And Lee, what would you say?

I would say there's lots of things exist outside consciousness, but I think we have to do that. Doing that null experiment is hard, right? I think that the causal chain that gave rise, so how chemistry, so I'm going to give the boring answer, but I think that the process of evolution in the universe and selection exists outside consciousness

because it had to invent consciousness. I would be interested to know if computation is a fundamental thing in the universe that didn't need to go through consciousness. That's an interesting question. But my simple answer is I think that a lot of the universe exists outside of consciousness, but I will never really convincingly be able to prove it because I am a conscious entity. Just to make it clear, because I want to make sure this person doesn't write in the comments,

say they equivocated. What is one example of something that is outside consciousness? I think understanding consciousness. I think the meta problem of, you know, what is? is it like to be a bat? How do you separate in the heart? David Charlemorne's is coming on my show in a couple of weeks. I'll certainly ask him this question.

Oh, you're saying, you're saying to something beyond conscious comprehension intrinsically, right? I think here's what the person is getting at. Let's imagine I say X is outside consciousness. Well, that X appears to you in your own consciousness. So it's not technically outside consciousness. Now, you can think maybe it can exist besides me, outside of me. But even that itself is an idea within consciousness.

The easy answer, right? And I think Brian, well, I mean, I think Brian might agree with this. It's like, I'm not a term. I think that the ground truth for quantum mechanics appears to be outside of consciousness because quantum mechanics wasn't constructive conscious beings. And then we get all else. And it's shown by, you know, there are people who are closets, many worlds people, right? And they get really stuck.

Another thing is that I can imagine that there might be. something outside of the universe that is entirely separate to this universe. I can imagine it, but I just, but I, there is something beyond my imagination because clearly what can it be, right? I mean, I could say, this is really like me saying, I can imagine all the set of prime numbers, but I can't tell you what the next one is. And that's really important. So I think there are things outside of, that intrinsically outside of consciousness. And, and, and I think that we have to be humble because I think even if we think we could nail everything. I mean, actually, I'm not religious, right, but I have a great deal of respect for religious people. I do not like

the approach that Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krause take to people who have religion and say they're stupid because they're not. They have belief. And I have beliefs. And my beliefs are kind of a bit boring, but I do have beliefs. And one of the reasons why I get a buzz out of science is I'm taking something in my belief box and putting it into my fact box. And it's not that I'm trying to just prove God, but it's like I'm going through this process of actually understanding more about the universe, the more in awe of it, and the more I know there's more belief.

And so I don't think we're ever going to get to the answer. So I think, of course, intrinsically, there must be things. I think is this provable? I think we would need to get a proper philosopher who would take us through the thought processes and understanding how it set up the axioms and the argument. But I believe my crude answer would be probably. almost yes, there's lots outside of our consciousness. Okay, this question comes from David, and it's directed toward you, Lee, but you can comment

on it as well. Brian, in what sense does Lee think that we need new laws for life, like extra stuff at the fundamental level or some emergent higher level type of stuff? Well, I've already said it. I think that so not new laws necessarily, but I think that I, well, I would say that we can get rid of some laws, get rid of the second law. and account for it correctly. So I think there's a new law needed there. So we have to remove the second law. We have to deal with the fact that we require order at the beginning.

Again, get rid of the second law, have time. So I don't think there's a nice thing about this. It's provable. It's going to be experimentally tractable. So I'm not saying we need to tear up all the rules. I'm just saying that Newtonian mechanics is not appropriate. And I think I would say something very, very crisp here. I'm so very I think Lee Smolin has the same idea that everything in the universe every object in every event is unique because it has a unique place in the universe as I said to the person we talked about earlier when I went to Austin I flew to Austin I've been to Austin before and I flew back to London I've been to those places before but I've never been there before because the planet is in a different place in our solar system and our solar system is a different part in space and so

I think that we need to understand that time is not reversible and that physicists should stop be given a free get out of jail card without allowing time travel because I think that's cheating causality. So I would say, ask that question is that we need to be clear about causation from quarks all the way up to, you know, from rocks to Rachmaninoff. So I think, yes, we need a new formulation of the laws, but it's not magic. It's just reframing. Brian? Well, I would say they're, it's poetic. It's there's certain romanticism about what Lee's talking about.

I think, strictly speaking, you know, I don't, I always say, you know, cosmology is the one specialization of physics that doesn't require biology. You know, it's like almost everything else, yeah, to instantiate itself or perhaps the other way around. I never make use of, when I teach my undergraduate, say you're going to learn thermodynamics, electromagnetic, electromagnetic, nuclear physics, particle physics, but you're not going to learn anything about biophysics or, you know, you'll even learn some chemistry, right? We'll talk a little bit about the formation of the chemical elements. But that being said, I don't think that there's anything to learn about G-minus 2 of the muon or of sterile neutrinos or, you know, from a new interpretation that involves life.

I think, you know, much like I joke about this, like string theory is the best theory ever made to describe problems in string theory. In other words, there'll be new technology. There'll be new, you know, new kind of tools that could be used, new tactics to approach the problem, the essence of life. And don't forget, Erwin Schrodinger recently canceled, by the way. Did you hear about that? That Schrodinger's been canceled, finally, for some sexual improprieties that are quite awful, if true. But the bottom line is, no, I don't think that to understand that there may be additional forces and fields gauge both.

and so forth at the, and the standard model, there probably certainly are. I don't know. But I don't think that those will necessitate or require the conceptions of life to be emergent within them. So I push back to Brian slightly. I want to push for that. I agree with what from Brian said, but I think he's kind of causation, physics doesn't have causation in the standard model, in the core models we call it. And that is a big error. And I am really assert and very strongly with some courage and humility that I think that we need to add that in. And I think Brian, correct me from wrong, because we were kind of left the ring now, we're kind of like, I don't know if it's a draw or there was a, who went on point,

but I would say that really we do need causation at the beginning. Then that is, that shouldn't be, that shouldn't be, because when I speak to Frank, we'll check about it. He just, he just, I mean, I was speaking to him about it and he was very, very good. He's very smart. He's a bit cheek. He said, you know, you should do this. And some people get prizes for that. And I was like, it's just a prize dude. Who cares? Tell me if causation is at the beginning. And I could question for it. You know, I mean, there are people that talk about the causal, you know, the structure. Joe Amagajio, Lee Smolin, Stefan Alexander's the going to be on soon on

on this very podcast. So yeah. And I agree. I would, you know, maybe, maybe just, just kind of rectify my comment by saying, I don't personally have much faith into the Wolframian, which is the most kind of like lifelike, you know, at least in terms of complexity and rules and algorithmically computable essence, that that will, you know, make concrete astrophysical predictions that laws will emerge from it. And maybe it may be that, you know, understanding life allows us to understand artificial intelligence, which then allows us to make up new laws. I'm also kind of a AI minimalist, but that's really a podcast for another time because I would just think that the wife and kids will come and get me soon, Kurt. Okay. So then this is the last one. And it relates to what you said

about causation. Okay, why is there, this is from Kamar 910? Why is there something rather than nothing? And Lee, when you say causation, so physicists obviously study causal structures like Brian mentioned, but those usually mean you're within the light cone and it's as simple as that, not this caused this. So when you have a model of causation, which I'm unsure how one could formulate that, How does that not lead to an infinite regress or either an uncaused caused at some point, especially if you consider time to be fundamental, which ties into why is there something rather than nothing, which is Kamar's question. Yeah, let me give you two-cent summary.

So the theory paper I'm just finishing with Sarah right now actually tackles that very question. And it's to accept that there are, at the beginning, there is no causation. But that causation gets baked in when information can be stored about the past that can affect something differently in the future. And it's really as simple as that. And the only reason physicists have missed it is because they call scrain it out. So all I'm slightly asking for is to remove entropy, change it to assembly, have time going forward. And suddenly you do have causal cones. And those causal cones actually are limited by the light cone. And I think that Brian and I one day will be talking about assembly cosmology. And we'll be looking for those artifacts out there. But I think

we're a little bit far away from that. I need to prove the theory, do the experiments, get the data, show the error, convince peers, because right now it's just a kind of cool idea, a bit like lots of things in string theory. You need to get that mathematical structure in the reality. And I think we'll be able to, but we'll have to be held account on that. So it's a really good question. But I'm pretty sure I know where it is what we're doing.

I'm also going to re-ask you to leave so you can expound some more, but Brian has to go. So Brian, please. So again, the question from Kumar again is why is there something rather than nothing. Okay. So what I thought Lee might say is the why questions are kind of anathema. Even though they're the most interesting questions and the most natural questions, my toddler will ask me why, why, why. And of course, Lee as a parent, Kurt doesn't know this yet because he's not a dad yet. But please God, there'll be a father soon. Kurt, you and your lovely wife. But Lee knows the ultimate causal chain with an infinite series of why questions. Lee, how do we answer our kids?

I guess so. I mean, I just say, just tell them to look for themselves or to shut up asking the question, right? The answer is, why, why, why, why, why, why? Because I said so. But there is a way when these regression is tough, right? Because I said so. But look, you have a point, you have an origin and you have a cause and effect. Now, the infinite regress isn't infinite. What happens? This is, I just don't want to, this is the mechanism of selection. So what this person just asked. I'm sorry, you have to get, you have to, Brian has to go. And I'm going to talk to you about this. You can, keep talking about that, but after Brian goes, I know what it's like to have a wife that once you have gone immediately. No, no, I mean, I think Lee is, is, is, is correct. And I do want to see this and maybe I'll talk with Sarah about that when she comes on my show. But, but ultimately, why questions are

not necessarily part of what scientists should do. Why implies a meaning. And I think meaning, you know, it will bring up questions of, you know, teleological implications. And I don't mean that they're necessarily anathema, but usually when people ask why they mean how or what, you know, how did the causal chain get established? Those have great answers in cosmology as well, except they have great problems too and great mysteries. And Lee alluded to the one three hours ago now almost, which was, you know, how did the whole thing get kicked off? And what was the initial generation of, you know, a universe and so forth? You could ask why is there a universe. But I think the question of why, first of all, it could be trivial.

If it didn't exist, we wouldn't be here asking why it doesn't exist. And there's your whiskey. That's wonderful. I wish I could have some Scottish coffee at this time of the day. But in reality, in cosmology, as Kurt and I, you and I talked, you know, I only have one regret when it comes to Kurt, is that I was on his channel when it had the square root of the number of viewers that it does now. and it deserves the square of the number, if not more. But we talked about briefly, you know, what are the laws of physics? Are they so-called geodesically complete?

Can we extrapolate the laws and chain of causality within the light cone when you have a singularity? And Lee mentioned singularity a few times. I happen not to believe that there is a quantum theory of gravity. At least I don't believe it's as well motivated. I think physicists get distracted by it. I think that they're pursuing the theory of everything for the grandeur, the glory, the accolades that Einstein never live up to.

that's the very first paragraph of Mitch O'Cocco's new book. Einstein died with his unfinished symphony that he couldn't come up with the theory of everything. No, despite that being the name of this channel, I think the gut is almost being overlooked, the grand unified theory. We don't understand how the lower energy forces or the higher energy force are unified, let alone how all four are unified and who, if not, you know, one of us has the temerity to say that there has to be a law of quantum gravity. What if there's not?

So I'll channel my inner, you know, Lee and say, you know, I don't believe that there is quantum gravity because I want to inspire my colleagues to think harder about it. And we've been going about this for decades now with little signs of progress, not to say to stop even string theory, which I have my problems with. But the alternative, as they say, you know, the string theory is the worst theory except for all the others. That could be true, according to Witten. But I think ultimately the why questions are the most interesting. But we should be careful. not to ask for motivation. I think that evokes teleology, but also we should be very precise. We should answer all the how questions, as Galileo said, measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not yet so. And as experimentalist, Lee and I try to do that. Yeah, that's a great way to end it, put it.

I agree. Thank you so much to the both of you. I appreciate it, and the audience does as well. My pleasure. Thank you, Kurt, and thank you, Lee. I can't wait to be together with both of you guys at some point in the near future light cone. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel

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