Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Fundamentally Closer to Truth? A conversation with Deepak Chopra, Leonard Mlodinow, & Frank Wilczek (#108)

Episode Date: January 6, 2021

Does your mind create matter? What happens when an irresistible force meets an unmovable object? What is the nature of free will? Find out, in this special episode of the Into the Impossible Podcast in collaboration with Deepak Chopra’s “Chopra Well”. Fundamentals: Closer to Truth: A Look at the work of Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek and physicists Leonard Mlodinow and Brian Keating. In this riveting conversation, co-hosted with Deepak Chopra, physicists Frank Wilczek, author of Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, Leonard Mlodinow co- author with Stephen Hawking of two books, The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time, and me discuss what we know about the physical world, questions that fundamental science cannot address, and more. Frank Wilczek is world-renowned both as a theoretical physicist and as a writer and speaker on science. He has received many honors for his work, notably including the Nobel Prize. Watch my first video with Frank here: https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0 Find Frank here: frankawilczek.com Massachusetts Institute of Technology | T.D. Lee Institute & Wilczek Quantum Center Shanghai Jiao Tong University | Arizona State University | Stockholm University. Frank has literary and inventive projects in the works. Frank has an insatiable appetite for puzzles and games. He is also an avid, though mediocre, musician. And he is proud of his family. Wilczek has made seminal contributions to fundamental particle physics, cosmology and the physics of materials. His current research focus includes Axions, Anyons, and Time Crystals. These are concepts in physics which he named and pioneered. Each has become a major focus of world-wide research. In recent years Frank has become fascinated with prospects for expanding perception through technology. He is developing hardware and software tools for this. He has authored several well-known books, and writes a monthly “Wilczek’s Universe” feature for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality will be released on January 12, 2021. LEONARD MLODINOW received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology. His previous books include the best sellers The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time (both with Stephen Hawking), Subliminal (winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award), and War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra), as well as Elastic, Euclid’s Window, Feynman’s Rainbow, and The Upright Thinkers. His latest book, “Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics” released on November 8, 2020. https://leonardmlodinow.com/ Watch my most popular videos: Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose https://youtu.be/H8G5onAqlVo?sub_confirmation=1 Juan Maldacena’s First Podcast Interview: https://youtu.be/uIzTliTHn7s?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why would Brian Keating, a serious scientist, quote unquote, have on his show, Deepak Chopra, who some say is nothing but a new age huckster? Well, I think you'll maybe recognize some of the names that I have on the podcast alongside of Deepak, who are actually much closer to him and work much more closely with him than even I do. And that includes Leonard Miladnow, author of Stephen Hawking, a memoir of friendship and physics, which you'll hear a dedicated, episode about very shortly, and as well as Nobel laureate, Frank Wilczek, who is also coming on the show very soon to discuss his new book Fundamentals. So today's podcast, kind of a preview for

both of those interviews, which I confess I did previously in 2020, but looking forward to sharing more and more great content with you as the year unfold. So please take this opportunity to leave me an astronomically good review, leave a cluster of stars, an asteroid, if you will, or even one star in a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcast, please subscribe as well because that helps me get great guests for this podcast. I'm trying to keep it advertisement free and your support via reviews is really the only thing I ask of you in return in remuneration. Please visit my website, briankeating.com, to get resources from this and all my episodes, including a 60-page illustrated e-book, which I'll send to you free when you sign up for my mailing

list that documents astronomy's great debate from 100 years ago to today. How big is the universe? How fast is the universe expanding? Is there life on other planets? I discuss that and more with Nobel Prize winner Adam Reese, Wendy Friedman, Janelle Levin, Sarah Seeger, and David Spurgel, all of whom have been guests on my podcast. I ask you to do that only for me. Leave a review. Takes a second. I read everyone and it really means the multiverse to me. So sit back, enjoy this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast, enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishing from magic. This is Deepak Chopra again, and we are continuing our conversations with luminaries in

science, philosophy, the arts, conversations that expand our mind, our awareness, and give us an opportunity to question our habitual certainty. certainly guilty of that. I've been guilty of habitual certainty all my life. So I start with that confession. We are here principally to have a conversation with three influences in the world of science and physics. First, Frank Wilczek, who's a Nobel laureate, you'll see all his credentials, and you see a link to his book, which is absolutely fascinating. We have Brian Keating. who's also a cosmologist, very involved in the original experiments looking for gravitational waves. And we have my friend Leonard Maladna, who I met at Caltech on a debate with skeptics like Michael Schumer and others.

But we ended up being amazing friends. And Leonard has written two books with Stephen Hawking and has also co-written a book with me. talking about the different perspectives regarding science and what we call spirituality. But spirituality is a loaded word, and we have to be careful how we use that word. We'll come to it in a moment. But this conversation that we're having is initiated by Brian Keating. Brian is a very significant cosmologist, physicist. I've known him for a while.

I think we met together here at some of the conferences in San Diego with Roger Penrose and other people. So, Brian, you initiated this. Tell us why. Well, thank you so much, Deepak. It's good to see my friends all gathered around. We won't team up on you, Deepak. Don't worry. It's not going to be a physics intervention where we try to convert you to become a physicist like us. But in reality, I feel like the environment that we're in now was a very dangerous one for society as science loses some of its prestige, perhaps, or we believe that debate is impossible in the political sphere and that seeps into the scientific sphere, making it impossible for people, perhaps people of faith, perhaps not, to debate scientific and philosophical questions with comity, with friendship. This is what I wanted to arrange because I think there's really no better interlocutor than you, Deepak, to take these different worldviews, as you and Leonard are fond of saying, and try to find some comity between them, not for the sake of conciliants, just for its own sake, but for actually doing good for the world around us. And I felt like these gentlemen, Frank and Leonard are two eminent scientists that I look up to and have learned a lot from. And also, I'm not afraid to debate with me as long as it's done civilly.

And I think that's my goal. Ryan, we need to come to your book as well, losing the Nobel Prize because we have a winner of the Nobel Prize. That's right. Now, we talked about that when Frank was on my podcast, the Into the Impossible podcast, which I run from the Arthur C. Clark Center. But let's start with Dr. Wilczak. Frank, may I call you Frank, sir? Yes, of course.

So Frank, you know, a while back science magazine, published the 125 open questions in science. And the first one was, what is the U.S. universe made of. And the second one was, what's the biological basis of consciousness? And I stopped right there, because, you know, the rest of the questions, I think, depend on the first two questions. What's the universe made off? And what's the biological basis of consciousness?

Or is there a biological basis of consciousness? And so I was fascinated by your book, which is called Fundamentals. and it's an extraordinary book. I spent the weekend reading it very carefully. And I learned a lot. There was a lot that I knew thanks to Leonard. You know, and Leonard and I had a good relationship over many years. So there was a lot there that I did understand.

There was a lot there that I did not understand. But here's the question that I have for you, right off the bat. and it's your question in a way what do we know of the physical world? What is the world made off? Because my understanding is only, you know, there might be two trillion galaxies out there. Two trillion.

There might be 700, 6 trillion stars out there. There might be uncountable trillions of planets out there. And that may be less than 1% of the visible universe. So what's the universe made of? Well, at a fundamental level, the universe is made out of space, time, and quantum fields. And that is a very rich structure from which you can make a lot of things, the sort of things you mentioned. But fundamentally, there are very few concepts that we can boil down the description of the world, too.

and that's an extraordinary statement and an extraordinary achievement. I read that. The world is made of space, time, and matter, but you also said fears, and then you said dynamic complexity. What do you mean by dynamic complexity? From these ingredients, you can make dynamic complexity,

which is a way of representing and processing information. So those are emergent concepts that just as from Lego bricks, you can make extraordinary structures. And if you supply them with motors, you can make even more extraordinary factories from a few ingredients put together that have the right properties, fortunately. you can make stable but not too stable arrangements of matter that allow us to have patterns that can be interpreted as patterns of information and that have a useful stability and a useful regularity that support different kinds of objects that you mentioned, stars, planets, but also humans, individuals, animals, and so forth. So if the world is made of force, particles, particles, and some people call them,

and why does it look like this? Why does it look like you mean and everything else that we're looking at right now? Well, that's a tough job that we have as physicists to show how, from these very abstract concepts that we've boiled it down to that you can reconstruct the world. It's been a remarkable journey from Democritus who talked about atoms in the void as opposed to warm, cold, taste of different kinds. He had the vision that actually the fundamental part, the description of the world was something quite different. And ever since, we've been learning that lesson deeper and deeper. We've been

trying to get a more and more compact description. And now we have, for practical purposes, I believe, a complete description of how matter works. And you could put it all into a computer program and teach it to a computer that, and the program would be shorter than say the program and less complicated than say the program for word because the basic principles are very, very simple. However, they, in that profound sense, in that very precise and profound sense, you could teach it to a computer without loss. However, the world is so abundant in terms of how many copies of these structures it has and supports, And these structures are so rich in the ways they can combine and function with each other that we don't see any barrier to making the world we see around us out of those ingredients. And you don't have to take my word for it.

We're speaking at the moment from at great distance over computers made of transistors that were designed using quantum mechanical. principles and carry and the information is carried by waves that propagate through space according to Maxwell's equations it really works and and that so that so we've we've in in fundamental physics we've been on a journey now for close to 600 years to boil down to the description shorter and shorter that that's what we try to do we do analysis to get to most basic equations and then synthesis to build things back up. And both part, both of those directions are important directions for science. And we've done, I think, in culminating in the 20th century, the late 20th century, we've done an extraordinary job of analysis. And now

our big challenge is mainly synthesis. There are, there are loose ends in the description. to put it mildly of fundamentals. I think you've alluded to the fact that if you consider the universe by mass, the kind of matter that we really understand deeply is only about 5% of the mass of the universe. And there are other ingredients called dark matter and dark energy, about which we know a few scattered facts, but we don't have a really precise description worthy of standing besides our description of other elements of matter and the universe of those things. And the 5% that you referred to, most of it, 99.9% of it is invisible interstellar dust, mostly hydrogen helium.

So the actual visible universe is even less. Well, there are two kinds of dark matter. There's dark matter made out of the stuff we know about, which is not so mysterious. And that's, as you said, distributed in gas clouds and things that are just hard but not, but hard to detect. But modern astronomy is pretty good at seeing signals from those things. And then there's some other component that's about six times as much. So the kind of matter we understand really deeply, that's the subject of biology and chemistry and all forms of engineering made out of quarks, gluons, photons, and electrons. We understand deeply. That's about 5% of the universe by mass. And then there's something called dark matter that we're not sure what it is. I think I know, but the evidence is not really fully in place. That makes up about 30% of the universe by mass.

And then there's something called dark energy, which is still quite mysterious. But we know the equations it satisfies, but we really don't have an intimate knowledge or even an intimate guess of what it's made out of. So Dr. Winchek, you said something very interesting right now. We know that this works. We are having this conversation. Yes. You and I are speaking, millions of people might be watching us.

We hope to reach 15 million. Let's have your book a little more prominently displayed. You can look at the 10 keys to reality. So Leonard and I were once speaking in Sweden at the same place where you got your Nobel Prize. And I mentioned that science is very effective, but is it getting us closer to truth? And there was somebody right in the front seat who said, Dr. Chopra, how did you get here? I said, I took a complaint.

You trust your life with science, and yet you say, is it getting us closer to truth? And, you know, he got a standing ovation just for his remark. So, you know, this brings me to my second question, which is something that Leonard and I talk about a lot, can mind emerge from matter? And so I'd like both your opinion on that, Leonard's opinion and Brian's opinion on that. I think certainly certain kinds of mind can emerge from matter.

We know that. My computer will beat me at chess sometimes, and the best computers will beat the best humans at chess or go or many things that were thought to be fundamental indications of mind and intelligence. Now, we know can emerge from matter because we designed them that way. and the domain of things that our machines can do is expanding very rapidly, exponentially, as we speak. And the artificial intelligence is catching up with natural intelligence on many fronts. And there's no question that that's emerged from matter because we know exactly how it works.

We designed it from the ground up using quantum mechanics. And now there's another question, which is whether the minds that humans have that we sort of experience by introspection and by interaction with other humans, whether those are really emergent properties of matter. And there we don't have a complete understanding by any means. but I think the program that dominates neurophysiology is to assume yes that it does and so far there haven't been any showstoppers with years of more and more detailed investigations of how memories are stored how memories are laid down how the different electrical signals and chemical signals within the brain and the rest of the nervous system are propagated how simple nervous systems and simpler animals work. There we can understand almost at the molecular level.

So all those indicate that the substrate, the material substrate of mind is matter as we know it, and that this doesn't detract from mind. It enhances what matter can do. we understand its potentials much better. And one more thing I would add about that is when physicists do experiments, they have to be very careful now with modern delicate experiments that measure, say, the position of mirrors to within, in the case of the LIGO, Grappatational Wave detector, to within one one, one, 10,000th of the,

diameter of an atomic nucleus. And we do many other extraordinary things like measure time with an accuracy of one second per lifetime of the universe with atomic clocks and compare them. So people have to make all kinds of corrections and precautions for temperature, for vibration, isolation, for getting a very good vacuum. for making sure that the things are very cold so that they're not thermally excited. But one thing that people have never had to correct for is what people in the lab next door are thinking. There's never been any demonstration in these very precise, delicate experiments, of any ability of mind.

mind to control matter. So that's a very powerful constraint to me on the idea that there's something other than a property of matter involved in the phenomena we call mind. Okay, so, you know, for the last four years, I've been engaged in creating AI version of myself. And it's going to be released in three weeks. It's called Digital Depak. Right.

So we had a demonstration of it with Wall Street Journal. And the journalist asked my air version, what did you eat for breakfast? And he said, I don't eat breakfast. I don't eat breakfast. I don't feel hunger. I don't have sexual urges. I don't fear death.

So I'm talking about that kind of mind. you know, that has subjectivity imbued in it, longings, aspiration, creativity, vision, insight, inspiration, inspiration, intuition, reflection, contemplation, meditation, all the things that you talk about in your book. And I don't see how mind or, you know, I also have a practice at night where I do a meditation where I look, recapitulate my life. I look at myself as a boy, as a child, as a teenager.

I can't identify with those people. You know, they're like ephemeral memories. Yeah. Come and go. And I have a very hard time convincing myself that my self-reflection is the interaction of force, and gravity and wavicles and particles.

I want to be convinced of that. But I keep asking myself, who is having these experiences? What is questioning this? And can a machine or matter ever experience subjectivity? Now, of course, my body is made of matter. Yes. And I'm experiencing it. But who's the eye that experiences what I call my body?

That's a different question. We might come to that in the end. but I want to go to Leonard right now because what you raise is... Okay, the only thing I would say in response is don't underestimate Matter. Yes, you know, I would also say... We know that Matter can do some very surprising things. Yeah, I want to come to that because, you know, I also want to report from your book, which says something very interesting.

We are big enough specifically to contain the entire universe in our minds. and elsewhere you say, I'm large, I contain multitudes. Yes, that's Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman, who is a favorite author of mine. I was also thinking of Rumi, the Sufi poet, who says, look at your eyes, they're so small, and they see enormous things. Rumi also said, I'm so small, how can the whole universe be in me? So I want to go to Leonard right now because, you know, he was so close to,

Stephen Hawking, who was physically quite handicapped, and yet his mind explored the far reaches of the universe, going all the way to singularities and black holes and Hawking radiation and all that. So Leonard, please comment on what Dr. Wilczek has said. Can matter create mind? What's your opinion? I agree with Frank. I think he said it quite well. And, you know, there's never been any evidence in all the history of science of any effect or forces of the mind that are not attributable to physical forces.

And I think that as a scientist, hopefully we are all open-minded enough that if something, some evidence would come up, that we would investigate that and theorize. about it and accepted. But in the absence of that, even though there are many mysteries in the universe, there's mysteries of what is dark energy, there's mysteries of who am I, as you say, right? And who's experiencing this phone call and who likes you, Deepak, who loves it? Where does that come from? I don't know. But because I don't know, it doesn't mean that I, you know, attributed to something beyond what I have so far observed. I just don't understand how it is. and I would like to make one other point that came to me as you were talking and Frank was talking, which is my friend Christoph Koch, who I used to know very well back at Caltech.

He does neuroscience research into consciousness, as you know. I know you know that. And he told me long ago when I was thinking of writing my book Subliminal on the Unconscious Mind, that when a scientist studies the Unconscious Mind, that when a scientist studies the Unconscious, unconscious, it's much different than when people, you know, philosophers or people outside of science study the unconscious because we have to operationalize it and we have to study very specific, concrete, well-defined questions. So when he studies the unconscious, he's studying, he studies the visual system of the brain and how your brain through different layers, processes, information. As you know very well, Deepak, the photon, the data, the optical data that hits your retina is not what you experience. And it goes through, many different layers of processing and your brain is really constructing reality, your experience

reality from that data, but it's not an accurate reflection of that data. That's why we have, for example, optical illusions and things like that. And so when a scientist studies consciousness, there are scientists who are interested in it. We're not, you know, decades ago it was considered a taboo subject. I think kind of crackpots would study it, but now I think it's taken seriously. but we do it very slowly, step by step, by understanding how the neurons in the brain work, how different very specific phenomena in the brain occur. And we try to get at it piece by piece step by step and probably is going to take another, you know, decades and centuries, perhaps before we understand it.

But that's our approach. And when something's a mystery, you know, we approach it, but we do it step by step in a very methodical reductionist manner. I know we don't like that word. Not that we don't look for emergence, because I don't like the word reductionist, but we looked at it, I would like to say, in a systematic and very well-defined manner

using methods that we know make it harder for us to be fooled than if we just the ordinary person contemplating. That's great, Lendant, and we've discussed this before. Many times. Many times. Brian, any comments on what has been said so far? I should mention we are talking about Dr. Wilczek's book, Fundamentals, 10 Keys to Reality. Please look it up.

You'll have a link to that to Amazon and other sites. A link to Leonard's book, which is a memoir of his relationship with Stephen Hawking. And a link to Brian Keating's book on, why? he didn't get the Nobel Prize. I did get it. Frank left his when he came to visit me. Okay. Now, what did you say to this comment so far?

I want to move on to something. Yeah, the only thing I want to add is Wilchek's comments. Yeah, I had a little bit of a taste of that conversation with Frank and I also talk with Noam Chomsky over the summer. I've got finger puppets of all my guests. So we're working on one of Leonard and Frank's. on the way. But the thing that concerns me after talking to so many people in the last year, eminent scientists and thought leaders, so to speak, is that we seem to be really obsessed with this notion of artificial intelligence. And it seems like a reductive way that we want to

simulate the imitation game, the kind of approach that Turing suggested back, you know, can machines think? Which I remind you, he came to a conclusion that that's a meaningless question. and he felt it sort of analogous to like, do airplanes fly? You know, the question of what is the essence of an operation, especially when you're trying to apply to the human mind. So my thing nowadays, you've heard of the hard problem of consciousness and artificial intelligence. I'm more interested in artificial wisdom.

Is it possible for wisdom to be produced? Because I think that's the sine qua non of being a human being. I think that's what makes us individuals. I think that's why there aren't, you know, there are 30 different types of great primates in the world, but nothing like a human being. And so from my perspective, I'm more interested, you know,

kind of in this notion of the hard problem of wisdom. Where does the, what is the origin of wisdom? Where does it come from in a human being? I actually, Deepak and I spoke with Noam Chomsky and Roger Penrose two years ago here in San Diego, when Stuart Hammeroff organized his conference about the science of consciousness. And I came away depressed from that in a sense because they can't even agree with or Frank's beloved quarks that he has done so much with if they're conscious.

And to me, a field, you know, in that state, it left me depressed, except when I start to realize that we are the only creatures that we know that have real sense of wisdom. And so that's what I'm more concerned with. That's great. I was reading Frank's book. And I have to say, first of all, congratulations on the book. It's brilliant. Thank you.

Thank you. There's more questions than ever before. And one of the questions is, of course, can the human mind, the human brain, does it have the capacity to actually even know what fundamental truth is? And so when I was, you know, just now, Leonard mentioned Christopher Cox. And, you know, Christopher Koch, of course, worked with Francis Craig, whom you quote Dr. Wilczek in the book as the astonishing hypothesis. Which is that mind emerges from matter, basically. That mind emerges from matter.

Now, one of the other students of Francis Craig was John Hoffman, with whom I've been having many, many, many conversations. And Don Hoffman was actually charged by Francis Craig to prove the astonishing hypothesis, which he struggled with. He's a cognitive and perceptual scientist. He finally gave up. He said, you know, to believe this would be astonishing hypothesis

is to believe in Aladdin's lamp. You kind of scratch this thing, which is the consistency of jello, and suddenly it opens up a universe for you. So he finally actually has given up on the astonishing hypothesis, and he's now writing about the case against reality, where he says that even space time are emergence. They're not real, and that matter is a human. construct for modes of knowing and experience of human perceptions. And so when I was reading your book, I actually came across this passage where you talk about your grandchildren. And it's beautiful because you say that your grandchild is actually intellectually constructing

the physical world. Absolutely. What did you mean by that? Well, babies are confronted with a big problem. when they are born. They are not wired up. And they get raw sense impressions of the world, which are very confused and very confusing.

The electrical signals that arrive in our brains, or the impulses of light that arrive at our retinas, are very, very far from a three-year-term. the three-dimensional world that we try to make out of them we have to take that information find patterns process it interpret it as objects uh learn implicitly geometry and do all kinds of things learn the distinction between self and not self and or many many uh very difficult things that uh we still don't know how to implement really in artificial intelligence in order to make a usable world, to go to be able to interpret those sense impressions as a three-dimensional space with regularities and other people,

and some parts that are us and some parts that are not us. This is a very constructive, difficult process. And clearly, babies, children, humans, in general, even adults, don't understand how they do it or exactly how it work. We have not been able to teach machines how to do it, although we're making progress on that. And it's underdetermined in a way, and I'm sure evolution gives us some help by doing some pre-wiring. But we use all kinds of rules of thumb and experience. If you've ever watched a baby, you know they drop food over and over again and throw – and do – do these kinds of frustrating experiments that tire out the adults, but the baby finds them

endlessly fascinating because they're learning how the world works. A baby is constructing the physical world. Constructing a model of the physical world. A model of the physical world. So what we do in science is great models. Are we closer to truth or are we constructing models? Well, we have much better models in an objective sense is that they allow us to accomplish much more. And describe a much wider range of phenomena accurately. So we don't rely only on our senses, but on telescopes and microscopes and magnetometers and accelerators and all kinds of tools and demand a description

that's consistent with everything those tools reveal. So it's closer to truth. But as you've alluded to, it's an endless process, I think, because we've done very well on the analysis side, I think, in culminating in the late 20th century with what's called the standard model, or I like to call the core theory,

which seems to be a very complete theory of matter for practical purposes, with a very wide definition of what practical means. But the process, process of going from there to describing more complicated objects, even more complicated molecules that we want to use for drugs, let alone human beings or brains, is an ongoing process.

And we... The question then is... That's, I think, is an open-ended process. Oh, yes. It's then matter constructing models of matter. Yes. Matter is constructing magic to model. Yes.

Can we ever create something completely ab initio, Frank, or Len, in your opinion? Can we physicists create something that has never existed before? And it's the old question is math discovered or invented. Do we actually invent, rather than a model actually physically creating something have an issue? Well, it depends what your standards are. But let me give you an example that is dear to my heart that really bore fruit in the recent past. Almost 40 years ago now, I was thinking about fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and how they might be generalized. And for many years, since the discovery of quantum mechanics, over about 50 years, since modern quantum mechanics, people thought that the possibility, the possibility of the possibility,

for how particles could behave were limited to two, something called fermions and something called bosons. But in the early 80s, I realized there's a wide variety of other possibilities called anyons that would be possible for emergent particles within matter. And in 1984, we've made a convincing theory, I think, of how they could emerge in certain states of matter. But it's taken 40 years, and then finally last spring, after many improvements in materials and techniques, and people finally found it. And that without the original concepts, there's no way you could blunder your way into that.

And it's fundamentally new, I think, by most standards of what fundamental means, what fundamentally new memes. And yeah, it came from, it was thought that became embodied in reality. I have a more prosaic example, or maybe a more poetic example. I created two children when they're unique, they're new, they never existed before. But not ab initio. I guess there's the old joke, you know, scientist says to God, I can do anything you can do. God says, oh yeah, can you make a man out of dirt. The scientist says, sure, just get me some dirt. God says, no, no, no, get your own dirt. The joke being that, yeah, those are materials there beforehand.

Of course, yeah. Something out of the vacuum? Is that what you're asking? Well, I just mean, you know, like, yeah, creating, is it possible, you know, that matter? So Deepak asked Frank, do we create the universe? Does a baby create the universe? And Frank answered properly, no, the baby is constructing a model of the universe, but he's not actually constructing a universe. There are people who say we can make a big bang or a black hole in a laboratory. In that sense, do you guys believe that there's evidence for such things?

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whatever, I mean, you're creating a new universe in laboratory. Is that what they mean? Some claim this. Some claim, yeah, you could create a black hole that would swallow up CERN and. Well, but if you make a black hole that swallows the earth or CERN or, you know, why is that something from nothing? I don't. Well, I think, I think asking for something, from nothing is asking a lot and maybe actually, although it's a grammatical sentence,

may not be something that actually makes sense when you analyze the meaning of the words. However, I think a more fruitful question is whether you can get out more than you put in in sense of

you start with ingredients that don't have a lot of structure or complexity and kind of can't do much, and you end up with an iPhone. And yes, you can definitely do that. We do it. I guess, yeah, I mean, I'm thinking of the inverse. I think it's all, we'd all agree you can destroy thing.

You can destroy matter, right? I mean, you can annihilate it. You can't destroy energy, but you can destroy matter. And in the sense that, Frank, you pull out, you know, asymptotic freedom. I mean, you could explain that. You're basically shielding. And nature is invisible at some level to our gaze. but I think the inverse of destruction.

And that's what I worry about with the vast tools. You know, Carl Sagan said, you know, whether or not we have the wisdom to handle the technology that our knowledge has produced. That is the key question. That's a big question, indeed. And it's not a settled question. Well, when you say, Brian, can you create,

I mean, the knowledge of things that? Do you mean, what do you mean by that? I mean, you always have something that you start with. Even, you know, I have what I as a baby developed as my understanding of the world. I have the math that I learned. I may have some, I may create a new theory of physics or asymptotic freedom, as Frank did, but starting from something, right? What does it mean to start from nothing?

The moment a baby is born before any central input, even before the baby was born, because there's central input in the womb, when the baby is like eight molecules or has never experienced any part of the world. Can it create something? I mean, can it create something? Well, first of all, I think we have to give credit to our wives for doing the hard work and creating the baby, okay? I was present for a few minutes, I believe, at a certain moment.

But yes, something that is truly never, you know, it's this old question, is math invented or discovered? And our, you know, this difference between, as I said. Well, that's a different question, though, because it's invented versus discovered is a question of whether you feel that, you know, the universe has some inherent principles that you're discovering or whether this is a tool that the human brain is inventing.

But what you asked before was, can you get something from nothing? So does that, I mean, does that mean, if I never, you know, before math was there, somebody, Babylonian, I don't know, invented what we might call the first math, Sumerian, but that's not even coming from nothing because that person had experience of the world and knowledge of the world and at some basis of which to make that jump. So I'm not sure if, as Frank said, it's a well-defined question to say. Well, yeah, I guess I'm riffing off what Deepak said. You know, can you create is a model of the world the same as creating the world? Or I do believe that it's possible for us to destroy the world. I mean, we can destroy things that said. So is there,

is it a ratchet? Is it a one-way unidirectional process? Or does it have symmetry in time? And Frank's, You know, is it a time crystal in some sense? I think we, let me tell you what we can do. Let me interject. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, well, we can produce things that, in a sense, you could consider worlds if your standards are low enough.

I mean, in materials, we can create homes for particles and homes for behaviors that are very different from what we find in the world as we know it. So things with emergent properties that are very different like anions, but also computers in general, or smart materials that do things that are not natural in the sense. You don't find in the natural world. And we can design them. And in that sense, we're making worlds. And I think as time goes on, the things we can make are more and more impressive.

And I don't think it's impossible. I think in fact, I think it's very possible and maybe inevitable that we can make worlds that house intelligences. You know, intelligence. Some people would say we've already done that with computers that beat us at chess and so, but have a more general kind of intelligence. and this would be embodied within some fine of electronics or maybe a quantum computer. In any case, a physical object that's quite different from anything you find in the natural world.

And it's not making something from nothing, but it's making, I don't know, in some sense, more from less or taking concepts and using them to make, to, coax matter to do things that we didn't know it could do. And there's a famous, I think the third law of Arthur C. Clark is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I think that's certainly true. If you took someone even from 100 years ago and brought them to today and showed them around,

they think it was magic or certainly they'd see that things that they couldn't begin to understand. Wow, Instagram. I need this on the farm. And I would be very surprised if 100 years from now, that's still the case. If we went forward, we would see things that our minds would be properly boggled. Hi, everybody, Brian Keating back again with a middle episode reminder to please Take two seconds and leave a small asterism of stars as a rating and maybe even a written review of the Into the Impossible podcast. Even if you give it one star really helps me out.

This is a new year, a new beginning. As you know, January is named after the Roman god Janus, the god of portals, the god of doorways in Roman mythology representing transitions. And dichotomies, dualities, war and peace, beginnings and ends. Coke and Pepsi. And I ask you to help me begin this year off the right way with a review, a rating, a thumbs up, a comment that I promise you I will read and use only for good. Please do that. Please join my mailing list. Just go to briankeating.com. You'll get access to tons of free resources. I'll send you a free e-book, 60 pages in a length, that documents in illustrated fashion, the great debate between astronomy's greatest intellects. Nobel Prize winner Adam

Reese, Wendy Friedman, Sarah Seeger, Jan 11, David Spurgel, and myself held late in 2020 in the 100th anniversary year of astronomy's first great debate, the so-called Curtis Shapley debate. I'll send you more things as your coat goes along and you'll even find out advanced previews for my new upcoming book in 2021. Think like a Nobel Prize winner. Let me know what you think about that title. Join my mailing list. Like, comment, subscribe, do all those good things, and really help me out. Thank you. But before we go to the next question that I have for all of you, let's look at all the books because that's the purpose. In form 15 million people out there that are very important discussions. So Frank, can we look at your book? Fundamentals,

I happen to have a copy here. And we will be a link to. the book, Leonard, your book, what inspired you to write this book? And tell us a few words about your relationship with Stephen. Well, Stephen contacted me 2003, and he had read it my first couple books and asked if he was looking for someone to write with and someone who understood physics and whose writing he liked. And I was certainly blessed and honored that he asked me and through our work first what we did was we rewrote

a brief history of time to make it simpler and clearer really that became a briefer history of time so it was like a new edition and then he used to visit Caltech for about a month every year and I was on the faculty there

and so when he came by the next time after that book was published I gave him a proposal and I said why don't we write a book about your new work because all his other books were always about his work that he did in the 70s and 80s. And I thought he was doing fascinating things in the 2000s. And that took about five years.

And so we worked together closely. That became the book, The Grand Design, and got to be friends. And I have to say, it was one of the most inspiring or moving, life-changing things that ever happened to me to have that association with him. Because he was such a special individual, partly obviously, because of his, grit and his iron will to overcome his disability where he all, you know, had to work so hard just to get words out and it couldn't move or take care of himself. And yet he had a tremendous outlook and sense of humor. But also because as a human, as a person, he had an amazing quality, which is, I think, very important to satisfaction and happiness in life and to thriving

life and that was a sense of purpose. He, I think in his younger years, an undergraduate, he was floating and he was kind of a goof off and he was a brilliant guy but didn't have any particular thing he wanted to do. And when he got sick,

he realized that or he decided that there were some questions that he wanted to answer about the universe. That's how did the universe begin? And why are the laws of nature what they are? And he decided, identity would dedicate what he thought was his last couple years to pursuing that. And that

became decades and decades of that. And I think that really drove him. And that gave him his joy of living and his, you know, looking forward to being up each day and to attacking these problems and to working with other people and how they were looking at it. And that, and, and, and that was an inspiration to me because I, you know, I feel that I have a, I, I found that as well. in science and in as he did in popularizing science and so he he really showed me how you know the Stoic philosophy ancient Stoic philosophy that that you're and it's not far from your philosophy Deepak that that that your your your happiness your satisfaction your your joy or in life comes from within that that you should that that that it's good

if it's not material things that drive you or even other people. It's good to have good relations with other people, but really what you are comes from within yourself. And when you have that, then other things that happen to you don't disturb you where they might disturb you otherwise. And I've certainly learned that from you as well, Deepak. You are about the most calm and peaceful person that I've met.

gone through different periods of things happening and then you're always just a rock and you're always smiling, meditating. So I have to say that's pretty amazing too. So I was lucky enough to have both of you guys in my life and to become enriched by it. So what I have to say is that because of you, I had the good fortune to meet Stephen Hawking in New York when he was flown over for his 70th birthday, we watched that ballet called Icarus. It's about this kid who skirts a black hole and gets lost in just space

and ends up in a different galaxy. And when he ends up in that galaxy, they say, oh, what spaceship is that? That model went out of fashion about a few billion years ago. So, you know, that was an amazing play. and I'm grateful to you that I've met Stephen because of you. Brian has been an inspiration to me because he questions my habitual certainties.

And I think this conversation that we've just had, we could go on forever, and possibly we should. Before we conclude, one of the most interesting parts of Frank's book was his take on complementarity. And I found that very refreshing because I have worked with Menas Capatos who also trained at MIT

a long time ago. Leonard knows him. And Maynass has three principles when he talks about laws, laws of nature. One is universality. Whatever is here is everywhere. The second is complementary.

But the third you might not like is creative interactivity. And the reason I bring that up is you talk in your book about mass, spin, and charge as the most fundamental properties of nature. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. And then you also say, and I'm going to read from your book, I hope, I hope I can find it, you say, modern fundamental ingredients of matter, mass spin, charge have no intrinsic size or shape.

There are structureless points where mass spin and charge reside. So are they material entities? Well, by definition, that's what matter is. And as we've discussed now in different forms several times, it's a big challenge to get, to climb back up. So we do analysis to understand the most basic ingredients of matter. And they turn out to be these very strange things, very unfamiliar things. the mass been in charge located at points or you can in the spirit of complementarity you can also look at it in other ways as quantum fields and then there's the great task of going from those concepts to explain how the more visible aspects of the world arise

and this is the process of analysis and synthesis, and it's a wonderful process that's been fantastically successful. So Dr. Winchay, for a common person like me, I'm not a physicist, I don't understand the math, but for a common person, matter is physical. It's something that I can touch, I can grasp. That's energy and charge don't seem to. be physical entities, but they give rise to physical structures that we look at, including our own bodies.

Could you, would you be sympathetic, just sympathetic to the idea that mass charge and spin are actually principles and processes that govern the interaction? activity of certain very fundamental laws that ultimately give rise to the experience of what we call matter. Yes. Well, I think that's an accurate description of how they actually work. Okay. Well, in that case, your PhD has been granted.

Now you have an MIT PhD. Okay. Well, in that case, I'm going to conclude our talk about the point. The point of these concepts is that they go together. with rules for how you use them, very precise rules for how you use them. And those rules are things that govern how more tangible aspects of matter emerge. So that's absolutely. I totally understood.

So I'm going to just ask you a few questions and just respond yes or no. And feel free, Leonard and Brian to interject. Since we talk about complementarity, Are space and time complementarities? No, space time is a unity of the two, and I don't know of any useful way in which you can regard space and time as complementary. Complementarity in general is the idea that you can describe the same thing in different ways. So space and time are not that.

in sense they're not complementary. They're in a way they're almost the same thing. But in other ways, they're different. So, yeah, I mean, so the answer to your question of yes or no is a complementary answer is yes and no, both depending on how you exactly pose it. That's very quantum. That's very quantum. Yes and no.

In my mind, space-time, wave particle, mass energy, body mind, biological organism, world appearance, conscious, subconscious, science, philosophy. You mentioned humility and philosophy. Humility and self-respect, I think. The most important. Yeah, are all complementarities in my mind because there are different ways of looking at the same entity. I agree. And I disagree with others. But in general, I think the more ways you can look at something and use those viewpoints to answer important questions about that something, the better off you are.

Are free will and determinism complementarities? Absolutely. They are complementary because we experience free will. and free will is a necessary ingredient of the law and the moral codes. But on the other hand, the determinism is built into the equations of how we describe matter very profoundly. And if you ask other kinds of questions about us, since we're made out of matter, you will get determinate answers. Well, I don't agree. I think that free will and determinism are in opposition.

No. So they're not describing the same thing. I think that if you believe in determinism, then there is no free will. There is only an illusion of free will. No, I disagree with that. I believe you do. That's the result, I think, of a much too narrow conception of what free will means. And if you don't, I mean, if you don't believe in free will, how could you have laws that

how do you make a distinction between sanity and insanity? Well, those are all, look, the distinct between insanity and insanity are, you know, whatever, artificial. According to the law, you have to crime if you, it's a, it's a kind of crime. The big bang, the big bang made me do it. The big bang made me do it. I would argue that, if you knew, okay, And if you knew the exact state of the person at a given time and the laws of physics apply,

and as you said yourself, you don't believe anything outside the law of physics applies to the brain, then you would be able to predict in principle what the brain is going to do. Yes, but all those are big ifs. Those are big ifs. First of all, quantum mechanics tells you you can't. I don't want to say if. I'm not saying that you have to see that. I'm saying that for what you say to be true,

then what we call up is of free will because we don't know how the brain is doing the calculation, so it seems like it's free will. But if physics really governs the physical world 100% with no exceptions, then to know everything that there is physically about the brain would allow me to predict the state of the brain at a later time, which would allow me to predict its actions if I could do the calculations. Now, free will is the word

Wait, wait, let me just finish. Free will, I call an effective theory because it's the word we give to it because we can't do that and we can't do the calculations. So it's the illusion of free will because we're not capable of predicting what the system is going to do in the future. No.

But in principle, because we're talking to principle, in principle, there is no free will. It's only in practice that we seem to have free will. Okay. And then what I think is saying is quantum uncertainty actually says that there are problems. No, no, no, no, no. That's dangerous ground. No.

What I'm saying is. Okay. So let's that I'm saying that free will is a concept that stands on its own that is extremely useful and absolutely necessary. I agree. If you're dealing with your own experience or. with the law or with many moral concepts. So it's a concept we need. Saying it's an illusion does not, is, I think, very wrong because it's not an illusion.

It's a thing that really applies in the world in very concrete circumstances. And we can discuss why it's a useful concept on the basis of even though the underlying description, at some level is using determinate equations. First of all, we don't, we, so if you had a complete description of the human being, you could predict their behavior, but you can't have a complete description. We can't, we can't get the way, it's not just a matter of practicality, we can't. The way function has much too much structure. If you measure it, you lose that structure.

Interaction. And even, and there are severe practical problems. calculating the behavior of any complex object, even in classical mechanics, there's sensitivity to initial conditions, sometimes called chaos. And that's a practical problem that's so severe that it's a problem with principle, because it would take you so much time and so many resources to calculate how something behaves, that you would use up the entire universe and all its time and all its matter.

You can't actually do it. You also need to know the way for the way. So we need, in practice, we need concepts. And this is the essence of complementarity. You need alternative concepts in order to describe the world. And it won't do this. I'm not saying that they're not useful.

you don't need them to describe the world. Just like your brain calculates, as you said earlier, an illusion. It creates a reality for you from the data that comes to your eyes. So I agree with all that. But what's dangerous about talking about for you all the way you're doing it is the people who don't understand physics who think that the randomness of the wave function and the different ways that a wave function can be.

He didn't say that. He said the interactions with the... Please let me just finish. Please let me just finish. different ways of the way function can be measured, those different outcomes. When you attach them to free will, it seems like our decisions that might be based on good and evil somehow are not, are being determined by the physics. And what I'm saying is all that is determined by the equations. We can't predict what the outcome of the equations are.

And yes, when you measure something in quantum mechanically, you can get different answers with different probabilities, but those are totally independent and have nothing to do with what we think of as the decisions of humans, such as good and evil. and things like that. So I have to be really careful when you use that concept. Yes. Well, in any application of complementarity, and this is one, you have to treat the different sides within their own context and within their own domain.

And applying the idea that human beings are determinate and there's nothing you can do because it's the way you were born, it's your way function, would make a mess of the law. and morality. And on the other hand, saying that mind can affect matter and you can, by wishing, make it so, and do faith healing,

I think those also are very wrong. So when you apply complementarity, you have to be, you have to be true to the idea that, Different concepts are important for answering different kinds of questions, and neither one exhausts the full reality. Brian, any last comments from you before I have the last word? To say that I have to believe in free will because I have no other choice. Thank you, guys. That was really fun.

No, no, no. Don't go. I want to have the last word, and then I want everyone to maybe comment, maybe. if you want to. But I do want to have the last word right now because, first of all, I want to say that this was a very illuminating conversation for me. I continue to learn from all of you.

Dr. Wilczek quoted Wittgenstein in his book. See, Frank, I read your book. I read every sentence. Wittgenstein is a favorite philosopher of mine. And also, you know, I've been a fan of Schrodinger and his interest in the origins of life. And right now we are in a very interesting phase of questioning everything, including Darwinian evolution. Here we are.

This is the latest issue of, not the latest, but a new issue of a new scientist, which questions some of the dogmas of, you know, random mutations in natural selection. So we are in a very interesting time. But it was Wittgenstein, who said in one of his essays, our life is a dream. We are asleep. But once in a while, we wake up enough to know that we are dreaming. So I come from a tradition,

I come from a tradition, which is the exact opposite of what we've been discussing. What we've been discussing is matter as the ontological primitive of the universe. And that's an assumption. You have to start with an assumption. Anything starts with an assumption. So matter is the ontological primitive of the universe is the way we do science. And it works.

No question. That's right. Didn't have to work. No, it predicts the outcomes of experiments. Let's say that. And it creates technology, which saves our lives. and so on. But also the way we've done science,

we've created climate change, we've created cyber hacking, we've created extinction of species, we've poisoned the food chain, on and nuclear weapons. And nuclear weapons. And we are basically on a collective suicide mission at the moment.

If we don't wake up to climate change and all this, even the pandemic, you know, we say it's a mutation, but it's linked to the, this biosis of the genetic information of our planet, which is due to, I think, can be connected to climate change as well. So in any case, in your book, you also mention species-specific experiences. A bat only knows the echo of ultrasound. Bees navigate through ultraviolet. And insect with a hundred eyes, I don't know what it sees or what it experiences. on and on.

I can look at every species and look at it as having a bandwidth of experience. The human bandwidth of experience is less than 1% of the visual spectrum. Acoustic... Or acoustic... No, but you're missing an important...

No, no, we can extend that through instruments. We can... Yeah, through instruments, we can... ...imper red and radio waves and all of the... We can know what... We can know what we don't know and then we can do something about it. Absolutely. But all this begins with the mode of knowing and experience in human consciousness.

Science is an activity in human consciousness. Mathematics is an activity in human consciousness. I think of mathematics as unbelievable, amazing imagination in consciousness that somehow corresponds to the physical laws of nature. Then you have Gerdel's theorem, which says there are laws that can't be proved. Then you have the cosmological constant, which is way off. But then you have dark energy, dark matter. So we have lots of issues to solve.

Now, I come from a tradition which says that the ontological primitive of the universe is not matter. That matter is a human construct. for modes of knowing and experience in human consciousness that even the brain and the body and the physical world are a unified experience that we call mind, brain, body, and universe, but in fact these are human constructs for modes of knowing and experience only in human consciousness. So when Einstein said the moon would still be there

was when no one was looking at it, I think he meant a human moon, not the moon of a horseshoe crab that comes from the depths of the ocean to the surface, lays eggs on a full-bun night, and birds come to feed on it with exact precision of ecosystems, weather patterns, biological phenomena, gravitational waves, the Earth spinning on its axis and hurtling through space at thousands of miles and are. All of this is correlated somewhere and therefore what we call the scientific universe is a totally human construct and a very useful bottle that takes us closer to truth. But what truth is is a great mystery still. Well, there are many things we don't know, but there are also things, there's a lot we do know. Yes, but who's the we that seeks to know? I would say, you want us to comment on this? Well, I can speak for myself.

I want to talk to. Why is the experience of a caterpillar less legitimate than the experience of a human being through a human nervous system? Well, I just want to, I would just go back to what I've went through at some length before, which is that so far, we've never had to make allowances in very, very delicate experiments for what people are thinking. But I still don't know what produces not.

If any such effect could be demonstrated, well, would be fascinating, would win several Nobel prizes and fame and fortune. So there's an outstanding challenge. Do it if you think that mind can affect matter. Show me. Every time I lift my arm, mind is affecting matter. Well, but, oh no, but that, well, we, mind, yes, mind is affecting matter, but we can trace how that works.

Yeah, we can trace that. Mind is working through matter to do affect me. Right now, we are having a concept. conversation. And if this conversation was scary, everybody in the world who was watching us, their cortisol levels would go up. Their immune system would be compromised. If this conversation elicited awe and wonder and joy, they would make serotonin and dopamine and all this. So I personally feel that the distinction between mind and matter is actually is an artificial distinction. There are complementarities of a deeper reality.

So that could be... Can you believe in pan-psychism? No, pan-psychism assumes the existence of matter. What I'm talking about says matter is the illusion. Even mind is the illusion. There's a deeper reality that experiences itself as mind and matter, and these are complementarities of that deeper reality is. And we don't know what that reality is. other than mass charge and spin.

Deepak, when you say that you raise your hand, I don't agree with the part that says it's your free will that caused your hand. No, I didn't say free will. It's an intention. Your intention, your free will, it's not, it's still explainable by physics. But what I agree with, and this is, I think, the deeper part of what you are saying, is that I agree with you completely that, in a sense, that I don't say that matter, charge, spin is any truth or any fundamental, necessarily fundamental

aspect of the universe. It is a construction of these concepts and the theories that we build from them are constructions of a human mind that is peculiar to the way our mind is constructed. Intelligent aliens who have a different kind of a mind, maybe a horseshoe crap, but much more intelligent or a bat could construct their theory of the universe using completely different concepts, I believe, come up with the same usefulness of their equations and their predictions. They would sense, they would perceive things differently, but they could have a completely different viewpoint, just as, you know, in physics, for instance, Feynman's formulation of

quantum theory is different from Heisenberg and one Schrodinger's formulation. They could have completely different mathematics based on different concepts that we may not be able to comprehend it or maybe beyond us or just different from the way we're. That's a placerus. But if both descriptions have the same experimental consequences. Right. They're equivalent in a very specific sense. And yes, I think they could, but they might not have anything that we would call mass charge and spin that's easily identifiable in their theory. Well, it's not logically impossible, but all I can say is lots of luck.

We were going to... I think at some point we have to conclude... I don't spend a person in. Sorry. At some point, we have to conclude unless we want to have another conversation. Let me ask all of you, Frank, I've been reading Sean Carroll's book. something deeply hidden. He posits infinite universes,

almost, you know, multiverses and infinity universes. Leonard in his book, Grand Design, mentioned MTRI and possibly 10 to the 100 universes. Brian, I don't know what your take is. What do you guys think of these models? I asked Sean that. I'm sorry, go ahead, Frank. Well, I think they're very speculative.

They are inspired by physical phenomena, but they don't explain a lot, and their consequences are rather nebulous, so they are not part of the core of our understanding of the universe. They're interesting speculations and fun, but to me, they're not the center of interest. in physics or our fundamental understanding. Yeah, I've researched this a lot in terms of trying to find the complementarity between physics and faith. And I found many, many faith-based statements that assume these to be correct, including based on my conversation with Len last week, that Stephen Hawking sort of went to his grave, as far as I understand, believing in the veracity of M theory for which there's currently

a complete absence of experimental data. And so I find it interesting that in Frank's book, he talks about this, how this, this is the interesting aspect of the complementarity of the multitudes within us and the and sort of the humility that we also have to have as manifest through, you know, understanding the limits of our knowledge, but also, as I say, checking your biases because we do have this anthropomorphization fetishization. And I think I want to particularly be on guard about that. So I am very anti-multivariari. I did ask. Sean, I said, what's the probability that God exists? He said, less than 1%. I said, what's the probability that the multiverse or the many worlds of Everett exist? And he said, 50-50. By the way,

in the Indian philosophical system that I'm talking about, there's no room for God as a person. But there is room for God as pure consciousness that differentiates into different modes of knowing, different

modes of knowing, different knowers and different modalities known that are species specific. No one species has a privilege to truth over the others. We have the privilege of creating better models of the truth. I'd love to debate that from today a Christian perspective. And technologies that extend our experience of virtual reality. You're already in a virtual reality. And now with technology, we're expanding that with all the wonderful insights that you guys are supplying. I'd just like to conclude with a quote from Rumi.

He says, if you're not bewildered by now, go back to sleep. Elsewhere, he says, exchange your cleverness for bewilderment. And I think the scientific pursuit is based on mystery, bewilderment, awe, and if we don't have those, we are humanity is incomplete. And as long as we keep questioning, every theory of science so far has proved to be untrue. And every theory so far has been bound to be incomplete. Incomplete, yes. But as Isaac Asimov said, Deepak, never forget what Isaac Asimov said.

He said, if you think the world is flat, you're wrong. But if you think the world is perfectly spherical, you're also wrong, but you're less wrong than if you think it's flat. Yeah, but you see the magical illusion of the flat earth makes it possible for me to walk on the earth. If I knew it's spinning at dizzying speeds and hurtling through space and thousands of miles and are, and I knew that my body is proportionately as void as intergalactic space, I wouldn't have a life. No, not after you get your PhD from MIT with Frank. After you get that, no more worries, no neuroses.

You would. I mean, you can perfectly well get around. And I think these scientific insights about the world's spinning around and moving add to our understanding of reality. They don't replace or void our working models of how to get around in the world that we construct as babies. they add to it. Add to it, but they also...

And my mission in fundamentals is to expand people's minds, not to feed anything into that. I'm grateful to you for that. But I also believe that what we call physical matter and the world of perceptions is a magical line, period. It's a very workable and interesting magical line.

We need a part two. I'm late for dinner. I'm going to bring a bottle of Scott. The gentleman, everyone listening to us, Dr. Wilczak, he's a very humble person. He could have named the Anion the Wilcheck particle, but he didn't. So I'm grateful to you, sir, for your humility. Leonard, for being so open to these conversations, and Brian, for bringing us together. And all these wonderful meetings with that,

with Sir Roger Penrose, Stuart Hammerov, and all these great people who are bringing us closer to truth. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishing from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to

Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, Dr. Brian Keating. D.R. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to imagination.ucsd. E.U. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director.

Produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Balco.