Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Hawking Hawking! The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity with NYU Prof. Charles Selfe (#145)

Starting point is 00:00:02 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome everybody to this special episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. I'm your fearful host, Professor Brian Keating at University of California, San Diego's Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. And today we have a very special guest, New York University professor Charles Seif, joining us all the way from the East Coast somewhere, although it's hard to tell out the window. The view isn't quite as good as it is here in San Diego. But Charles, how are you? Where are you joining us from today? I'm great.

Starting point is 00:00:46 I'm in the suburbs of New York right now. My house is under renovation. So I'm actually in my mother's attic, believe in. Well, it's just a return to normalcy in these wonderful pandemic podcasting times. I want to thank you, first of all, for coming on the show. And second of all, for doing a service to physicists in particular. We're going to go deep. We're going to nerd out.

Starting point is 00:01:09 And that is to discuss your wonderful new book, Hawking Hawking, which comes in the heels of very many scientific journeys in so-called popular writing. This one is from basic books, a fine imprint. And I've devoured the book. I have it in at least two different forms, but I have two copies of the hard copy. One copy of the Kindle, and soon to get the audible book as well, it comes out next month in June. We'll probably time the podcast to come out around that time. loved all your writings and so far that I followed you. Let me ask you a question. You're a professor of journalism, correct? How does a journalist know so much about science that he or she can talk

Starting point is 00:01:50 about four-dimensional wick rotations and talk about Penrose diagrams in the difference between a penrose diagram for a black hall versus a penrose diagram for a singularity in the big... How do you come to this level of intellectual parapetitism? Well, I had a strange path as a journalist. I actually trained as a mathematician. When I was an undergraduate, I always thought I was going to be a PhD mathematician. I actually switched from physics to mathematics. Long story there. So I thought I was going to do pure math, and I was studying. I went to graduate school. I picked up an NSF grant for supercomputer time, and I came up with a thesis that I could do.

Starting point is 00:02:40 And I was realizing that, you know, with Moore's law, if I hold off for six years, it would just solve itself. So I was kind of depressed that, okay, so my entire corpus of work was just buying some time. And I happened at the time also to get a, I liked writing. So I got a internship at the economist to do science journalism. And I went over there for a few months and I said, forget this math thing. I found my calling. And so I spent my life writing about math and science, physics in particular, was my real passion for, because as a journalist kind of understanding. I can't say I have a total understanding since I'm not embedded in the physics.

Starting point is 00:03:29 but having that extra level of knowledge really gave me a leg up. And it's an exciting time, as you yourself know, how cool this stuff that we've learned in the past 20 years. Yeah, it's really a golden age, not only for scientific journalism, but for science itself, especially in cosmology. And many of the topics and subjects you talk about in this book, which has a wonderful name called Hawking, Hawking, the selling of a scientific celebrity. publish April 6 by basic books, as I said. And we have a lot of friends and contacts in common.

Starting point is 00:04:05 And I love the book. And I said, I thank you because I had on a character who's in the book, Leonard Mladnow, on this podcast about six months ago to discuss his book on Stephen Hawking, A Memoir of Friendship. And, of course, you know, that's a delightful book. And he's waxing rhapsodically about his late great colleague and friend. But during that conversation, I revealed to him that I had heard Stephen Hawking speak in 1995 at a Royal Academy meeting. I happened to be in London, and I said, how often do we get a chance to hear Stephen Hawking? And so I lie in these streets like a rock concert that you describe in this book whenever he would speak. And this is kind of at the height of his fame, just a few years after the book that looms large in your book, Hawking,

Starting point is 00:04:48 Hawking is a brief history of time. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about that. But I remember going there and listening to the talk. And that was back when he could respond in what I call quasi real time where you could ask a question after a lecture and it didn't have to be submitted ahead of time. A young person asked him a question, Professor Hawking, I have a question, why did you write a brief history of time? It's rumored that no one who has bought it has actually read it cover to cover and that nobody understands it. Why did you write this book? And he said very, and I'll never forget, he said, because my daughter needed to pay for boarding school. And I laughed, everybody laughed. But I remember talking to a Malad now, and I said, if I was writing a book,

Starting point is 00:05:26 this is before I knew about your book, Charles, I would be called Hawking Incorporated, but I actually prefer your title better. But I realize he's a businessman, as Jay-Z would say. He's not just a businessman. He's a business man. And he had to have an industry. But I came away from that conversation a little bit more sympathetic to Stephen because I learned he had to be turned over in the middle of the night, you know, for basically most of his life, his tracheostomy would clog. He would choke to death almost every day or, you know, the danger loomed large. So I want to ask you first. First of all, you validated that story in the book.

Starting point is 00:06:01 So it's not just my senior moments, you know, that he did actually say that explicitly on numerous occasions, as he would often do. And what's wonderful about your scholarship. And this book has got 30 pages worth of footnotes, basically, and references. It's a work of scholasticism. that actually is very good, Charles, for physics majors. And I'm going to give this to physics majors. I've actually given it to one of my primary students already, because it's actually a great book for treating subjects in black hole physics,

Starting point is 00:06:29 and gravitational physics and learning the history, as we often don't. I want to ask you, though, it must have taken a lot of courage to pitch a critical biography of basically a man who's been elevated to the status of saint, not so much within physics, but within the billions of people, who found him to be the most recognizable scientist. How challenging was it for you to write a criticism of a saint, anti-hagiography, I guess you'd call it? And have you faced any blowback since that time? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Well, I think I went into this a little naively. I mean, I knew that Hawking had this symbolism that was great. And I knew that trying to talk about the real person behind the symbolism was not going to be popular in some circles. But I had spoken over the years to people within the cosmology community, within the physics community, who would talk frankly about Hawking's place in their universe. And so I thought that it wouldn't be so hard to write this up in such a way where people were, people would frankly just talk about him and celebrate him as a person. And it turned out to be a lot harder than that, because you're absolutely right, that it is like going and kicking the shins of Mother Teresa in some ways.

Starting point is 00:08:00 Even though I mean, I tried very hard not to make it a hatchet job, not to kind of wallow in the bad parts of his personality. All of us have parts of their personality that if you had a biography, or go after you'd probably be embarrassed about. I mean, that's human nature. But at first, I actually had a bit of difficulty selling it. It took a while to kind of... Fewer publishers were interested than I'm expected. And it's actually the first book that I have done with Basic.

Starting point is 00:08:34 Everything else I've done has been with Viking. So there was that. And then people I've spoken to over... the years and have been very frank about kind of their work and Hawking's work and all that would just refuse to speak to me, even once I've had very good relationships with him the past. And I think it's not just people who were close friends with him and want to preserve that image, but it's also his antagonists who really didn't want to look like they were getting into the slugging match,

Starting point is 00:09:08 especially after this symbol, symbol, he died not so long ago. It was tragic, and to speak badly of the dead. You know, I wasn't trying to elicit the dirt. It was really just trying to get at who he was. And who he was is so much more interesting than kind of a symbol. As I hope we all are. I mean, we're all more than character.

Starting point is 00:09:34 And of course, you know, his character was intimately connected to his disability, to his ALS. disease. And in that sense, it's not only speaking about the dead, it's, it's, you know, you risk all sorts of pushback and blowback, perhaps, because you're criticizing someone with profound disabilities who overcame them despite this death sentence at an early age. But what I, what I found so, so delightful about the book is that you don't, you don't treat him with pity. And in fact, I think you treat him with respect. And to assess his legacy with respect is I think on the highest honors one can afford. And I just want to salute you for doing that, for having the courage to write this book. And I'm sure there has been, because there is basically this industry,

Starting point is 00:10:22 now that he's gone, you know, it's ramped up even more. I mean, we did a special episode of the Into the Impossible podcast, which I'll put a link, I think it'll appear up here, the link to it with my colleague, Dr. Dr. Doctor, he's a real doctor, and he's also a PhD, Eric Viri, who's the director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, he and Peter Diamandis, who was also a guest on the podcast and who appears in the book, they were the flight surgeon, so to speak, for his Stephen's Zero Gravity Flight, which you recount in the book. And we did an episode right after he passed away, and I've done multiple episodes, including with his late friend, he's not late, thank God, Roger Penrose, who's become a good friend of the show. And we actually talked about whether or not, you know, Stephen would have garnered a Nobel Prize in the recent Nobel Prize that was offered this past year.

Starting point is 00:11:12 And of course, I've spoken out against the Nobel Prize as another form of hagiography. It does appear in your book many times. But I want to first turn to Stephen as a physicist. And then we can get into Stephen as a writer because actually I'm a little bit more, you know, now impressed by Stephen's books. First of all, it came out when you and I were in high school, basically, and that book, A Brief History of Time, really was an inspiration for many physicists to go into physics and to learn more about it. But I do feel like there has been a fast one pulled over not only most of the scientific community, who, you know, every 20 years you have to go back and rewrite all of

Starting point is 00:11:52 scientific history, right? But also on the public. And that is that the main goal that Stephen had was twofold in his life, as I see it, at least with regard to theology. He wanted to invalidate or inviscerate the need for a God, and he did so in two ways. One was that he claimed the two roles that God had would be to initiate the universe and then instantiate physics. So you can think of creating this Sim City and then giving it rules and laws. And those are the two things. In a brief history of time, he claims he utterly devastates the need for God to initiate the the universe and in a grand design, he eviscerates the need to have a God to instantiate the laws of physics. Where was he wrong in the first instance of a brief history of time, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:43 invalidating the need for God to create time? Where is that argument off the rails from a physics perspective or mathematician's perspective? Yeah. Well, again, I'll say that, again, I'm a journalist and not a physicist. So to... Nobody's perfect, Charles. Nobody's perfect. Well, one would say that being a journalist is far more imperfect than other people. So, yeah, I mean, the taking down the no boundary hypothesis, I, I, let's put it this way. I mean, I, when I was reporting on cosmology daily, I didn't really encounter very many people who took it seriously.

Starting point is 00:13:34 In the sense that the, I mean, I never really got a sense of whether it was because it required this whole different mechanism, the mathematical formalism that people weren't comfortable with, which is a lot of the excuse that I got. Or whether they really just didn't buy it as a whole. And I never really formed an opinion external to that, but I just got the sense that it was not mainstream. And I guess that feeling kind of, I picked up that feeling. And in fact, actually, in reporting this book, I spoke to some people who are much more diehard about it than most others. And I mean, what they said to me is that, I mean, even they really did. didn't buy the details because when you look at it, and Neil Turok told me, kind of the more you look at the fine parts of what the No Boundary Proposal was, there's less there there.

Starting point is 00:14:40 That the, it, it kind of dissipates into a mist as you try to kind of borrow down into the details. But the people who admire it do say that it was really kind of a bold attempt to do exactly As you're saying, but in more mathematical terms, it's to kind of have to sidestep the whole question of determining boundary conditions. And the theological interpretation, of course, got hawking into trouble with philosophers whom he was battling with all his life. I'm still of the mindset that, I mean, it isn't mainstream.

Starting point is 00:15:21 I don't think it really answers much. Later in his life, he kind of was using, because some of the most elegant elements of the no-boundary assumptions, like all these universes had to be compact, blew up later on. And so he was relying more and more upon fixes and clutches and anthropism to fix it all. And it just seemed less and less elegant to me. So do I have the physics chop to say, no, this is garbage? I would not claim that, but it is less and less appealing over time, especially as the kind of initial simplicity dies to fix it, to fix the problems that he was finding. Especially, I mean, not least of which, the initial version kind of forced a big crunch. That because of the compactification, all the universes had to be compact, you had to have a closure.

Starting point is 00:16:18 And Turok showed that that wasn't true, but. that was a prediction, and it failed. And so, I mean, I have a lot less confidence in things that get. Yeah, I mean, the most damning condemnation of the trick, which my very astute audience will be familiar with is a property of analytic, you know, calculus and analytic geometry called a WIC rotation. And actually the most damning condemnation of it is Hawking's word similious. himself. So I quote, in any, from a brief history of time, in any case, as far as everyday quantum mechanics is concerned, we may regard our use of imaginary time and Euclidean space time as merely a mathematical device or trick to calculate answers about real space time. And you have such a

Starting point is 00:17:09 delightful approach to this. You constantly remind the reader that he was calling this a trick. And then you further reinforce it by saying calling it imaginary space and imaginary, and imaginary time, rather than space time, which is what all physicists work in. So, physicists abhor a trick as much as nature abhors a vacuum, about which Hawking also had much to say. I might dispute that, actually. And in fact, this goes partially to why I went to mathematics rather than physics, because I was in quantum mechanics, and all these functions they were integrated, they said, Well, it's zero because it's an odd function, but it goes to infinity and not to infinity. And so it's really non-integrable.

Starting point is 00:18:00 My head was exploding over the tricks that were used. Obviously, the mathematics held up if you did it. He was trying to save us some steps. But, yeah, I mean, tricks are accepted when they work. Yeah, that's true. Feynman, who plays a huge role in the book, too, sort of a foil for Gelman and a foil for when Hawking

Starting point is 00:18:24 interacted, although Hawking had great respect for Feynman. I don't know if the converse was necessarily exactly true. But yes, this WIC rotation, this tricky wicket, sticky tricky wicket. I don't know how to say it, but the point

Starting point is 00:18:40 is you do this WIC rotation and then you transform the time dimension effectively into a space dimension, which allows you to overlay a metric on it, and then you're able to do Feynman Path integration, which only works in Euclidean signature metrics or in Minkowski space, if you like. And so you're absolutely right. And so none of my physicist colleagues apply this. I don't know a single physicist who applies, you know, WIC rotations and the Hawking Hardle-No

Starting point is 00:19:05 Boundary, you know, conjecture as anything other than, you know, a curiosity that led to the fame of Stephen Hawking in some sense, if they know it at all. And in fact, I didn't read, I didn't finish a brief history of Ty started when I was 18, and I didn't finish it until two years ago, because I felt like he was such a towering figure. And I know one thing about the book, I feel like it's very well written. I feel like even though you make this patch writing and readers should read what that means. And Charles, you're really the best person in the world, I think, who can comprehend, you know, not at the full level of a theoretical physicist, or though that's not me either. I'm a simple experimentalist. But at the level of a journalist, looking at, like, well, is this plagiarism? Can you plagiarize yourself? All these things I found incredibly interesting. But I leave that to the readers to enjoy on their own. But just from a lay audience reading perspective, now taking off my professional physicist hat, he is a delightful writer. And it's impossible not to detach his mischievous mercurial nature. But of course, people didn't know the real him. And in fact, I brought this. up with Paul Steinhart, who's another character of figures heavily in this book. Paul's a mentor and a friend of mine, two-time guest on The Into the Impossible podcast. And I actually never knew about their embattled feud. And actually, earlier this year, Paul and I were talking, I had given a talk at the Simon's Foundation, and Paul and I had been talking about, well,

Starting point is 00:20:36 what is this state of affairs in, you know, in kind of the multiverse, you know, perspective, which Paul is vehemently against. And I said, well, here's what Hawking's, said in edition three, he talked about the Hawking Hardle theorem. He talked about the no boundary, and that's more than ever people are becoming to see that it's to be taken seriously. This is in 2016, so after Bicep 2, the inflation claim was retracted, et cetera. And he says, and then in the grand design, which he references obliquely in the second or third edition of brief history of time that I read, he says that that's taken even more seriously than ever. Now, that's step two in his evisceration of God. Let's talk about that.

Starting point is 00:21:16 The grand design, what was the purpose there? It was to, in my mind, invalidate the need for a God to instantiate the laws of physics. What is the perspective that you bring or that you discovered in the writing of this book? How seriously is that approach taken the invocation of M theory to accomplish these very, very lofty goals of instantiating the laws of physics itself? At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is our scene. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep and sudden belief in extraterrestrials.

Starting point is 00:22:05 No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Yeah. Hawking's own interest in M-theory was really not. not deep, that he got into it late and was more or less dragged, kicking and screaming into it because of some results which were butting up against what he was doing. Really, that's when he truly engaged with it. He, at the time, he was writing brief history of time, and we're talking mid-80s, he was an

Starting point is 00:22:46 an equal eight super gravity person. And he was always a gravitational physicist. He was not, he had picked up field theories and such. I mean, during his time at Caltech, he was immersed in that sort of area, but he was still a gravitational physicist at heart. And I think until the, The Witten work, he really got interested when N-E-Quilverity really got interested when N-E-E-Colven supergravity really gave you this insight into all of string theory, M-thory. So, and then he basically tasked his graduate students to learn it for him and bring him up to speed.

Starting point is 00:23:44 He used it himself to kind of shore up some of the problems, which the No Boundary theorem was showing, the fact that he had to kind of bring in the anthropic principle and reject the idea of a compact universe. and the idea of multiversism really appealed to him because he could really I think he re-envisioned the no boundary his gestalt

Starting point is 00:24:23 in in the language of M theory. But I don't I never got the sense that it was fundamental to his thinking about it. And honestly, if you look at the grand design, it is not that dissimilar from a brief history of time.

Starting point is 00:24:39 Just updated a little bit with a vocabulary changed to a more modern version. At least that's my take on it. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, uh, Dr. Bladena would, would argue that there's something more deep to it. And I, and certainly he, he, um, has the perspective of 20 years of fighting over this. And his, uh, attacks on philosophy, which again got him in deep trouble in the press, uh, reflect that. But honestly, I don't think the fundamental nature of his arguments were changing. It just took on a slightly different cast. I look at him, you know, the, I don't know how familiar you are with biblical Hebrew.

Starting point is 00:25:25 But the word Israel in Hebrew, the word itself means one who fights with God. In other words, you're wrestling with God. You're saturated with it because Jacob, the legend goes, you know, wrestled with an angel. and then his name was changed from Yaakov, Jacob, to Israel, and that means because he fought and wrestled and prevailed with God, meaning that one should struggle with God. It's almost a definition. So I made a joke to Leonard Maladna, who is, you know, at least culturally, biologically Jewish, if not a theist himself. I made a joke that, you know, I believe that Stephen was deeply Jewish because he struggled so much with God, and it's really saturated in his writing is replete with God.

Starting point is 00:26:08 I wonder if you can give a perspective on that. Although at different times in both your book and Leonard's most recent book, there really is an impression that I get that he would pay lip service to God. I mean, it was rumored that he said, you know, every equation in your book reduces the readership by half. Every mention of God doubles the number of sales that you make, and we all must hustle our books. and it's still his book, Brief History of Time, remains a bestseller, and it's really unparalleled in popularity. And yet, the end of the book ends with this invocation of the deity and saying things. If we come up with a theory of everything, which he ultimately did not do, although he was never close. He was never even working in that field that would unify all these laws together, and we'll get to that.

Starting point is 00:26:57 But the end of the book is if we can get to a theory of everything, then we will truly know the mind of God. And actually, that does double duty because just last week I interviewed Mitch Yokaku and his book, The God Equation. So, you know, Charles, if mentioning God once in your book doubles the sales, what about, you know, the title of the book? If it has God in it, come on. Yeah, there's a God particle. Yeah. So if you can, as a physicist, link your idea to a deity, I'm not sure whether Zoroastro would work. But, yeah, I think it does help.

Starting point is 00:27:31 And I, I, one of the things I wanted to find out is actually whether he himself pens that last line. And I was not able to get. Ah, that was my question. Yes, did he do that or did his editor? So some people say in the YouTube comments below that you'll see on previous comments, and I'm sure on this video as well, my audience is the most astute in all the multiverse, if I believed in such things. But, yes, they say, no, he was forced to by his editor and Bantam, you know, kind of did.

Starting point is 00:27:59 And there were various times that even Lennon. you know, makes the case that, yeah, he would change things here and there. But more than that, I think testifying to his ultimate, you know, kind of prominence is that not only did he invoke the name of God, but other physicists would invoke the name of Hawking. Most recently, a guest on the show, Leonard Suskind, who not only, like Leonard Mallad now, these, you know, theoretical, you know, particle physicists love to cite Stephen Hawking in the title of their books. So Leonard had, of course, written many books. Leonard Millad now wrote several, co-wrote

Starting point is 00:28:33 some of the books with Stephen Hawking in his later years. Some say he played a role in the brief history of time. Is there any truth to that? I don't believe that. Yeah, I don't think so either. And then Leonard Suskin invokes the name of Hawking. Now, I want to turn to this statement that everything

Starting point is 00:28:51 it said that we know about Stephen Hawking is wrong. In his lifetime, I'm reading from the publicity, for this book, this wonderful book, Hawking, Hawking, available now from basic books, talking to the author who I feel is a kindred spirit, and I salute his courage. Hawking was widely seen as a genius on par with Newton. But in reality, he was by no means the greatest physicist of his day.

Starting point is 00:29:14 His early work on Black Holes was groundbreaking. But Charles Seif, professor at MIU, today's guest, argues much of his later work failed to measure up to its promise, and physicists like Roger Penrose ultimately deserve more credit than Hawking. Walk us through that. Was he at any point in time, was he anywhere near the stature of a Newton, an Einstein, whose birthday he shares his death day with, and other characters in the history of physics? Yeah, I mean, saying you're no Newton is not really an insult to physicists. I mean, there aren't very many people who could stand up to Newton, who created an entire field

Starting point is 00:29:55 in a mathematical framework to do it. And to a lesser extent, although almost equally significant, Einstein, who also was struggling with creating a mathematical framework underneath it all, and also fundamental contributions to both relativity and quantum mechanics at the same time, and really a liminal figure. So saying that Hawking is no Newton or Einstein's, that is kind of like a well-dug. But for the fact that his fame, to a large extent, rested on that comparison. He, while at the same time, he would hold it at arm's length, and he was very explicit.

Starting point is 00:30:38 I am no Newton. I am no Einstein. I'm not Galileo. He would always bring up in a sideways way of these comparisons. His biographies, which he approved in his, would compare him to Einstein and Newton. He held the Lucasian chair, so he had the intellectual kind of the imprimatur of the same people who gave it to Newton. And his, I mean, he always used to say his birthday was on the same day as Galileo 300 years earlier. And he doesn't believe in metamacosis. I mean, he doesn't, but that sort of stuff. I mean, it goes back to, was it, Pythagoras who claimed he was.

Starting point is 00:31:23 the reincarnation of a Trojan hero. I mean, the idea of this kindred spirit goes back. So while pushing it away, he was very clever at claiming it. And his, I mean, his gravestone, another question which I was trying to get, did he design his gravestone or not, or did he describe the motto? Because it is in English exactly the same as what is on Newton's, grave just a few yards. Here lies what was, is mortal of Stephen Hawkins or Isaac Newton in Latin.

Starting point is 00:32:02 So, yeah, so that's not much of an insult. One of the biggest insults that, I mean, I think probably one of the things that in reading were views of his books that probably heard him the most was a colleague of his, someone who is kind of an academic sibling, had the same PhD advisor. John Barrow basically savaged him after his Hawking's big discoveries of Hawking radiation and all that, and said that none of it would survive, that it was not going to be looked at in future generations. And there's some truth to that partially. I mean, he was living in a quasi-classical, a semi-classical realm, which he knew at the very beginning was wrong.

Starting point is 00:32:53 some fundamental level. And I mean, he knew that Hawking radiation was real in the same way. I mean, but he knew that he was working with a theory that was going to, I mean, his mathematical framework was not complete in a way that would give him lasting fame like Newton or Einstein. There was not that mathematical breakthrough. And I also would argue that a lot of the, I mean, Hawking got a lot of the glory. But the person who

Starting point is 00:33:27 really started the chain reaction that led to Hawking Radiation ultimately goes back to Penrose. And he had a mathematical insight. Maybe this is the mathematician in me, but kind of understanding

Starting point is 00:33:43 the application of some novel mechanism to get this great insight. And Penrose's insight was the singularity at that a black hole collapsing must have a singularity. And you did it using topological arguments that hadn't been used before. And it opened up this whole field.

Starting point is 00:34:03 And Hawking, to his credit, this was not trivial. I mean, it was really interesting to apply that to the birth of the universe. And for, and he did it, the way everyone talked about is he realized that reversing time was, if you see a black hole collapse in reverse, it's a big bang. But there's some mathematical issues that need to be sorted out to make those equivalent. And Penrose was saying his real insight was not this time reversal, but making that mathematical structure works so that he could show that it applied as well. And so, I mean, I think that was a real insight, and it was important.

Starting point is 00:34:52 But by its nature, it was overshadowed by the father of that field. So one has to kind of look at his achievements. It's not in a vacuum. It's not like he's this lone genius who appears. And voila, there's this novel idea out there, which, I mean, Newton, you have an argument that there is some. Einstein even less so. I mean, I think if Einstein weren't born, I mean, Juan Corre was going around the edges.

Starting point is 00:35:26 Would it have appeared 10 years later? Probably. Yeah. Helbert. Helbert. Yeah. Similarly, like, if you took out Hawking, if Hawking disappeared, how would physics be different today? And that's a really good question.

Starting point is 00:35:42 I'm not sure it would be that much different. Because, I mean, you have UNRWA radiation. Davies and UNRWA were there like three or four years later. And that's really equivalent in some ways. And Beckenstein, as you point out, was there two years before him, right? Or five years before, many years before, right? Yeah, the fundamental idea was Beckenstein's. But to be fair, Beckenstein couldn't bring it to completion.

Starting point is 00:36:08 He just couldn't finish that up. But yeah, I guess the question is, I mean, for somebody like a hawking, how, you know, I mean, how reasonable is this? So one thing I have, and maybe we'll switch to this, although, yeah, let's just go there now. And then I want to ask you if you put on your journalist hat and you're in a press conference or you're in a private interview. And Stephen has to answer any one question. I'm going to let you pose that question in a minute. But before we do, I want to just take a break, remind people you're listening to a conversation that I'm enjoying so much with really a kindred spirit, professor Charles Seif of New York University.

Starting point is 00:36:46 who's a mathematician, you know, at the beginning of his career and now as a journalist, so we're going to, a journalism professor at one of the best universities in the world. And I want to talk to him a little bit about that if we'll have time. But before we do that, I want to just ask you, remind you, if you're enjoying this, please do give a thumbs up and subscribe if you would. It helps us all out. And please check out Charles's book. I'm going to have a link to purchase it. And I get one micro cent for every purchase.

Starting point is 00:37:13 If you use this Amazon link, then I'm going to provide. And that's Hawking Hawking by Charles Seif. Charles's written eight books, nine books, zero. You've written many other books that I'll have links to as well. But Charles, now, looking at these, you know, kind of theories, and when I look at things like M theory, and I look at Hawking's contribution, and we look at the question, you know, is inevitable, should he have won the Nobel Prize if he was alive or when he was alive? Hawking radiation, his signature contribution, is in at least in the cases where he believed it was already maybe evident in the production of gamma-ray bursts and stuff, which was later ruled out, at the center as responsible for the neutrino

Starting point is 00:37:54 deficit in the solar neutrino problem, which was later disproven. So almost all of his physical connections were disproven. Hawking radiation, you know, in our universe, on average, would take of order 100 billion years perhaps to observe. And yet, and yet, he would routinely lose bets to fellow physicists, including to Kip Thorne and Lenny Suskin, who is a guest on the show, whose book mentions him directly how my battle with Stephen Hawking made the world safe for quantum mechanics. So he's in the title of the book. Not only God has mentioned, but Stephen Hawking, a very serious physicist. Why did he concede these bets? You know, none of the work done has any validity or any provability. In fact, the disproof of the destruction of entropy, which I believe

Starting point is 00:38:43 or information, which correct me if I'm wrong, and that was Hawking's position, that the entropy or information could be destroyed in a black hole. And Preskill and Thorne and others bet him that it couldn't be, and he lost that bet like he did every single other bet. But why did he concede? The proof came from Juan Maldesana using, you know, holographic principle, ADS, CFT, you know, five-dimensional you know, Cosmole, which also don't exist. So, or proof from string theory from Ed Witten, which we have no evidence for. Why would you, why would he concede? Was it part of his publicity stunt campaign? To put it bluntly, I think he wanted to piss on that tree. Because everyone else had kind of done so. He was in the minority. I mean, there are general

Starting point is 00:39:29 relativists who still hold that position. But it really does, it was even at the time a minority opinion, probably, that information was destroyed. And I think he came to believe the weight of evidence was against him, and that rather than kind of looking like holding to the end as the ship is sinking, he wanted to take a lead in reclaiming his paradox, even through. through his concession, which was baffling to a lot of people, because I was actually at Dublin when he made the announcement. And people didn't understand what he was doing,

Starting point is 00:40:22 not least of reason, but there weren't enough details to really figure it out. Again, it used the Euclidean, the wick-rotated formalism, which most people didn't use, weren't familiar with. He didn't give enough detail, even if he were familiar with that, to explain his reasoning precisely. So it was kind of a thumbnail sketch. And it really didn't convince anyone but himself. And it was kind of an interesting anecdote that I got from the graduate student who was announcing for him, that even the graduate student didn't believe Hawking's proof at that point.

Starting point is 00:41:01 It wasn't convincing to him. So, yeah, it was, I think that concession in particular was really to keep his position at the forefront. Thought leadership. Yeah, and this paradox, which is kind of central, and it's kind of, it's gotten this renaissance recently, which is just brilliant. But he, he wants to still be there. And if it meant kind of reversing himself, I mean, I think I think he realized that he had to do it. But if he was going to do it, he wanted to do it his way.

Starting point is 00:41:39 Yeah, and he would, you know, he would say things, of course, and do things that as Roger Penrose said in one of my interviews with him that I'll link to somewhere in the notes or above. You know, he said no matter, it was great to bet Stephen Hawking because no matter which side you took, you'd always win. In other words, he not only, you know, made but bets, you know, almost as if to lose them, but he would switch sides midstream. He would concede things. And I remember seeing the bet with Kip Thorne, you know, at Caltech when I was at Caltech in the Westbridge building. And, but, you know, but I always felt about him. You know, he was known for these very prerocative things about, you know, God not being necessary. You know, God being a delusion, a fairy tale to let people sleep at night.

Starting point is 00:42:20 And in doing so, God had great value only in doing so. He also said this, this is one of the most quoted of his quotes that, at least in humanist circles, He said, the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburbs of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes. This is like, you know, very awe-inspiring, very hopeful, you know, kind of fair from him. I'm going to ask you, if you were to get to have an interview with him, it was a, it was, a, you know, Barbara Walters, you know, style now it's Charles Seif style. What would you ask him? He

Starting point is 00:43:05 asked to answer it truthfully. What question would the journalist in you ask him? Oh, if he has to answer truthfully, it's different than what I would ask him. I'll give you both. I'll give you both. You can do both. Yeah. So, yeah. So in ordinary circumstances, for me, I think I would press him on falsification of his ideas. And at what point would he have to abandon the no-boundary proposal? And given how it's kind of moved in different directions, and some of his kind of subsidiary particle physics predictions like the non-observability of the Higgs boson fell apart,

Starting point is 00:43:56 okay, at what point do you realize that you're barking up the wrong tree and have to make a major revision of your thought? So that's kind of what I would do if I didn't have the golden lasso. Let's see, if he had, if he were bound to answer truthfully, I think I would ask him the degree to which he really regrets his, fame and what it's done. What does he regret about coming to fame? Because I'm really interested in the interface at that moment when he rose to fame and at the same time he became estranged from, he divorced his wife, kind of became estranged and then wound up divorcing his wife. And in fact, his children as well in the years out. afterwards. And it was only, there was at least a decade, more than a decade, where he had

Starting point is 00:45:16 strange relations with, at least some of his children. And I want to know more about that turmoil. And to what extent he thinks he's responsible and could have done differently, and to what extent it was kind of just the circumstances? Because there's certain elements of his personality which kind of led to tragedy and certain elements which are just simply tragic. I'm very interested in the balance of that. Yeah, I mean, that's certainly true. I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on a couple weeks ago, and, you know, he was, I was asking about the impact. I was basically saying, you know, you're the most famous living scientist, you know, at least by, you know, Twitter accounting, if not by H index. And, you know, and he said, yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:07 The Kardashian index. How's this Kardashian index? It's higher than his Erdash number. But the claim that he made was that, yeah, he can't, even during COVID, he can't even take the subway in your fair city of New York with a mask on because he's so famous. People will recognize him. And God forbid he decides to speak. You know, his voice is so iconic.

Starting point is 00:46:33 And I really, I asked him, you know, would you trade it all as the story. in 1980, sorry, an animal farm by George Orwell, the pig says to the donkey, Benjamin, you've got this long, lovely tail. And Benjamin the donkey says, yeah, God gave me this long tail to swat away the flies, but I'd rather not have the flies and not need the tail. And I asked him, how do you resonate with that? And he basically said, yeah, I just want to go down to, you know, take a boat to the Bahamas and just write books all day long. And, you know, a little tear came down my chin, but, you know, I'm not going to weep too much. Maybe your next book will be a takedown of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Starting point is 00:47:11 That would be an interesting book. I wonder if that could get published. But, no, no. Neil's a good friend of the show, and we had a great conversation. I'll put a link to the talk with him up here. Also, I ask the same of Mitchie O'Caku. And this turns us to our next discussion topic, which is just about fame. And so, most physicists that are good, you know, they kind of, they earn in private.

Starting point is 00:47:36 it, and then, you know, to some extent they spend in public, you know, if they give a lecture, you know, day-to-day, like a Roger Penrose, he will do a lot of work over decades, and then he will, and then he'll give some lectures, and he'll try to, you know, maybe convince people of this conformal cyclic cosmology, which most cosmologists don't take very seriously. But in the meantime, he's done tremendous contributions to everything from, you know, crystal structure, tiling, pure math, black holes, singularities, cosmology. It's just, that his, you know, current model is not so, Stephen seems almost the opposite, or maybe, you know, delayed in that, you know,

Starting point is 00:48:13 he had this one spectacular contribution. And then, but basically all of his earning, you know, was in, was in, all of his spending and earning was in public. In other words, he didn't really, there were, if you look at his H index, it's, it's very low, you know, he has a couple of papers that are cited thousands and thousands of times, but his books are read millions of times. And I wonder, you know, what do you make of this that there are, are people like Hawking, like, you know, Brian Green nowadays, cross-town rival at NYU,

Starting point is 00:48:45 from NYU at Columbia, and other Lisa Randall, et cetera, Machia Okaku, hopefully someday Brian Keating, no, but the point being, you know, what do you make of this, you know, scientist celebrity? I mean, no, even Hawking didn't really fully compare relative to his time, no pun intended, as Einstein did, you know, When the day Einstein died, Time magazine printed a special cover, and it said a picture of the planet with a sign pointing Einstein lived here. But Einstein also did a lot of great work, turned 40-ish, and stopped really contributing. But the fact that Hawking's singular contribution cannot be falsified or verified in our time, unlike Penrose perhaps, you know, what do you make of this? that these physicists come, you know, raconteurs and popularizers. Is that, is that a sign of

Starting point is 00:49:39 decline, you know, in their physical physics prowess, or is that something that's healthy for society, if not for their own personal H indices, as we say? Yeah, good question. Well, first, I don't want to understate Hawking's contribution. I mean, he was definitely a physicist of the first rank. So, I don't want to kind of make it look like he's a pretender in that sense. However, I mean, you're absolutely right that there is kind of a disproportionate fame that accrued because of the popularization. You know, I'm all in favor of scientists going popular. I think our society needs more of that. And not just kind of the science of the first rank.

Starting point is 00:50:29 Like, I mean, George Gamow in generations previous. I mean, lots of people grew up with his books. Just, again, a brilliant physicist. And had he become a superstar, I think our society would have been the better for it. So I don't, I mean, I think Hawking's voice was a good voice to have. I think part of the reason it seems like it fits so poorly in some ways is because there's so few others out there who, you would think, given equivalent achievements, would at least be a little bit more prominent. They may not be as prominent as that, but people kind of bubbling around. Really kind of the famous scientists of our day, it's to the public, it is, I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye,

Starting point is 00:51:23 who's really an engineer and hasn't done, his career isn't doing science. And I mean, Brian Green has some as well, but I mean, I'm not sure that Brian Green gets recognized on the street in the way that Neil DeGrasse Tyson does and certainly not the way Hawking does. Right. So I think Hawking's fame looks bizarre

Starting point is 00:51:48 just because there aren't, I mean, that's, it's so rare. and he was so far above everyone else. I mean, he needed it too. I mean, he, because of his disease, had these huge expenses, and his fame and his royalties allowed him to live outside of a communal setting. I mean, it's a testament to his first wife. It's a testament to his friends who got charities holding it together for him.

Starting point is 00:52:21 And then his royalties kept him functioning and contributing not just to physics. I mean, even after he himself was not doing physics on his own, real great physics. He was a PhD advisor who was getting some of the best students out there, many of whom found him inspirational. So he was important to society. I just, again, I just wish it weren't so anomalous that there are people who should have equal fame and aren't equally articulate and have great contributions and can write and can lecture and they don't get the same element. But if life isn't fair, as Hawking is the first to tell you. So I want to close just by talking first about the halo effect and that just like Einstein, you know, he was really held. in high regard in regimes far outside of his discipline of expertise, you know, in the same way

Starting point is 00:53:27 that Einstein was asked to be the second prime minister of Israel, you know, this is a man who aboard nationalism, so, you know, but because he was so bright. And the two men share another fatal flaw, at least in my opinion, in their characters, which is that they were kind of terrible fathers in many cases. I mean, Einstein basically abandoned one of his kids who, to a, uh, what they called a sanatorium, a mental institution, what we might call, you know, today. And of course, Hawking had this relationship, even with his kids and his wife, his first wife, Jane, that was really, you know, almost like completely disinterested and, and disconnected. You talk about their first trip as young, you know, postdocs maybe to Cornell. And he's just like listening to Wagner and,

Starting point is 00:54:16 you know, blasting the volume. And the kid is, you know, almost dying, you know, almost choking. death at another point and she has to take care of him instead of her child, her two-year-old or one-year-old, whatever Robert was at the time. So, you know, both of these men have these huge flaws. I wonder, you know, is it true that just raw intellectual horsepower supersedes the aspects of one's character? I remember thinking, you know, I've said this before, you know, because I am a practicing Jew, if not like, a complete theistic adherent. I still practice my, you know, I remember thinking and saying at different interviews I've given, you know, that I don't believe that the Torah, the Old Testament, the Bible, whatever, is a science book any more than I believe

Starting point is 00:54:56 a brief history of time as a manual of wisdom and ethics and how to raise my kids. So why do we care so much about, you know, the life advice or the ethical teachings of people that had really tortured, you know, at best, you know, personal relationships? Yeah. Hawking's background, I mean, his relationship with his family was complicated. Because, of a situation. I mean, it's, it's, he was unable to rough and tumble with his kids and be a father in the same way that other fathers could be just because, I mean, it's not a total explanation, but it does, his situation does limit him. And when he was interviewed a number of years later, someone asked what he regretted about his disease, it was that I wasn't there more for my

Starting point is 00:55:44 children. So I don't think that it is a total disinterest. as much as kind of the reality is getting in the way. But yeah, I mean, I think that, I mean, he doesn't, if his intellect were all that he were, I don't think this public would have been very interested, honestly. I think that there was more to him. And even, even disease aside, I mean, he was witty. He was, and as he mentioned, I mean, it shows in. in his way of talking to others, his way of writing, this self-deprecating humor, this stoicism,

Starting point is 00:56:27 the, I mean, he's quite a character. He's, he can leave people laughing. His lectures were, would have people rolling. And I asked a number of them because so much of humor is timing, and he can't plan things. How is he so funny? And they couldn't explain him, but it was just his personality worked. And it was something warm about him too. So I think he succeeded in a way that, say, an Edward Teller or a Johnny von Neumann

Starting point is 00:57:06 would never kind of become, I think, just out of their pure intellect. But yeah, no, he is not someone to look to for moral advice. And again, which of us are. There aren't very many of us I'd listen to, much less myself. Is it true that, you know, his second wife, Elaine, she was a nurse, right? One of his carers, as he would call them. And then her husband was really the driving force behind Stevens' second voice synthesizer. Is that true?

Starting point is 00:57:42 Yeah, he engineered it so it would fit on his wheelchair. that it was engineered by someone in the States, and David Mason, the Mason's husband engineered. And he wound up servicing it long after his wife left. Yeah, I found that so bizarre. You know, basically he enabled the technology that Stephen seduced his wife away from.

Starting point is 00:58:09 And so he just wouldn't talk. I actually went to Cambridge and knocked down his daughter, hoping that he would answer. He actually did. And he gave me this look when I told him I was talking about the sorrow. And I just can't talk about it. I'm sorry. And that was it.

Starting point is 00:58:34 Well, Charles, we've come to the end of our conversation. I've really thoroughly enjoyed it. Now I have to go and teach. I want to give you just a chance to say a little bit about your teaching and your role at NYU. It's one of the world's foremost institutions. What is your area of specialty, and then what could students expect if they are lucky enough to get accepted and matriculate there in that fine university? Yeah, so NYU has a really nice journalism department, which is both undergraduate and graduate.

Starting point is 00:59:05 With the graduate side, we have a science, health, and environmental reporting program we call SHRP, and I'm attached to that. And I teach science journalists how to do investigative reporting. And so kind of getting your green eye shade on and getting into books and having a very skeptical sometimes view of science, as opposed to the G-Wiz science, which we all enjoy writing about. But there's more to journalism than that. And undergraduates, I teach writing generally. One of my favorite courses right now is I teach programming for journalists. using Python. And I teach them how to do web scraping and hooking up to APIs and doing data analysis,

Starting point is 00:59:51 which is a lot of fun. And by the end of the semester, they're actually pretty good. So journalists can learn to code. Wow, I thought we weren't allowed to say that. Yeah, absolutely. And what we're not allowed to say is that it can help you supplement your income. Just the last question, just because you brought it up, you know, science and science journalism. I am vehemently opposed to press conferences in science as a modality of disseminating information

Starting point is 01:00:23 that makes it into like a sporting event or a prize match, literally sometimes, you know, gunning to, you know, be first in line to win one of these Nobel Prize medallions, which I happen to have from my nine guests that have left different things in my couch over there. But what's your opinion about press conferences? Are they net good? I mean, first of all, they're relatively modern phenomenon. Is that not right? Relatively.

Starting point is 01:00:50 That there is kind of this engineering of the science press. It goes the journals have these press releases and for big things, they have press conferences. And the press conference after peer review has gone back decades. a press conference before peer review is a much more recent thing. The Cold Fusion fiasco was one where it really kind of the Pons Inflation held a press conference so they could gazumph Jones, who was sniffing at the same direction. So that sort of thing is pretty recent. And I think that sort of stuff is it is problematic, to say the least.

Starting point is 01:01:44 And I put the kind of the engineering generally as problematic, because what it's doing is presenting a pre-packaged narrative rather than, and journalists like all creatures that kind of do the path of least resistance, least action, and will take that narrative. instead of teasing it apart. And as you know, I mean, the Bicep Two thing is a great example of that. There was a kind of an embargoed press package that turned out to be giving a very misleading impression of what was there. And had people been going outside of the narrative, it's more likely that they would have picked up some signals that go against that narrative. That's right.

Starting point is 01:02:34 Yeah. Yeah, I'm all, I'm all fortunate. transparency, but, you know, my goal is, and if I could ask you to do one thing with your colleagues in science journalism, is really conveyed to the scientific teams that whatever dollars they reserve for publicity, that they have some fraction to hedge against the possibility of retraction. Because as you know, in the front page of your hometown newspaper, the New York Times was splash these results, and then maybe on page B-17 of the Saturday edition, which I believe the least read of all the weekly edition, you know,

Starting point is 01:03:10 additions of any given newspaper, then on B-17 on Saturday, you'll see, oh, Bicep team, or whoever retracts, claim that was above the fold, literally, you know, just, you know, six months ago. And so the public is left. I still get from scientists, oh, wow, you were involved with bicep. You know, that's so amazing.

Starting point is 01:03:27 You detected inflation. And so I think that, you know, every dollar needs to have at least, you know, 10 cents, 25 cents in reserve, you know, to guard, against the possibility that, you know, if 99% of three sigma results are wrong, you know, I mean, how much more so of, you know, two sigma and so forth? So anyway, that's my hobby horse. I don't know if you agree if you want to say, respond to that kind of provocation. Oh, yeah, I definitely do. And part of the problem is that what journalism often does and what

Starting point is 01:03:57 makes people interest in a story is that it goes against what you expect and what is normal. And so big results are automatically abnormal. And of course, in science, things that are abnormal are more likely to be wrong, which sets up science journalism for failure before we even start. So there's a structural problem. It's amazing. Charles Seif, professor NYU journalism, author of Hawking, Hawking, selling of a scientific celebrity, Zero, the biography of a dangerous idea, Alpha and Omega, the Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe. decoding the universe, science of information, sun in a bottle, proofiness. I believe maybe you're working on a book as we're talking.

Starting point is 01:04:41 Maybe your hand was hidden at a... Show your hands, make sure that you're actually not typing another book. What's next? Nothing, nothing at the point. What's next for you? I don't know. Right now, this book was fairly exhausting. It was done during COVID and doing that while my kids have tremendous

Starting point is 01:05:02 needs was very difficult. So I think, I think this summer is going to be kid time, at the very least, before I start working. Your kids and your students are very lucky, Charles. I mean that sincerely, I feel, again, this connection, your wonderful writer. I envy your students to be able to learn from you, especially Python. That would be really fun. I've always, I've always struggled with Python myself. I'm more of an IDL-Fortran guy myself. But, but anyway, Charles, you're really a shining light, no pun intended, in this field of science journalism. You're also, you bring a really special perspective that is unique. I want to thank you for this book, Hawking, Hawking, and I want to invite you back.

Starting point is 01:05:42 Whatever you do next, I'm down for, and hopefully we'll meet in person someday when I'm back in my former hometown as well. I'd love to see you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time.

Starting point is 01:06:20 Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Hawking Hawking! The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity with NYU Prof. Charles Selfe (#145)

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