Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - How Being Wrong in Science Can Lead to Great Breakthroughs w/ Rocky Kolb [Ep. 462]

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 How can embracing mistakes, challenging common assumptions, and daring to be wrong lead to groundbreaking discoveries in cosmology? Here to talk about why being wrong might actually be a good thing is the legendary astrophysicist Rocky Kolb. Rocky, a professor at the University of Chicago, is known for his work on the early universe and dark matter. With decades of experience under his belt, Rocky explains the tricky balance between confidence and humility in science. Tune in to learn more about the interplay of ego, humility, and science! Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro  01:55 Judging a book by its cover 04:29 Humility, ego and science 14:50 Controversies in cosmology 21:06 Neutrinos and dark matter 24:26 The role of data in cosmology 35:46 Ethics and responsibility in science  43:48 Arthur C Clarke questions  48:01 Outro  Additional resources:  ➡️ Learn more about Rocky Kolb:  📚 Blind Watcher Of The Sky: https://a.co/d/aw0qZDt  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And how can having a dose of humility drive breakthrough discoveries? Embracing mistakes and challenging assumptions daring to be wrong can lead to groundbreaking discoveries in cosmology. Here today to explore these thought-provoking questions, and more, is Rocky Kolb, an inspiration to millions and a renowned astrophysicist and professor at the University of Chicago. With decades of experience exploring the mysteries of the universe from dark matter to the hobbled tension, Rocky shares his insights and thoughts on the interplay between ego and humility and science. Join us as we dive deep in this in-person interview recorded this summer at the University of Chicago,

to explore the mysteries of the cosmos with one of my biggest heroes, Rocky called. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Rocky, thanks for meeting with me. Well, I'm happy to do it. So much fun. I've always been a big fan of your career,

and we've had too few opportunities to meet in person, but you're gracious enough to lend me some of your summer vacation. I really appreciate it. You're a fan favorite on the podcast. So it's just a delight. So I should say that we are at the University of Chicago where you have been for how long? Oh, well, in various roles since 2006, 2007, something like that. Okay.

So it wasn't quite as long as I thought. You are, of course, known for being the co-author with a past favorite on the podcast, Michael Turner, who was on last year and had the kindest things to say about you. And that book. I won't return it. Well, what we do, and I should have brought my copy, which is 20 years old, blind watchers of the sky. We do a little schick on this podcast called Judging Books by their covers, which you're not supposed to do, but how the hells do you know about it other than the cover?

That was a wonderful book. I read recently just the intro of it, but I've read some of the reviews. And some of the reviews are from former students that not only bought the book, which is the most important thing. important thing, right, right. But took a class with you and where that was kind of featured. So what are blind watches? What does that mean?

What is the origin, the genesis? Walk us through the cover. We'll show an image of it in post-production, but talk us through the title, subtitle cover of that wonderful book. Blind watches of the sky comes from a quote from Tico Brahe, a great astronomer of the 17th century, 16th, 17th century. And he did not have a high. high opinion of many of his colleagues. So he observed a supernova in 1572, and he determined that the

supernova was far away. It was what he said, beyond the moon. He could not determine a parallax of the supernova. And this went against Aristotelian ideas that anything that changes in the universe is due to human corruption. So it had to be closer to us than the moon. And many of his fellow astronomers disagreed with him. And he wrote that, oh, crossa ingenia, oh, Kekos Corlis, spectatoris, oh, thick wits, oh blind watchers of the sky. So this is a theme that runs through this book that in some sense, we are all blind watches of the sky. And I go through the lives of many of the great astronomers and physicists and heroes, you know, Newton, Galileo, and they were all wrong in some ways or another.

And astronomy and physics and science is hard. And the easiest person to fool is yourself. Right. That's fine. And it's something that we have to always look out for. And I think we have to be humble and realize that some of the things that we think certainly it's true. Nobody argues with this will turn out to be wrong. Yes. And a humble, humble scientists are not easy to find, but we should all have a little humility. That's right. I think I always say that you need to kind of balance these two traits of hutspah, arrogance, you know, ego

with the extreme humility that you're likely, very much likely to be wrong. And pivoting to that, I think it was in that book that you mentioned this quote and it dovetails nicely. You just said from Galileo, who said, our job is to measure what's measurable and make measurable what is not yet so. We're trying to do that. We build instruments, but these characters were tremendous egos. I mean, I think back, whenever I get a nasty comment on the YouTube video, I won't get them in for this conversation. It's too wonderful, I'm sure. But we'll have on somebody and they'll be like, oh, it's so arrogant, blah, blah, blah.

And they, you know, they criticize Bruno too. And he turned out to me. My role is anytime you compare yourself to Bruno, Galileo, or Einstein, you've got big problems. And I say, well, you're very much like Bruno and that. Your brain is dead. And it's completely fraught. Talk about the personalities because Galileo, who's one of my favorite, if not my favorite sign. In fact, I'm the, you're standing in the presence of greatness, Rocky.

I was tasked with doing a book review of Galileo's dialogue. And my favorite medium is audio. And so I said, I'll just download the audio book. It doesn't exist. I found out that a University of California. own the Stillman Drake translation, definitive translation of dialect. And I made the first ever audiobook of Galileo with Carlo Ronelli, Frank Wilczek, and Jim Gates. Who is Simplicio?

So Simplicio was my friend, Lucio Petriello. So Carlo was Saviati, I was Sagreiro, the kind of interlocutor. And then we had Fabiola Gianatti read Galileo's dedication to the Grand Duke of Tuscanian. But these were arrogant individuals. And I love Galileo. You know, but talk about the personalities. And really, yeah, what does it take to, it can't, you can't just be humble, but you also have to, you know, have a little bit of Hutzpah. So how do you balance that?

You also have to be fearless because you're trying to discover something or see something that no one's seen before. And, you know, you have to believe that you can do something that other people have not done. And it's so you're right. It's a real balance between Hutzpah and, but you see. should still keep in your mind that you might be wrong. And of those characters and the people, you know, I would say you should aspire to make blunders like Einstein, or is there a particular, you know, story of an astronomer or, you know,

maybe even someone the lesser heralded, like Henrietta Levitt, we talked, I talked with Wendy earlier about her career. Talk about some of the personalities. What are these like as individuals? I mean, like Vesto, like the name like Vestos life. This guy must have been fun of parties, right? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, a local hero around here, of course, is Edwin Hubble.

Yes. And, you know, there are others also. But I keep in mind this phrase that you should never meet your heroes. I got to go. I don't know. Just kidding. Because they are all human. And they all have, you know, personality flaws.

And when I was an undergraduate, a hero of mine with Schrodinger, you know, developed quantum mechanics. and he had a philosopher. DNA, you thought all right in our life. And all sorts of things. But his personal life was rather distasteful. He would just leave it like that. He would get me-toed.

Yeah. I mean, he would not survive in this era. And possibly he shouldn't have survived in the 1920s and 30s. So you should never meet you heroes. But that said, you know, they're redeeming values in all of them. And you can admire what they did. And you can also realize, their mistakes. And I think it informs my research. And I always think that if I would ever be wrong,

it hasn't happened yet. But if I would ever be wrong, I would admit it. What was it like working with Willie Fowler? He's a local hero in Southern California. Sure. What was he like? Well, Willie Fowler was a real hero of mine for a couple of reasons. One is I saw what he did. I saw what he did. And I saw what he did. in his career at Caltech. He started the field of nuclear astrophysics. And he was, his training and, you know, his education was in nuclear physics, and he applied it to astrophysics. And I think that, you know, the people who came out of Willie's group, there's a long

list of names who were very famous, and I would list them, but I'd leave one out. And you would get a bad email or something like that. Well, this meant George Fuller, because. George Fuller was my office meeting. So I saw what Willie did. And I also saw that he had a quality that I think is sadly lacking in our community, that he appreciated and celebrated the accomplishments of people around him, even if he wasn't involved.

So his students in postdocs, he just loved when we did something that he thought was good. And he, you know, talked to people about it and supported us. And even if he wasn't involved in it. And that's, you know, I had many postdocs and students and people at Fermilab and at the University of Chicago. And that's always inspired me to appreciate what they've done, even if I wasn't involved. Yeah. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates

who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. In a way, your mentorship of your students carries on his legacy as well. And I think George Fuller feels the same way, and Dick Bond feels the same way. He's a good friend, a member of the SEO community as well. And Willie also told me, don't be afraid to be wrong. There's a difference between being wrong and being stupid. So don't be stupid, but it's okay to be wrong.

It's okay to risk a little bit. Yeah, you need that kind of permission sometimes to dare greatly. And I think about him, I think about kind of a polymath that makes. may not exist anymore. I mean, there was one a couple of feet over here in Rico Fermi, right? Who could do theory, phenomenology, and he could do experiment. Will you sort of in that same mold? I want to ask you as a, you know, you're not an experimentalist. You're very commercial on it. What is sort of the theory, the experimental minimum? If you're teaching and mentoring a student, what's the minimum she or he should know about my craft of experimentation in cosmology,

astrophysic, particle physics in general? Errors. You know, what does an error mean? you know, systematic uncertainty, statistical uncertainties, and just to get an idea of what goes in to experiments and how things can, you know, experiments are hard. So another mentor of mine was Leon Letterman, who was director of Caltech, director of Fermilab, hired me at Fermilab, and, you know, he would always say that, you know, experiments are hard. And once in a while, you can get something to work. And it's beautiful when it does work. So appreciate how difficult experiments are and that the experiments may be underestimating

the errors or maybe overlooking something. But pay attention to it, but I don't think as scientists we should believe things. I think belief is a word that's very dangerous. Yes, exactly. I say I don't believe in gravity and people are like, you're an astronomer. So I was talking with Wendy earlier about that, and she always makes this distinction between accuracy and precision. I know you talked about the two. Like, we have enough, you know, precision cosmology for a lifetime, but we need accurate cosmology.

And I think the thing that I didn't appreciate until I was a much older grad student was that when you have a systematic error, you really can't improve it unless you build another experiment, which is guaranteed to not do the main science goal that you have, which is to measure the inflationary gravitational waves in my case or other. But, you know, astronomy is hard in that way because you are an observer. You're not really an experimentalist. Like, you know, you go into a laboratory. You can change this. You can change that. Controls and control things. It's much harder to control the universe.

Especially when, yeah, the universe. When I was a kid and you were a kid, there's only one universe now. We've got multiverses. Speaking of that, when I think about Fowler, I also think of his connection with my late great colleagues, the Burbages, who were. who were at San Diego until 10 years ago in the case of Jeff, and 14 years ago when he passed away. And four years ago now, Margaret passed away.

And they worked very closely with Fred Hoyle, who of course coined the Big Bang and it bleaked in panspermy and all these other things. But he's known for the Hoyle miracle, which is this triple, this process in the brilliant resonance astroparticle. A lot of people make claims that this is evidence for some sort of underlying architecture, some design in the universe.

And I wonder if you're comfortable discussing it. When Willie, because Willie effectively found that, right? I mean, he experimentally led the campaign that discovered this Borrelium resonance, which lasts for a femtosecond or so, so on. Is that really evidence or does it, you know, fall to the realm of, out of the realm of belief and faith into the realm of evidence and science? I don't think so. I don't think it's related to faith and, you know, an intelligent design.

You know, the universe was designed to have this resonance in beryllium. Maybe we should just say what that allows in the triple out. You want to take it away? So this has to do with nuclear reactions. And Fred Hoyle realized in order for some specific nuclear reaction to occur, to understand stellar evolution, there had to be an excited state in beryllium with a certain energy. And he sort of calculated what the energy would be, what the width would be, what the properties would be. And then an experimentalist, Willie Fowler went off and found it. But it does seem without that, stellar evolution would be different.

The production of heavy elements would be different. You know, the universe that we see would be different. When we look at controversies in cosmology, there's a famous quote from Stephen Weinberg, who you knew very well. And I want to talk about him and David Tram also, of course, you knew extremely well. Weinberg would say, you know, physics thrives on crises, and unfortunately there aren't many crises now. And I was just talking with Wendy about, you know, the Hubble tension and all these things. One of my favorite solutions to the Hubble tension, actually, in fact, my favorite solution.

We're not supposed to have it. I'm not supposed to have favorite kids either. My mom would say, you know, I asked her, who's your favorite me or my older brother? And she said, that's like asking me to choose my left hand or my right hand. I said, Mom, you're left-handed, you know. There was someone who had seven children and someone asked, who's your favorite child? and he thinks for a while and says, does it have to be want to bond?

Reminds you a joke. A rabbi is on a plane and he's writing a book about how to raise children. And the guy sitting next to him, well, what do you know about children? What gives you this credibility to write a book on children? He goes, well, I've got four children. And the guy gets very sullen. He turns away and he goes, wow, I wish I had four children. And the guy, the rabbi is like, oh, my God, did I say something wrong?

Did you, God, forbid, to lose it? He's like, no, no, no, I have seven children. But one of the solutions to the Hubble tension comes from an area that you covered in the early universe, which was primordial magnetic fields. And that they can change and alter the sound horizon. They can do all sorts of things to the stress energy tensor. Talk about, you know, how we are looking for these exotic things, evolution of dark energy or, you know, some new physics and so forth. Is that like the last bastion of the scoundrel? Or should we look for honest of goodness things we know about like magnetic fields to solve new?

tensions and controversies and cosmologists. Right. So we have a remarkably successful model of cosmology, the standard model of cosmology. I'm sure people on your podcast have talked about the standard model of cosmology. I hate it. Because it looks, you know, once everything's understood, I'm out of a job. Right, exactly. What do I do if we understand everything?

So there's a lot of effort in the community to try, we call it, break. we call it break the standard model, to see where the flaw is. So it's like the sweater to find the thread that you're going to pull that unravels everything. One of them might be the hubbo tension that Wendy Friedman talked to you about. Then there's other little tensions that are coming up in the cosmic microwave background radiation. You could tell me about them, but you'd have to kill me, I guess, right? Because the meeting's going on now is not public. But there's a lot more we don't know about cosmology. We don't know about inflation. Inflation's an idea we have. It's a great phenomenological success without theoretical underpinnings. We don't know the dynamics

of real, the fundamental physics behind inflation, which is responsible for the fluctuations in the microwave background radiation as you study. It's responsible for the fluctuations in the matter density that grow to become galaxy, stars, planets, people, etc. You are in amplified quantum fluctuation. The podcast. But we don't really understand. We don't have any idea about the basic physics that drives inflation. Then there's dark matter that most of the mass of the universe is dark. 25% of the mass and energy in the universe is dark. And we don't know the nature of dark matter. And it's a problem that's been around, an issue that's been around since the early 1930s. And in the past 20 or 30 years, it's attracted a lot of attention.

I think for many decades, it was not considered a problem. Then people started realizing, hey, there's a real issue here. It's telling us something. What is the dark matter? And then there's dark energy that's driving the accelerated expansion of the universe. That's a real head scratcher. So is the standard model have these things that are not understood, but yet describes, seems to describe the evolution of the universe. Or does it?

So is there a hubble tension? Is there another ingredient that has to be added? What about the role of magnetic fields that you mentioned? And, you know, turbulence and all these other things that you can put in to make. to make a more complicated story. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose Google Fi Wireless.

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What is a phase transition and how did you come up with ideas in terms of relating them from something like ice or, you know, a hand warmer in a ski resort where, you know, I'm sure we frequent quite frequently. How could they possibly have relevance to the universe as a whole? So we think that in the evolution of the universe, the universe underweigh the universe underway, in a series of phase transitions where the symmetries that started out in the early universe at high temperatures, there was more symmetry than we see now in the laws of nature. We call it symmetry breaking. But in phase transitions, one of the things that really excite me is the idea that there could be a remnant in the universe today of a previous phase. And this,

would be the inside of cosmic string, domain walls, magnetic monopoles, things like that, that have a remnant of what the universe was like well within the first second of the universe. And it's a beautiful idea, but we need observers to go out and find the darn cosmic string or something like that. So cosmic strings may be around. And in terms of going back to dark matter, people have ideas for dark matter that range over 80 orders of magnitude in its mass, something that's incredibly small. Incredibly like that deep dish pizzas, dark deep dish pizzas. Right.

Good. So yeah, in that realm, one thing you've worked a lot on neutrinos, which are these ghostly particles that are irradiating us right now. But I always like to say, maybe it'll slap me around. But I was like to say at least we know there's one particle of dark matter, right? Yeah. Nutrinos fit every single category that you need for dark one. Doesn't that tell us that these alternatives like mommed and tedes and all these other,

that they're sort of, you know, a fool's error? I don't work on it. I don't think it's a productive way to go. I listened to it just to make sure nothing, you know, being a little humility, I could be wrong about that. But I think modifying gravity is really hard. It's something I've thought about and worked on. Einstein's theory of gravity is a beautiful theory.

And it's almost indestructible. It's hard to change it. So modifying gravity is a tough thing to do. Now, maybe the Einstein of the 21st century will figure out how to do it, but it ain't going to be me. I try. That's right. It's sort of, well, Einstein also tried to outdo himself,

and that kind of brings me into my next question. A lot of times we hear about, you know, in context of phase transitions, so forth, we hear a lot about the theory of everything. But as far as I know, we don't have even a plausible grand unified theory. So I always joke we're putting the toe ahead of the gut. You know, we should really focus on our guts first.

Can we solve and can we help to unify laws of physics when we don't even, and I'm not, I mean, obviously, the heroic efforts of many people from this institution and around the world have contributed to the standard model, the core theory, as Frank Wiltshire calls it, of particles. But are we really not kind of getting ahead of ourselves and really looking to kind of a level jump beyond our capabilities and looking for a theory of everything. Is there a theory of everything? Well, that's a good question. Is there a theory of everything? Or are there theories of everything? Now, my friends who are strength theorists, I don't know any friends who are a strength theorist,

but if I did, they would tell me that there are many possible laws of nature. Yes. They call it the multiverse. And we're just the landscape. Right. We're just seeing one realization. of possible laws of nature. So maybe there's not a single theory of everything, but theories of everything. Now, how do you prove that is the question that no one's figured out how to do. So maybe the next step is some unified theory.

What's beyond the theories that we have now? It's called the Electro-Weat theory, the standard model of particle physics. What's the next step beyond that? No one thinks that it's the final answer. So there are tantalizing hints, neutrino masses. We don't understand the origin of the asymmetry in the universe today between matter and the anti-matter.

Maybe that's pointing the way to new physics. You know, inflation or dark matter, one of the reasons particle physicists are interested in dark matter so much is it could be the next step beyond the standard model of particle. physics. Dark matter has no place to live in the standard model of article physics. That's right. It has to be an auxiliary additional hypothesis. Hey there, I know you're enjoying this deep dive into cosmology and scientific discovery and humility as well. And I have to maybe beg your indulgence and be a little bit humble myself to inquire why there are so many of you who have

not yet subscribed to this podcast or YouTube channel found only about 50% of you are engaged by subscribing or following the podcast. And I really love to boost that number up closer to 100%. I am a perfectionist after all. I hope you'll consider subscribing wherever you're listening or watching this podcast. Now, back to the episode. Was it possible for astroparticle physics to kind of come about before it actually did? In other words, it sort of came after, you know, the high-energy physicist kind of moved into cosmology and particle and astronomy relatively late in the, you know, go back to Brahe in your book, right? I mean, four centuries, right? Was it possible? I mean, could they have, in fact, entered earlier? And I don't mean like the cosmic rays and stuff that

were discovering in 30s. But was it necessary for us to have a mature, you know, quantum field theory, QED? Was that a necessary condition in order to have folks like you revolutionized by adding the tools and techniques of particle physicists to the world of us? astrophysics? So I would go back to Willie Fowler in nuclear astrophysics. He introduced nuclear physics. He and others, of course, introduced nuclear physics and championed nuclear physics in astrophysics. And nuclear physics can describe how stars work, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, where does the helium come from, where do the elements come from? And, you know, we didn't, we still don't completely understand nuclear physics, but we have a good understanding of it.

But we had to have some understanding, some understanding of nuclear physics before there was nuclear astrophysics. We had to have some understanding of particle physics before there was particle astrophysics of particle cosmology. And the understanding of particle physics, I think, really traces back to the standard model of particle physics. which emerged in the late 60s and early 70s, and shortly after that, people turned to cosmology and astrophysics, because we had this tool that we didn't have before. So when I was in graduate school for the early universe,

people talked about something that was known as the Hagadorn temperature. Oh, yes, a strength of that. Right, no matter how much energy there was in the early universe, the temperature was never larger. than a certain amount that's quite low by modern standards. And that if you put more and more energy into the universe, it would create rather than more energetic particles, more massive particles.

So there was a limiting temperature. It was called the Hagenin temperature. And with the development of the standard model of particle physics, quantum chromodynamics, QCD, the theory of the strong interactions, people realize that there's not a limiting temperature. and that quarks and gluons would get higher and higher energy earlier in the history of the universe. And that opened up a lot of possibilities. That's true.

Yeah, now it has a, we've had Robert Brandenberger on many times my former co-advisor for Brown. Now McGill. Yes, he's string gas cosmology and super string gas cosmology. I want to ask you sort of a philosophical question with a broad spectrum of history that you can draw access to, which is we are theoretically on the cost. of discovering the mass of elementary particles using cosmological observation. And to my knowledge, correct or if I'm wrong, there's 17 elementary particles. 14 of them have had their masses measured on Earth.

None of them have had their masses measured off the Earth. Would you believe us? If we came upstairs and I said, Rocky, don't tell anybody, don't tell the 400,000 people watching. You know, we have measured the mass of nutrient. Will a car carrying particle physicist out in Batavia over there, wherever, will he or she believe what we have to say as cosmology? just intruding on her turf. They better damn well believe it.

I would believe it. And I think the determination of the neutrino mass will come from CMB observations and astrophysics, not, won't first come from particle physics. So, but there's sort of historical precedence for this in discovering elements. Helium, the second most abundant element in our universe, was discovered, Helios looked like looking at the sun. I thought they went there at night. Didn't go there at night?

Because I tell my kids. Right. So, yes, that's true. And of course, muons and cosmic rays. And cosmic rays and things like that. So they should pay attention. And I think it could be a very exciting time when we know the mass of the neutrina.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's 3.17s of that. Will it mark, you know, as Kuhn would call a paradigm shift? I mean, would it be, is it like, I mean, imagine if a botanist came to you and said, I know the massive nutrient. I mean, you might respect their botany, but I don't know, I'm just making this up. But, you know, astronomy is radically different. I mean, we're looking at correlation functions of little smudges on the last scattering surface. And it's not, you know, so obvious.

I think you're right that, you know, we better make them, you know, we better do a good enough job that they have no reason to doubt us. So your measurements are hard. And, you know, you say you're looking at little smudges. Yeah. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

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It matters where you stay. Hilton. for this day. But look at the collisions at the large Hadron Collider, producing hundreds of particles, and they have to sort through this and this and this and this. So it's hard. The bleeding edge of science is also the leading edge of ignorance. You really have to struggle. You mentioned something in passing in the string theory landscape and the multiverse. So in one case, the multiverse is a consequence that seems to be built in part and parcel. You've got to accept it. If you're you accept inflation, had Andre Lindy on the podcast and, you know, talked to Alan Goose privately,

but he hasn't yet come on, hopefully he will soon. But they both kind of admit you get it concomitantly with inflation. How do you feel about that? There are those that like your probably Caltech contemporary, Paul Steiner, a very good friend of mine, who don't believe that the multiverse is not only, you know, a good thing for physics, but he thinks it's bad for society, the scientific method. I'm not asking you to comment on Paul specifically, but is the multiverse something that gives you pause or is it something that's exciting? Well, it's certainly a head scratcher. I think the idea of a multiverse is almost unavoidable if you, if you, in inflation. So if inflation, as we even, most people envision it now, had anything to do with the early universe. A multiverse is

almost inescapable. Now there's another question, if you create other universes, will the laws of nature, the laws of physics, be different in those other universes? And people usually conflate those two, but you can have a multiverse without having laws of physics different in different universes. I asked Andre, you know, kind of just to, I don't know, kind of take my shot at the king. And I said, you know, why stop at physics? You know, he always says, why should there be a universe? You know, it should be a multiverse. And you have to convince me it's a universe.

It's a universe. And so I said, well, why stop at the laws of physics? Why shouldn't, you know, modus tollens vary from universe? And he was like, I don't think math would vary. But, you know, who knows if it's true, that we actually know as much as we know about math from the physically universe. And that dovetails with the famous quote by Eugene Vigner commented on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and the physical sciences.

We take it for granted. Of course you're going to use math. You've got to be a good at the calculator and the pencil, right? It's a great tool. Yeah. Will it be the tool of the next century? So I have a friend Stephen Wolferm. I don't know whether you ever.

He's been on the podcast many times. Okay. Another Caltech. Yeah, right. Well, we collaborated together at Caltech. I've known him for a long time. And he thinks computation is a way to go. Yes.

And I've always told him that suppose in 1667, sitting under the apple tree in Wallsthorpe, with Newton's mother's home, if instead of an apple falling on his head, an Apple computer had fallen on his head, how would science have been different? Right. And I asked that question of many of my colleagues that work on artificial intelligence, because, you know, if you ask, if you recall, or I'm sure you do, Einstein said the thought that titillated him the most, the one that gave him an exhilaration of the intelligence. up his spine was that an observer in free fall would experience no gravitational field.

The greatest thought of his life. The happiest thought of his life. So I asked my colleagues that are artificial intelligence, optimists that believe that we're on the verge of AGI and turn test is going to be obliterated and so forth. I asked them, well, in what sense could this computer, if I pick this computer up and put it in free fall, I can predict exactly what's going to happen to it.

It's not going to be happy, but to what extent. Free fall is fine. It's the landing that is not there. It's the end is a doozy, as they say, in Ground Dog Day. But the question I always have is, you know, what, A, how could a computer, you know, understand the concept of happiness? What are you? Like, rub its capacitor in a certain way?

Or, you know, and second of all. I thought this was a PG. That's right. Yes, I've already violated that norm. You know, so how could it experience? And the embodiment, you know, which with some like Nomschomsky's been on the show as well, as that is essential for not only, for communication and computation, but for consciousness.

So I ask this question, maybe in the context, you're not an AI expert, but in terms of tools that we'll use in the future, as our profession is a thousand years old, I mean, you and I are doing a sackaul at the second oldest profession, right? After, you know, what? No, no, I'm going to keep it PG-13. But, you know, back in Bologna in 1080,

they were scratching on blackboards and, you know, with rocks. We're not doing that much different. So how do you see our profession as faculty, professors and whatnot, a lot of my audience or faculty or aspire to be. How do you see it changing? What can artificial intelligence add? Can it do what you do as a theoretical synthesis? I think eventually it will do much of what I do. Hopefully not soon. Hopefully I can retire. Merit is pushed out for because somebody has a better computer. Yeah, I think it's going to be a real tool in the future, not just for data analysis and things like that. It already is a

big tool, right? But in coming up with new ideas and theories, it's going to see things, I think, that we don't see in our usual way of thinking. When we think about, you know, kind of the biggest mysteries, you know, I like to give you the option. You talk to the old one, as Einstein would call God. You know, you could get one answer out of God. What kind of, what's the most mysterious thing that you've encountered in your career? The thing that you're most keen to get the answer to before you get a meritor status. Well, I have a bunch of questions. You only get one.

Maybe, okay. Why is there a universe? Ah, interesting. I'm sure happy there is a universe. At least one. I'm happy with just one. That's right. But why?

Why is there a universe? Yeah, it could have been otherwise. Yeah. Again, these always dovetail into questions of purpose and teleology and meaning and, you know, if there's existence. And those are the things. we never give our students the chance to actually ask or answer us because they're too busy solving, you know, integrals in grad student. You know, physicists are good at answering the question of how.

Yes. Why is a more difficult question to answer and something that's not really part of what we do. Do you think, you know, I look at my colleagues and, well, we don't have a law school, thank God, at UCS. San Diego, but we have a medical school. You're lawless. That's right. It's like mad max down there, Rocky. I don't even.

know how to describe it, but we have, you know, my brother's a lawyer, right? So, but they teach ethics. They teach, you know, kind of like, how do you be assigned? What's the practice of your, of that craft, of a lawyer, of a doctor, even of a businessman or woman, right? These are, the ethics are taught. We never teach that. We never teach about research ethics. Oh, well, like, Rocky, my advisor's got to get tenure or I got to get my job for my student because otherwise it'll look bad in my brother. How do you handle that? Or do you ever encounter those situations where, you know, we're not, you know, we're not, really trained to deal with these things and yet they're very common. It's very important too. And I think the way most people experience and learn it is through osmosis. And I think it's the

responsibility of those of us who are in responsible positions to demonstrate ethics and responsibility and maybe kindness and humility and maybe our students and postdocs will pick that up. I don't think it would be good. Okay, so today we're having a lecture on ethics, you know, and work these two homework problems and you'll have one problem on the final exam on ethics. I don't think that's the way to instill ethics in people. Yeah, I even talk, no, worst class I had, the only class I didn't get the, you know, high marks on a freshman, you know, first quarter freshman year at Case Western was philosophy. And this professor was like, you look like Gabe Cotter from Welcome Back Carter with the hair and the mustache and everything.

No offense, but he had, he would only give true and false exams and philosophies. So it would be like, the categorical imperative doesn't necessary for you to have this contingency. Like, true. And I would get less than 50%. Every single exam, I got 25. How could you get less than 50%? It was so over the time. Yes, so it's probably good that we don't, that we don't delve into those waters.

When we look at, you know, kind of these mysterious things, a lot of times people say, you, cosmologist, you know, Rocky, Brian, you guys are so. you know, cocky about what you do, but there's 95 plus percent of the universe you know nothing about, even by your own admission. I mean, dark matter, yeah, you know, we can say a neutrino, but really you know nothing about it. And then dark energy, you know, you know, the square root of nothing, or maybe even less. So the logarithm. So tell me, what, how would you answer those kind of critics, you know, standing on one foot? What's the answer to such accusations? Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top

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Well, from my personal life, finding the answer is great, but the voids to find the answer, I find very rewarding. And, you know, I think we should have humility about what we don't know. And I like to give public lectures about what we don't know. And I think it's a mistake to go up in front of a general public or a class or something or even graduate students in your field and say, oh, we know all this, this is what we know, we know this, we know this, but it's the vast ocean in front of us that we don't know. And I view, you know, so I give a lot of public lectures, and most of the audience are not scientists.

And they think I know so much more than they do. But I think, you know, it's just that it's like the last several inches of a mountain that I know, but they know a lot also. Yeah. So, you know, I always try to respect the intelligence. and curiosity of my students in the audience. I think that's important for us to do. And if you come across as being arrogant, it's a terrible thing. It is. Because, you know, the one thing that a lay person can have is curiosity, just like a scientist. And you're renowned for your

public lectures and also your technical lectures. As we, you know, come to the final three or four question. One thing in the zeit guys nowadays, I don't know if you've encountered this is the concept that the Big Bang never happened, that were all just shills for big now. And I wish. I wish we could get, you know, some kickbacks from we're not getting enough money if we're chills. I mean, where's the money in this? Well, we're here in this Pritzker, you know, appointed to, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't speak, you know, it's too loudly from UC's perspective, at least, you Chicago, not UC California. But have you heard this? That they claim that either the universe is twice as old. I've had on Regina Gupta from University of Ottawa, claims that, no, actually, we need tired light, plus a model, you know, plus dark energy. Have you encountered this concept that the Big Bang? we can explain things via tired light and that actually it's a better fit in some sense to you know observations yeah so i you know i say i don't think the big bang is the complete model

well we don't know everything and but i think it's going to be part of the complete model just like newtonian physics is not a complete description of the world but it's part of a complete description of the world we still teach it right it gets us to the moon yeah right it got us to the moon it's got to be something right about it. Right. So I try not to, but people seem to be, there's a feeling a zeitgeist of people against experience or experts, authorities, or something like that. And I think it's not just in our field, but in every field, whether it's epidemiologists or, you know, what have you.

What are those idiots know? Right. Yeah, it's where when a scientist become political scientist, that's usually a challenge as well. So you recently celebrated the, what is it, the 10th anniversary of the KICP? The 20th. 20th, sorry, 20th, yeah. So talk about that. What is on the menu, you've been a director of it as you've done many things.

What's the future hold for this great institution? Well, that's the right question. So we celebrated the past, but we also want. to know what's going to be the future. I think here at the Pavli Institute and University of Chicago, I think that we have been the center of maybe one of the centers of cosmology and, you know, the students we've trained that people who have come through here and the science that's been done here. And what is going to be the future? And I

think it's going to be different. I seen as a cosmologist I try to predict the past, predicting the future is even more challenging than predicting the past. But it's incredible to me. So when I started out in cosmology, there were many more theories and ideas and there were experimental data or observational data to test them. Now there's data all over the place coming in all the time. Thank you very much. A lot of it. We're flooded with data and it. It's It's a different world now. So, you know, when I first started doing particle cosmology, I could write a paper every night

because there was no data to describe it. Now it's so hard. Yeah, but it's exciting too. So the future is going to be more and more data, larger and larger collaborations, and more and more and more expense. It's going to look a lot more like particle physics. Yes, yes. Big collaboration. So as we wrap up, I like to ask two.

questions of all my guests that grace me with their presence on the into the impossible podcast. And they connect to different sayings of the great Sir Arthur C. Clark, who is the namesake of this podcast. So the podcast called Into the Impossible. And that's from one of his aphorisms that said, the only way to determine the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. But he said other things, too, like any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I want to kind of use that to ask you a question, a version of Feynman, your your former teacher and friend, I'm sure, Caltech. He used to say, what sentence contains the most information in the fewest words?

And he would say the atomic hypothesis and everything. But I want to ask you if you had to make a billboard, you know, about the greatest technology, science, discovery, ethic, whatever you want, say, that happened on Earth. What kind of swagger, what kind of bravado would we have the Hutzpah to declare is the most magical thing that you've encountered? Maybe your career or maybe someone. What else is there? Well, I think in general is the development of quantum mechanics. So I think general relativity was a tremendous intellectual accomplishment.

But in hindsight, it would have been done. If Einstein hadn't done it, I think other people would have. Others were on the trail. Quantum mechanics just, we still don't understand it. Right. Where did this idea of the uncertainty principle and the correspondence principle and just the simple things like the double slitting is it a particle or is it a wave right um i think the development of quantum mechanics took a lot of people you know there are some people made larger contributions than others you can list or heisenberg schrodinger lisa mightner you know people like that but uh the development of quantum mechanics was amazing yeah i think that's the most remarkable

thing, it makes me proud of our species. Yeah, that's right. There's not many things that makes me proud of our species. Yeah, nowadays. Yeah, well, yeah, it does remind me the day after Einstein died, Time magazine ran a cover and there was a picture of planet Earth and a giant sign that said Einstein lived here, but of course he was wrong about most of his things in quantum mechanics and that's a cautionary tale that, yeah, like to make blunders on the level of Einstein's blunders that turn out to be, you know, Nobel worthy. He was wrong, but he wasn't stupid.

Yeah, he was. He was an incredible intellect. I mean, he's, you know, he's very much, you know, lionized in the public. But he's also amongst physicists. I mean, he just cannot escape the admiration that we have for him. And it's quite well deserved. So the last quote is not the one that I will often levy on my department chair from Arthur C. Clark, which is when he said that for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. So I like to drop that from time to time.

But no, he said the following. And he said, and I'm not calling you old. God forbid. Rocky, but he said when an elderly but distinguished scientist, I'll call you distinguished, scientist says something is possible. He or she is very much likely to be right. But when he or she says something's impossible, very much likely to be wrong. So I want to use that as an opportunity to ask you, what have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about, if anything? Oh, I'll go back to when I was in graduate school. No, as a postdoc at Caltech,

My biggest disappointment was the experiments that were looking for proton decay. This was in 1982 or something like that. Didn't find it. I was absolutely convinced they would find proton decay. It was such a beautiful theory. It was a grand unified theory. It was a way to understand the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, the barion asymmetry. I thought, sure, they would find it.

But they didn't. So I don't know what was wrong with those experimentalists, but they didn't find something that was theoretically beautiful. You can have, you know, nature is like that. You can have a beautiful, elegant theory that turns out to be wrong. Yeah, didn't Eddington once say, you know, never believe an experiment unless it's been confirmed by theory, turning the aphorism on its head. Well, Rocky, this has been a great joy as I knew it would be.

And I hope to maybe see you again. in San Diego or back here again. I'll do a part two. This has been a great choice. So thank you so much for doing. Thank you. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount.

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