Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Is Science in a Legitimacy Crisis? | Peter Boghossian (#346)

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Today, I sat down with someone who I respect greatly – Peter Boghossian. Peter is a former Portland State University professor, renowned philosopher, and best-selling author. His primary research areas are critical thinking and moral reasoning.  He actually resigned from his position at Portland State University because he felt that ideology had taken over the institution and that he did not have enough freedom as a scholar to continue his work. So, there’s no one better to talk to about the current legitimacy crisis in science and the moral obligations of scientists when it comes to communicating science to the public. We also dive deep into religion, the origin of the universe, and quantum computing.  Tune in!  Key Takeaways:  Do we have to agree on everything? (00:00) Can there be an infinite regress? (03:20) Why do we need a unified field theory? (13:12) On Eric Weinstein’s theory (23:43) Joe Rogan vs. Peter Hotez: Should scientists debate publicly? (37:53) Legitimacy crisis and death of expertise (56:38) Quantum computing and the multiverse (1:06:41) Laws against Holocaust deniers (1:12:43) Outro (1:18:48) — Additional resources:  ➡️ Check out Peter Boghossian: 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzoizcjErP9bNWnuU2CbWxg  💻 Website: https://peterboghossian.com/  🥗 Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. 📝 With a MasterClass annual membership, you can take one-on-one classes from the world’s best for $10 a month with your annual membership, get unlimited access to every class — and even better, right now, as an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off when you go to MASTERCLASS.com/impossible. 🧑‍💻 Visit LinkedIn.com/IMPOSSIBLE to post your job for free! ➡️ 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/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ 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 so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Would you believe Scientific American if they told you that we had some way to deflect a meteor, I would go to yes. But when it came to anything that was morally fashionable, specifically race, gender, trans issues, et cetera, not only would I say no, but I would say it's almost invariably the truth is the opposite of that thing. I just don't know how we can function as a society with all of these institutions captured and large swaths of the country not trusting them. There's this weird thing in today's age where people think they have to agree with literally everything. Everybody's, like all of someone's beliefs before they can have a relationship or be friends with them or something. It's a very bizarre phenomenon.

So you and I have different religious beliefs, different metaphysical beliefs which fall from that. I'd like to take a look at that. And that doesn't affect, I mean, like, it's just crazy to me to think that because people have different. metaphysical beliefs that that would somehow intrude upon a friendship of virtue. I mean, that's like, I don't even know why, like, even thinking that itself is a kind of ideology. I think it's narcissism. I mean, if you think that you're incapable of being disagreed with and maintaining comedy and comity, then it's a sign of a low-rate intellect, a midwit intellect.

I think what distinguishes you and I, you know, and the way that our colleagues and friends the people we respect and you've had on, you know, millions of just incredible conversations. And you yourself are one of the best, you know, kind of public intellectuals. I always say, you know, if you had a choice, you know, between Peter Bogosian or almost any other professor, you should have chosen him. And I really, when you left your campus previously, Portland State, that, that I said was a devastating day for Portland State students. And it was something they wouldn't likely recover from.

and because you are such, you care about lecturing. And I hope that some of the audience will want to talk about education because Peter, it's time we basically blow up a lot of education, the higher education.

And from education at the highest levels flow all the culture wars and all the devastating nonsense. We call Narshkite and Yiddish, just bull crap, nonsensical ideas. It all flows from academia.

Everything. Politics. Every politician went to college, you know, pretty much. I don't know. All journalists do, all the Twitterati do. They all go to college. So, therefore, if you want to kind of stop the metastasization, we must start at that level. Just to set the stakes, Peter.

As you know, I am not a theist in the sense of my, you know, my rabbi at that same level. I believe it's almost presumptuous. And as our mutual friend, Jordan Peterson says, like, who the hell are you to say you believe in God? like, oh, God needs like Peter and Brian's, you know, whatever. But I am what I consider to be a devout, practicing, you know, card-carrying agnostic. And for reasons I can get into, I believe that is the ecumenical and also economical in the Occam's Razor's sense, parsimonious way for a scientist like me who studies the Big Bang origin of the universe, et cetera, to maintain. Okay. There's just so much to talk about. I'm just, I'm flooded. with thoughts right now. So the other thing that we need to talk about is when I was in graduate school,

I had a professor literally yell at me when I asked him why there couldn't be an infinite regress. He yelled at me. Like why? I've, and I had a, I've talked about to our other mutual friend, Lawrence Krauss, I've talked to him about this stuff at length. So explain to me why, and I know you've said, You've talked about the multiverse, and we have a clip about that. Why can't there be an infinite regress? Well, certainly there can be. You know, there's nothing, everything that is not forbidden is not only permissible, but is mandatory, is the saying that we employ in quantum mechanics. So the question is, is there sufficient reason to believe that the multiverse exists?

And what becomes uncomfortable for both believers, theologically inclined believers and non-believers, is that there is almost a conflation. There is an overlap between the tenets and postulates of those that don't believe in the multiverse and those that do. And they're diametrically opposed when it comes to theism. So here's an example. Steven C. Meyer is one of the leaders, directors of the Discovery Institute up in Seattle.

Right. And he's a friend. I've had him on the show. And he maintains with all his might and force that the theory of what's called cosmological inflation, which we can explain, is the spark that ignited the Big Bang that we now observe today. Concomitant with that, Lawrence Krause, who was one of the staunchest atheist and probably wouldn't talk to Stephen, maybe. Although he is the main character in Stephen's most recent book, Return of the God hypothesis. they were supposed to have a debate. It didn't happen.

There's a lot of hijinks involved. You'll find out about it if you read the book, which I blurbed, as you may know. But the belief of Lawrence and Stephen are diametrically opposed when it comes to the big banger or lack of. So how can these two different things be reconciled? Well, they can't unless the underpinning of the theory is so flexible, so all-encompassing, so squishy, that it admits, you know, these completely diametric downstream conclusions to be drawn from the same theory. That's a sign of an immature, but not necessarily incompetent or incomplete theoretical framework. And so the question we have to ask is, are these part of the scientific endeavor, you know, that great, you know, you use when you come to visit me or I come to visit you, I'm going to bring you some finger puppets.

My audience knows that I'm, I'm used to finger in Galileo. I've got Carl Sagan here. I've got them all. I don't have Peter. I'd love to finger you, Peter. But Galileo said, our job as scientists is to measure what's measurable and make measurable what is not yet so. And so you have to ask the question.

You can speculate on these matters of wordy philosophers, as Galileo used to deride philosophers and sometimes Lawrence Krause does as well. But at the same token, you should have sufficient reason to do that. So can you propose an experiment that would reveal the presence of the multiverse? Or can you only say we must wait or we must use only indirect evidence? As I wrote about in Skeptic magazine for Michael Shermer, I wrote about what if we're in a situation where the belief in credulity in a scientific field must be accepted not on logical proof but on social proof. That's a scary situation. Can we agree that one cannot reason one's way to the answer to the question of if there can be an infinite regress?

Can we agree that you would need empirical evidence? Forget about what the empirical evidence is, but can we agree that reason alone will not answer the question? Reason alone cannot answer that, but evidence may not also be forthcoming to answer it as well. Okay. So let's just be. let's do very slowly and construct this. So if you and I agree, which we do, that reason alone cannot answer the question, then I think it follows from that that we can also agree to the extent that you're remotely knowledgeable about the domain of philosophy. Many philosophers have tried to do this. They've tried to kind of reason their way to these things. But that you can't, the way that you answer that question is through science.

It's not through really cool syllogisms, right? Right. Yes, exactly. And in fact, I want to just amplify that one more step because I, as a Jew, find it very distasteful when someone like Stephen C. Meyer or someone like William Lane Craig, all these guys have three names. I love, you know, Prince and Medanica, I was just one. I'm doing fine with two. But they will start with the following chain of syllogisms. they will start by saying anything that exists had a beginning,

you know, kind of the column. Yeah, the column argument. Then they will say that which came, you know, from something, you know,

also cannot come from nothing. And then they will say things that were created, had a creator. And then finally they will say Jesus is therefore God. Correct. And that's, that's difficult for me as a practicing Jew, though not at the level of,

you know, my friend Ben Shapiro. that we can't necessarily get to an extrapolation or proof of a creator, let alone a personal creator. It's clear you need such things. But that smacks of the same type of infinite regress. And it's usually formed in the same way as saying, well, if God is eternal, then who created God?

And then you get into these infinite turtles as well. Right. Okay. So the Jesus part is not part of the column, but he adds that in as like you need a personal creator. And if anybody's wondering about where they can see the best summary of Craig's views, see the best summary of Craig's views, not elite reader. And it's his debate with Alex Rosenberg.

Just watch the Craig part. I wouldn't watch the Rosenberg part. But he lays that out in perfect syllogistic format. But I think that so many people have been hoodwinked by thinking that they can reason to certain conclusions about the nature of reality. but reason is not the tool that will get you there. Now, let's bracket for a second what evidence it would take. I'm just looking to formulate an agreement with you

that you cannot reason to these things. If that's true, then much of the domain of philosophy in which philosophers attempt to do this, they're just spinning their, I was going to say, a more expression, but they're just spinning their own wheels, right? So you go ahead. No, no, I'm agreeing with you. I think, yes, there is a, and I see people are saying in the chat,

oh, no, Craig never mentions Jesus. No, no, no, but that's not the point. They're not there to prove the existence of a God. They're there to prove the existence of a personal God or else of what use is such an entity. And the God that intervenes and answers prayers and performs miracles and causes evolution, et cetera. So I would say, you know, when we talk about things like the multiverse,

It is possible for rational, reasonable people to extrapolate laws of physics in, you know, kind of incontrovertible laws of physics down to the point where they no longer have applicability. Let me give you an example. So we talk about the origin of the universe is originating from a big bang. All of our lines of evidence point to the fact that the universe has been evolving, has been getting cooler, has been getting more tenuous, less dense. and Hori in its old age. Now, that implies based on, you know, kind of modus tollens that you just run the clock backwards and it was more dense, hotter, more pressure, more, more dense, et cetera. Then you come to a point where you get to a point where mathematically you can predict a singularity.

Now, what's interesting about singularities, you know, where you divide a finite quantity into an infinitesimal or zero volume, say matter, finite amount of matter, compressed to infinite density is a singularity and density. Those would also be correlated with singularities in pressure and temperature. The math works. The math maths out just fine. But the physics is completely unpredictable. We can't say what happens once you get below the plank length, which is something like 10 to the minus 40th meters. When you get to such infinitesimal length scales, the human brain, Peter, is the only organ we think exists in the universe that can contemplate what infinity means. When I put infinity into my computer, I get out not a number. You know, I take one divided by

zero. You get not a number, NAN. You, you don't get a sensible value. The computer can't, but we can process it just fine. Human brains can do that. Uniquely so. So conversely, I'll just, I'll just finish this last touch point. The extrapolation mathematically can be used by both William Lane Craig, Lawrence Krause, and Stephen C. Meyer to extrapolate to a point where should properly be said that our physics has broken down. Our ability to describe the physical universe with mathematical laws is incomplete. I read and blurbed actually, someone who was a mentor to me. I didn't really understand because I'm not a particle physicist. Victor Stinger wrote God in the multiverse. And I don't know if you read that. I did. I remember you told me about it. Yeah. Yeah. And so he claims that

there's sufficient evidence to warrant belief. Now, there's a clip of you to warrant belief in a multiverse, evidence being the key word in that sentence. There's a clip of you talking about the multiverse that Reed will pull up in a second. But here's how it goes from the point of view of many contemporary Christian apologists led by William Lane Craig. He'll say, and he'll invoke Lincoln, he'll talk about the Big Bang, and he'll say, the reason that people believe or claim to believe in the multiverse is because they they want to deny the God hypothesis. They want to deny the first cause, this kind of Aristotelian, boom.

And so you have to posit something. So it's more of a kind of metaphysics that's posited to avoid an inevitable epistemological. conclusion and that is that God exists. Wittgenstein writes, and again, this is, Victorstein's obviously not a particle physicist, but he wrote about something that I find to be a, there's only necessity in logic. There's no necessity in the world.

And so when I see people try to think about a unified field theories and come up with string theories, I'm just, again, I'm not a physicist, but I'm wondering like, why would people even think that there's necessity there. Like, why would people even think that, I understand why someone would think it's possible, but why would someone think it's necessary?

Why would they think is necessary? Does that make sense? Well, just explain one more time, that what is necessary? That there even would be a unified field theory. Like, why would anybody think that? Yeah, so let me think. I don't understand.

Yes, I agree. So let's take a step back. What is a unified field theory? And it stakes back to discovery by none other than another three-name individual, James Clerk Maxwell. And I don't have a doll of him. But what he did is he studied and investigated the properties of electricity and magnetism, which were thought to be two disparate things as different from one another as a magnetic field is from a gravitational field, as the force that drops this thing down just there, losing my meteorite.

And by the way, Peter, because I love college students, and I know you do too, and I love graduate students, postdocs. I even love some professors, Peter, okay? I give away these meteorites to anybody with an EDU email address. If you go to Brian Keating.com slash edu, and you have an EDU email address. You sign up for it. I will send you guaranteed a chunk of 4.3 billion-year-old meteorite material. I'm going to send one to you, Peter, once you become a professor again. I really want you down here at UCSD.

But what Mr. Maxwell, James Clerk Maxwell did, is he reconciled the fact that the electric field imposed on such an object could be understood in another sense by an observer, say, in a moving reference frame as an electric field and vice versa. You could convert electric fields to magnetic fields. And it was known that they had something to do with each other, but he unified them. This set off a path of unification.

that continues to this day with people like my great friend Eric Weinstein and others who are still trying to unify gravity with these three other forces. The three other forces are the strong nuclear force, which is responsible for atomic, which is responsible for atomic fission and fusion, the binding together of the nuclei in the movie Oppenheimer. I did a video about that, the physics of Oppenheimer, semi-viral movie on my channel. And that unified that with, with or the belief is that the weak force, which is responsible for what's called radioactive decay, that that force is unified.

We know now, thanks to the work of Abdes Salam and Stephen Weinberg, that, and Shelley Glashow, that they're unified with electricity and magnetism. In other words, the same types of fields and forces are in sort of this family tree

that relate electricity, you know, electric carrying wires and resistors to magnets, refrigerator magnets, and maybe superconducting the devices, those are related genetically to the weak nuclear force, which couldn't be more shocking. So then the logic took over.

Well, if those are unified, maybe the nuclear force that binds proton to proton. Remember, a proton shouldn't be able to bind to a proton, Peter. They're both positively charged. They should repel each other. Well, guess what? They don't, except if you put a neutron in there. So it's very unusual to get two things to stick together that are repulsive, that hate each other,

that are like the faculty and the bureaucratic staff at the university. You have to bring together a third, a different element, a different type of constituent, like a student. And that moderates the force of repulsion and causes a force of attraction. That's called the grand unified theory, or G-U-T. And then finally, if gravity could be made to be unified with those other three, forces, we'd have a theory of everything. But we don't currently even have, and I say even, I'm not a theorist, but we don't have, and I don't want to minimize, it's very hard to do, a grand unified theory. And yet we're looking for theories of everything. So I always joke,

Peter, it's hilarious dad jokes that I'm known for. We're putting the toe before the gut. So you have to be careful with that. Yeah, that's your name. 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 speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay.

Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. So the fact that I followed 99% of that tells me that you're incredibly, Incredibly good explainer. I love this. So, okay, so let me repeat back to you the answer to my question. So you're saying that there's not necessarily a necessity that there's a unified field theory,

but because other elements have been unified at different scales, we can extrapolate and make reasonable inferences from that that it's very likely, I don't want to give a probability vector to that, but it's at least likely. It's possible. What degree of possibility? Is it possible to the extent that it's likely? I mean, I don't want to get too far down the weeds because...

There are people that claim the success of the unification of electricity and magnetism together. And then electricity, magnetism, and the weak force provides ample hope and reason to search for a grand unified theory. I think the notion that there's a theory of everything, which unifies all four forces together is taken for granted. As I said, people pursue that because here's the deal, Peter. What happens is people think in physics, they have a target on this guy's back. This is Albert Einstein, if you're listening. And they want to shoot that target.

They want to say that where he failed, I will succeed. So I get letters. I get emails. Professor Keating, Einstein was wrong. I can show you how to unify this. I'm not good in math. So if you help me prove it, then we can split the Nobel Prize together and I'll only take, you know, two thirds.

Okay. So we get a lot of that because it's such, it's the paragon of the human brain is Einstein, where he failed, if I can succeed. Therefore, I get all his dungeons and dragons hit points, his life force. And I am superseding him. Now you're speaking my language, Brian. You're speaking my language. Keep going.

You rolled it. Isakahedron, acosahedral dice. And then you're in, but though. So, but that's not to say there aren't reasons to pursue it. As I mentioned, Eric Weinstein is very much convinced that he has a contender theory of everything that explains a lot, but it has to admit other currently unobservable phenomena, such as the fact that in his theory, there are multiple time dimensions. So we've talked about space time in physics for years.

That's the unification of space up, down, left and right, and forwards and backwards, namely the three dimensions of degrees of freedom and space with the time dimension. I want to meet you for this podcast. I had to be in a certain place at a certain time. That's four dimensions needed to be adhered to. What Eric and others have thought about is, well, what if you extrapolated that to even higher dimensions? In Eric's case, something like 10 dimensions.

And what if time is not a monorail that goes in one direction? It could potentially go backwards and forwards, but there's an orthogonal time direction that we have no real connection to. And Hawking and others did postulate that as well. So he's in good company. Now, there are other theorists like Sheldon Glashow, who won the Nobel Prize for the Unification Electricity Magnet. He also tried to similar vein.

There's something called Petit Salam. Ed Witten has tried to do this with string theory. Ed Witton is behind everything, like virtually everything that's just insanely out there. But yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. I have a lot of trouble with him. He is one of the foremost self-hating, anti-Israel, Jew-hating.

He is truly on his own level like Ed Witten is. If you look at his Twitter feed, you'd think that he's like a Nolmchomsky or somebody. Oh, really? In terms of his feeling about Israel, it's every, only nothing about physics or math, only about about Israel's atrocities, you know, carried out against the Hamas and Palestinian government. It's amazing with all these stuff that he does, he thinks about anything else. But, okay. So, yeah, we get back to it.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. What I would like to see is more experimental backing. I think we have an overabundance. I always make the analogy like theoretical ideas are like software. It's relatively cheap because one person can make great software, but it takes a lot of people to build a computer that the software is programmed. I'm not criticizing theorists at all. I mean, some of my best friends are theorists.

But the bottom line is we need to have empiricism to work. 100%. 100% okay so let me ask you a question so you know I'm very friendly with with Eric I like Eric we just hung out in London with Winston and and I listen to Eric talk about this I have dude I have no idea what he's talking about like like I could not even like it's just so like nothing zero it just does not and I was talking to Shermer about this so what here's what I understand. So let's say that that Eric is correct. And I haven't asked him this. So perhaps it should be more, I should have asked him before. I asked you, but it's not a dig on Eric. I'm just genuinely

curious. Let's say that his models are correct. Why doesn't he publish that in peer reviewed journals? Okay. So now we're getting into like some really controversial stuff. So Eric, Eric is perhaps the most interesting and mercurial and and delightfully challenging person that I've ever met. I was listening to an interview with Sam Harris, so I hope we can get to Sam, talk about him in a bit. But I was just thinking, like, I get to talk to Eric. And Eric, just to my mind, just completely obliterates in the public intellectual space, Sam, on every level. And he's so much more kind of just articulate, but his ability to articulate and his humility,

which I don't believe Sam has at the same level. I forgot. Do you know Sam well or no? Very well. And I don't want to, you know, I'd love to talk to Sam. He's never been on like a very high level scientifically oriented podcast. I mean, he's been on with many people and maybe he's not, he's not a, he's not a physicist, though.

No, but I've had on, you know, I talk to economists, a Nobel Prize winning economy. I don't need to, people come on the show, not just to talk. Oh, I thought you, I thought you meant to talk to, to talk about Eric's theory. No, no, not at all. No, no, I'm just saying like, he was talking about other things. So when I, what I mean to say about Eric is that he, there's no, Eric's mind works in multiple dimensions in ways that normal people can't really contemplate. So, for example, when we talk about peer review, he is already like five steps down the road.

So if you ask Eric, he will say peer review is not, should not be part of science. In fact, his pinned tweet on Twitter for a long time was we should talk about this graph. And it was, you know, the Google and gram of how many times peer review has been mentioned in a given past 100 years. And it was zero until the 40s and then it spiked up. Okay, so that's one thing. Peer review is not that traditional. It's not that irrelevant. Number two, who started peer review as a.

kind of sine qua non of good science or Shibboleth. Well, it turns out there was this publishing company called Pergamon, I believe, and they were affiliated with a couple of other people. And then all these academic universities had to buy subscriptions to journals. And then the journals hire, you know, reviewers, but they don't pay them anything. And all that's true. And then one of the leaders and the funders of this peer review kind of industry was Jeffrey Epstein's father. Okay. So, um, so for that reason he's like unwilling. Um, there are other, you know, as like, you know, and, and he should speak for himself if he's interested in coming on. But, but the bottom line is he does not hold by peer review. So this is not something that by, in fact,

when he published quote unquote his, um, his most recent disdisputations about what he calls geometric unity. It was first shown on Joe Rogan's podcast, immediately shown on mine, you know, live from Austin, Texas, from his hotel room. And we went into the details of it that, you know, Joe is not going to go into on the physicist level. But he copyrighted it as a work of entertainment so that it couldn't be, it could not be plagiarized by forces such as those that Eric has claimed proof and demonstrable proof has copied his ideas in the past.

And some of his claims are very meritorious, in my opinion. And not all of them necessarily. I'm not saying he's lying, but I'm just saying I haven't investigated them. But at least one or two, I've personally investigated and found him to be correct. So peer review is a good for science. So I actually disagree with Eric.

I take the Churchillian perspective, that peer review is the worst form of advocacy and argumentation about science and discourse, except for all the others. In that, we have this tradition, and it's not perfect. I just got back from London myself. And while I was in London, I had the great honor of speaking at the Royal Institution.

I saw that. Excellent. Yeah, congratulations. Yeah, it was a wonderful thing. And it was where Michael Faraday, who first invented the concept, we talked about fields. He came up with the idea of the field. What is the magnetic field was electric field? And I got to use his exact experiments, wax paper with iron filings and magnets.

It was a treat of a life on my wife and two of my kids there. It was such a wonderful treat, Peter. I can't explain it. And it's part of what's called the discourse, which is never supposed to end. In other words, I was locked in a room and they didn't announce who I was.

They didn't introduce me. I just come bursting out through this door. In a Faraday cage. Yeah, this continuing lecture series that never ends, dating back to apocry when some speaker failed to show up and Michael Faraday had to give the lecture. Anyway,

getting back to this. So when I did that, I was reminded that this is the way that people would announce things, that they would do discovery. They wouldn't do it in a journal. A journal didn't exist. in 1826. Instead, they would come there and say, I believe that this chunk of meteorite,

which your dot edu email address will get you, is 4 billion years old. And they would do an experiment with a Geiger tube or, you know, some sort of, you know, proof or JJ Thompson demonstrated the existence of the electron. Like live in person is incredible. And I was using some of their same equipment. So that's an alternative, right? So you could think of other alternatives. You could think of subject or domain expertise. I will say, though, that it is very difficult to construe a way of adversarial, but it should be not ad hominem, critiquing of scientific presentations. And Eric is of the opposite. He thinks it's bad for science. I think it's neutral to slightly good, and especially compared to all the others. Could Eric demonstrate his model live?

No, he's not, it's not an experimental model. So the access to this, if you've seen Oppenheimer, plan to first check out my video on my channel about the physics of Oppenheim. Because they left out all the physics, all the fun, nerdy stuff that I went to and see it for. And I was like, I got as much physics out of Barbie as that. But when you talk about the physics of the nuclear, now we're talking about the physics of space time. So to go from the electronics scale, the scale of chemistry, the scale of refrigerator magnets, the energy scale associated with an electric shock, it makes. hurt you. Now you go to the nuclear scale and you have Hiroshima. Okay. Now, what Eric wants to do is get to the sub-nuclear scale, the space time scale. Can you imagine the conflagration that it would take

to demonstrate such a, such a theory? So no, no, Peter, we couldn't demonstrate it. Is it at least in theory capable of being demonstrated that it's, that it aligns with reality? I don't want to say that it's true. Yeah. So he could, but we don't do these like live like a magic show anymore. And there is, there was an element of showmanship and,

and there was stuff that I did, you know, that's just, yeah, it is like a live magic trick, right? But, but no,

I mean, what Eric should do is, is indeed publish it and, and indeed look for criticism of it, respond to that criticism. The problem with Eric's theory's ideas is because he's such an influential, public intellectual,

because he's, probably one of the brightest living human beings. Because of that, he's attracted a huge cadre of people that would love to see him fail, be humiliated. I see that 100%. He has a massive, massive target on his back.

And just to buttress what you're saying, every time I've hung out with Eric, I found him to be, I found everything you've said about him to be absolutely true he's very affable as well i really i really like him as a person um but with all that being said i'm just i have literally nothing to say to him about physics i like i couldn't eat i know i just don't know enough to i wouldn't even begin to know a root you know saying so like having that conversation with me would be totally pointless no in fact so i've i've

done that i've had him down i've invited him down the ucSD a couple years ago he was sort of a visitor you know, permanent visitor. And now he's, you know, on occasion, we'll visit me from L.A. But we actually had a quote unquote debate with with another colleague of mine, Daniel Green, who's a brilliant young, you know, 30s, 40s, guys, good looking, brilliant, you know, great father, great, great, like, he's just the guy you hate, right? But he, no, I love him. But, and they talked and debated live and it was, and there was great comity.

They did not fight with each other. There's no ad hominem attacks. And I could tell Eric left that conversation. feeling energized and alive, knowing that there were not only, you know, physics kind of wannabes out there, but actual,

you know, highly cited practicing theoretical cosmologists that were taking him seriously, that could debate with him, that he could hold his own with and at some levels go deeper. And so, but when you have people on the internet,

you know, who want to see him fall, like dedicate podcasts that go on venues, and then attack his paper using the pseudonymous name. so that you can't verify, is this person the same person that said something that was misgendering somebody? Or is that person somebody who's causing people to come to people's houses? We don't know because that person's name. So at that level, now there is a very public critic who has made his name known online and is frequently critic.

And he also loves to try to engage me in it. And I know who that is. I think he's a brilliant, you know. We won't use his name. Let's not use his name. I don't care. But, you know, he's had like four or five podcasts, Peter, on his podcast about me, my book, Eric, trying to get, you know, other scientists to comment on the quality of my science or some of the things.

And why is it bad that I don't have him on my podcast? Look, I find it flattering at some level because every time he mentions me, I get this great boost because he's such a brilliant young guy. this guy who's criticizing Eric. However, I don't find that he's acting in good faith. I feel like he wants their, you know, and I've seen attacks. And so anyway, I'm happy to talk to anybody. They have to be doing it in good faith,

and they have to be doing it from a point of view of trying to have clarity, not just taking somebody down and, like, standing over them and revealing them to be the grifter and everything else. That's what happens when you move at high levels in the public space, is that the number of lunatics who come out of the woodwork in bad faith accusations. I mean, if you think it's bad for Eric. I don't think this guy's a lunatic at all. I think he's brilliant.

I'm not, I'm not taking about him specifically. I'm just talking about the number of insane people who come out, who literally has a huge target. And if you think it's bad for Eric, it's so much worse for his brother. I mean, they come after Brett like crazy, crazy. Like, and just the sheer the tuperation. the sheer nastiness, the sheer, and that's part of the problem is you don't really know if it's 50 people or 5,000 people, like 50 people with 100 kind of sock poppet account. So there is a

kind of, and I do think there's something about the anonymity in those that bothers me in a way that when you move it at public space at a high level and you have these huge targets on your back like you have like Eric has. And yeah, I, I, I, I mean, something you never say in person, right? If somebody were to say to me about my friend, Eric, if they were to say he's a grifter and a fraud, you're going to find something out about me and, you know, the kind of the kind of, you know, physicality that I'm willing to maintain. If you're, if you're, if you're actively threatening me or my friends, okay. Now, on the internet, that doesn't happen, right? I mean, people, there's, there's no repercussion.

You're not going to get punched in the face. Somebody once said that. And actually, one of the things that Sam Harris did say that I did agree with is, Like, you know, most of the worst weekends of my life, you know, in the last 10 years were because of something I said on Twitter. That's that's what he said. So why are we inviting this thing in the, you know, it's just because I'm a, you know, I'm a narcissist and I want public affirmation. You just, yeah, okay. So you just, I just, okay.

So that right there, I have to pause and say it's like, okay. So when you do this thing that we do, when people come after you online, you just can't, I mean, you just have to be non-phased by it. You just cannot let these people get to you because the moment that that, happens you know Helen pluck rose they've really done a number on her oh yeah they've called her horrible things mostly about her weight and she you know she had a a problem like a cyst was on her brain and she used to be an athlete and i mean what people have said about her and done to her is horrific instead of engaging her ideas but you just can't let these people get to you that's that's the thing you just no i agree and and i and that's why i was wondering why about the whole peer review

with Eric thing, why that just doesn't go through peer review. And I thought you were going to say that the journals are institutionally captured. But that reminds me, if I can just, you know, use the word,

orthogonal, I love that word. If I can just go to, go to something, you know, the whole Joe Rogan put up $10,000 to $10,000 or $100,000 to debate.

Yeah, Peter Houtes. Yep, with RFK. Yeah. I'm interested in your take on that, but because it parallels this conversation. But I'd like to give you mine and maybe you tell me if my reasoning is an error. So Peter went on his podcast before.

So he already moved in the public space. He has a Twitter account. So he's not a scientist who has avoided the public space. That's right. So I think it's incumbent upon him because he's in the public space to accept that challenge. Yeah, so I'd love to talk to Joe Rogan about this. And God willing, someday I'll get that chance, Peter. But I thought, you know, there is this constant refrain from Peter Hotez.

First of all, there are all these baseless, really slimy kind of accusations that Joe was doing that as kind of like an anti-Semitic trope. I didn't even know Peter Hortez is Jewish. That's insane. I'm not even sure he is. But I was like crazy talk. Yeah. Yeah, it was a reporter from the Atlantic or the New York Times. It was Frum, David Frum, I think.

Oh, yeah. So I wrote David Frum back. I was just like, yeah, it's already bad because this anti-Semite already had Peter Hotez on his pot. It was clearly like he didn't even know that he had been out like, Frum was a, oh, don't give him a platform. Okay, it's a great, it's a great line, except for when you actually do a second of research as a reporter and see that he already had been on the podcast and treated wonderfully. Second of all, when he says, oh, we don't debate.

That's nonsense. We do debate. We don't allow a debate on Twitter or Joe Rogan experience to count and replace substitutionally peer review. On the other hand, we also, you know, it wasn't just that he said, well, I won't, like scientists don't debate. So you're saying if you had on, you know, if I could talk to, you know, Eric Topol, which, who I have talked to, and, you know, you wouldn't debate him.

You know, he felt we shouldn't give the vaccine out before the 2020. election because that would redound to Trump's benefit. So I claim if he believed that, Peter, and correct me if I'm wrong, logically speaking, but if Eric believed that was true, Eric Topol, and it turned out that the vaccine indeed did save lives, then by withholding the vaccine from the public and using his influence to do so, then lives were lost. I don't think you can say both things. The virus is, the vaccine is 100% effective or was effective, save lives. And if it was administered earlier, it wouldn't have saved. So anyway, would Peter Hote's, not debate one of the foremost, you know, kind of researchers and public figures, namely Eric Tolpaul.

Of course he would. So it's a nonsense to say that they don't participate in public. He didn't want to. And he knows that RFK is more skilled. But I actually don't think RFK is the best exemplar of this point. But that should redound to Peter Hotez's benefit because, yes, he may be more skilled oratorially. But scientifically, shouldn't Peter Hotez have so much better scientific apparatus?

and Joe mediate and moderate that. So I thought it was a cop out. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

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Okay, so let me ask you at least one, perhaps two questions. I want to see if we can find agreement or if we disagree on this. Would you agree that if somebody was a scientist with no Twitter account, never been on a podcast, but they worked in this field, and then somebody challenged them to a debate, there's just no, a public debate in a public forum. Maybe they should consider it, but it is an unreasonable, expectation for other people to want them to do that. Would you agree that if someone already does

not move in the public space, that there's no compulsion to do so? I actually think that scientists who do receive public funding have a moral obligation to engage with the public at some level. It doesn't mean like every time they're challenged by a flat earther, I have to go and debate them and put on my debating clogs and do that. No, it means that I receive public funding and I have a responsibility as a mensch and as an individual who is responsible for the fiduciary obligation that we have a scientist to spend other people's money, namely U.S. taxpayers to do it wisely and to do it judiciously. That's an obligation that I feel I have. That's the reason I started my YouTube channel and so forth. If you don't want to do that, you know, that's fine.

I often get the saying, I actually had a conversation with this guy, Dave Farina, who actually calls people like Stephen C. Meyer and others, charlatans, grifters, just hateful individuals. I mean, he is really vehemently antagonistic towards the Discovery Institute, towards this guy, James Tor, and other people. But he even said, well, no, it's not in their skill set. I want them staying in the lab where they'll do the most good. I said, imagine you work for AT&T.

and you're doing, you know, marketing for them. And your boss comes by and your boss says, hey, Brian, what are you up to? And you say, look, I'm doing very complicated things, things that you may not understand, you know, and so forth, Mr. Begaz. You would say, pack up your stuff by the end of the day and the security card will take away your badge

because you have no right to tell me how you are too intelligent, erudite and wise, and you should have a blank check and how you spend your money with no accountability, and no fiduciary duty. And yet that's what we as scientists are doing. So there is an obligation. There's not an obligation to meet me on the Potter's field at 6 in the morning with pistols at dawn.

That's not, that's not. It seems to me that because RFK, now, is he a viable presidential candidate? I don't know. But, you know, he has a large X following on Twitter, whatever you want to go. He has a very large public platform. A lot of people listen to him. it would seem to me given that

there's an additional responsibility on someone who is a scientist because of the political nature of both the claim and the person with whom you'd be having that discussion is my reasoning

I mean what do you think about that? I mean, do they have an obligation or to be part? Obligation might be too, strong, but because this is a presidential candidate with not an unreasonable likelihood of success, but there just seems to be an additional gravitas or duty or responsibility because it's RFK. Well, let me flip it around you. So if I've learned nothing else, by the way, when you were on my podcast, it was such a delight.

And I really want you back on. I want to do it in person in my new Impossible Studios. But Peter, the comments were like, because I was asking you things, they were debating religion and talking about like experts and follow the science and what does that mean. And then in the comments, it was, there were all these comments like, Peter's using all the tools of how to have impossible conversations with Brian Keating in real time. And Keating is too oblivious to understand he is getting one pulled. Anyway, so I'm going to pull one over on you.

Okay. So let's say, let me take the opposite. So let me say this. It's reasonable that Peter Hotez shouldn't engage with somebody who has said, things conflating vaccines with autism and, uh, and, uh, conflating the fiduciary venality of the pharmaceutical industry with, um, with their profit motive and with their policy directives. And so for engaging with these people, would it not be like, you know, Ben Shapiro runs for, uh, runs for office and he's asked to debate a Holocaust denier. Now, I hate the word vaccine denier.

I hate climate denier. I just had on a wonderful professor at NYU, Stephen Coonin, who's been called a climate change denier. I've been called a multiverse denier. It's the currency of the word denier. That's awesome. A multiverse denier. Oh, my God. My wife denied me.

She didn't let me hold her hand last night over dinner. I've denied a lot of things in life, Peter. Don't cry for me. But the bottom line is, you know, to what obligation do you have? On a platform like Rogan, I thought it was disingenuous, which doesn't mean that he wasn't right to maybe not debate with, with, with, with RFK himself. I think RFK is, is a very skilled orator.

He's been in the public sphere for a long time. He's got bona fides. So I think Hotez was, was, you know, I think he was scared to do it. I think he's, oh, for sure. Smart not to do it. And maybe there's some venue,

but he wasn't actively proposing it. So let's say Eric doesn't want to do peer review or Sam Harris doesn't want to be on Twitter, are there ways that they can have their own echo chamber punctuated or punctured, rather? And I found this listening to Sam, you know, he was, he's so kind of just, he's such a brilliant mind that I think in his mind, he's convinced himself that there are no flaws in his logic. And so it is like debating, you know, is two plus two equal five. And so it's not worth his time. On the other hand, there's ample evidence to show that a lot of the things that he would claim preferable to Trump, you know, never happened.

I listened to a podcast that he did, um, with this guy Scott Galloway, who's a professor, so-called professor at, at NYU. He's not like, I don't know.

Teaching staff. And he is probably prof. He's on with Kara Swisher. They have a podcast. If you know her, I think she called for Ben Shapiro to be de-platformed ones. Uh, to Susan Wajicki on,

on YouTube because her son likes to watch, uh, Ben Shapiro. Anyway, um, so this conversation was, was from 2020. And it was all about the dangers of

reelecting Trump and how it's an existential threat. And so Scott and Sam Harris were debating how it could lead to like a new invasion of Ukraine. It could lead to tensions with Iran, you know, and and it could lead to, you know, Chinese interference and, um, and, and, and, I'm like, do you guys like ever do an audit on yourselves like Scott Galloway or Sam Harrow? You ever look back and say, look, when we predicted this, we were wrong. Like, I made a mistake.

And, and that's, that's fine to do that. And actually just, and it's totally different contact. I just did an interview with a renowned theoretical physicist. You know your paper, the, the hermeneutic penis. The conceptual penis is a social contract. One of the highest in gender studies, it's one of the most cited papers in all gender studies. In the top tier, that is. Do you know what your H index is or what that papers?

No, but the funny thing is it's still cited as a real paper, even though it's not available online anymore. It's still cited. That testifies to the rigidity, to the durability of the conceptual penis. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. There's something called an H index, and we're going to nerd out as professors. That is the number of papers that you have that have at least H citations.

So it's a metric, a parametric measurement of your throughput and creativity and output as a professor or as a scientist. So someone could have one paper that has a million citations and never write another paper. and that's, you know, that's interesting, that's useful, that that might be a one-hit wonder, or someone could have 10,000 papers that have each been cited a hundred times, and that might be even more indicative of that professor's impact on the field. So it's an impact factor assessment. The person who invented that statistic is Jorge Hirsch.

I think the age stands for Hirsch. He's my colleague at UCSD. He was a very great skeptic of the superconductor that's recently been announced to operational at room temperature. And I know you want to get into type two type one. I actually do. Base one superconductors and also talk about levitation and the Meisner effect. And we will do that.

And quantum computers. I just had him on my podcast a few hours ago. And he's changed his mind. And he's big enough to do it. He's one of the biggest naysayers. So Sam Harris can't come out and say, look, I was wrong. I don't think we would have had a fascist state. I think we maybe have descended more into kind of fascist or suppression of free speech under Biden potentially.

And maybe Biden is more as corrupt as I thought. when I said on trigonometry that, you know, he could have, you know, dead babies on his laptop. Oh, yeah. Anyway, this is all to say that, um, that there's, that there's no obligation to debate, but I think you shouldn't shy away from it. And if you do, find another venue. Say, I don't want a debate.

Let's have a debate on, uh, on, you know, Peter Bogosian.com. Let's just have a written debate. Or let's do it live or, you know, whatever. But, but, but to say completely, it's not, he's beneath me. I think that's insulting to the scientific process. Yeah. I mean, I can expect. the psychological reasons and the social reasons why he didn't want to debate.

But you've mentioned Sam Harris a number of times, so I think we should talk to that. But beforehand, hey, Reid, pull up the, we have a super chat question about the trustworthiness of science. And thank Maverick Christian. We appreciate this. You know, I have a nonprofit. Everything goes to the nonprofit to allow us to do this. And I get 20% of it, right?

You get 20% of her, just 20. whether to trust the majority of scientific opinion in practice boils down to who do you trust when you lack the relevant expertise to judge BS, which can go awry, for example, creationism. We should talk about that because Dawkins does not debate creationist because he says it gives them the, quote, oxygen of legitimacy. And how do you navigate that? So that's actually a great question for you. Yeah.

So when I think about, you know, who do you trust? You have to trust is earned just like in life. And all of us have a moral and ethical bank account. And I think you can draw upon it. You can be right. I may have declared that we discovered the imprimatur of the singularity that began our universe. But I also was part of a team that retracted it and worked to overturn it. And that's the story of my first book, losing the Nobel Prize.

Spoiler alert. I lost the Nobel Prize. Great book, by the way. Loved it. Thank you. Thank you very much. And yet, and yet, you should have the intellectual capacity to say that does not invalidate you. There's a trope that, you know, a scientist only has to be right once in their life to be, you know, successful career and only wrong ones to have no career.

That's not really true. The problem is that the public communication of science is a unidirectional ratchet that only allows the amplification of sensationalism and never the actual sausage retraction being made. I'll give you an example. So when there are claims like the one involving my experiment, Bicep, or say one involving a room temperature superconductor from years ago or cold fusion, that comes out on the front page of every newspaper around the world. Correct.

And it happened to us. And it comes out and it leads above the fold. And then, and then if there is a retraction, that will occur on page B-17 of the Saturday edition, which is the least read of all seven editions of the newspaper. If at all, It'll never be on TV.

And so I have called for rather controversial sort of a PR budget ratio where you have in reserve, you have to publicize your results. You're getting taxpayer money. All of a scientist are funded by the taxpayers, even though people like me who receive a lot of private funding and the preponderance of my funding is from a private foundation. Nevertheless, I teach at a public university. I've, you know, been educated in the public school system my whole life, et cetera, et cetera. So for these reasons, we have an obligation.

However, we should keep some of our budget in reserve. I've called 10, 20%. Call it in reserve to publicize at the same level of attention that the initial announcement got. And you must keep working with the media. And I call this the academic media hype cycle because something will be found like a claim that the universe is 26 billion years old. And that will be one person working in Ottawa, Canada is a legitimate professor. and he will claim this and then it will get picked up by a couple of physics, you know, news sources that have the word physics in it or scientists in it. And then Joe Rogan will post it.

And then Elon Musk will retweet and ask questions about dark matter subsequent to it. And this really happened two weeks ago. If I ever do talk to Joe, I'm going to bring this up. Because the fact is having this one researcher kind of present a single finding that's not vetted or really consistent or coherent with the majority of the first. field. And it turns out this researcher also had felt pressure from his home institution to make a press release, which then gets picked up by a local newspaper, which then goes to a national website, which then goes to Joe Rogan. So this got tens of millions of views. Now, if it turns out, as I think it is, incorrect, it doesn't mean he's a fool or he's an idiot. It just means that

his logical reasoning process was meant to fit an outcome rather than, you know, blindly apply to data as a random control, you know, trial. So it would hopefully allow us. do. So if that occurs, if Joe Rogan could have put on another tweet, I was wrong. You know, this isn't, you know, he might, I'm blaming Joe. I'm not really, yeah, I'm not really mad at him. But I'm just saying when the, the Penn City, as Mark Twain said,

or somebody said, maybe it was Sam Clemens, not Mark Twain, that, you know, a lie goes all the way around the world before the truth puts on its pants. I'm not saying these are liars, not saying these are fraudsters, but the lack of resources, financial resources, dedicated to this. And I get this from a Talmudic perspective, it'll be interesting.

So in the Talmud, if you say, Peter says, I witness Brian Keating trying to murder somebody. Okay. Or actually murdering somebody. Okay.

And you didn't actually see that. And if, but if you did see it, I would be convicted of that and I would be put to death. If you say that, Peter, and it's proven that you lied, then you get the punishment.

You get executed. Okay? In other words, the thing that you would have brought upon me gets brought upon you. So I'm using this in the Talmudic sense to apply to scientific publication retractions. The amount of attention you had put into this to either garner attention, research funding, Nobel Prizes, fame, attention. That you must maintain in reserve an insurance policy. And that insurance policy is to retract at the same level that you promoted it.

Okay. So I followed and I agree bracketing the death thing. I follow. I follow. and I agree with what you say. And what's making, it made me think about something that I've been thinking about for a while. It's just this idea of the death of expertise. It's how we've come to a legitimation crisis or a legitimacy crisis in our institutions. We don't, we're inherently distrustful of expertise. And you've spoken with Jay Batacharya about this and others have spoken about, Brett has spoken about this.

And do you think the following scientific institutions are trustworthy? So I was wondering if you could comment on like scientific American has is completely lost. I mean, I'm just amazed at what's happened to that. These venerable legacy institutions, the journal Nature, Center for Disease Control, world health organizations. And then I have a good friend of mine who works for the CDC and I'll tell her, I'll tell you what she said. What do you think about like the fact. that are these trustworthy and how do you relate that to expertise and if you can to the

legitimate this is a complex question i'm trying to not ask compound questions but no they're better than me because that's to the legitimacy crisis yeah so so what do you what do you think about like the trustworthiness of our institutions and the fact that the public just my buddy said to me the other day if there's a if there actually is a pandemic that's literally like black plague level no one's going to believe it. Like, literally, by the way, don't say if, say when. And I, I talked to Jay about this, uh, my podcast as well. And it's, no one's going to, no one's going to believe it. You know, this could be, uh, kind of a preview and a, and a, and a, and a, terrifying one at that of the real pandemic. God forbid, Peter, imagine if or Zeus or whatever you believe,

nothing nature of it, uh, that there is a pandemic and it kills not the 89 year old, you know, people in nursing homes, which is tragic, but, uh, eight, nine year olds. Okay. So just imagine what would it would wrench society. I don't think we would have the same kind of planetary scale reaction that we did. And so did we dodge a bullet? Well, but maybe we didn't because the next one could attack, God forbid, as I say.

And then we got all these people like my kids had to go in for their TDAB vaccine. I was like, well, you know, how many people really get tetanus in the U.S.? I was like looking at it. I remember talking to Brett Weinstein on my podcast. And he was like,

I got the rabies shot. And I was like, oh, well, big, big freaking deal. I got a tetanian. He was like, no, like, very few human beings get the rabies shot. Like, it's so rare that you get rabies. And, you know, he had to go to, like, collect fruit bats or something, you know, whatever. So the bottom line is like, you start thinking about this. Well, like, or like the HPV vaccine.

Yeah. Well, how many, like, are I saying to my wife, like, we are expecting our kids to have sex out of wedlock. And when they do, they will be sleeping with a partner who, has, who has, you know, these polyps or has this, um, uh, hepatitis or whatever it is. And, uh, and then they'll get cancer. Like, what are we saying here? Like, just to pause that for a second. So, uh, HPV is linked to cervical cancer and women. And so there's some really interesting, uh, literature on that that I read a while ago and about public health campaigns, etc. So the HPV vaccine is if they have sex that they're, um, you know, you want to,

ward off that like that possibility of cancer. So I think it's a no brainer. The most probable age that they would get cancers in their 60s. And there's, you know, for my son, you know, let's say does he need it? Oh, because it's meant to prevent. Anyway, I'm not saying not to get it or get it. I think that is the personal decision. I'm just saying like how many people are really getting it?

And then what does it say about individual? Because it's different than, it's different than even the COVID vaccine. So called vaccine. I don't really call it a vaccine because it. It didn't really seem to do what a vaccine typically does with, you know, dead viruses and so forth. But anyway, let's call it a vaccine. Whereas this is saying something about like the sexual, like it's 100% preventable disease. I mean, you may not like it if I say, well, you could prevent AIDS by never having sex whatsoever,

getting any transfusions. That's pretty rare nowadays, too. Like, it's not politically correct to say that. But it is true. It is theoretically 100%. I'm not advocating people don't have sex, gay sex, heterosexual sex, whatever you like. But I'm just saying the fact is scientifically, you can't argue with that. But now we have to debate this because of the ideological capture of some of these institutions.

So if Scientific American tells me that we successfully deflected an asteroid before it entered the Earth and produce more meteorites that your audience can get at brineking.com, I will trust that. The problem is they're like a weather forecaster who is like 50% right, 50% percent. wrong and especially at scientific American where they've decided that their mission is to wade into gender ideology. So reporting facts and sort of our opinions as facts. And I don't bias. But this is a longstanding trend. And here's where I witnessed it in my first book and losing the Nobel Prize was the statement

that, you know, 70 Nobel Prize winners advocate voting for Hillary Clinton or for Joe Biden. And every four years, we get the same thing. It's always just look up X number of Nobel Prize winners, why you should vote for the Democrat. It doesn't matter who the Democrat is. It could be like someone who's anti-science or what happened. So they all vote. So is that a capture?

Are the Nobel lists themselves captured? I talked to one recently and I was like, I noticed you had like in your signature, you have your pronouns. And I know you very well, this Nobel laureate. And I was like, did you do that? Like, was that important to you or like,

because maybe I should do it. You know, and he's like, I didn't know. like, no, I didn't agree to this or that. And I was like, well, this is strange. Like, you know, it's like in your signature or, you know. So I'm wondering to what extent that we need to rely on experts comes down to the human brains unwillingness to accept what I call Schrodinger states, ambiguous states.

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When you talked about, would you believe Scientific American if they told you that we had some way to deflect a meteor? I mean, I know literally nothing about it, But if I had to had a dial that said yes, no, maybe, I would I would go to yes. But when it came to anything that was morally fashionable, specifically race, gender, trans issues, et cetera, not only what I say no, but I would say it's almost invariably the truth is the opposite of that thing. So I think it depends in the subdomain about the articles. And, you know, our mutual friend Michael Sherman, who's come up, one of my closest friends,

He used to be a longstanding columnist for Scientific American until it got ideologically captured. But I just don't know, Brian, this is a larger issue, but I just don't know how we can function as a society with all of these institutions captured and large swaths of the country not trusting them. And what's really frightening about that to me is that among the people who trust them, they are also in the orbit of the ideology. So if they actually knew, and Socrates talks about this in the Theatetus and a little bit in the Republic, but if they actually knew what, either what went on in the university or what the facts of the matter is, just as a simple thing, and I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, but can someone change their sex and not go on this crazy redefining of sex? Jerry Coyne is written about this. Dawkins is written about this. I try to be optimistic, but I just don't know how we can survive as a country when people don't trust experts, when people have a, when there's a wholesale legitimacy crisis in our institutions.

And I'm deeply concerned about the country. And this kind of connects back, Peter, to the earlier statement that I believe scientists have a moral obligation to communicate their results in a language the public can understand. And if we don't, it redounds to our detriment. Because eventually, first funding will dry up, which is bad. But eventually trust will start to dry up because I don't like, if I don't talk to my brother, you know, for like six months and then all of a sudden, you know, I have this great opportunity. He's going to be like, well, you know, maybe my brother would. I love him. But some friend or something that's just a fair weather friend and he comes up to me only when he needs something.

You're not going to trust that person. And so I think the more we can have, you know, scientifically. educated or curious, you may not be able to do differential equations like I can or, you know, my guess can't. But to be curious about the scientific process, to be curious about the new discoveries, that is the sine qua non of human beings that we know based on what our name is. I mean, you know, the name Homo sapien means man who knows. So what is it that we know? It doesn't mean that man who is like knowledge, it means wisdom. Like Sapienza means wisdom. science means knowledge so you know talking about science as if it's wisdom i think that's very

dangerous so people like fouchy or other people work collins and so forth to suppress science to obfuscate what they're doing and to censor scientists like j badicharya it's very dangerous and they should be held to account that's the first thing we don't have a nuremberg trial you know but we we actually get them together and say look this is where we do a postmortive and i see no interest in doing that. And COVID was a lightning rod and it was an opening of the eyes for parents, for scientists, for lay people all around the world about this ideological capture that you speak so eloquently about. But again, all this is downstream from academia. So the thing that blows my mind, like, I don't, it just, it blows my mind in the way that I can't even,

I can't even articulate how it blows my mind. It's this whole quantum computing thing. And I'm, I'm going to, I don't think I'm, no, this does not betray a confidence when I say this. So I have a very good friend who works at a high level at a tech company. And this individual, let's not use their pronoun, this individual told me that tech companies have placed a significant amount of money betting on quantum computing, to say the least, a non-trivial amount of money. And so I was wondering if, one, if you could just give us a brief summary of that, if you feel comfortable doing that.

And two, can you relate the quantum computing to the possible existence of a multiverse? Not in the remaining 10 minutes or so, but I can speak about each one separately, and I think that's probably the most useful way to do it. There was a claim that there was quantum tunneling and behavior, not unlike a wormhole, and allied phenomena with the multiverse,

demonstrated in a quantum computer last November by a friend of mine at Caltech. but we won't conflate the two just now. So quantum computing is a breakthrough in the computing process. It was proposed by many people, but most particularly known and popularized by Richard Feynman, as many things were in physics, who's been canceled in some ways nowadays,

so we can talk about that some other time. And the proposal was that there were certain objects, there were certain phenomena that did not lend themselves to the Boolean algebra, the binary logic tree of zeros and ones, that are indicative of a classical computer, a semiconductor computer, the kind of which that we are using right now

at the trillions and trillions level of the transistors on each of our screens, not to mention all the supporting architecture. So these classical computers work by logic gates that then can be converted to mathematical operations that can process at fractions of the speed of light to do computations much faster than a classical computer could do anything. So these are zeros and ones being processed at near light speed.

You can think about it and you can break down any operation, all language, as you know from Morse code is basically zeros and ones. All language, all mathematical operations can be employing binary code to operate them. But if you had multiple, if you had trinary code or tertiary code or quaternary code, you could do more operations simultaneously. It's still discrete. So you'd still have, you know, fourfold algebra. and so forth, and beyond. But now you could get to a level we had like near continuous, a near infinite number of bits per, per quantum transistor,

which is called a qubit. So these could take on different values, typically encoded in either their spin of electrons or topological effects, solitons and polarons and light optical quantum computers. And they're found to be incredibly descriptive and useful these quantum computers at describing the physics of quantum computers. Right now, a lot of what they do is doing things that need to be highly parallelized. So looking for prime numbers is a very arduous task in mathematics.

These objects can do that, and it's pertinent to everything we're doing now because a lot of encryption is predicated on finding prime factor pairs that can be used to generate public key encryption and then decoded in private. So that is a possibility to date. That's one of the major opportunities of quantum computers, as well as understanding the properties of quantum systems at very extreme temperatures and pressures, including possibly these newfound room temperature superconductors, if those are confirmed. And I'm sorry if this is such a dumb, newbie question. I'm not a physicist, but is there any relationship between quantum computing in the multiverse? Let me ask you the question this way.

if at any point in a trajectory of quantum computing, let's say we're able to do utterly extraordinary things, would that be evidence of a multiverse? No. I mean, they used to say, you know, if you wanted evidence for aliens, you already had it. Fermi's paradox is answered because there are people called Hungarians. And as a Hungarian, I'm very proud of that. And I know you have affection for Hungarians as well. I'm a big fan. No, there's not necessarily any link between that. There are weird aspects of the multiverse that can be envisioned as so-called splitting of the wave function.

So in quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, a position of an object and its velocity, specify everything that it can do. In quantum mechanics, you need more variables, but it's a similar type of operation conceptually. Now, in fact, though, when you do a quantum measurement, unlike a classical measurement, you completely unavoidably alter the state of that system permanently and irreversibly, collapsing the wave function. So the so-called double-slid experiment or the Shredger's cat experiment, when you observe the cat, it's either alive or dead. Before that, it's in this hyper-superposition of living and dead,

which is bizarre to Einstein and others. Now, in the multiverse that is called the many worlds hypothesis, popularized by our mutual friend, Sean Carroll, and his most recent book, something deeply hidden. No, I know. He might not like me very much anymore either. But anyway, he did talk about my research on this podcast by this critic of Eric Weinstein, but he was very generous, I should say. So anyway, the multiverse and that instantiation takes the effect that the cat literally. lives in another universe, even though in our universe, it's dead. So that's a form of a multiverse, not in a distant cosmological vantage point.

Okay. Right. So that's the thing. Yeah, yeah, okay. So real quick, we only have a few minutes left. I would love to get you on to talk about room temperature superconductors. I'd love to get you on and really drill down on some of the ideas we've talked about metaphysics, religion.

We didn't really talk about the God hypothesis. I'd love to talk. So I'd love to have you back on. But we have a question on the superconduels. chat, I want to ask you, how do you view laws against Holocaust denial of countries like Germany, Austria, understandable in their historic context. You know, Christopher Hitchens was against that. And, you know, you have people like David Irving, deniers, et cetera. So you have any, any thoughts on that real quick before we end? There's a curveball question for you.

Yeah. I mean, I don't really feel, you know, that this is something, you know, that is pertinent on such a level as to, you know, as to really warrant policy intervention from a third. physicist, I would say as a Jew, these things are distasteful. But I actually don't believe in in, you know, kind of suppression of hate speech. I think that that's kind of a tautology or it's sort of a logical impossibility that you could have free speech and suppression of hate speech. Let's say there's a baker, you know, who won't make the bar mitzvah cake, you know, for my son. And because, because I'm a Jew, well, are there not any other bakers that could do it? And like, should that place be forced out of business by lack of demand? Absolutely so.

Should the government come in and shudder it? I think that leads to very dangerous conclusions. I don't know what happens in not Germany, Austria. Of course, they were complicit. The people were complicit. They did suffer. And I should say that to my knowledge, Germany and Austria,

especially Germany, has made heroic kind of attempts at reparations, unlike the Japanese and their treatment of Chinese comfort women, Korean, you know, the Holocaust that they committed. Yeah,

and actually something would be good to talk about. Yeah, and rape of Nanking. I mean, they have done less. soul searching, I would say, being an ignoramus about most of these political topics, but then the Germans, which I have great

affection for, and I don't, you know, of course, historically, but if they, they're Germans, right? So they can do whatever the hell they want. It's like when people criticize Israel that are Jewish and they say, well, we should do this. Okay, you can move there. I mean, there's nothing preventing you, but like you're staying here in America safe and sound for many of the

repercussions of your, of your, I don't know what the repercussions are in German. I don't know how virulent anti-Semitism still is. I understand. it's still active. It's active everywhere. It's like saying, you know, can be erratic. It's rising. It's rising its ugly head again. So I just want to say as an Armenian, someone of Armenian descent, I, I agreed with everything you said. And I was thinking about, and I want to be respectful of your time. So very, very, very quickly before you wrap it up,

I was thinking about, well, what if you were in Pakistan and you had like, are there ever circumstances when one would, there should be a law requiring such things like as, about your son's bar mitzvicekake and if anti-Semitism was so malignant and so widespread and ubiquitous, would you need those laws? In other words, that's, for example, why we have a constitution to protect some basic rights. So states can make their own whatever they want to do,

but they can't contradict constitution, right? We can't. So I'm just thinking about cultural and historical context. Okay, so real quick, we're going to finish up. But what do you, like, what do you, what do you, like, are you, like, I don't even know, what are you working on now? Are you working on like, like, can you explain?

And maybe this is unfair. I don't even know how to phrase the question. Like, are you doing experimental stuff or like, what are you working on now intellectually in, in your field? So in 1609, Galileo took the first look at the heavens through a small telescope. And when he did that, he, he not only discovered that Jupiter had. moons around it, but he upended our concept of the paradigm of the geocentric universe in favor of a heliocentric universe and substantiation via data and observations of what's called now

the Copernican principle, which has been extended to something called the cosmological principle. The fact is that telescopes lead to data, which lead to rejection. Most people think that the job of physicists prove a theory or prove that you can't prove that the universe had a big bang. You cannot prove it. You can theorize about it. You can provide evidence for it. But at any moment, new evidence could come in that would supersede contradicted.

This has happened many, many times the structure of scientific revolution. But my job is not to prove or disprove, but it is to provide evidence that then excludes the models of theorists like Eric Weinstein or Alan Gooth or if you like any other cosmologists or somebody who believes the universe didn't have a big bag. That's fine. We're not going to suppress that freedom, right? So my job is to build with my students, postdocs, colleagues, right now the biggest cosmological project ever attempted of this type is called the Simon's Observatory. It's located at 17.5,000 feet in the Atacama Desert in the Andes Mountains of Northern Chile. And this is not only the highest astronomical observatory of its kind currently.

It's actually the highest construction project on Earth. It's 3,500 feet above Everest base camp, or they have like a warming shack or something. So it's an amazing logistical triumph that my colleagues on the Simon's Observatory, people at Princeton, Penn, colleagues here at UC San Diego at Berkeley and Chicago, all around the world, 300 scientists ranging from undergraduates to gray hairs and beyond. We are building the most sensitive instrument, which will get first light to look back and look for the telltale signs of a singular inflationary origin of the universe, which Peter, like what Galileo did, overthrew the biblical,

interpretation of a of a stationary central earth this could overthrow the notion of a singular universe in that it could provide the first circumstantial evidence but evidence nonetheless of a multiverse and so to me it's the most exciting thing that we how incredible like how crazy cool thank you so much for for speaking with me i genuinely appreciate it i appreciate you taking the time to popularize science which is one of the most important things that i think we can do is make these ideas accessible to people and really explain in language that even I can understand some pretty cool concepts. So I really appreciate the work you're doing in the public room. I said I have a non-sexual crush on your mind. Everything you do, it's awesome. Thanks,

thanks to read and everybody over there at Bogosian Enterprises. That's a phenomenal thing. Congratulations to the year. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, We roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.