Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Is There A MIND Behind the Big Bang? Luke Barnes on Brian Keating’s INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast (#290)

Starting point is 00:00:03 We're talking about the fine-tuning argument. I take the fine-tuning argument to be a sort of an extension of a very basic, it's not even an argument, it's just kind of an instinct. Why do most people who have ever lived and still live, believe that there's a God? Well, one of the reasons might be if you look around at the universe, and there are various bits and pieces of it that seem to fit well together in a way that you might think needs a mind. Welcome everybody to another exciting episode of The Into the Impossible podcast featuring yours truly, Dr. Brian Keating, and my friend, Luke Barnes, who is a lecturer, that's like a professor, of astronomy and cosmology, at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. And he is one of the most renowned thinkers and authors, popularizers of science. He's done so much. He's written two wonderful books, one that we've had on previously for.

Starting point is 00:00:59 You'll hear a little bit about that, the Cosmic Revolutionaries Handbook. written with his advisor, Garant Lewis, who's been on the show twice as well, as well as another book called A Fortunate Universe from what this interview is loosely based on. And that has to do with the fine tuning of the universe and how the universe could be designed for life. And it comes from Dr. Barnes, Professor Barnes, who is a former, I should stress former young Earth creationist who believed originally during his upbringing with his father as a pastor and a church that really maintained that the, Earth was only about 5,700 years old and that all of science and all appearance of it could be explained through a biblical narrative where God essentially imposes upon us a viewpoint that we can't help but be confused about. So obviously he doesn't further that anymore believing as he does in a 13.8 billion year old universe in a 4.5 billion year old Earth. But he also is able to converse from a theological perspective, believing that God, does play a role in his life as a Christian. He is not one of the many, many messianic Jews or Jews

Starting point is 00:02:07 for Jesus that I have interacted with lately. He is an actual, he's an actual Christian for Jesus. Let me say it like that. He's very devout and very passionate about his faith, but he's also incredibly philosophical, learned and a great educator and really fun raconteur. And it was great to meet with him and see him in person and do this interview in person. And I want to commend to you his books and we'll hear about them in this interview, why he believes that the universe may indeed be finely tuned, how it could be finally tuned? In other words, how does God twiddle the knobs, so to speak, to tune the universe in the way that he does? And other than that, I think the most fascinating thing is that he's able to converse. You always ask myself, would Richard Dawkins

Starting point is 00:02:47 come to a meeting of young, former young earth creationist, even though they're now not young earth creationist? Would Lawrence Krause have a big conversation with a theologian? And he has, but I always feel that the kind of more theologically inclined folks are a little bit more accessible or open to the conversational debate, not just to score points and win. I think all debate is pointless. I mean, has anyone ever been convinced not to vote for somebody for president because of some debate? I mean, you usually go in with preconceived notions. I'm sure some people do, but it's only for the worst. You went in thinking you might vote for someone and then you ended up not voting for that person.

Starting point is 00:03:24 Anyway, this is all to say. I hope you enjoy this episode. It's kind of a departure in some ways because it's with a more theological overtone to it, although we talk about the nitty-gritty scientific details as well, as you'll hear. Watch the video of the two of us online at Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe to my mailing list, where you will find a fragment potentially waiting for you of an old Earth or an old solar system. Here they are right here.

Starting point is 00:03:47 I'm shaking them up. These are meteorites that I've collected over the years from a 4 billion-plus-year-old asteroid fragment that crashed through the Earth and became a meteorite on a system. the goodness meteorite here on earth and you can enter for your chance to win one of the next 100 entries into this competition at my website, Brian Keating.com slash list, and you will have a chance at winning one of these precious fragments of an ancient solar system. And I hope that you'll also subscribe to the podcast and leave a review an asterism. I'm looking, I do get reviews from Australia all the time, but I haven't gotten one in the last 30 days, so I can't quote any of

Starting point is 00:04:21 my Australian listeners. I know there are many. I'm looking at you, Stephanie, someone out there You'll know who you are. But this review came in recently from Great Britain, where Luke did his PhD work and did his postdoctoral work, Cambridge and beyond. And this comes from Super Sion just a couple days ago. Makes hard signs convincingly comprehensive for the non-scientific people. Like me. I love it.

Starting point is 00:04:47 Well, thank you, Super Sion. I endeavor to do that. And I'll bring you scientists, Nobel Prize winners. Many, many more brilliant thinkers to come. Stay tuned. You won't want to miss some of the questions. great episodes that are coming up in just the next few weeks alone. So with that, I bid you.

Starting point is 00:05:02 And benevolent entry into the kingdom of science with Dr. Luke Barnes and yours, Shirley Brian Keating, enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please, help. Dr. Luke Barnes, joining me in person in an undisclosed location. For undisclosed reasons, we've been brought together. Do you expect me to believe that, Mr. Barnes? Dr. Barnes is a lecturer at the university.

Starting point is 00:05:36 I always forget. University of, is it Western? It was the University of Western Sydney, and then they paid a lot of money to change it to Western Sydney University. You know how much consulting fees they had to pay? Oh, yeah, I don't want to say. Did you change mascots from the fighting? I wasn't there, thank goodness.

Starting point is 00:05:50 From the fighting wallaby to the dingoes. It's a pleasure of meet you in person. Yeah, yeah. We last spoke together about two years ago for a previous book of yours called The Cosmic Revolutionaries Handbook, which laid out the case for sort of proponents of alternatives to the standard Big Bang cold dark matter cosmology, what they would have to do to overthrow it, overturn it. And maybe we'll start there. How does it feel to have your book utterly obliterated by the forces that have proven based on JWST-D? that the Big Bang never happened. How do you feel, Luke?

Starting point is 00:06:29 How will you ever recover on that devastating blow? What's your take on it in all seriousness? I think collectively a lot of cosmologists, so what we're referring to, JWST results, came out and an article came out from Eric Lerner. And this was treated as something new, something dangerous, something's going to overthrow the establishment. Panic. And panic, yeah.

Starting point is 00:06:54 And without going into too much, basically. Basically, it's the same objections to the Big Bang that he published in 1993 without a lot of changes. There's two things to say about it. One is there's been plenty of, this isn't a secret. There are plenty of online people who are in cosmology who responded to those critiques, you know, weigh them up yourself. And the other thing is it was really, it wasn't really about the Big Bang. It was about the physics of how galaxies form.

Starting point is 00:07:23 So at worst case scenario, we need to rethink. the way we think that matter collects into galaxies in the universe, but it didn't really touch the expansion of space, the hot Big Bang, the sort of the real pillars of the Big Bang theory. When we look at the Big Bang, previous books of yours, including with your former advisor, right?

Starting point is 00:07:46 So the Cosby Revolutionary Sandbooks is Garant Lewis, your former advisor. And who's that, New South Wales? Is that right? Sydney University. In New South Wales. In New South Wales. It's so confusing. You know, everything's upside down.

Starting point is 00:08:00 We had a conversation recently as well. But you also wrote a book prior to that with him. I mean, the name of that, Luke. It's called A Fortunate Universe, Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. So I thought we'd start there. A lot of the discussions that we've been having this this week, with eminent scientists from around the world, tend to involve around things pertinent to biology,

Starting point is 00:08:22 chemical life formation, the improbability of forming a late. lipid cell structure and eukaryotic life and so forth, very stimulating. I would say, you know, this positive one way or another, but oftentimes we look at the universe and we're told it's extremely finely tuned. And that no secret would lead to the title of that book, A Fortunate Universe, fortunate implying some teleological purpose and maybe some ultimate beneficence of something or someone or some force.

Starting point is 00:08:53 So what is fine-tuning, first of all? Where does it come from? And what is the weak anthropic principle whap? And how does it all come together in the cosmological argument? So the nice thing about that book with Geroen was we, you know, I'm a Christian, he's an atheist. We wrote that book together. And most of it we wrote together, the last chapters are sort of debate about what it all means. But on this fine-tuning issue, here's what a Christian, a theist and an atheist can agree about the science.

Starting point is 00:09:23 So he interprets fortunate as lucky in the context of a multiverse. But the thing we agree on is something that's turned up in the physics literature over the last sort of 40 or 50 years where there are these fundamental constants of nature. When we boil things down as we love to, as physicists, to the deepest equations we can find, there are some basic properties of the universe that just need to go into those equations. How heavy is an electron? How strong is the forces between them? and into the standard cosmological model.

Starting point is 00:09:55 What's the ratio of dark matter to barionic matter, ordinary matter? What's the value of the cosmological constant, which is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate? They're just numbers. You can look them up. There's some number that all of these are. And what's been just sort of discovered almost accidentally, or certainly, it wasn't expected over the last 50 years was, as theoretical physicists asked, What if we change them?

Starting point is 00:10:21 We don't know why they are what they are. So let's at least ask the question, what if they've been different? You find universes which are perfectly mathematically fine. We can write equations down and we can solve those. But for a number of those constants over the range in which the equations are fine with them, you might think is there what's possible,

Starting point is 00:10:44 you only get an interesting universe like this, which has any sort of structure in it, it at all, including life, for a very small range of the constants. So this is called the fine-tuning of the universe for life. And as I said, two scientists who have very different beliefs about what's really underneath it or can at least agree on what happens when you change these numbers. Yeah, we'll get into hopefully the discussion of what fine-tuning is, how it could be accomplished in a moment.

Starting point is 00:11:14 But before we do, recently I've been reading some work by Fred Adams, that you, University of Michigan and he's been on the podcast, although I think I may have deleted the recording by accident, by accident, Fred. Before I became such a pro, as you guys could tell out there in internet land. I want to do it again, yeah, because he is a phenomenal thinker and he was at UC San Diego visiting his close colleague, George Fuller, is a good friend of mine. And in his most recent papers, which I believe will be a book, supported, I believe, by the Templeton Foundation, if I'm not mistaken, which kind of ironic, the Tempton foundation tends to support things that seek synthesis,

Starting point is 00:11:51 if not harmony between science and religion. And some people have a problem with that. Be that as it may. Fred argues that, no, in fact, some of these wide-ranging phenomena are actually broadly tuned or, you know, hoarsely tuned. For example, he sets the stage, which is the first comment I'd like you to make.

Starting point is 00:12:10 When we apply our perspective from the weak anthropomorphic principle, we're necessarily filtering out a whole host of variables to concentrate on a select few variables. And his kind of rubric, he looks at stars. What would it take to the stars? Gravitational forces, electromagnetic forces, nuclear forces, and he finds there's a huge parameter space to use his word. It's not improbable at all. First of all, I want to ask you, is there necessarily kind of an anthropic bias when you after when you search out, well, what is it mean to be finally tuned? And then second of all,

Starting point is 00:12:45 how do you react to his claim that, no, the universe ain't so finely tuned after all? Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199, and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details.

Starting point is 00:13:20 So, first of all, Fred's doing absolutely first rate work on this. It's really great and really helpful. I've tried to sort of follow a little bit in these footsteps, and so I've published a few papers on this as well. What Fred, one way I would summarize some of his work, is to say that stars turned out to be more robust than we gave them credit for. So in the early fine-tuning literature, this goes back quite early, actually. It's in 1970, I think it's a paper by Freeman Dyson, who said, first guest on the podcast.

Starting point is 00:13:51 Oh, wonderful. Oh, if you, if I've got it right, I might not wrong. Anyway, in our universe, if you take a proton and a proton and you smash them together, they will not stick to each other. Those two will fall apart. The way the sun operates is you take a proton, a proton, a proton, smash them together, and you hope that in that instant where they're close to each other, thanks to something called the nuclear weak force, proton turns into a neutron,

Starting point is 00:14:16 and proton plus neutron will stick together. What Dyson had argued is that if you had a very small increase in the strength of the force that sticks those two types of particles together, you could actually stick a proton and a proton to each other. And if that happened, stars would be explosive. because now it's really easy. You don't have to wait for the weak force to turn one of them into a neutron, proton, proton, bang. You know, you just blow everything up.

Starting point is 00:14:45 What Fred pointed out quite rightly is that that's not true. A star is what we call a thermodynamic system where the micro details of reaction rates are actually controlled by the overall balances of heat and energy flowing. So you won't get an explosive star. You'll simply get a star which is cooler in its size. center and will react appropriately to the fuel it's got to power itself. So actually, you can have perfectly long-lived stars in those sorts of universes. And this is what needs to happen in this fine-tuning, anthropic principle kind of investigation. We need to know what happens

Starting point is 00:15:28 when these constants change. And sometimes, because it's not our universe, we're thinking about weird alternatives. Sometimes we get it wrong and we just have to rethink it. Fred's done some great work. So stars turn out to be more robust than perhaps we thought. I think there is, in fact, one way he discovered where stars can fall apart in a way we didn't think of before. If you look at his 2008 paper and you change the strength of electromagnetism, there is a famous plot in there.

Starting point is 00:15:59 I say famous. I've looked at it a billion times. Where we knew stars would be in trouble if electromagnetism was too strong. But it turns out there's a way they could be in trouble if they're too weak as well. It's a two-sided thing there. But in general, yes, stars are quite robust. You can sort of hope in any old universe you might get stars to fire up and be long-lived. The main driver of the lengths of the sort of lifetime of stars is really the strength of gravity,

Starting point is 00:16:28 rather than the nuclear, for a wide range of parameters, the nuclear property, the nuclear reactions will adjust. But overall, I think there's still very strong cases of fine-tuning that we've done calculations again and again and refined of them as Fred's done as I've done as other people have done looking more deeply. And they have retained their, look, here's a set of possibilities and it's only a small subset where life can exist. So yes, yes, of course we keep doing calculations to refine it. But I wouldn't say it's this is just any old universe. And when we look at the overall kind of sieve, you know, that physicists apply to the observations and then select out certain components that we think are dispositive or might be dispositive towards the origin of life and evolution of life, I find it, you know, sort of the physical

Starting point is 00:17:25 constants are almost the easy part. And I kind of make an analogy towards, well, COVID-19, and it's one of our first, you know, it's the first time we're meeting in public. and it's the first, you know, some of the first in-person podcast I've had the opportunity to do. And I think back to 2019 when we were building the Science Observatory, which is my ongoing project with 300 collaborators around the world, including some in Australia. You'll be pleased to them. And we're putting it together. And to do that properly, we had to have an analysis of risks to the project. And so we had things like the Chilean peso might fluctuate against the euro, which is where we build some of the hard metal works that we have.

Starting point is 00:18:02 concrete comes from Bolivia. Maybe they come, you know, there's shipping challenges, you know, whatever. There's some fluctuations and there's sarcastic processes. You could model those. And it could be a strike and you could even have some punctuated things. It happens in South America. You never know. Yeah, the experimentalists, we have to be quite caught on top of things from many different angles.

Starting point is 00:18:22 But one thing we didn't have, no one had was global pandemic shuts down the world for two and a half years, causing things like, you know, my graduate student, I can't just say to her, you know, see in two years, I'm going to stop paying you now and come back in two years. No, we had a sustain. So we did. But it's sort of to bring up the notion of these punctuations, these radical things that occur in order for there to be life on Earth, you know, and why we think that the physical properties of the universe are the most contingent. And so I guess, you know, if you had to select a few, you know, kind of from your studies of the fortunate nature of the universe, what are some of the ones that speak loudest to you of some perhaps, you know, organization in the universe.

Starting point is 00:19:04 I don't want to say designer if you want to, it's fine. But how do you, what do you feel are some of the most pertinent and calculatable properties of the universe that we can draw some conclusions about how fortunate we are or not? Yeah, because it's, we're at the level of fundamental physics, and we're trying to go from these fundamental constants up. Actually, it's really hard to do calculations right from the bottom up to anything, even from quarks to protons. But this is all the stuff you discover when you start digging in. That's really hard. And then protons to nuclei to atoms.

Starting point is 00:19:39 So what we really focus on when we do try and do fine-tuning work is, is there a, it's sort of the reverse of the question you ask, is there a real disaster somewhere in, in possibility space, parameter space, that that's going to help. That's going to be obvious that, okay, no strong. structure over there. And some of the more obvious ones are if you look at the masses of the fundamental particles that we're made out of. So famously, there's the electron in our atoms, that thing going around the outside. There's, there's, sorry, up quarks and down quarks that make protons and neutrons. So how heavy are those? And there's a number there. It's very small in any

Starting point is 00:20:18 sort of kilogram scale. And then the sort of particle physicists get to work saying what happens if you start changing these numbers and you map out the three-dimensional space and you can see it mapped out in the book. But some of the really interesting kind of disasters are things like if you change the numbers that say the masses of the quarks in a certain way, you end up that the lightest kind of particle that you can make out of three quarks, right, is not the proton or the neutron. It's something else. It's a three-up quarks or the delta plus particle. If you're in a universe where that's the most stable thing you can make out of the quark, here's a problem. You could, through very simple energy arguments, come to the conclusion that a delta plus

Starting point is 00:21:07 particle, delta plus plus particle will not stick to another one ever. And so suddenly, your periodic table is gone. Because that proton sticks to neutron, sticks to everything else. That's how you build up all the nuclei on the periodic table. Suddenly, all you've got is a part of. And a part of the, article with the charge of two electrons. So it has the chemistry of helium, which is to say no chemistry at all. And suddenly you've got a universe where it's just so drastically simpler than our universe. If you want to write a chemistry textbook, there's one element in the periodic table. There's no chemical reactions. That's a pretty easy textbook to write, except there's nothing to write it on or with. And so it's those sorts of cases where once you start to see those sorts of things

Starting point is 00:21:58 inhabiting big swathes of the way the universe could have been, you start to really think that, okay, there's something interesting going around here. You know, 92 stable elements in the periodic table, the chemistry of carbon. We've really got it going on around here. Another one that cosmologists will be more familiar with is just a cosmological constant. It's a famous, there's called the cosmological constant problem, which says, you know, we've discovered in our universe something that's making the expansion accelerate. So galaxies are not just moving away from us. They're moving faster today than they were yesterday.

Starting point is 00:22:36 And what could be doing that? Well, it turns out in the way we describe the fundamental structure of particles around us, we use things called fields. So an electron is really a sort of ripple in an electron. field. And if it were the case that even when there's no particles in a particular place, there's still some energy there, that would cause the expansion of the universe to accelerate. It has that effect on, that gravitational effect on space time. And if you then use a kind of calculation that we can do in other places in quantum field theory of how does, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:18 How does the structure of the vacuum, the structure of the field when nothing's there, when no particles are there, how does that structure, you know, add up to energy difference? You end up with a rough calculation that would predict an enormous value of the cosmological constant. And that's a problem because it's another very easy way to make sure there's no structure in the universe because space would expand so fast that no particles are ever near each other. So even if this proton and this neutron could come together to make something, there are a trillion light years apart. And it's these sorts of disasters where, okay, we can debate structures of stars. There's some really interesting edge cases and complicated cases, but there's some real proper disasters waiting us out there in sort of the ways that

Starting point is 00:24:08 according to the best physics we have, the universe could have been, but isn't. Are any of the arguments you think capable of convincing, somebody, you know, of the existence of some sort of overarching teleological purpose for these? Or do you think, you know, there'll always be sort of room for down? I spoke to Jim Tour with this conference earlier in the day and asked him, you know, as a, as a, you know, someone who is practicing, but might be considered agnostic myself. I do practice and contra-discension of people like Freeman Dyson, who was called himself agnostic, but didn't do anything different. than Raymond Dyson, then Richard Dawkins didn't go to the same church that Freeman

Starting point is 00:24:51 Dyson didn't go to. But, but, you know, wondering, is there any kind of, you know, hope of convincing people? I usually feel like I don't engage in debates because science isn't done that way. And also because you never change your mind. Like, I don't know if you guys have prime minister debates in, and, and, I assume you do at some level. They're a bit pathetic. Yeah, but we, I mean, we never, oh, yeah. Oh, Trump made a great argument.

Starting point is 00:25:12 Let me just, just, I'm going to phone for him. You know, I don't find him a objectionable at all. But, you know, how do you view this? Is it sort of just people wanting to vent their own ideas without any help of really convincing the other side? Or could you see your faith strengthened or maybe weakened by an argument, you know, either on your side or on maybe in my opposition side? Yeah, the one thing that all of this, so I started looking into this sort of almost by accident

Starting point is 00:25:37 during my PhD, the one thing I can't predict is how people react to it. It's kind of hilarious. One of the reasons Garang, and I wrote a book on this is because I, I wrote a review paper in 2012 and then some people ask I could you do a talk on that stuff that looks interesting just at the at Sydney University where I was at the time

Starting point is 00:25:57 and you know the department turns up give us just pretty standard talk Garaint was there as well as everyone else and then something happened that I've not seen before or since which 45 minute talk and an hour and a half of questions afterwards. Everyone just sat around, which is amazing because it was lunchtime, but no one left. And not just that there were questions, but immediately people had not just opinions, but different opinions. And so someone would ask a question and someone else would answer it. And then someone

Starting point is 00:26:30 else would reply to that. And so it wasn't just people wanted to get information out of me. I'd laid the ground rules. And now everyone wanted to talk about what this meant. And I've seen that again and again and again in as talking to, I've talked in churches, I've talked in like skeptics in the pub groups, all sorts of, you know, amateur astronomy societies. And more than any other topic I've ever seen in my life, people just immediately are like, either, either this has got to mean something or I know what this means and I have to tell everyone. And yeah, it just has that effect. And I love it for it because I love, A, the physics is wonderful how this affects this and that affects that of these equations. It's beautiful.

Starting point is 00:27:09 and then just the way it lights people up. And so there's every reaction to this under the sun. I mean, me personally, I already believed in God. And so this was sort of, I don't have a problem here. I've heard of someone else who did a talk on fine-tuning. And then someone in the audience said afterwards, look, I don't believe in God. I'm not, sorry, I'm not religious, but something weird is happening here. And I think that impression is sort of there.

Starting point is 00:27:37 But what I love about it is people can't sit still in their seat. It just draws opinions out of people. You have to have an opinion. I apologize for the siren sound in the background. There's some caribinary somewhere chasing after somebody. I call them the carbunary because they're always trying to get me more pasta. Some wine emergency up the mountain. That's right.

Starting point is 00:27:59 We've been out of Reno. There's no more. So getting back to sort of more, you know, and the technical side of things that your research is concerned with, is actually not these topics. You're actually practicing as a theoretical cosmologist on a daily basis. You were talking earlier in the week about a course that you're teaching, maybe for undergraduates where you get into actually philosophical arguments,

Starting point is 00:28:24 but not necessarily pertinent to God or anything like that. So can you talk more about your teaching and sound very interesting? And we talked a little about quantum mechanics and this Aristotle, all of anything to do with quantum mechanics. So what is the role of the ancients? Because in my conception, Aristotle basically has the highest ratio of fame to number of things he got right. You know, I can only think of one thing that was absurd. I mean, you could have discovered just by dropping this.

Starting point is 00:28:50 And I'm not going to do it, but dropping these two things at way very different amounts back then, that they don't hit the ground at the same time. The one doesn't fall faster than the other as he presupposed. Now, now do it with a leaf. Okay, I'll do it with a leaf. Right. Go to the moon. Well, so this is, there's so many wonderful, wonderful things to talk about there.

Starting point is 00:29:09 Let me start with the teaching. I got put in charge of a course at Western Sydney called scientific literacy, and all the first year science students take it. And what it was was a number of things. It was sort of, I welcome to university, here's how to do well, and here's how to reference properly and research properly. So let's just make sure all that's good. You know, don't plagiarize all that sort of stuff.

Starting point is 00:29:31 Don't. how to write properly, which is something I'm actually quite passionate about, how to give a talk properly. And then there's a real chance to take a couple of lectures just to say, what's this science thing? What are we actually doing here? And there's two approaches that I take there. One's a very, very rapid history of science broadly construed, where that I don't think science, by one definition, science started with the scientific revolution but on a more broad let's try and understand the world we live in it's a very human activity so we have experts in um aboriginal australian aboriginal astronomy at western sydney

Starting point is 00:30:14 so i was able to get one of those experts ray norris to give a a 20-minute talk on that which was really fascinating um as a as uh yeah we can talk about that if you want uh but but the bologians and the greeks and what so getting onto aristotle i have i have a very high regard for Aristotle. Part of that comes from a few things. There's a wonderful book. The man's surname is L-E-R-O-I, and I suspect it's not pronounced Leroy, but maybe something French that's equivalent to that. It's called Aristotle's Lagoon. And he read all of Aristotle's immense works on biology, and as in a modern biologist, we could sort of try to to untangle the logic of why he thought that when he's wrong, why is he wrong, and what does he get

Starting point is 00:31:07 right? And there is a remarkably hard, deep thinker and a close observer of nature in Aristotle, this idea that he just sat in an armchair like this. No, no, of course. I mean, but that's a paradox of him. So one thing that I, the one thing that sticks in my mind that he got right, maybe in the lagoon was that whales or mammals, not fish, as men, people have thought for millennia, right. So, you know, so therefore he, he was aware of the observational component of a free scientific method and just to, you know, rebutt just to be a little bit more harsh on him than I know you are. I'm a big fan of his too, but, but let me just say that, you know, it's not like Galileo had like the Large Hadron Collider available to him. Yes, yes, good. A couple hundred miles from here.

Starting point is 00:31:50 He dropped some, you know, some objects that were available to Aristotle from a height available to Aristotle, did the observations and no, and did a thought experiment. If you have two masses, connected by a string, are they one mass of a given weight? No. So you could do the thought experiment or the actual experiment. And it seems to me that Aristotle did neither, not condemning him, but what can we learn about the scientific method from somebody who was often, at least in the physical sciences? Yeah, that's a crucial question. That's a very good way to put it. I think here's one of the things which is logical if you're Aristotle, but with hindsight actually caused a lot of problems. He made a distinction between natural motion and violent motion. So if I drop something

Starting point is 00:32:34 and it falls to the ground, he's saying, well, it's made of earth, earth natural places at the bottom of the universe. And so it's seeking out its natural place. If I lift it back up again, that's something violent. I'm doing. I'm moving it away from its place. And so that requires an agent. If you think that, then experimentation is violent motion. You're not seeing nature. You're interfering. So we think of, and it's so natural to us, when we say, if you drop two things with different masses, they fall at the same rate. And the thing you have to remember is that what we're putting in brackets after that is in a vacuum.

Starting point is 00:33:17 Now, Aristotle A, didn't believe in a vacuum. But more importantly, that's not a very natural state, right? Let's suck all the air out and then see what happens. And Aristotle would be saying, well, of course you're men. messing with nature when you do that. If I just take a piece of paper and a rock, they fall at different speeds. That's the thing we want to explain. And so I'd say it's amazing how subtle little things like that shape so much of the way

Starting point is 00:33:42 that you move the, that you view the world. And there's another thing which is sometimes pointed out, all of these are a little bit oversimplified. But whereas Plato was a mathematician, Aristotle wanted it. classify things. So he didn't want to measure, you want to classify things. And that probably comes out of actually at heart he's a biologist. And if you see nature, you don't immediately I don't see that tree and immediately want to start counting the leaves. And I don't think if I went to all the effort, there'd be some beautiful mathematical law there. And so that emphasis on what I

Starting point is 00:34:18 need to do to nature is classify. It then, you know, the thought that if I really went and measured some stuff, I might discover some laws there, is something that takes a while for people to realize that can be done. So soon they'll be calling us for another 2,000 calorie helping of pasta and bread, which Luke and I want to partake of. So let's do a little bit of rapid fire kind of questions. And just playing off the last topic, we just talked about Aristotle. If you give your students a set of books, only one set, would you give them or her the

Starting point is 00:34:53 collective works of Aristotle or the fun. I have to say Feynman lectures on physics. Oh, I have to say Feynman. Okay. There's two brilliant minds there, of course. And I mean, I don't want to say that, you know, they're just as good at each other. No, look, the last couple of thousand years,

Starting point is 00:35:11 we really have learned some stuff about the way the universe works. And it's more, I'd like to think Aristotle would want Feynman's books as well. Certainly would have a lot to glean from them. one recapitulation on the fine-tuning problem. So, you know, Sean Carroll has passed multiple-time guests on the show as you are now, the pantheon of two-time guests on the show. Bad John. You know, there's no need for God.

Starting point is 00:35:35 It's a theory that's, you know, barely useful or, you know, maybe one of the least useful. It's still a theory. It's still, there's no need for it. And in that context, he and I talked a long time ago about, you know, take the standard model in his book, The Big Picture, and you say, where are these couplings and which couplings could couple to an agent? There's really nothing in there that could do that. And I phrased it a little differently when I spoke with Stephen C. Meyer a couple of almost two years ago now for his book,

Starting point is 00:36:02 The Return to the Gun. I bought this. He said, how does an intelligent agent, you know, instantiate, you know, is there some knobs? And when does he, you know, and the Judeo-Christian said, when does he start in the manipulative? Is it like at the BBN phase, you know, pulling elements? Is it at the stellar evolution phase? is it at the genetic evolution phase? So how do you think of it?

Starting point is 00:36:23 Like, how does the tuning get done? I mean, if I had to nail me down on something, I think the initial conditions. So there's a wonderful quote from John Wheeler in his book, At Home in the Universe. Actually, it's a collection of essays, but it's in there somewhere where it says nothing is clearer in, it's paraphrasing, but almost, nothing is clearer in physics than what is and what is in physics. So the laws that govern the way particles move, yes. The initial velocities, no. The initial conditions are really something else.

Starting point is 00:36:56 So if you're that choice that you have to make there between, say, the way I view the world and say the way Sean views the world is, I assume if you're Sean, if there are something like initial conditions, they're just the start of explanations and that's it. So he has, as a quote from here is that I use a lot because I think it's very clear. which is, you know, his view is that there is a chain of explanations in the universe which reaches the ultimate laws of nature and stops. And part of those laws of nature would be just initial conditions or boundary conditions or whatever they. Either this is a wheeler or Carol. No, sorry, Carol. Okay.

Starting point is 00:37:30 Carol said that. And so, you know, either the choice is not between do you just let the universe run itself or do you have someone sticking their finger in? It's whatever these initial conditions are, are they just it? or do you think there's some cause deeper than that in reality? So maybe I'll close. I usually have four existential questions. We only have time for one. So in Sabina Hassanfelder's most recent book,

Starting point is 00:37:57 existential questions, existential physics, which you've got from my topic calling things existential questions, I'm sure, there is, you are referred to. And I want to appropriately reference the quote. First, let me preface it by saying the progenitor of the name of the show,

Starting point is 00:38:13 is Sir Arthur C. Clark, who came up with a phrase the only way to determine the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. But another thing that he said is when an elderly but the distinguished scientist says something is possible. He is very likely correct. When he says something is impossible, he is most very mostly wrong. I want to ask you as described by Sabina as a middle age scientist. You're not elderly, but you are distinguished. I won't say the other adjectives she describes you by, but that's, you know, that's just her favorite curmudgeoning way of doing things.

Starting point is 00:38:49 What have you changed your mind on, if anything? What does I change my mind on? So, no, I'm going to say what it was. We had a discussion on, it's on YouTube, you can go and find it. And she says something along, reporting on this latest is something along, but Barnes turned out to be a big-faced middle-aged man with brown-faced, or whatever it was. And I cut that quote out of,

Starting point is 00:39:11 of the book, I got a book and then put it on my Facebook page and everyone who knows me thought that was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. It's probably got the most likes of anything I put on any social media platform. So thanks. I laughed my head off. That's fantastic. What have I changed my mind about? I grew up young earth creationists. That's the, that's the background that I grew up in. That was the church. But in Australia where it wasn't, so for example there was a debate between the pastor who happened to be my father

Starting point is 00:39:42 and the local science teacher at the local high school who also went to the church but on the validity of evolution as a theory and people turned up and it was quite, I just remember it being quite cordial

Starting point is 00:39:57 and it was fine and it wasn't like people ran him out of the church or something so it was It seems odd to say, you have to sort of say this in the American context. It was young Earth creationist, but somehow not dogmatic. Right. Over the course of then getting, you know, I was good at maths, obviously, I'm now an astrophysicist,

Starting point is 00:40:17 going to university learning physics, discovering that astrophysics is the best. And then being able to actually look at the claims that had been made by young Earth creationists about the age of the universe, realizing they all fell apart in my hands when I had the ability to look at them for myself. So that was, and then the reason that didn't affect sort of my Christianity was that, you know, the most that follows from that is not God doesn't exist, but oh, I've misunderstood it to two chapters of the Bible, which there's plenty of chapters of the Bible. I misunderstand. So that wasn't a major sort of moment. But that's, that was quite the process. I mean, that was quite the years of digging into this, that, and the other. And I salute you for having the courage of. as we like to say, to go into the impossible. It takes a lot of courage and you're renowned for both the clarity of your presentation and your explanation and the fact you do so much outreach to the public.

Starting point is 00:41:12 I really salute that. I have a, you know, Kinar and I would say, you know, we scientists have a moral obligation to do share what we do with the public. And I think we have a venal financial interest as well because if they don't understand what we do, I think I'll stop supporting us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, Luke, it's been a pleasure to meet you in person. I have to have you come back for our part three.

Starting point is 00:41:30 Thanks, everybody. Subscribe to follow Luke. on all social media links. We'll have those in the bottom. And do tune in next time for more exciting content and to The Impossible. Thank you so much Luke. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology

Starting point is 00:41:44 is indistinguishable from magic. Well, that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube to my YouTube, my Twitter, Brian Keating, Dr. Brian Keating, Dr. Brian Keating, rather. And Luke Barnes is also there as well. And

Starting point is 00:42:01 you will hopefully enter for your chance to win a fragment of the old earth the old earth shaking around actually it's not the earth it's a solar system from which the earth amalgamated conglomerated instantiated

Starting point is 00:42:15 I don't know the point is you can win a fragment of a piece of meteorite space schmuts that I love to collect and send out to one of the next 100 people who saw it up for my mailing list I send out two emails a month and they're kind of the hottest coolest content from around

Starting point is 00:42:31 the world of STEM science technology engineering and math, with occasional philosophy and other things thrown in for good measure like this week's episode. So with that, I bid you a wonderful rest of your week, and I hope you'll make it magical. That's what I always hope for you. Thanks for being a great, great part of the most magnificent set of minds in the multiverse. All pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Is There A MIND Behind the Big Bang? Luke Barnes on Brian Keating’s INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast (#290)

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