Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Jim Tour: Darwin's Deception!? (#278)

Starting point is 00:00:08 Hello and welcome to another exciting, life-changing episode of The Into the Impossible podcast featuring yours truly Dr. Brian Keating, along with a renowned scientist, James Tor, who is the TT and WF Chow Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, professor of material science, and nanoengineering at Rice University, and the Smalley Curl Institute and the Nanocarbon Center, and he's got several companies. You can follow him online at J.M.Tour.com. He has a YouTube channel as well. YouTube slash Dr. James Torr.

Starting point is 00:00:44 D.R. James Torr. Just like Dr. Brian Keating, D.R. Brian Keating. We come at this podcast from remarkably different perspectives. Jim is a Christian, but he's a messianic Jew as well, which is something that may need some definition. These are people who began their lives, perhaps, as Jews and practice the mitz vote, perhaps. even some to a high extent. And then later in life became Christians. They actually converted to Christianity.

Starting point is 00:01:15 Now, an interesting fact is that you can't actually convert out of being Jewish. It's as much an ethnicity as it is a religion. And you could be Jewish without believing anything about the Torah, the Old Testament, if you will, or even believing in God. Many, many Jews like that, including past guests on the show like Lawrence Krause and others. So when we discuss Messianic Jews, these are people that became. Christians, which means they actually affirm actively the notion of Christ as a personal savior. And they take, in some cases, quite literally, as you'll hear in this interview, the relationship that they have with God and with Jesus Christ. And this interview was conducted

Starting point is 00:01:52 live in person when I was in Florence, Italy, partaking in a conference on science and religion, and I had a chance to meet several other Messianic Jews, as they're called, sometimes called Jews for Jesus, although they don't seem to like that moniker anymore. Well, I'm not a Jew. for Jesus, I'm a Jew for Judaism. So it was interesting to talk to somebody so almost diametrically opposed as Jim and I are, theologically speaking at least. You'll see on my YouTube channel the actual video of us together. But I think you get a sense of Jim and what he's interested in.

Starting point is 00:02:22 He is a hardcore scientist. He's responsible for many, many breakthroughs, inventions. As I said, starting companies, and as well as being a renowned educator and distinguished a professor of organic chemistry who has done tremendous. us research into what's called nanomachines. So we talk a little bit about this in this episode. He's got 750 research publications and H index, which is really astronomical. It's 165. That means he has at least 165 papers with at least 165 citations each, some probably have even more. He's won awards, including recently the Ospre Award from the American Chemical Society,

Starting point is 00:02:58 awarded to outstanding chemists for the lifetime, significant accomplishments in the field of chemistry with long-lasting impact on the chemical sciences. In 2020, he was a fair, I'm a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Anyone that's a centenary prize from them. It's incredible. I'm bringing this up because he is a proponent of what's called intelligent design, which I know will turn off many of you, but he's done some work with past guest Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute.

Starting point is 00:03:24 And is actually one of the most renowned scientists to take this notion of biological evolution from a chemical standpoint very seriously, very forcefully. He's a dynamic speaker. He's a thinker. We don't agree on everything, but who do I agree with everything besides my wife? And if I don't, there would be hell to pay. Just kidding, honey. But the point being that I like to have on all sorts of different personalities on this show,

Starting point is 00:03:48 from militant atheists, like I said, Lawrence Krause, and look for me on Lawrence's podcast in the near future, The Origins Project podcast, to devout thinkers in Christianity and Judaism. We've had on two rabbis so far, and we'll have on more. And so for the other side of the take, I like to have on people from a more Christian perspective and a lot of scientists are atheists, as you all know.

Starting point is 00:04:10 But I hope you'll enjoy the episode and really give it a chance to think about someone who believes as forcefully as he does. And what his claims about the ability or inability to instantiate the evolutionary process, in other words, to start life off evolving from non-biological, i.e. chemical system. So that's where his expertise comes in. So called a biogenesis. biology generated from non-biological systems, from purely chemical systems. So I find that fascinating, and I hope you will too. So for now, sit back, relax. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel where you find this interview video of the interview, along with some nice B-roll footage that we folded in for my super producer.

Starting point is 00:04:51 I have two super producers, Lucas Shineback and Stuart Volkow. And I really enjoy hearing back from you. So I'm sure I'll get some feedback, positive and negative. I'm welcoming all of it. So you can leave feedback in the form of a podcast review. I read each and every one at Apple Podcasts, where you'll find the end of The Impossible Podcasts. You may be even listening to it right now on Apple Podcasts.

Starting point is 00:05:12 And I just recently received a wonderful review of four stars. So maximum five stars, but I get a lot of five stars. But sometimes I get a four star review. Great show. My only complains that suddenly in the middle. Someone started screaming about a corporation unrelated to the podcast content. Well, sometimes that's because of some sponsorship that the podcast apps depend upon. So that's not necessarily my fault.

Starting point is 00:05:34 But really, I think it is much more important to look at the content. And I appreciate that from D. McBear. I don't know. That's their name. But anyway, thank you for all your feedback from everybody. I'm always trying to improve. And if you really don't like ads at all, you can go to YouTube premium. And you pay a little bit.

Starting point is 00:05:54 I do that, so I don't have to listen to ads. And that's $16 a month, I think. And I also have a Patreon account. and I have a YouTube membership account where you can become a member of the channel, not just a subscriber. Anyway, I'm not in this for the money. I'm in it for meeting interesting people,

Starting point is 00:06:11 learning cool things, and hopefully entertaining and educating along the way. That's my mission. So for now, sit back and enjoy this trip into The Impossible with Professor James Torr of Rice University. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology

Starting point is 00:06:29 is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please, how? Professor Jim, Jim, tour. It's a pleasure to meet you in person. Nice to meet you this first time. Yes, and I followed you for such a long time. You're one of my audience kind of recommendations and really they've advocated so long to have you on. You are a renowned professor of nanotechnology at Rice University. Been there? How many decades or years have you been there?

Starting point is 00:06:59 23 years at Rice and then I did 11 years at the University of South Carolina. So this is like, yeah, 33, 34 years. And we're at a very interesting workshop. We're not going to disclose locations of where we are to protect the innocent. But this has been a very stimulating conference. I would say that this conference has been dedicated to the biggest picture topics in all of science, philosophy, culture, etc. And maybe we'll have more to say about that at another time. But I want to start off.

Starting point is 00:07:29 You are a religious scientist. You are observant religious scientist. I am an observant religious scientist. I'm an observant religious scientist. scientists, sometimes to make the distinction. We've had on a Christian scientist, people that have worked in science who are Christians. We've had many of those who have many more atheists, a couple of agnostics, including my first guest, Freeman Dyson, who was what I call a practicing agnostic. I want to start there. As a scientist, do you think it's more economical, say,

Starting point is 00:07:59 to approach science from a neutral perspective, not affirming an active intelligence behind the universe at some level, whatever that means, or is it equally valid to start from a position of maybe a theistic origin of the universe? Can a good scientist be atheist? Can a good scientist be agnostic, a theistic, or is there a natural starting point whatsoever for a scientist to approach his or her research? Yeah, I've never really thought about the question, so I'm shooting from the hip, but I think it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. There are good scientists that are in each camp, and there are bad scientists that are in each camp. So a lot depends on your training, where you trained and your approach to science.

Starting point is 00:08:42 So you do not have to be, in my mind. I mean, there's a lot of scientists that I know that are not very religious at all. I've never asked them exactly what they are, but they are great scientists. And we've had a lot of conversations on this particular podcast about alien life, in particular, whether there's specific instances of observed signatures of spacecraft or around America in particular, around Southern California, where I live. But I want to ask you, is the notion that intelligent aliens has somehow created life, whatever that means, on Earth, in the universe, is that something to be taken seriously

Starting point is 00:09:24 as past guest on the show, Lee Cronin, has as postulated life as you, life is uniform and perhaps alien life is the progenitor of life on earth is that is that something you take seriously well i should be taken serious i think that wherever we look we've never seen life off of this planet and if we find life nearby of that we need to really ask did it come from this planet you know a lot of material has exchanged between planets certainly we can find things on earth that are from mars things that are on mars from earth so you always have to be concerned with exchange. I don't worry about alien life. Serious, not serious. I don't really know. I don't worry about it at all. I don't concern myself with it. And that's probably because of my

Starting point is 00:10:12 faith-based side. I am a firm believer in the Bible, but every word in the Bible is absolutely true. I love the scriptures. I love the word of God. God created the heavens and the earth. He doesn't go into great detail on how he did that. He doesn't tell us how the molecules came together when he formed a man named Adam and a woman named Eve. We know that she came from some part of Adam's side, but he doesn't give us much details. I don't even know how much allegory is read into that. I just take it for what it is that God created Adam. And what we do find, and there's been writings about this in the Christian community is that you find you find more alien activity where there has been greater occult practice and when when prayer comes in and the occult is

Starting point is 00:11:05 is is really dissipated the occult activity that dissipated the alien activity seems to go away so how much of that is is what the Bible would call demonic I don't know I really don't know these well. But I really am not concerned about it because I've read the Bible from the beginning of the book to the end. And I know what the end is going to look like. And so I don't worry about that. Jim, you gave a really phenomenal talk. And we laid out what is necessary and be contingent, just focusing on the micromachene, this exquisite structure that we call the cell. You talked about what are the contingent properties of a cell that would be necessary, to, you know, credibly call life. And even beyond that, the different levels of chemistry,

Starting point is 00:11:55 of predecessor chemistry that would be necessary from enzymes to base pairs and RNA, et cetera, et cetera. What's the most complicated? And you gave a wonderful example. You asked, what do you think the, people have been asked in America, I believe it was, what's the most complicated thing that scientists have made in the lab? Maybe I'm just rephrasing it in some sense. And 30% or so thought a frog had been created in the lab by scientists, which was, and these are college-educated. These are, yeah, 80% of the people that were interviewed had some college-level training, either from associate's degree,

Starting point is 00:12:30 through PhD degree. Yeah. And one-third of the population feels that believes that scientists have even created things like frogs in the lab. Two-thirds believe that scientists have created simple, single-celled organisms like bacteria, like a bacteria. And so, yeah, that's what the belief is. I wanted to put you at ease a little bit.

Starting point is 00:12:52 I gave a talk in Italy and Florence, actually in Galileo's old home, essentially. And I put up a slide back in 2015. And it postulated or demonstrated a survey from the National Science Foundation in America that 25% of Americans believe that the sun orbits around the Earth. So everyone in the audience was cackling, stupid American. I don't know why I used like a Russian accent, but these were Italians. And then I revealed the next slide, 33. percent of Europeans believe the same thing. What is the most complicated biological chemical entity

Starting point is 00:13:24 predecessor, precursor, constituent, contingent structure that humans have ever made? Is it Venters, you know, kind of encoding in an existing DNA structure? What's the most complicated thing humans have ever met? No, I don't think Craig Venters work on his so-called synthetic cells. I mean, he took an existing cell. He took, he copied a genome from another cell and he put it in the first cell. I mean, that's a clever experiment, no doubt. That's a clever experiment, but it's certainly not the making of life. Nobody's ever gotten close to life. I mean, a cell is a huge factory.

Starting point is 00:14:00 It's a machine. It's just of so much transport, so much processing. And the target of a cell gets harder every year, and that's not because of some evolutionary process. It's because of, we've got some background folks here, talk, but it's all right. I think they can hear us. But the processes that go on in a cell are getting harder every year to think about because we learn, for example, with chiral-induced spin selectivity that this is how a cell makes things so cleanly. We always thought that it was the hand in glove, the enzyme, and that's the way we taught chemistry for years. And now we're learning that that's just a part of it and maybe even the minor part.

Starting point is 00:14:40 The major part is that these chiral environments, these handedness and environments are spin valves. So only the electron of a proper spin, spin up or spin down, can go down this path. And because of that, there's very little back scattering. And so the processes don't evolve much heat. And that's why a cell never burns up. We're always wondering about this. How can all that chemistry be taking place in a cell? And the cell doesn't just overheat.

Starting point is 00:15:08 And we see this in biological systems. Our brain only puts out at 10 watts when we are full-powered thinking about a topic. And then you see the interactums, the non-covalent interaction. Not just the covalent, but the non-covalent. The alignment of molecules is critical for information flow that is transferring through electrostatic potentials and near the speed of light. And the number of combinations of non-covalent interactions that you could have, if these things were just randomly associated in a cell,

Starting point is 00:15:39 in a single yeast cell, just protein-protein interactions is 10 to the 79 billion. As an astronomer, you can think that's a big number. 10 to 79. Yeah, that's a crazy number. And so that's just protein-protein in a simple yeast cell. That's not protein DNA. That's not carbohydrate with protein.

Starting point is 00:16:01 That's just protein protein. And the way the cell deals with this is it takes the information, that arrangement, and it starts to divide it up between the two sides, and then it clamps down and the cell divides. So you get this progenitor, it just keeps passing, you get this information flow from one to the other. And we don't know how to do this. So the complexity of the cell is so hard. Nobody's come close. There's a, I showed you a whole list of things that need to be there in the simplest cell. People would always say, oh, the cells are very simple. You take the simplest cell that you can possibly be modeled, it's been modeled, so simple that it

Starting point is 00:16:39 can't make any of the amino acids by itself. It has to have all this exogenous input. The simplest of cells has to have so many pieces and not a single one of them has ever been made by a human being, even with all their advanced techniques, let alone a prebiotically relevant synthesis. So we are so far from this that whatever people have made is absolute child's play compared to, you to what is happening in a cell. Talk about the arguments on the opposing side. Steel Man, for me, the best and maybe most common arguments against, you know, an intelligent designer or some process pre-occurring to the formation of life on Earth, perhaps by a large

Starting point is 00:17:23 amount of time. What are some of their best arguments and maybe some of just their most common arguments against an intelligent designer? But, you know, I don't really, I don't normally speak toward an intelligent. intelligent designer. Because as scientists, I don't have any proof of that directly. Now, many people will come with inferences, and I understand, and I'm sympathetic to those. So I don't normally speak about that as far as the best proof against an intelligent designer from my world, of an organic chemistry world, I don't know that there are any good proofs against an intelligent designer,

Starting point is 00:18:00 from my world, just looking at it as a synthetic chemist, because we're so far from even being able to think about how molecules would come together to form anything remotely close to life, because molecules don't move toward life. Molecules have only moved toward life when you have a biological entity and organism pushing them toward life, propelling them toward life, or a human being trying to organize them towards life. molecules move away from this. And so even if you consider a liposome, which is a lipid bilayer, people have made lipid bilayers, if you take lipids and you put them in water and you bring them through shear, it's not just shaking, it's through a shearing action. You can get a liposome, which is a lipid bilayer where you have some water on the inside and water on the outside.

Starting point is 00:18:50 Even those are ridiculous. Those have nothing to do with the protocell because cells aren't like that. as we heard from from our friend Tony Futterman today, the inside has to be different from the outside or else you don't get a proton gradient so the thing could never work as a cell, as a living cell. The thing could just never work. And you always have the saturated systems on the outside, the unsaturated ones on the inside. How this happens, we don't know. In biology, we know how it happens. There's something called enzymes, flipase enzymes which flip these things around. So I don't know that there are any good arguments that could disperial.

Starting point is 00:19:24 spell an intelligent designer. When we hear things, though, you know, we're out under the Tuscan sun, literally, and feeling the warmth, warming glow, you think back to 1896 and Lord Calvin and speculating on the origin of the sun and maybe the age of the sun and using the best inference from the available data at that time, he concluded the sun is 20 million years old because it's a consuming wood or charcoal or some biological, you know, former proto-biological substance. you know, but of course that we now that's far, far inadequate. We know the age of the sun is much many orders of magnitude greater.

Starting point is 00:20:00 We know the age of the universe is greater still. To what extent can you attribute some of the outright hostility, which I view is ad hominem and having no place in science towards you, but couldn't some of it come from the fact that at some level you're saying we can't do this, we can't do this, we can't do it now, may not be able to do it now, just like we couldn't explain the solar. fusion back in 1896 and therefore got a whole host of downstream facts wrong. To what extent are you overemphasizing the man's ability, you know, humankind's ability, if you like, to create plausible origin mechanisms. Why is that relevant? We don't know so much and we don't even know

Starting point is 00:20:41 what we don't know to use Rumsfeld's lingo. Right. So why is man the human beings in the lab? why are they the standard by which we can say we are failing or inadequate to the task of explaining originally? 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. Loss supplies last.

Starting point is 00:21:19 Priced invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. You make a good point. As I've said before in many contexts, I mean, if you asked a man or a woman in the year 1500, will we ever have space flight? I can't imagine we'd have space flight. What is space even to them?

Starting point is 00:21:41 And so, you know, they didn't have even have flight within our atmosphere. or would people be ever able to get to the moon? I mean, how can they answer it? It's so foreign to them. And if they have said, I don't know, maybe in 500 years we'll be able to do it, they would have been right at that point. And because the best you could think of is, you know, somebody got up to a very high mountain and jumped and somehow got there.

Starting point is 00:22:08 So it's hard to imagine how these things can, we can think about this. That's why I never say we will never know. I just say it's very far from today. And the more we learn about the cell, the more the target, the goal moves away from us much faster than we're moving toward it. That's what tells me that we're nowhere close. I could never just a priori to say we're nowhere close. I have to base that on something.

Starting point is 00:22:35 And the something is that every year we learn more about the cell that makes it more complex. And so I suspect that we will someday figure out how life was full. form. I think we will. And that doesn't, that doesn't negate God for me. I mean, there's a lot of things. Just because we figured out the structure of DNA doesn't lessen God. It makes God all the greater to me. It's like, oh, so that's how you do it. So I think it makes God all the more magnanimous in my mind. I mean, he doesn't change. He's static. I mean, he's always been magnanimous. He just is greater in my own mind. And that's what I love about science. The more I learn about science and particularly about biological systems as a chemist. As I learn about biological systems, I'm like, Lord, you are magnificent. Yeah. No, no, I made the point today, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:22 as someone I characterize myself as a devout practicing agnostic in that I am searching. I am not making stipulations that there is no God. I had a lunch conversation earlier with some people that said, you know, I'm a devout atheist, essentially. And I had this conversation with, with Freeman Dyson, the very first podcast on The Into the Impossible, I said, Freeman, what are you? And he said, I'm agnostic. And I said, oh, okay, so what church do you go to? And he said, well, I don't go to church. I said, oh, so you mean to tell me Freeman, with all love and respect, as I had for him, I said, you go, you don't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to. In other words, how could an intelligent alien look down

Starting point is 00:24:01 at an agnostic? An agnostic isn't to be a great cop out because people aren't willing to take aside. It means unknowable, but it doesn't mean that you don't have elements of practice. In other words, Freeman, you are functionally indistinguishable from an atheist by your practice. You may believe in the open to the possibility. And I've had conversations with Lawrence Kraus from a prominent atheist, militant, self-declared militant atheists. Do you get the sense that your opponents ever doubt their atheism? Because I assume you doubt your faith on occasion. I doubt, I doubt faith all the time, but I'm less on the spectrum of religious observance or fidelity, perhaps lessening. Do you doubt your faith?

Starting point is 00:24:38 First of all, I shouldn't just preach. Are you asking me? I'm asking you, Jim, yeah. Absolutely not. You don't doubt your faith? Not for a second. Not the the audacity, not the children gets cancer, dies at age, you know, five years old at the peak of his or her cuteness. No, there's a ton that I can't understand, that I don't understand.

Starting point is 00:24:54 But I love the Lord Jesus Christ with all my heart. I love him so much. And, you know, I had an experience with the Lord when I came to know him at the age of 18 and where his presence filled the room right there in my room. I never had an experience before that like it. I never had an experience like that. And that was so rich. And I will, I just don't doubt them. I just don't doubt.

Starting point is 00:25:19 This are all experienced. Yeah. It's just part of me. No, so I don't. I was talking to a very eminent lawyer in California recently. And I said, you know, there's all these notions of, well, this and that is just circumstantial evidence. And he said, well, actually, circumstantial evidence in a court of law is actually very highly, you know, reliable. For me, I do doubt, and I find there is doubt.

Starting point is 00:25:43 I also find there's no doubt on the militant atheist side. They are never questioned by the birth of a child, by the opening of a flower, by the wings of a hummingbird, by the biological mysteries of the cell. And that I find that that's non-scientific. I'm not accusing you're an eminent scientist, but to never doubt or not to believe that there could be a falsification of a hypothesis. Again, I don't put Popper on a pistol, but is there, is there any combination of evidence or direct evidence other than personal revelation that can bring one to a specific, you know, instantiation of God? We had this conversation at the end of the session earlier today, you know, is God benevolent? You know, can you go from

Starting point is 00:26:26 intelligent design to benevolent design, could there be malevolent design? I find those conversations fascinating because I also think they may be unanswerable because not everyone has had the revelation, personal revelation that you attest to and that you were witness to. I certainly haven't. I should point out, we're both biologically born Jewish. We've both had interesting paths to our practice and our faith. But I have always wondered, is there an argument from scientific design that would lead to a specific instantiation of a theology. Do you find, is that possible? Could you essentially have the same faith, you know, but from a scientific point of view, in the virtue and reality of Jesus Christ? You know, this is a hard question

Starting point is 00:27:12 for me. It's hard because I don't normally think in these contexts. I don't speak often to philosophers and not that you're a philosopher, but you're speaking philosophically. And so I've really not thought much about this. I guess I'm a lot simpler in my faith and in my understanding than many other people. You know, I love the scriptures. I love the word of God. It means so much to me. I love the Lord. And I enjoy my science. You know, I don't even, I know that God is good. I know that he is kind. I know that he is gracious. I know that man is rebellious. I see it in my own heart. I see how wayward I am, how fickle I can be. I see how at one minute I use my tongue to praise God. and the next second I'm cursing man.

Starting point is 00:27:57 And I see what's there. So if there's anything good, anything righteous, anything holy, I mean, it's all because of the grace of God. And if there's anything wicked, it's all because of the wickedness of man. And so for me, it's a much, in a way, it's a simpler question, and I don't even ask it that much. So it's hard for me to answer you because I haven't really pondered these things. We'll get back to science in just a bit because, I mean, I can't resist with such an eminent scientist to just talk shop and

Starting point is 00:28:27 understand what really excites you about nanotechnology, nanomachines, chemistry of the cell, et cetera. Before we move off of the philosophical bent that you mentioned, and I should say, you know, physicist, the early word for physicist was natural philosopher, right? So Galileo spoke about natural philosophers in derisive terms, but he was a natural philosopher. I can't resist it. So the one thing that I am curious about, and I ask this of Stephen Meyer when he was on this podcast a year and a half ago for his book, A Return of the God hypothesis, said, at what level does God intervene in your estimation? Is it at the level of, well, there's a cell germination or a sperm and an egg

Starting point is 00:29:06 or DNA or DNA or the fine structure constant or the gravitational potential or the inflationary perturbation spectrum at what level and how because the key revelation that i've had from talking to militant atheists and other atheists like sean carroll who's calls himself a poetic poetic naturalist who's been on this show is that there's no term in the standard model lagrangian that in that is even has an exchange interaction with anything that is necessary to explain the properties of say particle physics just restricting ourselves to something simple like Lagrangian of the standard moment. Where does God intervene? How early does God intervene?

Starting point is 00:29:45 Because as I said, I think it's a problem. If I tell my kids, oh, that rainbow over there is so beautiful. And they say, oh, Daddy, how did it get there? That's how God made it. You know, I think that short circuits their ability to become good scientists themselves, not that I force them. So at what level and how can a God entity can, you know, a theological entity or maybe just an intelligent designer, what element can he intervene with nature?

Starting point is 00:30:10 and how. So I would say that fundamentally I'm a progressive creationist, meaning that God didn't just set the whole thing off and then it ran by itself, that there were specific acts of creation where he set this thing in motion. He called the molecules together. However, he does that through self-assembly and gets it into this very, very stable, high-energy state, as we learned about this morning. And so I don't know. the details. I know what the scriptures say, that everything has been created by him. Everything. And the details of this, I don't know. This is what he gives us the ability to investigate and to look at. And some of these things we learn. You know, that this, this then then modifies and now we have a new structure based on this. I don't understand it all the places. It could be as fundamental as the electrons moving around this proton, these protons. in the nucleus, you know, does this happen all by itself? Is there something where he is there at that level? You know, I don't know. I don't know enough about an atom to know really,

Starting point is 00:31:22 really what's happening here. But there's no doubt that he sets these things up. And they seem now to run autocatalyticly. They seem to run by themselves. But I don't know what happens if he lifts his hand from all this for an instant. If the whole thing just, just, just spins out of control. I don't know. Maybe as a physicist, you know better. And you say, no, these things are very controlled. There's no problem. You have this force. You have that force. And these things are well defined. I take these things and I use these to my advantage all the time because I know exactly how these molecules are going to respond. And they do it the same way every time. And so when I pray God, bless my reactions, bless my work. I'm not saying just bless it for me.

Starting point is 00:32:05 Sustainment. Yeah. And not somebody else because if it's not reproducible, then I'm in big trouble. But it's more of a, Lord, guide me in the right way, guide me in the way of truth, because the Bible says that darkness and the light are the same to him. So he sees in, he sees in the darkness, and I don't. He sees things that I don't see. And I'm saying, Lord, enlighten me so that I can see this thing too. You're asking me a very deep question, and I'm not sure I'm giving you the answer that you deserve, but I'm trying.

Starting point is 00:32:36 Yeah, no, I think it is. And I think the earnest approach that you have is refreshing, Jim. I think there's too much kind of anodyne, you know, this association of the soul of a scientist, because we are human beings. If not, good luck to artificial intelligence and, you know, just go on, let me know the answer at the end. We are human beings. Einstein said the greatest joy he ever had was a visualization that a person in free fall would experience no gravitational forces. Tell me, how can an AI, how can something dispassionate, how can they even comprehend?

Starting point is 00:33:07 and what free fall is, let along what joy is. So I think to dissociate the soul from the scientist is a grave error of our time. And it's unique to our time. Harvard was started as an institution to teach theology, divinity, teaching you couldn't graduate that knowing Hebrew. And there's so many paths we could go down here. I guess I can't resist but to ask you about your, and I have to say, you ask me, how does God do it?

Starting point is 00:33:28 Or you ask yourself, how does God do it? If he keeps sustaining it, what is it like from his perspective, dark and light are the same? It's meaningless to us. It doesn't mean it's meaningless ultimately. reminds me of a joke that one of my kids told me. So, Dad, you know, did you ever hear about the story where the kid asked God? You know, God, what is, what is a million years like to you? And God says, it's like a second to you, my son. And then the kid said, well, God, what's a million

Starting point is 00:33:52 dollars like to you? And God says to the boy, it's like a penny to you. And the boy thinks for a thing and says, God, can I borrow a penny? And God says, yes, in a second. We can't comprehend these things, but to not confront these things. As most people, especially my Jewish friends, like Lawrence Krause, I debated this on my podcast with him. I said, Lawrence, when was the last time you thought seriously about God, studied the Torah, the Old Testament, he's a Jew lapsed. He had a bar mitzvah, which I didn't. But he said, you know, when I was bar mitz, I said, Lawrence, let me ask you a question. If some kid, he's 12, 13 years old, comes up to you, some little pisha, as we would say, and says, Lawrence, your theory of the universe from nothing is total,

Starting point is 00:34:31 you know, nonsense. It's inadequate. It doesn't seem. right doesn't sound right to me, you would say, you know, what do you know? You're 13 years old. And yet, you, Lawrence, you are refuting and rejecting a tradition that you last studied at age 12. So what do you know? And it was clear, you know, it was kind of shaking, but he couldn't, yeah, he'll never, I'll never convert him. And that's not my job is to bring him back to do Teshuvra. Jim, I have a little gift for you. This is a fragment of the Earth's moon, which was brought here via gravity and eventually the U.S. Postal Service to me, it's 0.251 grams. If I told you that somewhere deep inside of this moon meteorite, which is your gift for coming

Starting point is 00:35:11 on the end to the Impossible podcast, it deep inside of there, and I'd love it if you look for it in your laboratory, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's DNA. What would that say to you? What would that mean to you? Thank you very much. They would probably tell me that something went from the earth to the moon and the moon and then the moon back. And what about the reverse hypothesis? I've had this debate. with Sean Carroll, the non-observation of life on the moon and the non-observation of life on Mars, yes, we haven't searched everywhere in evidence, absence of evidence is an evidence. But doesn't it not have to have some Bayesian prior reduction? I mean, doesn't it tell us something that we haven't

Starting point is 00:35:47 seen a megacity on, I mean, it might not tell us very much, but it tells us something, does it not, that life is ubiquitous, the exchange of material from Earth to the Mars and Mars to the Earth and the Moon to the Earth, et cetera, for billions of years? Does that not give us a sense? something to say about the efficiency of so-called pan-spermic origin of life on Earth. Sure. I'm fine. I'm fine with life coming from somewhere else. What I'm talking about is origin of first life.

Starting point is 00:36:13 Yes. And so even if some advanced creatures came and seated it here and it took off, I mean, I'd say, okay, where'd those creatures come from? That's what I'm dealing with. This is very nice of you. Thank you. So this is lunar regular. Not brought by the astronauts, brought by,

Starting point is 00:36:30 eBay. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the this day. So we have a new session starting in a little bit. I want to ask you, first of all, what's the most exciting aspect of your research? What jazzes you up every day to do the work that you do as a distinguished professor at Rice University? What is that to you? I have four children.

Starting point is 00:37:18 You might as well ask me, which one do I love the most? I mean, it's in the top 10 things. It's whatever is in front of me at that moment. I mean, this, we're using flash fuel heating, to make graphene from trash. I mean, this is really interesting. We take municipal trash, boom, and no solvents, no water, boom. The whole thing turns into graphene that he can put into concrete and building material. Wow.

Starting point is 00:37:40 And then we're using it to volatilize metals out of electronic waste, which is the fastest growing waste in the world. We're using it to remediate soil. So this is a very exciting thing. Our little nanomachines that are drilling into cells to kill them, killing superbacteria, killing MRSA, and all these deadly. these deadly bacteria that are killing hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Starting point is 00:38:04 So this is really exciting to me to be able to work on projects like this. And so we work from medicine to materials to interesting ways of synthesis. And I love it all. I'm like a kid in the candy store. We have a lot of young listeners that are maybe considering graduate school, maybe beginning graduate school. what advice do you have for a student who's fascinated by these nanomachines, this technology that you are pioneering and I've done such an eminent work? And what advice do you give to such a young student?

Starting point is 00:38:40 Well, you know, they say the people that have the biggest effect across the sciences are people that are T people that are T people that are highly trained in some discipline. That's why I don't think you should get a degree in something as nebulous as nanotechnology. It's too broad. You need something in chemistry or physics or biology, something that was very deep. And then be able to speak across many different disciplines, be able to cover many disciplines so that you're reading broadly. So, you know, I have a company that makes electronic memory. I've companies that work on these nanomachines, others that are straight drug companies, others that are straight materials companies. And I've learned to speak across many domains. And that's one of the things that nanotechnology has done.

Starting point is 00:39:26 It has forced people to speak across domains. So you need to first be deeply trained in something. And then while you're getting that training, be reading broadly at 10 seminars outside of your exact area so that you can begin to learn the lingo. And you will see you probably have a term for that in your own sciences. So, for example, when I started working with physicists, I mean, they would talk about a polaron. What is a polaron? What is a polaron?

Starting point is 00:39:51 Well, we have a term in chemistry called a radical. catign. I know what a radical cation is. And we're talking about the same thing. It's just the different terminology. And the way they view things, I talk about electrostatic potential. Physicist talks about a virtual photon. I'm like, what's a virtual photon is? Which is a virtual photon? Well, this is the same thing where I have an electrostatic potential. They start pushing two electrons together. They want to repel. And so it's terminology and they view things a little bit differently than we do. And I learn from that. So I would say learn broadly, study deeply. Study deeply.

Starting point is 00:40:25 In the remaining couple of minutes, I usually ask three existential, four existential questions. We only have time for one. This one has to do with what Richard Feynman called the cataclysm question. I should point out, of course, Richard Feynman's famous for an essay called There's Plenty of Room at the bottom, which is one of the pioneering aspects of nanotechnology from the 50s or 60s. He said that what if the Earth is faced with the cataclysm? in Armageddon of sorts, and we want to encode or encrypt the most information in the smallest amount of sentences to describe it, such that, and this is my take now, we can put it on a time capsule

Starting point is 00:41:02 and send it off into space to give a little brag, a little swagger about what human beings of the human creation. What would that be for you? He said the atomic hypothesis. You can't say that. What would encapsulate the most information that human beings in their greatest glory could brag about with a little bit of swagger for all eternity in your estimation. I would say the scriptures. I would say the Bible. Nothing scientific, but you take that and you send it up because that's what certainly humanity is going to need if it's ever going to start over again. Jim Tour, the senior professor of nanotechnology of chemistry at Rice University.

Starting point is 00:41:43 It's such a pleasure. I do want to do a part too. We only barely scratch the surface. was maybe our time here or by Zoom in the near future, Jim. This is a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. Well, that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this really fascinating, kind of divergent episode of The Into the Impossible podcast. I couldn't resist the chance to interview Jim while we were in person.

Starting point is 00:42:10 He is a dynamic force. He is very interested in dialogues. He receives a ton of ad hominem attacks. And he just keeps going. And maybe that's a sign of being stubborn in a good way, or maybe not. but he's certainly an eminent scientist. Nobody can contradict that fact. It's just objectively true.

Starting point is 00:42:28 I hope you enjoyed the podcast. As I said, please do subscribe to my YouTube channel. You can see us. Subscribe to Jim's YouTube channel. I'm Dr. Brian Keating. He's Dr. James Tour. And also leave a review of the podcast. Enjoy my mailing list.

Starting point is 00:42:38 You might get some space dust, some space schmusts I gave to Jim. In our interview, here they are shaking them up. These are fragments of a four billion-year-old fragment of our proto-solar system, and you may win one if you go to Briankeedin.com slash list. Click on that link. your address to win, potentially win, one of 100 meteorite samples that I have provided for you. And stay tuned. I have an episode coming up. If you like the Christian perspective, I've had a few Jews on, I have a few Christians on, a bunch more atheists than agnostics. But the next episode in this kind

Starting point is 00:43:08 of series of theology and sciences, Dr. Luke Barnes, who was a past guest on the podcast, he's coming back on, again recorded at this conference. We talk about fine-tuning. And from his perspective, as a former young Earth creationist, can you imagine being a young Earth creationist, believe? leaving the earth is 5,700 years old as a youth, and then becoming a professional theoretical cosmologist and teaching at a top university in the world. So stay tuned for that episode, and for now, I do wish you a great journey in your future,

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Jim Tour: Darwin's Deception!? (#278)

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