Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Lawrence Krauss: The Mysterious Origins of Dark Energy (#371)

Episode Date: November 26, 2023

✨ To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit https://brilliant.org/DrBrianKeating The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. ✨ I had the pleasure of participating in an exciting onstage dialogue with the renowned theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss. We had a lively discussion about the mysteries of the Universe, the latest scientific discoveries, and their implications for our understanding of existence. From the origins of dark energy to nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change - we delved into it all! Join us for A Night at the Museum, presented by the Origins Project.  Lawrence M. Krauss is a highly acclaimed theoretical physicist, commentator, bestselling author, President of The Origins Project Foundation, and host of the Origins Podcast. Among his many significant scientific contributions was the 1995 proposal that most of the Universe's energy resides in empty space.  Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) Dark energy and its mysterious origins (02:01) Laymen, theorists, and experimentalists (09:51) Teaching controversies in science (16:34) Einstein’s creativity and the role of embodiment in AI (20:12) Advice to aspiring students (26:50) Nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change (30:44) UFOs and aliens (41:40) Which technology will be most useful in my area of physics? (44:48) Outro (49:41) — Additional resources:  📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Check out Lawrence Krauss:  📚 The Edge of Knowledge by Lawrence Krauss: https://a.co/d/2Dtwy3x  💻 Website: https://lawrencemkrauss.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LKrauss1 ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lawrence Krauss is a world-renowned theoretical physicist, a man who significantly changed our view and our understanding of the cosmos. He's a fierce advocate for the public understanding of science and aims to bring it closer to the masses through the Origins podcast. Recently, he's also been pushing for much-needed societal and cultural changes. Lawrence's books have been pivotal in popularizing science and have profoundly impacted me since I first read them. And his latest book is no exception. Check out my episode from earlier this year, right here. Join us as we embark on a captivating journey to the edge of knowledge, recorded live in October 2023 at the San Diego Air and Space Museum.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Lawrence, how are you doing? It's great to be here. I'm really thankful for the museum and for Brian. When the Origins Project decided to do some events in California, the last one we did was in Orange County a few days ago. And I contacted Brian.

I thought it'd be great to come down here. And Brian, because he's on the board, said, you know, I have a great place. And he arranged for this to happen. And so it's the first time I've been here, but it is truly an amazing place. And what a place to have this joint podcast in a sense that we're doing. The Origins Project does do public events every now and then, and this is just a wonderful venue. So I want to thank you and the museum.

It's been great. And of course, Andy Orndon, who organized it and helped set up the venue and the VIP reception. It's been a great chance to meet many of you. So it's fun to be with Brian here, and I hope we'll disagree and in chat about science. And since it's his home turf, I'm going to turn it back to him for the minute.

Yeah, one of the things I'm most excited to talk to you about tonight in our signature kind of way where we debate things. I am a what I call a practicing agnostic Jew, which we can get into what actually that means. Lawrence is a devout Bible-beating Christian, as you all know, can't get enough of it. We'll talk about religion, we'll talk about politics, all the stuff you're not supposed to. But really, it's talked science with a person who has had a considerable influence. both about my career and my thought process, but on a generation of young people. And I want to start with something that, you know, you can deny paternity, maybe, but I want you to talk about this mysterious substance, which I'm told fills the universe

almost without par, and it's called dark energy. And it's something that you and our friend, mutual friend, Mike Turner, really invented, discovered. Let's talk about the scientific process. How do you think of this creation and the fact that it will someday rip all of more molecules apart? No, it won't. It probably won't do that. By the way, I appreciate what you say, with the news that you said, I cast a long shadow on science because I thought that was an interesting way of putting it. But so dark energy is the biggest mystery in, I think, in fundamental physics, it is the fact that when you take space and get rid of all the particles and all the radiation and everything and just,

have empty space there, it weighs something. And we don't know why. It is true that Mike and I had proposed that it existed. Mostly I did, anyway, and I think I convinced Mike that I was being erratical, because at the time that we looked at the data, and all the data of cosmology didn't agree with our picture of cosmology, the standard rule of cosmology. we knew, we theorists knew way before the observers and he's an observer and I'm an experiment,

he's an experimentalist, I'm a theorist. We'll get into the difference and there are differences. And, but we theorists were virtually certain that the universe was flat. That means it's, and the other day in Orange County, I don't think I got to explain what flat was, so I should explain here. It's not flat like a pancake. It's flat, a flat universe is just one in which the X, Y, and Z axes point in the same direction throughout all of space. If you follow them up, they keep going in straight lines. A curved universe is one that you might imagine, the X, Y, and Z axis point here, up there,

but somewhere in the distant part of the universe is over here, over there, and over there. And in a say, in a closed universe, if you look far enough in that direction, you'll see the back of your head. There are good theoretical reasons, and maybe we'll get to them, why we thought the universe was flat, but there was a big problem.

The observers being, difficult people, didn't, weren't finding the universe to be flat. Well, Richard Nishon, they weren't flying enough matter to make the universe flat because the geometry of the universe depends upon the stuff in it. And you have to have a certain amount of stuff to make a flat universe. And it wasn't the right amount of stuff within a factor three. And then we looked at all sorts of other observations, and it wasn't just not agreeing.

And then we realized, in order to make it all agree, you'd have to fill up the universe with another kind of energy, the energy of nothing. And that was so absurd and ridiculous. That's why I love the idea of proposing it. But more important, I did it because, and this is really important because we'll probably get to some current issues. At the forefront of science, results are often wrong, not because the experimentalists

are doing, they're doing difficult work. And it's very difficult to measure things. And sometimes the first measurement isn't, you know, isn't quite right. And so I was convinced some of the measurements were wrong, and this would be a message for observers to review their data and get it right. And some of the observers, one, I remember a guy named Saul Prometre said, well, you know, we'll prove you wrong. And it turned out, much to my surprise, more than anyone, that what we predicted was exactly right, that 70% of the energy of the universe resides in empty space.

We don't know where the energy came from, why it's there. But it's there. It's exactly the amount we predicted, and those guys won the Nobel Prize for the observation, which is fine. No, it is, because the people who convince the world of things are the people who actually measure things. You know, we can talk.

I can say it's flat, or I can say there's dark energy, but no one's going to believe it, unless the observers in some ways confirm that. And so physics is an empirical science. experimental science and and it's led by experimentalists. I say that as a theorist. But in any case, so it turned out to be right and I was very surprised. But we don't know if it's constant, if it's going to stay there. Brian said it's going to tear us apart. Only see, if the dark energy is there, one of two things can happen. It could just stay there,

which is my bet, by the way, just stay there, not change. And then it would be something that's akin to something Einstein invented to call the cosmological constant, a fundamental lowest energy state of the universe. Or it could go away one day, and we talk about how that's happened earlier in the history of the universe,

something very much like it, or it could increase. Now, if it increases, then dark energy has this weird property that it's gravitationally repulsive. All of you who studied physics know that gravity sucks, okay? it always pulls, pulls in. If you put energy in empty space, it blows. Okay, and it causes the expansion

universe to accelerate, and that's what the observers saw and others looking at supernovae first measured. But if it's constant, it causes the universe to accelerate, but it really only impacts on the evolution of the universe on the largest scales. That's why we never observed it before. You have to look at the motion of distant galaxies. But if it's increasing, its effect becomes more and more important on smaller and smaller scales. So right now it's pulling apart galaxies. The galaxies aren't being pulled apart. Our galaxy is the same size and it's not growing due to even due to the expansion of the universe. But if the dark energy increases, eventually that repulsive force will blow apart the galaxy. And then if it keeps increasing, it'll it'll ball apart the solar

system and then it'll blow apart planets. And then it'll eventually blow apart atoms and it eventually will blow apart space itself. It's called the Big Rip. A former student, you know, invented the name. It's a nice name. I think there's no, I would say there's no theoretical reason to expect that at all. There's no theory that suggests that that dark energy will increase. It's a cute thing that the, you know, captured a lot of people's imagination, but it's not likely. The likelihood is it either it's staying the same or quite possibly it may not be a fundamental energy of empty space, there may be somehow energy being stored in empty space, and it may go away, and that would change everything, including our lot, well, including life. So anyway, that's a long

answer. This won't happen for several billion or perhaps trillion a year or so keep paying your tax. Well, actually, show up tomorrow and I have something. Interesting thing is we don't know, because we don't understand it. It could happen tomorrow. The great thing about it is if it happened, we won't know it until it will hit us and we won't be there afterwards. The effect will happen at the speed of light. And so we will go away before we even knew we got hit. So it doesn't matter, enjoy life. You know, that's like that song says. When you think about the differences between observers, experimentalists, theorists, I find like a lot of my students don't really comprehend the subtleties between those. But I think one thing

is, you know, right over there, they put up a great image of Earth's nearest neighbor, the moon. and that's a view that humanity never had for thousands of years until some Dutch guy took his spectacles and broke him in two and put one in front of the other and then Galileo, or my hero, at least. I'm sure you're also a big hero. You know that. Intellectual debt.

He turned it to the moon. And no one had ever done that before. They never looked up with a telescope until Galileo, essentially. They were looking at people's windows before that. Yeah, that's right. Okay, anyway. Go on. I mean, my neighbor was quite, quite attracted.

Anyway, looking at the moon, even now, you can see it. You can use something built by a human being. You can observe something. Then you can take that observation and use it to test a hypothesis. One hypothesis that Galileo tested was whether or not that ball was actually perfectly smooth and crystalline and ideal in its form. And when he saw it wasn't that it had mountains and it had valleys and it had holes in it and all sorts of crazy stuff, he could use that to formulate a hypothesis.

And he said famously, I love this quote. He said, a scientist should measure what is measurable and then make measurable what is not yet so. I've always been curious, what do you think is the minimum amount of knowledge that, A, an educated layperson, and some of you are brilliant laypeople, but what do you think an educated layperson should know about science? And two, what should a theoretician, like those that you train, know versus, say, an experimentalist, such as someone in my laboratory, building telescopes? Now, let me preface is by saying physics being the most advanced of the sciences in some ways is probably is one of the, is not the only science, but one of the only sciences where it's so complicated in, there's so much intellectual baggage that it has in most areas of physics separated into theorists and experimentalists because what you need to do to be a good experimentalist in terms

of the cutting edge technology that you have to master requires a great deal of time. And similarly, the mathematical baggage that you need to understand fundamental science and physics is also extreme. So you don't see theorists and experiments. The last, in my opinion, the last great theorist experimentalist was Enrico Fermi, at University of Chicago. If you saw that movie, Oppenheimer, you would have seen Fermi. He's a huge hero of mine. and he was he was a theorist in fact and and an experiment list equally well and he he proposed the fundamental theory one of the fundamental theories that later ended up describing one of the forces of nature and then did experiments on it and won the Nobel Prize I think for his experiments but anyway that was the last time you could sort of do that so it's sort of separated in terms of the the fundamental stuff that people should know I really think that what we really need to teach is not the stuff that you should know,

but the process by which you know it. And that's the one thing that I think is most important for people to carry on. You know, the details of science are fascinating for me and you. And I think for most people, once they realize it's science, you know, a lot of people don't realize they're interested in science because they don't know it's science. That's one of the reason I wrote the Star Trek book, okay? Because, you know, I go to a party and say, I'm a physicist,

and they go, how about those Yankees or something? And then I'd say, you know, talk about time travel or warp drive. And people are fascinated. But so that's great. And this, and it really is amazing. And I guess people should, of course, the basic things people should understand about the world is that there was a big bang. The universe is expanding. Evolution happened.

Basic stuff like that. But more important, the process by which we get that information, the process by which we test it. Because that's the tool, those are the tools that people will carry with them in all of the areas, aspects of life. And if we just used the scientific method, then politics and, well, even religion, but politics would be more sensible and more rational because people would test the ideas of politicians and they say, are they telling the truth. But politicians might also develop policies based on empirical evidence and also be able to change their minds. Do a policy.

It's not working. We're going to change our minds. Wouldn't that be wonderful? So I think that's the kind of thing that we really need to teach. I wish, as a theorist, I've, of course, come to appreciate experimentalists much more than I did when I was a student. Theorists, you know, like Oppenheimer, right? It's the sexy stuff. It's Einstein.

And so somehow theorists have captured people's imaginations and the tinkerers, if you wish, aren't usually the heroes of the movies, but they're the heroes of science. and I kind of wish I as a student appreciated that. I more. I actually did a degree in mathematics and a degree in physics. And I did that for a variety of reasons, but one of the reasons was so I could get out of the laboratory requirement in physics, okay? And so, but over time, of course, I've come to appreciate that. And as a theorist, actually, I used to be a very mathematical theorist when I was a student,

a graduate student, and then a friend of mine, who you know, Sheldon Glashire, who won the Nobel Prize, I remember when I was a student, he once said to me, there's formalism and there's physics, and you have to know the difference. And from that time on, I've always, in my physics, tried to tie it to things you can measure and see. And that's become fundamental to me, and to try and understand what observers can do and experimentalists can do. And in my life, I've tried to propose new experiments because it's fascinating to learn about new technology. because every time we open a new window on the universe, we're surprised. So I think if people realize the significance of that, that would be very important.

But it's not the facts. It's the process, it's the tools. And I do think everyone should, the problem with you know this, if you're in a physics lab, it's just like first year physics is boring and all. Anyway, it's things sliding down inclined planes. But experimentally, it's also these recipe things. You know, here's the stuff and you do this. And it would be great if we could design experiments that people could discover,

not know what the answer was going to be, discover, because that's really, when you're playing, that's what's really, really fun. I have a special favor to ask you. YouTube Analytics tells me that of the 30,000 plus of you that viewed my previous chat with Lawrence for his book, The Edge of Knowledge, only one third of the viewers actually subscribe to the channel. I'd really appreciate it if you consider subscribing to this channel.

Doing so helps me get great guests and helps me deliver the great content that you've come to expect from this channel. Thanks so much for helping me help you. Now back to my live chat with Lawrence Krause. But I think, you know, sometimes you'll hate this phrase, Lawrence, I know, but I think we should teach the controversy. And by that, I don't mean what you're thinking about, but I mean, you just mentioned this boring, rolling down an inclined plane. Well, you know who came up with the formalism for that. It's my hero. We already mentioned him, Galileo.

Yeah. It was his final book. He was discussing relativity. He was discussing how things in relative motion cannot determine who is truly moving and who is stationary. If you're a fish in the ocean next to a boat and the boat has an aquarium on it and there's a twin fish of yours and they're swimming, you cannot tell relative motion who is moving. He also used a genius trick by using this inclined plane that we call it to slow the force of gravity. Back then, they didn't have clocks. You couldn't measure things.

You had your pulse. You had an hourglass. You use this pulse. And I, you know, have you, have you been to Florence? Have you, I've been, I've been, I had a conference, hosted a conference in his prison house. And that's the controversy. Because I want to say. No, but anyway, I like that.

I like the museum there. The museum is beautiful. Everyone goes to the art museum in Florence, but go to the Museum of Science of Lawrence. They have a glitplane plane. They have a little telescope, which you just cannot see how he did anything. And I think they have his finger. That's in a different museum. But yes, it's his middle finger.

I was about to do it. I won't do it. Just to that plane making noise overhead. What I'd say is imagine you taught people this, that Galileo's manuscript was smuggled out under penalty of death, that that manuscript that we talk about, if we told out to freshmen and sophomores when we teach the first year students, I think it would make it more engaging. I think we do a terrible job. We've been given the greatest script ever made.

I mean, the greatest story ever told is your book, right? But the greatest script ever handed or bestowed upon humanity is the story of science. And we are the worst actors on any stage imaginable, I feel. We need to do a better time. I think you speak for yourself. No, I'm just talking. But the, well,

everything I know, I need for me. No, actually, I agree with you. I actually require my students, especially the non-science students, to read Galileo.

I always, you know, would photocopy because he doesn't have the copyright anymore anyway. I'd photocopy parts of the book. And I,

because it read, I've often said this, it's, we force these students to read like James Joyce, but Galileo is easier to read and funnier and poetic. And so I really, I'm a huge fan of Galileo's, and I do think it'd be great for students to me

because you see how these things which, as you say, seem boring out, how he was thinking and seeing the thought process is what I think people were like to do. And when he was wrong, too. Great scientists, great women, great men make great mistakes. Brilliant blunders, right? Yeah, yeah, no, no. So it's, but you're absolutely right. The reason we do in Climb Plains is because it's too hard when you drop something.

it travels, it accelerates so fast. That's why Aristotle thought, you know, things immediately got their final velocity. And he said, well, if I do it on a climb plane, it'll slow things down, but I can watch them accelerate. And it was the basis of modern science. And, and yeah, he's, he's at the top. I wonder if there will be new, not only new teachers for upcoming students, but new, new students and new ways of thinking. And I'm thinking particularly of large language models, of artificial intelligence. You talk about this in your latest book, The Edge of Knowledge, hold it up so people can go to Amazon, you know, when they're not getting my book. Yeah, yeah, I know you were. Your book is there somewhere. Dueling plugs. You can hold up your book in a second.

We'll see. We'll get there. And that is artificial intelligence. And I wonder, I wonder how, how you react to this state. When I think of what Einstein, who was a successor to Galileo in many, many ways, not like that prick Newton, who you've written about as a real juror. And I learned that from your writing. But good old Albert, he said that he had his happiest experience, his happiest thought ever, was that somebody in free fall would experience no gravitational force. And that led him to construct the Einstein equivalence principle and everything in GR follows from that. But you know, what people don't realize is that he said that, but he said that the only time his heart ever had palpitations.

And this is what's important. I mean, I think Einstein was sort of working this vacuum. They all think, you know, Lone genius, or alone at night, just coming up with things. But he was tied to observation and experiment. And the moment that he wrote down this beautiful theory,

but that didn't give him palpitations, even though it was beautiful. And he once said, you knew it couldn't be wrong because it was so beautiful. But, although most theorists say that about their own work and most of them are wrong. But when he did the calculation for general relativity and discovered something called the perihelion of Mercury, Mercury's orbit sort of rotates very slowly,

a few seconds of arc per century. But no one could understand that Newton's laws didn't give it. And he did the calculation in general relativity, and it came up with the exact number that people had observed. That's when he said he had heart palpitations and almost fainted. It was realizing that he, you know, it agreed with observation. And that, so physics isn't done in this vacuum. It depends on the observations of the time.

Very, very rarely theorist lead, but, you know, even Einstein wasn't, was certainly a product of stuff. And his earlier theory, special relativity, people, I hate the way it's taught in schools and I've written in my books of different ways of teaching it. Everyone says, okay, the speed of light is a constant. In fact, I got asked by someone the other day and Orange County, what if we find the speed of light isn't constant or something?

He didn't just say, oh, the speed of light is constant and therefore the world is crazy. What he realized was two things. In fact, it's good you mentioned Galileo. Galileo told us just what you just said, Galilee and relativity. If you're on a plane and the windows are closed and show up a ball, you don't know you're moving.

We don't know. We think we're standing still, but we're moving at 30 kilometers per second around the sun. We feel like we're staying still because Galileo told us there's no experiment you can do that will tell if you're moving or standing still, if you're moving in a constant velocity or standing still. I say you're moving, you say, I'm moving, it doesn't matter.

That's Galilean relativity. It's true. It's been tested. James Clerk Maxwell developed electromagnetism, this theory of electromagnetism, and for reasons I won't go into right now, but I could, but I'm not going to. It turns out the theory of electromagnetism is our prototypical, most beautiful theory we have in physics almost. it was inconsistent with Galileo. You couldn't have Maxwell and Galileo at the same time. And it was thinking about that that forced him to the theory of relativity. The only way to make Galileo and Maxwell consistent was to do crazy things to space and time.

So he was driven to it by thinking about the observations of time. So if Einstein had been born, you know, Maxwell was like 50 years before Einstein. If he'd been born 80 years earlier, he wouldn't have been Einstein. One of my favorite anecdotes about Einstein is that he was offered the presidency of Israel. And can you imagine what kind of a career he could have had if he was the president of Israel? He could have been famous. But I wanted to be one point about this and get your reaction to it. So here's Einstein.

He's saying you're free fall. You can feel this gravitational force that you're in motion. And it was this delightful, visceral experience that he had. how can my iPhone running chat GPT, as it often is, how can it experience heart palpitations? How can it have a happiest thought? How can it visualize the sensation of freefall? What I'm getting at, can we have, and I asked this of your friend, Nome Chomsky, when he was on, you know, can you have creativity of a physical variety that without embodiment? Well, no, in fact, again, I was talking about this the other day. I think it's quite likely,

And I talk about it in the new book. I think it's quite likely that systems, AI systems, if they ever could be self-aware and conscious, will not be able to do it unless they have feelings. And feelings will require sensors that can sense the outside world and the internal state of the system. That's what's developed in us. It's a homeostatic system.

We can start sensing pain and pleasure. But beyond that, we sense the world. and then those physical feelings turned into emotional feelings. And I think it's quite likely that you won't see a chat GPT or a static regurgitational system that can't sense the world. Now, can you sense the world through the internet? Maybe at some level. But I do think that that consciousness, that self-awareness

requires that connection to the world. The interesting question is whether it'll become an emotional connection or not. And who knows? Because we don't really know. Can you have emotions without visceral, you know, without sensors or replication of physical sensation? Could have what? Can you have emotions or emotions?

Who know? I mean, that's the point. Between one of the other emotions or visceral sensations. Well, you know, who knows? I mean, it's, we do know that amoebas don't have, you know, don't feel good or bad. But as I was saying, I debate this, you know, with some neuroscientists, my dog. And I was just, actually, tonight, there's a podcast dropping with Robert Zubolsky on our podcast from his new book about free will. And Sibolsky agrees with me.

Our dogs, you know, have emotions and feel bad and good. I'm convinced of it. Not just Levi, but I'm not sure my cat does, but my dog knows. Well, who knows what cats are thinking. Yeah, I know. Cats are, cats are, yeah, you can't tell what cats are thinking. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. So what if you are a beginning graduate student right now or smart undergraduate?

there's some here tonight and there's even some you know pre-freshment yeah I was talking about the youngster the future is right there what what excites you about science nowadays you were starting off where you somebody asked you what would you do a 20 year old sort of getting into science brilliant smart whatever has the gifts privilege whatever what do you advise them to do well you know the of course I should advise them to do what they like to do which is the first thing because they're not gonna be good at tic talk unless you enjoy it but but one thing that one of the things I would tell them to think about, which I unfortunately, well, I did what I did,

but when I was growing up, my mother wanted me be a doctor, of course, and I thought I was going to be a doctor, and I took biology in high school, and I dropped it after two weeks, because we dissected frogs and memorized the parts of frogs. Wait a wait a second. Who they have? Jewish mother wanted you to be a doctor? Not only if she wanted me to be a doctor, I think I've told this story. When I got my first job at Harvard, which was the best job in the country at the time. My mother phoned up my first wife at the time that day when I was out of there and said, he could still become a doctor. And so, anyway, she was for a long time. But anyway, so I went into biology class and it was memorizing the parts of a frog. And I ate memory. The reason I like physics is you don't have to

memorize anything in principle. And so I feel cheated in a way because, of course, DNA had been discovered, you know, I was a child of this, at that age in the 60s, and DNA had been discovered a decade earlier, but of course in high school, it usually takes 20 to 30 years to get into the books. And I didn't realize what an incredibly exciting field it is. So nowadays, in fact, when I was doing my PhD, I did at MIT, as one does, I think, and as one I hope one does, I got discouraged many times. I think students should get discouraged. If they're not getting discouraged, then they're not really pushing the edge of the envelope. And I thought of doing, and my mother would have been thrilled, I thought of doing a joint MD PhD, which you could do

at Harvard, MIT. And so I went to the cousin of a friend of mine who was the chair of cell biology. I was going to do biophysics. You know, I liked fundamental physics, but I was getting so discouraged. So I went to see him, and this was in 1980, 81, maybe late 70s, early 80s. And I said to him, you know, should I do this? And he said, don't do biophysics. And I said, why? And he said, because it's not of interest to biologists and it's not of interest to physicists.

That was true in 1979. But now it's really one of the most exciting forefront areas of physics, because biology is becoming an area where physicists are learning to study physical processes, and of course the tools of physics are being used in biology. So it's an incredibly exciting area. So I would say, you know, and of course genetics and genomics and combinatorics and genetics and will along with AI, an incredibly studying area.

And the disciplines of the 19th century disciplines are disappearing. So the interface between physics and biology is disappearing. And so I would argue that there's a whole spectrum from biology to fundamental physics, and in the kind of physics that, if you ask me, what are the sort of growth areas? One is manipulating quantum systems. We can manipulate quantum systems like we could never do before. Some of it involves quantum computers. Some of it involves making new materials that might do just what you wanted to do. Of course, astrophysics is a, and cosmology are growth areas, because we have all these new tools. Ultimately, though, I think, you know, I would come back and say,

What, well, I would say, try a bunch of things. When students ask me whether they should go to graduate school, I often say, go to a school that has a lot of different programs so you can see what you might like. And it's a, I often say it's more important who you work with than what you work on because your advisor and you develop their relationship. Since we're in the air and space museum, the best one in the world, I want to run a topic by you. This is I called the Von Kerman line, which is loosely defined. if people are here more expert than me, but it's loosely defined as a boundary between space

and the Earth's atmosphere. And it seems to me that, you know, kind of the most pressing problems that are being approached by physicists, and you worked on some of these, all happen below the Von Kerman line. And I'm talking about nuclear war. I'm talking about pandemics that spread their atmospheric transmission and climate change. And climate change. So you've written books on at least two of the three of these things. I await your biophysics book, which is undoubtedly being worked on as we speak. But of these things, can you rank them?

I should say, the chairman of the board of atomic science, of the bulletin of atomic scientists, which is one of the foremost agencies founded by Oppenheimer and Einstein. So I was very honored to have the same position as that man. What keeps you up at night? I mean, I often say, you know, the problem with physics is that we saved the world. You know, we created the atomic bomb.

But that's not clear of it. Einstein deeply regretted it. Oppenheimer, at some regrets, it's not really clear exactly what he regretted. You and Shelley Glashow written about this. Pandemics. Science has made the world a better place. To deny that, I think, is ridiculous.

People this audience are alive who would not be alive to be here 100 years ago, if a word for science. And more people eat and are able to survive, and live a higher quality of life because of science. We can do amazing things. We can communicate around the world. We can experience things. We could never experience.

Someone with a phone in even a poor village and in Africa experienced parts of the world they never could experience before where most people in the world never, for most of human history, never walk more than 10 kilometers from where they live. Yeah. And of course, along with technology,

can come problems. And how we address that is unfortunately not a scientific question. It's a political question. So the politics of dealing with these questions is much harder than the scientific ones. The technologies of dealing with climate change are much easier to consider than the politics of implementing it. I never rank things. And all of those things concern me. I think nuclear war is still, in my mind, the most immediate. it and it gets poor, well, maybe now it's not, but it amazes me that people sort of, as you know, or may know, you know, I wrote, I written for lots of newspapers over the years, and every time

I wrote an article about nuclear war or nuclear weapons, it had the least response of any of any of the pieces I wrote. I think people don't want to think about it, but people don't realize that there are, right now, at least a thousand warheads. in the United States and Russia that are on trigger-hair alert, but ready to be launched if a perceived signal of another launch is perceived. And that also, as people did learn when that guy was president a few years ago, the command and control infrastructure in this country is such the only person who can issue a launch for order to launch in the global crisis is the president.

And no other organization, no, it doesn't have to go by anyone else. There's no other individual who could override that unless they decide the president's crazy. But in the actual organization, there's no, there's no, you know, other people don't say, hold on. So I do think it's amazing. It's amazing that we've been around for 70-some-odd years without the use of nuclear weapons and maybe mutually assured destruction is part of the reason. But it's a problem and it's a problem we can address, but it's a political problem.

But, you know, saying that scientists create the problem, You know, Steve Pinker had a great analogy. He said it's like, it's like blaming architects for Dockow. You know, you had to have architects to design the concentration camps. Is our concentration camps a necessary product of architecture? No. And so I think it's really, you have to think about it carefully before you point those fingers. Before, I want to ask you a question, though, but a second.

You asked me what people should know. What do you think people should? As an experimentalist, do you think people should, you know, what do you think people should know in science in school? I mean, I think for me, the most important things that people should have as a scientist, first of all, I don't speak to that first, is humility. But I don't think you can only have humility. I think you need a little bit of, I call it swagger, maybe it's arrogance, that you can actually attempt to take on problems that even Einstein was unable to solve. and hopefully, you know, maybe even people in this room can approach and solve it. And it's not an exclusive sect of a high priesthood that can't be approached except by

the ordained members of a certain sect. But I also think that we should also not fool ourselves. We're mostly wrong. I mean, it's amazing how much we've been able to do, you know, to gum in a few decades to, you know, from the first transistor. If you look at the first transistor invented in 1956, the first practical transistor, Shockley, Bardeen, et cetera. it looks like the following say go and get some Vizuka bubble gum chew it up and go down to the dry cleaner and get a wire hanger and stick it together on a piece of rock and that's exactly what it looks like.

Yeah. And now each one of you has 14 billion of them in your pocket right now, except for maybe the kids, but maybe, you know, maybe they even do now. I don't let my kids up. And they know how to use it better than you do, actually. That's right. When I first got worried about technology when one of my kids was looking at me and I was just staring into her beautiful eyes. was only a three-year-old could have this perfect, innocent face. And then she reached up to touch me.

And I was welling up to tears. And then she tried to swipe and change my image. But I think that we should know that, you know, we need to be humble. We're off and wrong. But the progress gets made, you know, exponentially. And we just are not capable of thinking with our linear limited brains of the pace of change. And I think that is the hardest thing. I think scientists, the public should know that a good scientist should often say, as your tutor,

as your mentor, Richard Feynman said. You know, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, not the knowledge, not the wisdom, but the ignorance that actually Lawrence wouldn't have been able to create this concept of dark energy. Had someone gotten to it first or been right that there actually is no such thing as dark energy, so you've doubted that person, it was Einstein at one point, and you proved that wrong, or you conjecture that he indeed may be wrong. I think that's incredibly powerful that you have to realize science is done by people and human beings despite the contrary, right?

Yeah, and I, you know, the first, I said it the other day, the first free words in the book are the most important words in science or I don't know. But actually what we really should get across, you've made a good point. Most ideas are wrong. Most experiments are wrong when they're first done. And that's okay. The press never gets that. I was castigating the press the other day.

Because they all, you know, someone gets an absurd result and their university press office sends it out. And then simply because most papers don't have enough money to have science reporters anymore, the science reporters just take the press release and publish it. And it's nonsense. And you read it as a scientist and you know it's nonsense. And then it's wrong, but no one ever writes that story later on.

They just show another result that disagrees with it. And it gives people the idea that science is faddish. If you weren't wrong most of the time, anyone could do science. I mean, it's a process. But anyone can do science, right? I mean, it shouldn't be this exclusive thing that's only popular by Einstein. And it doesn't mean that you guys can all go out there. Einstein says a lot of things, right?

One of the things he says was imagination is more important than all. But, you know, I don't know about you. When I go to my, you know, gastroenterologist, I don't want to say. I want to try this new procedure I've been waiting to try. Yeah. Would you mind if I imagine. on it. No, but I do think it's, it is important to have, we don't want, people mistake this. They, they, they, everybody, have you heard famously Eisenhower's farewell address where he

warned about the dangers of a, what did he talk about? The military industrial conflict. That very same farewell speech, he warned about the dangers of a technological scientific elite that would do things to promote their own interests and keep a shield. And I often say that you and I, as every scientist, who. is paid by the public has a moral obligation to share what he or she does, not to be professional communicators like, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson or, you know, Mitch Oku or whoever you like, Jan 11 or somebody, but but should give back to some proportionate what they've received from the

public. You know, look, I've spent a lot of my life explaining science and I, and I enjoy doing it. And I actually think what young science, because of young people who want to do what I'm doing, say, say, how can I do what you're doing? And I always say to them, do good science. If you're a young scientist and you're a good scientist, what you should do is spend your time on science. Now, if you're interested in reaching the public and explaining things, the more science you do, the better, more opportunities you'll have to then reach out. But I think most scientists actually do want to, but feel uncomfortable. It's very, the first time you talk out, academia is a very safe environment.

People that pretend it isn't, but it is. It's an ultimately self-invain, it's the safest environment. And so when you go out in the public, it can be terrifying. And I understand that. And so I don't think everyone should be, in fact, I remember with the National Science Foundation once had some requirement. When I was chair of case, where you went, young faculty have come in, they'd apply for these awards

from the National Science Foundation. and they'd have to have a part of their plan, which was an outreach plan. Now I'm a big believer in outreach. But this was nonsense because these people were post talks. They'd never been involved in outreach. They were really interested in doing their work. And they'd come up with these cockamamie plans, none of which ever happened. And I think forcing them to do that is crazy.

There are people who are talented and naturally like to do it like anything else and will do a good job. But there are many my colleagues, I would far prefer. not have a, the public would be better off if they didn't hear them. 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, pricing valid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. Only Exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Talked about a lot of things. A few more minutes, the two of us can check about. Pre-requisite for most podcasts, talk about eye, but also talk about something that has those two letters, AI, and that's aliens.

I haven't talked to you about this very much. I'm going to do an event in New York on December 1st. Not debating because I stopped debating UFO people, but I'm having a dialogue with a guy named Nick Pope, who was the MI6, British guy who looked at Nick Cope. Yeah, he looked at unidentified objects. And so we're going to have that discussion. Anyway, what was that?

I think he was an inspiration allegedly for somebody in the X files, a Mulder or Scully. I mean, I made it Mulder or Scully. I hope it was Scully and not Mulder. But anyway. Well, let's talk about that. So one thing that's always bemused me, maybe, is the fact that the public's fascination did sort of start to, you know, initiate around the time of the atomic bomb program right after

and it was in the same part of the country. Roswell is not far from Alamagordo and from Los Alamos. So what do you make of this recent resurgence, given, what do you make of the testimony in the and one of my friends is here tonight, a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy, who did a podcast with another fighter pilot who claims to have encountered certain things or have eyewitness reports about that. But what do you make of all this? That important is, it's just funny.

Well, I'll tell you what Feynman said, and I've always subscribed to this, he said, I think, you know, UFOs are aliens. UFOs being a treat to aliens, it's kind of amazing when you think about it. So you see something up in the sky, you don't know what it is, it's immediately aliens. Okay. Now, let me give two aspects that. What Feynman said is I think UFOs are more likely, and the other day I was explaining the audience that physicists say more likely or less likely. we don't, but UFOs are much more likely due to the known irrationality of humans rather than the unknown rationality of aliens. And he said that because if you think about it, and I guess

one of my books, I think beyond Star Trek, I talked about this a great length, almost anything you can think of, regardless of how absurd it may seem as an explanation of what people may see out there is more likely than its aliens coming here to Earth. So almost anything you can think of is more likely. The laws of physics are such, the known laws of physics, forget the unknown laws of physics, the known laws of physics put constraints that make it so unlikely that anything you could think of. It's like the magic bullet and the Kennedy assassination.

Anything is more likely than it, that it's aliens. And the way I like to think of it this way, to come for an alien spaceship, powered by fuel inside the spaceship to come here from a distant star, a nearest light speed, would require harnessing essentially the power output of a star. I have a hard time thinking they come all the way here to abduct patients of some Harvard psychiatrist and do kinky experiments on them. I mean, it just seems like a big waste of time to me. So it's almost 8 o'clock. Yeah, let me ask you one question. It's almost 8 o'clock. We should end.

And I do want to ask you one question, an experimental question, because you got to ask me a bunch here. But I did want to say, what experimentally, and it gives you a chance to maybe talk about your own work too, but what experimentally do you think is the next, what technology is going to be most useful in your area of physics or in physics in general that you're aware of? Yeah. So, you know, I'm a experimental cosmologist, which means I build universes in the Labrida. Now, I don't build universes. We build telescopes that have technology to do it like Galileo. did with the telescope to reveal things deeper and farther and more exotic than what we could

perceive close to home. And the project that I'm privileged to be leading is called the Simon's Observatory, which is a $100 million plus experiment in the high Atacama desert of Chile, where we are going to attempt to be the first instrument to do something that's never been done before, which is to measure the actual spark that ignited the Big Bang and it ensures some properties in common with dark energy that Lawrence mentioned earlier, but it couldn't provide a whole host of cosmic observables that would answer a lot of questions

that cosmologists and lay people have had. And one of my philosophies as an advisor to my students is reach for the stars, as Casey Kaysen said, but keep your feet on the ground. And that to me means do something really ambitious, like measure what actually banged,

who banged, she bang. No, no, I don't know if she banged. But let's keep it, you know. Yeah, we'll keep it clean. BG. Okay. As your famous pops on. But the question is, is there something safe that you also get no matter what?

And for us, that's measuring the mass of these ghostly particles called nintrinos that we've known about for 100 years. This is neat. But what I really would like you to do because these are, you see now people say this is great. But why don't you say how you're going to do it? I think that's really neat because, you know, what technology, you know, I know. but I think it's worth explaining what the Simon's Observer. So I'll do a little demo here. So I brought a handy-dandy flashlight, which you can hopefully see in the back.

I won't blind you. It has a blinding mode, which is kind of cool. If Lawrence gets out of hand, I'll blow it. I didn't mean to blast you. So if you have a light source, you can use that light source to illuminate everything, not only about where the light source itself was created, but everything it encounters along the way. Here it's my finger or here it's this vodka Coke.

No, no, it's just plain coke. And so you can learn about it by knowing something about the source of life and its primitive state and then how it has been transformed by the medium, the material along its path. If you can detect it. So we build the most sensitive detectors ever made that can see literally this flashlight on the moon in appropriate units from here on the planet Earth. We don't have to launch a satellite.

It's not like the web telescope. It's much less expensive, although pretty expensive. and we cool down these ultra-sensitive detectors instead of your eye, Galileo's eye, looking through a telescope, we look through telescopes with very, very sensitive, highly sophisticated quantum devices called superconducting ballometer. And we build those here in San Diego, we ship them down to Chile.

They just set up their first astronomical image of the moon, and if you saw it, you'd be hardly impressed because it just looks almost like a bell curve, and that's about it. But that's the first wispy indications that we are on the right track to actually unveil both the properties of the extremely early universe and then the late universe, neutrinos, exotic particles, forces, fields, energy, and matter.

And what's really fun is we get paid to really, not to prove people like Lawrence right, but to actually prove everybody else wrong, perhaps, and then the last woman or man standing, that theory is the one that for a provisional period of time is entitled to enjoy some attention until some other theory comes along and experiment to supplant it. So to be, it's the most exciting time to be. There's many other telescopes of Eur Rubin, Nancy Grace Observatories, either space and ground. As a theorist, I mean, and this would happen, as I say, well after I graduated.

But the other thing that's worth important saying to the students and everyone else, too, is I certainly learned a lot more physics after I got my PhD than I did before. And I learned a lot about experimental physics because to me, it fascinates me. And I remember before you were even a student at case, talking about the importance of billometers, and we proposed ballometers to look for dark matter. And it was amazing to me to see what you could do with superconducting technology and ballometers. But by the same token, that's why I'm a theorist, because that was 40 years ago. Yeah. And then all the experiments have to have to work for 40 years. And I just have to write the paper in 1985, and I can do go do

something else. So thank you, Lauren. Thanks for watching, part one of my very special conversation with Lawrence Krauss. After our conversation concluded at the San Diego Air and Space Museum, we did a wonderful Q&A session with the 100 or so members of the audience. But to get access to that, you'll need to subscribe to my mailing list at briankeating.com. You'll also be eligible to enter a drawing to win a real piece of 4 billion-year-old space schmuts, a meteorite, a real piece of our early solar system's history. And if you have an EDU email address, you automatically win.

So to get one, if you have an EDU address, go to Briankeeting.com slash edu and enter your email to win a real chunk of our early solar system. Looking forward to seeing you in the Q&A session. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.