Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Leonard Mlodinow – My Friend, Stephen Hawking (#112)

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics Leonard Mlodinow was Stephen’s closest colleague in his final years. Who better to put us in the room as Hawking indulges his passion for wine and curry; shares his feelings on love, death, and disability; and grapples with deep questions of philosophy and physics. Whether depicting Hawking’s devotion to his work or demonstrating how he would make spur of the moment choices, such as punting on the River Cam (despite the risk the jaunt posed), or spinning tales of Hawking defiantly urinating in the hedges outside a restaurant that doesn’t have a wheelchair-accessible toilet, Mlodinow captures his indomitable spirit. This deeply affecting account of a friendship teaches us not just about the nature and practice of physics but also about life and the human capacity to overcome daunting obstacles. my previous conversation with Len, Deepak Chopra and Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/E-8mF4HWDnE?sub_confirmation=1 Get the book here https://amzn.to/3gWgS7U Len received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute and was on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology. His previous books include the bestsellers The Grand Design and A Briefer History of Time (coauthored with Stephen Hawking), Subliminal (winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award), and War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra), as well as Elastic, Euclid’s Window, Feynman’s Rainbow, and The Upright Thinkers. 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:39 The story of the book cover 00:08:05 Stephen Hawking Inc. 00:12:51 Living with ALS 00:15:55 Hawking Radiation 00:16:28 The origin of the book 00:18:51 How do you rebuke Stephen Hawking!? 00:20:45 Even Stephen Hawking got writer’s block 00:28:27 Our book is NOT an argument against God. 00:29:49 More thoughts on God how Hawking was “Israeli”! 00:30:54 Do singularities exist? Can we ever know? 00:33:50 What was Stephen Hawking’s philosophy of science? 00:38:45 Have you ever “seen” a triangle? An example of realism. 00:42:42 What could the role of God be in the universe? 00:56:04 Which was the more jarring event: completing your last collaboration with Professor Hawking or his death? 00:59:28 How did Leonard balance his life while collaborating with Prof. Hawking? 01:00:37 What would you tell Stephen now if you could? 01:01:27 Thrilling 3 Final Questions 01:01:56 What is in your “Ethical Will”? 01:04:27 What would you put on your monolith? 01:09:25 What advice would you give to your younger self? Watch my most popular videos: Jim Simons, the World’s Smartest Billionaire  Bill Perkins: DIE WITH ZERO:  Patrick Bet-David YOUR NEXT FIVE MOVES  Sheldon Glashow Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner  Frank Wilczek Jill Tarter  Eric Weinst Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But I want to welcome today, Dr. Leonard Mladnau, whose books have been entertaining me and educating me for many decades now. I first read your book on Feynman. I think that was one of the first books I read by you, at least. And today we're talking about the book that's behind me and behind Leonard. And that is Stephen Hawking, a memoir of a friendship in physics. And I want to welcome you to the Into the Impossible Podcast, Leonard. Thanks for joining us.

Oh, happy to be here. So you are known for many things. You're a theoretical physicist in your own right. You're an author. You've written many books, too, at least, with Stephen Hawking and now this new book. So the Grand Design, of course, runaway bestseller, a briefer history of time, which maybe we'll have some chance to talk about. You wrote Subliminal, which won the Penn Award and also War of the Worldviews with a friend of mine, Deepak Chopra.

And one of the questions I'm going to talk to you about is these interesting collaborations that you've managed to put together for yourself and advice for people like me when asked why I go on and do interviews with Deepak Chopra or somebody else. Not to mention the fact that he was, he's one of the endorsers of Frank Wilczek's books who I've had on my show. they'll make fun of him for not being a scientist and why should I give credibility to that. I want to talk about that later. But first, I want to just read a quick blurb about the essence of this new book, of your book about Stephen Hawking and your friendship and your collaboration together, primarily on the grand design. And the statement that I have here is that you are able to put the reader,

and I agree with this, into the room where it happened, and the words of Alexander Hamilton, if you will, for sharing these intimate moments of a friendship that in some ways, that sometimes we note as scientists, we spend more times with our collaborator and our students than we do with our spouses or children. So I want to commend this book to people that are interested in seeing scientists as human beings.

I often joke, you know, I use this joke too many times. But you know a scientist is outgoing when he or she looks at your shoes when he talks. here. But you're you're much more gregarious and extroverted than that. So anyway, thank you for doing that. I want to also begin where I do normally. I ignore the advice to not judge books by their covers. I first and foremost judge books by their covers and their titles. How did you come up with the title and the cover of this particular book? Well, you know, we thought long and hard, and as you know it's not the most creative title so what was left when as Sherlock Holmes

would say when all other things were were ruled out was what you might think is the impossible let's just call it Stephen Hawking I tried to come up with something and I you know sometimes sometimes when I write a book it's interesting that the title will shouldn't mean that much, but you feel like it does. And I don't know, you know, you attribute later after the fact that people, you know, like the book, remember the book partly because of the title. You don't really know. If they, if people like the title, you say, wow, that was a great title.

If it turns out of it didn't like the title, you say, yeah, I had a crappy title. But actually, you don't really know what effect the title has on a book. And like, I love Drunkers Walk, which my, which I wrote, which is about how randomness in the world. affects your life and how much of your success and even just wherever you are in life is due to random events and that you don't how hard it is to recognize realize and appreciate that so we called it the drunkers walk these you know that drunkers walk is another word for a random walk in a mathematical term where something is just moving and changing directions randomly yeah and my publisher hated the title they said who knows what the druggers walk is I said well it's true

they might not know what the drunkers walk is but once they hear and they found out what the book's about, they won't forget it because it's kind of a nice, you know, sticks in your mind. They wanted to call it the power of probability. Oh, yes, must, must read. That sounds like a must read, right? Now, certainly in hindsight, people like the cover and they like the title. And in this case, I was trying to find something like that where I would have a term or a phrase. Like, for example, theory of everything would have been great.

It would take it. So I couldn't find one. And I wanted one that would, you know, once you may not know immediately what it means, but once you said it was Hawking, you would remember the title. I just couldn't find anything that was, you know, not misleading or obscure.

And in the end we just said, you know, let's let the subtitle say it all, a memoir of friendship and physics. And that's what it really is. That's what it's about. I wish I could have called it, a memoir of friendship and physics subtitle

regarding Stephen Hawking. But they wouldn't let me do that. I was jokingly going to suggest, you know, it's the most provocative of all your titles, most controversial, you know, the grand design, that didn't cause any controversy whatsoever. Right. Or the war of the worldviews. It actually reminds me of this book, written by an up-and-coming author named Galileo. And, of course, the title is evocative, or your book with Deepak is evocative of this,

dialogue concerning the two chief world systems. But I don't know if you know this. That wasn't Galileo's choice. That was his publisher's choice, or at least the the pontiff choice that was acting as the provider of the imprimatur that allowed him to publish this book in the first place. Galileo wanted to call this book on the flux and reflux of tides on oceans and ferns. It's just like, oh, you can't put that down. You know, that's a, that survives A-B testing and whatever. So our friend Galileo, so the Pope actually, ironically, did him a real solid favor by making him change the title to the dialogue on the world systems, which is much more evocative. So your publisher sometimes know things that we don't know as often. Yeah, I think he surprised

the Pope of the contents, too. That's right. Yeah, and he kept it up. And his next book was also a dialogue, the Discourse. I want to go to a part that the only encounter, I only met Stephen once. I was at Caltech for many years when he was there and when you were there. It's a shame I never met you there as a postdoc or met Stephen, but I did meet him in the early 90s, mid-90s, my first trip to Queen Mary College, as it used to be called. And that was when Stephen spoke, quote-unquote, at the Royal Academy meeting, I believe it was 95 or so. And there was a question and answer period. And you very tenderly and lovingly describe how challenging how it would have driven you mad, it would have driven me mad, the modality of communication he had was so torturous.

But I remember somebody asked him at the end of the talk, and they said, Professor Hawking, you're so brilliant, you wrote a brief history of time. It's reputed that the ratio of people that have bought it to people that understand it is almost infinity, you know, because nobody understands it, who reads it to good approximation. Why did you write this incomprehensible book? And this young person asked Stephen, and 10 minutes go by, and he's working out the answer. This is when he could still move. I think he could move a finger at this point in the early. 90s, but you'll know better than I do. And he answered, I wrote it because I had to pay for my daughter's college. And everybody laughed. You know, it's kind of a cute line. But in reading your book, I realized that Stephen was a very practical person and in a way that many of our colleagues are not. And actually, I think of him now after reading this as kind of the CEO of Stephen Hawking Enterprises, that he was an entrepreneur. He had a brand, obviously. He cultivated that brand. And he had a monopoly on that brand. Talk about Stephen as a businessman, which is a dimension of him that I never knew until, I realized until I read your book. Well, you know, it's interesting. He didn't start

out that way. In the early 80s, he had the idea of writing a popular science book on cosmology. And, you know, one big aspect of his character was an evangelist for science. He truly wanted to spread the word and the scientific way of thinking really bothered him in the later years for example, all the anti-science in the U.S. And so he was going to write a book for the Cambridge University Press, which your viewers may not know the ins and outs of academic publishing, but the Cambridge University Press, they were offering him 25,000, which was huge at the time. That was huge.

And it would have probably sold about 25 books. And he would have had very little editorial help. He would have had very little marketing or not. no marketing. And he had agreed to do that. And actually he had agreed to it. It was waiting to sign the contract when the, where was it now, the New York, was the New York Times, I guess, did a feature on him. And that, you know, no one really outside of physics knew him before that. Not a lot of people knew him after. I mean, it was just a feature. It wasn't like, He got set, you know, his image, his brand was set on fire. But people in the know, people in intellectual circles really paid attention to that. And one of them was Al Zuckerman, the founder of an agency, which is now my agency that I'm at, writer's house.

And Al said, wow, this guy, this, this guy is great. He could, you know, he loved the, based on the profile, he just loved Stephen's character that he seemed to be adventurous. outgoing and evangelical in the fact that he was in a wheelchair. So Al went to him in and said, hey, don't sign that contract if they give it to you. Let me see what I can do about this book. And he got $250,000 for that,

which would become the brief history of time. And I think just as important, more important in the money is he got Batham as the publisher with a brilliant editor named Peter Fuzar, and Peter deserves a lot of credit for that book because Stephen's writing was, you know, first of all over the place. Some parts were, as if you were explaining it to a kinder,

well, I should say, you know, an eighth grader or a sixth grader, and parts of it were good for his graduate students. And everywhere in between, and parts of it, you know, when you're a physicist, as you know, it's hard to get perspective. You sometimes are so in love with some ideas and so passionate about them that you think everyone will like will be interested in. And so there were parts that were overly technical and so forth. And so Peter worked very closely with Stephen to make that book a success.

And around that same time, which is why it seems like he just wrote that book because he needed money, but he was actually interested in that. But around that time, he got one of his really bad lung infections. And every year he would have a lung infection or two, and often in the hospital. And when I knew him, it was almost a yearly occurrence that he's on his deathbed and you're worried for him. It was very, very common because when you have ALS,

your lungs aren't that active. And so things have settled down in there. And he had to breathe through, or later on life, through a stoma, a hole in his throat. And so around that time, 1985, he had this very severe problem, and in order to survive, they had to make that stonement, which meant he couldn't speak anymore. And it also meant he really needed round-the-clock care

after that as he was going further and further downhill. And that is what caused his need to be a businessman to start Stephen Hawking enterprises. So it was kind of a confluence of the fact that he had this opportunity and the book took off and he had this need. And so what he did was put those two together and he realized that he needed to keep his brand and his career going just to afford to live.

Because a normal person in that situation that he was in would be in a home and they would be in a bed somewhere, maybe in a room with other people, maybe not in a private room. And you wouldn't have nearly the stimulation, the access or the life that he was able to have by having people, carers who could take him around places,

who could travel with him, where he would have access to physics documents or people to turn pages for him, which they were doing as the electronic age came to the equipment that he could actually read online and so forth. He would have just been, you know, more or less, unfortunately, and sadly, warehouse there. And he would have, you know, I'm sure, had him died much sooner than that because he would have no real reason to live. Yeah. And as it was, he was still able to do physics to participate, to be a leader in the field,

and to have this public life with his writing. And that's really what kept him alive. That's what gave him the spirit to keep living. A lot of the mortality from ALS is partly physical and partly because the person loses the desire or the will to live any longer and to fight through all those infections and to have that kind of minute care. I don't want to go on and on about.

Just one example. Every night when he slept, he had to have his stoma cleared every, I forget how often it was, every hour or something. Or they would have to suction it out. He would suffocate. They had to turn him because he couldn't move. So if you lay in bed in a certain position, not only does it become painful to you, that's why we turn around at night. But after a while, you develop bed sores and you blood clots and all sorts of things. So every couple hours they would turn him.

Now, it wasn't very pleasant for him because he couldn't turn when he wanted to. If he wakes up like we do and there's an ache, you can't just turn on your other side. It was almost like torture, but he was kept alive because they would do it periodically and it would keep bad things for happening. So, yeah, he became a, he saw that he needed that and he put all that together and made a business out of it. There's an old joke, not to have too rugged a segue, but there's a joke as Jerry Seinfeld talks about like the reason that old people drive so recklessly. and they back out of the driveway, they don't even turn around because I've lived this long, the hell with it, you know, I'm going to go for it. But it kind of made me wonder, he had a lot of, you know, gumption or as we say, chutzpah. He had, you know, he certainly had no fear, I think,

of as you recount in the book, when you yourself were quite trepidious about asking for a doubling of your advance on a contract that was imminently going to be signed. I wonder, do you think that stemmed from having overcome this annual battle with brushes with death? Or do you think that's just the way he was? And even if he was done. He was a brash guy. He was, he had Kudspah. I mean, his physics is all about that.

Like, if you look at what he did, he did things that people didn't think of doing. I thought it couldn't be done. He, when he came up with the hawking radiation and the black hole evaporation, he went and spoke in from a pretty hostile crowd. And he could have just published it quietly. nature and let people read it and draw their own conclusions. But he went up there and before it was even published and told people about it and took, you know, face the music.

And so with the advance, I think at some point I'm not sure why he had agreed to the events that we had, but it was not just about to be signed. The contract had been signed. And one day he just tells me I'm going back to New York, you know, like that was in Cambridge, working with him. Tell him why I want to double the events. We have a signed contract. I don't think you can do that.

That's right. You know, just do it. And when I went to, you know, the stories in the book, but when I went to tell Al, who was still Stephen's agent about my agent, came with me as moral support, you know, it was quite a, you know, quite a, quite a scene because Al was an old time,

everything's a handshake kind of guy, and everything's done according to honors and convention and tradition and honesty. and he was very much against it, you know, he was very much against it. But if you read the scene, you'll see how he did turn around, and of course, they did it. And the way book advances work, in case your viewers don't realize, is, you know, you get a royalty on every book that's sold. So Steve and I would get a royalty. And the advance is you get a certain lump of money.

And so as the books are sold in the beginning, they don't pay. tell you, they just take an accounting until you get to that amount they give you in advance. But it's not just an advance. You get to keep it, even the book doesn't sell anything. But the point is, if a book sells a lot, it doesn't matter because it'll go past the advance, and it doesn't matter whether you got it in advance or you got it when it did the sales. So I'm sure the publisher felt that that was fine, but they agreed to it. And when I went back and told Stephen, I thought I'd get a good job, good work, or was it hard, did they fight?

He just thought, yeah, of course they just expected it. Yeah, I'm Stephen Hawking. Well, talk about your own Hutzpah at a certain point in the book, which I found very, you know, revealing about the true level of intimacy that you guys had. Because, you know, if it was someone like me working with him, and I find this with Stephen's late, was the late Stephen Hawking's great friends, Sir Roger Penrose, who's been on the show many times, and we'll get to, and hopefully in a few minutes. But, you know, when Roger comes up with something and I think it's, you know, it's at a left field. Sometimes I feel reluctant to criticize him because of, you know, how much he means to me. He's the first book I ever read in popular science. He endorsed my book.

You know, and so I'm more reluctant. But talk about the time when you really had a slightly gently upbraid Stephen. And it's a very tender scene in the book that I found very revealing of your own courage to gently rebuke one of the greatest living scientists. I guess you're talking about the scene where we had been apart for a while. And the way we worked was we first spent about a year designing what he called the plan, the plan for the book, like a beat sheet if you're a screenwriter, or the chapters, but what's in the chapters, and debating it endlessly back and forth. I thought we were never going to stop.

And then one day he just said, you know, it's time to write. Okay, we weren't finished with it. But whenever, we started. When we did it was he's taking certain sections to write, or certain parts, you know, certain passages, and I'm taking other ones. And we would each do our own, we would talk about it, and we would separate. He's in Cambridge, and I'm in Pasadena, and we would do our own parts. And sometimes we'd email back and forth, and then we'd meet again. He would spend about three or four weeks every year at Caltech.

So I was right next to my office, so I would see him there. pretty much day and night. And then I would go to Cambridge and see him. And so we would trade what we did, and then we'd sit side by side and go over what he wrote, what I wrote, and so on. And one time when I'm meeting him and we're supposed to be going over it,

I realized he hadn't done anything. He hadn't done his part. He hadn't read my part. And it was like, you know, I had another book. I thought what was I working. I think it was subliminal about the unconscious mind. I have my own physics research. I had a lot to do on my plate,

and I'm feeling like stressed out trying to get my part done, and then I come to see him and tra-l-la-la, it's like months had passed and he hadn't done the thing. So I was, as I described in the book, you know, I was a little nervous about bringing it up, but I felt I had to bring it up because I couldn't not bring it up, because how could I keep working this way? I mean, you know, either we just say let's not work or we have to both do things. I know the one thing that wouldn't happen is I just finish it and he says, fine.

Because if you read the book, you'll see that. No, no, no, every word he would debate. Even the last straw. Well, we would. Right. That's the last straw, exactly, literally. So anyway, I, you know, waited to we are alone. I brought up the courage and I confronted him with it.

And I had no idea how he would react. I think in the book, I'd said that, you know, when you have a relationship, say a romantic relationship or relationship with a really good friend, one of the key things about the relationship is not that you never have conflict, but how do you handle it when you have a conflict? So I thought I'm going to see. And actually it was great. He was not, you know, he could be very gruff and very rough person with you, like.

He didn't suffer fools lightly. If you're not getting it, if you're stupid, or if he believes something very strongly and you disagree and don't come along with them. That would also be a time or, you know. But in this instance, not at all. He totally understood what I was saying, and he admitted it, and he apologized for it. He said he had this kind of a crisis of not knowing,

even though we had the plan and we spent the year on it, what is the book really about and where are we going with this? And so I guess he had a kind of, I don't know, it was writer's block or maybe never even sat down to have writer's block. He was simply avoidance because he didn't feel. inspired and you know in physics and in writing and other creative things you kind of need

you need to have the craft that you do it day to day but you also need the impetus to spend that time sitting there and working like that but then we had had a talk the night before and we had worked some things out so he said I think I get it now I think I have a vision

of it and I'll be better so luckily you know that worked out okay or we probably wouldn't be here right today And so now getting to Stephen a little bit more intimately, I find, you know, some of the arguments of the conclusions that Stephen, I never realized it, actually, honestly. So I'm reading a book now by a Christian apologist, but his name is Dr. Stephen Meyer. I think he's either runs or affiliated with the Discovery Institute, which is, you know, intelligent design, essentially. but he has a lot.

He wrote this book called Darwin's Doubt. You may have heard of it. And in that book, he spends a lot of time talking about hawking. And so I went back because he's asking me, you know, what are my thoughts on it? Can he come on the show? And I hope to have them on the show. He's had actually asked him, does he have questions for Leonard? So I'll ask you his questions.

But they're basically ones you would expect about the multiverse, etc., which hopefully we'll get to. But in any case, I never realized how much of a polemic in some sense, a brief history of time was about perhaps, you know, first of all, the singularity work that he had worked on in his PhD thesis, popularizing that, but really confronting this notion of God. And you talk about this in Stephen, in the current book, in your memoir of friendship with Stephen Hawking, and you talk about, you know, he was of two minds. I mean, he was certainly, as we said, he wouldn't suffer fools, but he would, on other occasions,

you say that he would say things like religion is for people that are afraid of the dark. That's a very, and some of his, his romantic, you know, partners, I can't remember he had so many, some were married, some weren't. But, you know, some of them were deeply religious and some were not. I think his first wife was religious. Is that right? Yeah, actually, yeah, his first wife, his second wife, and then his girlfriend at the end, they were all deeply religious. Yeah.

So he didn't want to insult them, but I, and of course, he wouldn't, he's, too smart to say, I'm an atheist, and he was very, you know, almost epiplectic at the criticism that he got, oh, he's just, you know, dumping on God and the Catholic Church was very upset about him. But in reality, I think his views were kind of clear in that I don't think he believed in God. It doesn't mean that he would be like a Dawkins, a militant atheist, but necessarily and I think he thought those were, that was a mistake to act in that way towards believers. But Nevertheless, my sense is that he definitely didn't believe, even in the god of Einstein, the pantheistic Spinoza God. Why didn't he make that more clear? Because I want to be careful

not to ascribe, you know, like a venal motive. Like it would hurt book sales to say that God doesn't exist. But it seems so clear that a lot of his work was predicated, at least in the singularity work that he worked on and in the grand design, obviously, that God, you know, the act, the personal God, that was a non-existent concept for him. Right. So first, I guess I should say, it's funny that just to go to something he said toward the end about whether he was not talking about his atheism in order, because he didn't want to hurt book sales, he's been criticized for that.

He's also been criticized for the opposite for talking about atheism or implying atheism to help book sales. And I think these ad hominom attacks that people make on him. ridiculous and I knew him and I know what he was thinking so I'll tell you but by then let me also give you a little data when the grand design came out I was walking my daughter to school she was the deal was like in I forget second third grade or something I get a call from Judith Stevens assistant it's whatever time it is there it's the evening I guess and it's early morning he in here

in LA and she I need help answering I need help with this report as I help us report what's going on i mean there's not let's the reporters here you know and the book had just come out and she said oh my god uh every every news organization of the world is calling me and stephen can't handle you have to answer the questions for him she said haven't you seen it haven't you seen the times and i go the times the l-a times the new york times the london time i said who reads the london i'm a daily subscriber i the headline is stephen hawking colon there is no god right i remember that Our book became number one immediately in the New York Times bestseller list. So in terms of, you know, hiding the atheism to help book sales, you know, you could argue both ways.

But in that case, it certainly helped the atheism help book sales. It's not that people that, you know, both atheists and theists bought the book because the controversy helps the book sales. We were condemned by the Catholic Church by all sorts of people. And I'm turning on pretty soon, ESPN and then it's some kind of sporting event going on. and they start talking about my book. And I'm, oh, my God, if ESPN, Men's Health Magazine interviewed me. I mean, it was like, so I don't know. Anyway, it's kind of silly to say he did one or the other.

The truth is that he wasn't atheist. And yet, he went to church. He went to church with his wives. He respected their belief, their church. He's buried. His funeral was Westminster Abbey, right? Right. And his internment, his funeral was at the church.

and you know he even I heard the story of the time where he actually was brought to tears by the sermon and the music at the church so he was not anti-religious at all he told me once it was a little bit after Dawkins book came out what was it called the god delusion yeah that he did not want to be like him he did not want to insult people his wives his friends or anybody out there you know who believes in God So that's why he kind of kept intended to keep that to himself. But what he wanted to do, and he said our book is not an argument against God. Our book says you don't have to have God.

Okay, the universe can come from nothing. Right. And the laws of nature can be explained in the way we did in the grand design. But it's not to say there isn't a God. We don't prove that the non-existence. Yeah. You just say that you just kind of, we don't try to prove anything. We just try to say what science says and let you, you know.

Yeah, it's funny. You know, Leonard, they... I mean, he was critical of the church when we talked about Galileo's time, for instance. I mean, it's not like he thought that all that was okay. But he wanted to present the science, and he wanted to know for his own edification, why are we here?

Where did we come from? How did the universe get to be the way it is? And those are the answers he wanted to present. And of course, religion has the same question, so they have two different answers. Right. He didn't have an axe to grind one way or the other. Yeah, so I think about him as a deeply devout agnostic, in a sense that I'll make clear.

And I feel that way about myself, although I do practice Judaism. But you probably know being culturally, at least biologically Jewish as well. The word Israel in Hebrew means struggles with God. It's very different than Islam, which means submit to God. And obviously Christianity just is named after Jesus Christ. But Israel means to wrestle with God. literally to fight, I mean, there's a scene in the Old Testament where Jacob is wrestling with an angel of God, but not only that, it means to every day really fight with this notion or take the

notion of God seriously. In that way, I think of Stephen as like an Israelite, you know, somebody who struggled constantly. He never dismissed it as a folly or a stupid question like Lawrence Krauss might or a Richard Dawkins might that it's child abuse and certainly wasn't acerbic about it. But since he's not here, but you are here, I've always been fascinated by your views on it, because as I say, you know, I know that you're culturally Jewish, but I don't know what role it plays in your life of any. That's actually not that important to me. But what I'm interested in is, yeah, this notion that I observed myself when the Bicep 2 experiment, when we released our results in 2014, you know, Stephen Hawking gave talks about it, pointed to it. You know, it's amazing

with the laser pointer. And he, you know, gave a talk in Cambridge. about this. And it often seemed that he was a little bit overtaken by the power of these ideas that he had. And let me give an example. Like the singularity theorem, I've had this conversation in the last month or two with Lenny Susskind, with Sir Roger Penrose, and with Frank Wilczek, and many, many others about whether or not, you know, the notion of a singularity even should be taken seriously in the following context. We don't believe there are naked singularities that you can observe or witness to Sir Roger's chagrin. And so these singularities are forever firewalled off in the case of black holes by an event horizon, as Stephen worked on with Sir Roger. And then in the

case of the Big Bang singularity, that is also outside of our cosmological horizon, as close as we could possibly get to it is perhaps the inflationary epoch that I study observationally. But the question I have for all these people, and I want to ask you as a physicist, now forget about Stephen for a minute, but do we have any reason to believe that a singularity is real, or is it merely the consequence of extrapolating general relativity to its ultimate conclusion? Do we have any reason to think that a singularity actually exists? Well, okay, that's quite a question that could be answer on different levels. And I know you want to know asking me, not Stephen, but I can't I still hear Stephen in my head.

Yeah, I'll take both of you guys for the answer. The grand design, we wrote, and of course the new book is about that process. And I talked about how at one point we had this little discussion where he had told me that he wants to write about a new philosophy for physics, which answers questions such as you just asked. And then he also said in some prose that he sent me, he wanted to, he was going to write philosophy. you know, used to explain the universe, but philosophy is dead. And I said, well, how can the book be, you know, first of all, how can the book be a new philosophy for physics? And then we say that's the philosophy that it's dead. And I said, plus, you're going to insult law of philosophers. And they may not be doing the philosophy of,

they're not natural philosophers. We're trying to explain the origin of the universe. They're doing ethics or they're doing the philosophy of language or whatever. So let's not make a blanket statement. And then we had this kind of argument where he says, yes, but your sentence has no punch. And then I would argue some more. And then he'd say it even louder. And I finally gave up because I thought it was going to hit me. So we've said, you know, that philosophy is dead.

And, you know, and we did get a lot of flak, especially from philosophers. He was okay, pissing off philosophers, but not theists. That's interesting. That's right. Well, so, yeah. And I think, like, as I said in the book, when I finally said, we're going to get a lot of flack, you know, we're going to get, he's a smite. And I think he liked that idea.

But his philosophy, what it was, would address his questions like that. So he recognized that in physics, like with the multiverse and with singularities, we have our new, our theories bring up, bring up phenomena or situations that are not observable. And we know that physics is about observables. So how do we reconcile that? And the idea is that a theory has to be testable, certainly. And so you have to give some predictions that weren't there before, and you test them and you find that it works and it fits all that.

If it has other predictions like a singularity or parallel universes that are uncoupled that we can't get to, that's not bad. That doesn't, it's not like saying our theory makes no predictions. That's not the same thing. theory makes predictions that we can confirm. It also makes other predictions that we can't confirm. And so, okay, that's okay. So the question is, now you talk to a philosopher who says, what does that mean?

Like you just did. And this is what his model dependent realism was. He was also recognizing that, so he said, look, to understand what this means, you have to realize, first of all, that we can have multiple theories that describe the same thing. right for example just take quantum theory as you know there's different formulations of quantum theory there's the more standard ones that came up in the 30s from schrodinger and Heisenberg and forget about which pick which picture you take or which interpretation whether it was Copenhagen just look at quantum theory as it was invented and then you look at Feynman coming in the 40s and a totally new formulation of quantum theory that looks at it differently right So the original one is based on all these waves, matter, and energy waves and uncertainty. And his is based on the fact that he says that the history of any situation, the unfolding of events, does not, there's not a unique unfolding of events in the quantum world. There are many or infinite occurring kind of at the same time.

And when you make an observation, they all affect what you're measuring. It doesn't matter with the details. but there's two different pictures of the world. And it's been proven that they give exactly the same predictions in all cases. So they're equally good. But do you think of the world as having all these multiple histories in parallel? Or do you not? Do you think of it the other way?

So Stephen was saying that you have to recognize that a scientific theory should not be taken literally. And so if we say, you know, but being very practical, he says, don't even ask if there's an objective reality out there, okay, because we know that our theories are filtered and formed through the brain of the human. And that in itself imposes certain orders and certain concepts. And aliens with a different brain or a frog, if it was smart enough, you know, with its archery. of its brain would have different theories and we believe in the end that all these theories would agree on their predictions but through the uses of different concepts. So depending on which theory you use, you know, you can picture it in your head as being real. But is a singularity real if you can't get to it because of the black hole horizon?

You know, he would say it's, you may as well think of it. He would say think of it as being real but be open to an, to a parent. to a parallel theory where they don't exist and just be happy with that. So that's why he called a model-dependent realism. So he felt that you should, you kind of take it as being real, but you realize that it depends on your, reality depends on your model. Now, in a way, it's in between. I talked to philosophers about this who weren't to the ones who weren't throwing stones.

And they said that, you know, there's a philosopher about realism, and I'm not a philosopher, which is one reason neither was Stephen. Yeah, we didn't really want to write about, I didn't think we should write about this too much. But anyway, there's realism which says people think that the laws of physics are describing something that's really there, that's concretely, and they are just a description of it. And then there's anti-realism, which says that the theories that we make are kind of all in our head. They're a way of our dealing with sensory input, and there's no deeper meaning to them than that. So if I can interject just an example, so I often,

say like, have you ever seen a triangle? Well, I mean, I can see of a triangle, but I've never seen a triangle that has three zero dimensional points, right? So is that an example of anti-realism, essentially? So this goes back to Plato, right? And Plato said that we can, there's an ideal world, which is the real triangles where the lines have zero width and the points have zero dimension, right? And then there's the real world, which were confined to perceiving,

which are, let's say, triangles drawn on paper, which are some kind of approximation of these ideal forms, right? And so I think the anti-realists would say that a triangle is just a human imagination and doesn't reflect anything in the world deeper than that, whereas a realist would say a triangle it may be an idealization but it's an idealization of something that's really there so like the matrix take the matrix moving right that that is a good uh let's say illustration of what could be the truth right i'm not saying that i believe that

it's the truth but but look we don't know the difference we can't tell you know are you really there or i could just be a brain floating in space the Boltzman's brain you may remember that Yeah. So I might be a brain, and all the experiences that I'm having, which I come through my own sense and I'm perceived by my brain, aren't, don't really exist. They're all a big dream that I'm having, or I'm in a computer or something.

Yeah, Descartes, right, the brain in a bottle, yeah. Descartes, I think they're far. I am, but I think, so you're saying, the only thing you know about is that you exist, right? Yeah. And then, of course, I felt like Descartes copped out because he appeals to God in the ultimate extension of that. But I guess with physical, so a triangle, I agree, you know, it's not something, it's almost immaterial if that, if it exists or if it's only a concept, you know, I had a conversation with Jim Simons about, you know, is math invented or discovered and his answer is basically yes, you know, both. But in the concept of a physical quantity, I call this the hard problem of singularities when I talk to people about this. And that's, you know, a physical quantity like temperature, density or, you know, or, or, or, or, or, or, or.

or infinite, cannot be infinite. And then, like, Zeno's paradox, how does it taper down to be a finite value? You know, a minute after the Big Bang began, if it's infinite, how could it be a finite temperature? You know, it's the Xenos version of Zenos cosmos. As we know, that's all fine mathematically. So, you know, 1 over X at zero, it is infinity.

Anywhere away from zero, as soon as you get as little as you want, it's finite. Right. And that was what sort of I felt like, you know, just again, being at, And it's unfortunate, Stephen's not here. But I felt like at certain points, he would say it's almost immaterial if it's really a singularity or if it's essentially the plank length.

And you guys discuss this a little bit. But he discussed this in the structure of space time with Ellis. And, you know, but I think that that's the key nugget, you know, is if it's, if it really is zero, you know, how does time progress infinitesimally before the universe itself exists, for example, is a big question. But really what I want to get back to is more, not the specific details of even what you believe, but the notion that, you know, what you talk about in the book is that, you know, Stephen says a law is not a law with God.

In other words, if you have to appeal to God, you know, here a miracle happens, you know, kind of that Sydney Harris cartoon, if you have to appeal to God, it's not a branch of physics. And yet he then went on, you know, kind of modus opponents, you know, to say, like, You know, God has two roles. You know, he basically can establish the initial conditions of the physical state of the universe. And then he can also choose the laws of physics. And that's really his only two job description, you know, on his job card. Those are the only things God is necessary for, at least in the physical world.

We can talk about personal God some other time. But, you know, he seemed to view himself in his work on singularities of Hardle, or rather in the No Boundary Proposal. as eliminating the need for the God to choose the initial conditions at all because the universe basically is responsible for its own initial conditions. You know, the thing I always wonder about, and I've, you know, had this debate about Lawrence Krause's work, when we say, well, the laws of physics allow you to extrapolate back from GR to, you know, in the Valenian theory, you can extrapolate and you can prove there's a, you know, geodesically incompleteness at a point in time. And that means that any expanding universe had an origin in time, essentially. But where did the laws of physics come from? That's the big question that I, you know, it's Sean Carroll, I've asked.

He says it's a Hilbert space, but you know, where does the Hilbert space come from? I find it's a lot of hiding the ball. So I'm curious, where do you come down in this? Where do the laws of physics come from? It's a simple question. Stephen considered that his first book, A Brief History of Time, was explaining the initial conditions of the universe. and that's the no boundary proposal that he worked on with jim and jim is sensitive about this jim hardle uh key you know key person in that uh not not a flunky of

stevens but uh you know if you're watching this jim there i you know i i i because people have a tendency to call it stevens no boundary but but that was the piece of his work by the way that he told me he was most proud of yes so um and uh then so the first book uh brief history was that Of course, he wrote some other, like, Nutsch, the University of Nutsch. Those are all, and when I wrote with him, the Reefer History, those are all reworking. Yeah. But then we wrote a totally new book, The Grand Design, and that answered the other question.

Where did that book was an answer to where did the laws of nature come from? And his answer was the answer of M theory, really, that there are, depending on, you know, on the geometry of the vacuum. the topology, there are different laws of physics. So Stephen felt, based on his work with Jim Hardle, that the universe creation, which no one can deny, was a quantum event, right? And when you put it together... Well, there are those that do dispute that.

Paul Steinhart, Neil Turak, Roger Penrose. That they were quantum events? I mean, the quantum theory applies, right? Well, no, they say that the bounce, at least in the bouncing cosmology of Turak and Steinhardt and Aegis, now there is a purely classical transition through the bound. There's no quantum phase of the universe.

Okay, well. And then Sir Roger just has these eons that expanded. Is that a semi-classical or is that, I mean, there's a classical phase where there's no, no planks constant? Is that? In which, in Penrose? I don't think Penrose feature in his work was classical. But I mean, we can do it classically, certainly.

Stephen's early work was just classical. and then he applied quantum theory. And then since we don't have quantum gravity, you do semi-classical approximations. But anyway, Stephen was saying that you have to look at the universe like Feynman, with quantum theory like Feynman did, and the universe has multiple histories, right?

And what that means, a history, you know, if you're in a laboratory and there's a parochial going from A to B, the history is its path. Right. And, but if you look at the universe, the history of the universe, is the states of the universe and to him that includes the laws of nature

so the laws of nature themselves are Is an element of a Hilbert space? Yeah, right. So there are multiple universes developing each with different laws with every possible set of laws, okay? So, you know, in M theory, you know, they're out and say there's a landscape,

there's all these possible M theory, versions of M theory, which one is it? His answer is they all existed, They all have, they're all there and in the quantum group of parallel histories in the Feynman sense. I know trying to not be too technical, but he's saying basically that the universe began in every possible way. And some of the universes allowed inflation, and they lasted for, you know, finite long time, and we could have stars and people develop and some re-collapsed right away. And some have these, this law, physics, some of that law,

physics and some very small fraction of them have laws of physics that actually enable life to develop, which we can talk about later if you're interested, but that's a very interesting thing that most, if you just change the laws of physics by a percent, half percent here and there, and you go through the evolution of the universe, you find that life could not have developed. So there's a very special set of laws. I do want to talk about that just to put a pin in that because there is modern work, Fred Adams and the University of Michigan and even lowered Martin Rees. So I talked to earlier this week with Mario Livio, they are seeming to suggest, and I believe what you just said to be true,

but they are suggesting that the envelope, the parameter space is far wider for the evolution of stars of massive gravity, of electronic chemistry, et cetera. We can talk about the quadrupole in the CMB. They're suggesting Fred Adams in particular that our universe isn't particularly finally tuned. But I don't want to take away from what you're saying because I But there's been a lot of work so I don't know. I didn't do the work so I wouldn't date them on that but I've talked to Stephen about that and some of that I remember It's in the book, but if you change the massive electron by a half a percent I mean I'm not necessarily talking about not having stars develop but you need a lot more than just having stars. They

have to they have to go through and have a supernova XPics. They have to have the heavy elements created and they have to be dispersed. first. There's, you know, you change the strong force by a little bit and protons become unstable and they decay too fast for any of this. I mean, there's all these very intricate things that have to happen for life to exist. There's the, the, um, there's one parameter that depends on the fine. Robin atom have to be just right, right? It must be a certain resonance. The Hoyle, Hoyle, right. I mean, there's so much. And I don't know. Actually, that's not my feel, but, but we looked at that and Stephen pointed me towards certain books. But,

I don't follow that, you know, there may be other work recently that's questioning some of that. So I don't know. But, yeah, and it's not just, though, the development of stars. But, yeah. So, yeah, I want to, yeah, just so, okay, so I'll just, I'm not going to pull any punches with you because I have so much respect for you. Just like you had respect for Stephen Hawking, and you didn't pull punches with him. In fact, you held his hand, as we talked about earlier. You're far from, you know, punched poor Stephen.

But, you know, it's far from being true that that string, that string theory, let alone M theory has been, you know, validated or verified. Some say it's actively been refuted. I mean, there are people that say that M theory and string theory in particular have held back the progress of theoretical physics for last 50 years. And these aren't like, Shelley, Glash out has said, you know. I know. I used to have just talks with John Schwartz at Caltech.

Yeah. He was one of the founders of string theory. So I just, how could Stephen, so I understand that he. John, I think, resented the fact that Stephen for years did not, was not a believer in string theory. And I think it was the M theory work by Witten that really convinced him. And he, I mean, we talked about that many times. And he felt that string theory, that M theory was correct. And I wouldn't, I have not seen anything that I, look, again, just like you talked about the fine tuning,

everything in physics is always being questioned. You can go to certain websites, and it's almost like there's a revolutionary breakthrough every week, and then we forget about it next week. So, you know, I say that's fine-tuning. You say these people say, eh, you know, M-theory, then you'll say, no, M-their. Yes, everything is in flux,

and there's camps on both sides of almost everything, because science is like that. Not that science stays like that, eventually it gets settled. Right. And in case of M-theory and string theory, I certainly haven't seen anything that would convince me, that it's be bumped.

On the other hand, I haven't seen anything that convinced me that's bunk. That's right. That's the latter. I'm not saying that's been,

you know, fantastic, but I'm working with Stephen, I took his, point of view, and it was writing about helping him and working with him

to write about his ideas. And I, you know, I felt that, I certainly didn't feel that he was misguided. I just felt that people can certainly legitimately have doubts.

And I have to say, for my own personal self, you know, we wrote the book 10 years ago. And the last 10 years, in my opinion, has been pretty depressing for the string theory, M theory crowd. And from my point of view, or pretty, let's say for me, pretty surprisingly uneventful in

terms of progress. And so I don't know. I think Stephen believed it until the end, which was just a couple years ago. Yeah, it's interesting. I'll ask you in a couple minutes, and I have my closing questions that I ask all my guests. But one of the questions is harkening back. to Sir Arthur C. Clark's 2001, a space odyssey in the Kubrick movie, when these hominids encounter this obelisk on the plains of the savannah of Africa, and they hit it with a bone.

And later on, this obelisk appears on the surface of the moon, and it's supposed to be like a time capsule. So I'm going to ask you later, so I'm giving you a little homework assignment right now to be multitasking, as I know you're so capable of. And I ask all my guests, you know, what would you put on a monolith like that that could last for a billion years? And I asked this of Kamran Vafa, who is one of the most preeminent theorists of any kind, but string theorists in particular at Harvard University. He was on the podcast last week. And you can watch his answer.

And he says he put on it the equations of string theory. And I'm thinking as I'm interviewing, and I just love them. I just love them so much. I can't like, you know, I can't like take him down. Like, what are you talking about? You know, why would you do that? And the only analogy I can make is like, if you ask me that question, Brian, what would you put on your monolith to last for a billion years.

And I said, oh, I put the Bicep 2 results, you know, which is like we knew that it now, we know that it's at least as likely that it was contaminated by dust as by revealing the presence of primordial gravitational waves from inflationary origin. So it just seems strange to me that like that so many people put so much stock in something, so much so that I feel, and again, I can't armchair analyze anybody. But that Stephen, you know, was kind of taken by, A, the singularity, you know, No Boundary proposed with Hardle, and kind of almost like confirmation bias. He wanted to, I mean, he's so proud of it that he felt like it really was true,

even though, as we both said, it's not clear if such a question is even well posed to verify or falsify the existence of an actual physical, not mathematical, physical singularity, and to validate or bunk or debunk, as you said, M theory. So it's these two things that he built such a huge edifice on, to me. To go back to what you said before, and to be clear, also on Stephen's no-bondry proposal, it's not universally accepted certainly. Yeah, yeah. So I guess I should have started all the things that I've been saying is this is the frontiers of physics.

So everything I'd say, there's another side to it. some things are maybe 80% you know people believe this way some maybe 30% yeah but we're not talking about stuff that one percent believe so stephen's stuff was mainstream but but it's not it's far from um and and that was something we struggled with in the book too is like how many disclaimers do you give i mean you don't want to have a footnote by everything you say and say the other side says this you know oh you know you say what you believe in and um you know hopefully it's clear that these were Stephen's theories. Yeah.

So before I close with those final questions, I would love to do a part too, just about the grand design because there's so much there in Feynman and Euclid's Rainbow and Euclid's Rainbow. I always get your Feynman and Euclid's Window. Okay, I always mix those up. So thank you.

I'd love to do a part two someday. A memoir, similar parallel to this, but about five, because I happen to be blessed to know Richard. That was the first book. I remember reading that 2004. That was probably the first. book I ever read by you. Okay, so, but before I do the final questions, which I ask all my guess,

I want to ask a question that only you could answer, which is on a personal level, which was more, I would say more depressing to you when you finished the grand design, which you must have known would probably be one of the last books you'd write with him or last collaborations you'd have of him, or after he died, like, which was sort of a more final or more jarring to you emotionally event in your life and you know platonic love affair with Stephen Hawke. Well, when he died, I mean, you know, I actually, you know, came to tears. I don't know why, you know, it's like everyone knew that he, you know, I knew he was going downhill and he was sick, very sick.

And he also knew the whole time I knew him that that could happen any time. As I said, he had brushes with death every year. And yet because he had brushes with death every year, you feel that he's immortal because, you know, at the first time he had a brush with death. death, you get worried. And then they start going, oh, yeah, these things happen. So, you know, hopefully it'll come through, you know, he'll be okay. And then eventually you go, oh, yeah, well, that's just, that's, that's nothing. You know, it's like, and as you alluded to, I had a brush with death during my writing of the book. And I remember laying in the hospital bed going, oh, my God,

you know, he's going to outlive me. He's going to outlive me. Who would have thought? He thought that he's going to look for someone to replace me on the book instead of the other way around. So, you know, I thought, I just didn't feel it wasn't real that he would ever die. And, and so that was quite a, I mean, it was, it was one of those things that, you know, it doesn't happen very often, but like, you wake up the next day and you go, that, that didn't really happen, did it? You know, and, but, you know, I think he was ready to go. And I talked about that in the book, and some of his, I pick him encounter he had, you know, near the time that he died. And, he seemed to be ready to

seem to be ready to go. I always felt that his purpose in life was accomplished when we wrote the grand design because he had two questions that he had really drove him and fueled his will to live in a way, in some way at least. One was

how did the universe begin, as you said, and the other one was, where did the laws of physics come from? Those were the, you know, how do we get here, basically, questions. And so the first one was a brief history and then in the grand design really crystallized his answer to the other question. Now, so I felt like he, back when he was in his 20s, he had, you know, found a purpose in life and a reason to live and a reason to stop goofing off because he was a goof off until then, which was to answer these questions. And finally, you know, 2010-ish, you know, he realized that he had the answer and then we wrote that book.

So I lied when I said that that was my last question about Stephen in particular. So I want to ask you, my father died about 14, 15 years ago, and I was taking care of him, and I was getting ready, taking care of kids and so forth. How was it with you having young kids? And basically, I mean, you were literally a caregiver for one night of your life, at least, which was very harrowing, as I will you'll read about in Stephen. in Hawking, a memoir of physics and friendship. But how was it balancing these two needs?

I mean, you have this little kids and you're off going to Cambridge and working with him and he's coming there. And how do you balance those roles of kind of taking care of a parent and taking care of kids? Yeah. You know, that's hard. I mean, everybody who's, I think, a professional who's, you know, overworked or even actually not a professional, so many people in this. country are overwork. I lived in

in Wormney for some years, and Bavaria in Munich. And they get, I think, 16 holidays a year and six weeks of vacation on top of that. And, you know, here we all work constantly. So I think it's it was hard.

You know, you don't get sleep or you feel guilty a lot of the time. You know, when I'm with the kids, I'm thinking I better get some work done. When I'm working, I think I should set the time with the kids. I always put the kids as my priority. and so I would you know that was the two things I did and and I would you know I would pass up whatever just to spend time with them when they were growing up and then I would just say well I'm going to sleep tonight I can get my work done after that wow and then the last thing is this happens to me often with my late father yeah I'm like oh I gotta tell dad because my and then I'm like he's not there if you could get a text message to wherever Stephen is right now.

What would you send him? What would you want to tell him about the books or his work or physics in general? What would you want to send to him if you get that one-way text message? Oh, I was going to say I wouldn't send anything about here. I'd say, you tell me. No, that's one way. No, no, no. Or he says it's very hot where I'm, no, I'm just kidding.

I think that, you know, I would just say, hey, Stephen. Guess what? You were wrong about something because you're getting this message from me and you've been dead for a few years and P.S. I love you. That's wonderful. Okay, Len, thank you so much. I want to ask you the three questions I ask all my guests. Sometimes I ask, I make it four questions when I'm talking to like a financial advisor or a psychologist. I'll ask them to unify gravity and quantum mechanics and under one equation and they, oh, what are you talking about? But actually, I'm going to skip that one because I know you could do it, but there's not enough room in the margin of this conversation. But I do want to ask you something that relates to the religion of Judaism, but it actually applies to everybody, including Alfred Nobel, as you'll understand in a second. And it's about an ethical will. So Alfred Nobel, when he died, he left a material will.

He had no kids. He had no wife. And he left almost all of his material money to go to this Nobel Prize, which I stole from Frank Wilcheck last week. No, no, it's a piece of Hanukkah Gelt that has his image on it. But it's a notion that you can also leave ethical values. And in Hebrew, it's known as a Zaba'a, an ethical will. And Alfred did that too because he required that his, the things that were rewarded with the Nobel Prize be given to those inventions or discoveries that had the greatest benefit to mankind. And first of all, you know, do you feel Stephen should have deserved a Nobel Prize,

alongside of Sir Roger. And then second of all, what would you put in an ethical will encapsulating your wisdom for your biological, but also your ideological children? Well, I think that Stephen felt that he would not get a Nobel Prize

because Nobel Prizes are generally, almost exclusively given to theories that have been experimentally verified. And it was a big surprise when Roger got it. And I think that if Stephen alive that he should have gotten it with Roger, but you know, they can only give it to three, so God knows how they would do that. And, you know, I think the Nobel Prizes are, you know, often unfair, let's say.

Yes. Someone should write a book about that. Yeah. And, you know, when there was a scene in the book about Stephen and Nobel Prizes, but ethical will is interesting because I did write one. My rabbi, when the kid's first child, Alexei was born, you know, I wrote, asked me to write an ethical will, so I don't remember. He's 30 now. I don't think I kept it. Go ask him. I hope you don't put, do that with your crypto coin that you leave to your kids.

Yeah. Don't lose the wallet. You know, my real answer would be I'd have to think about that, but I can give you a superficial answer, which is, you know, I think that, um, you know, the Hippocratic oath, I think that's part of it, but one of the principles of medicine is to do no harm. And I think that's what you should live your life. First of all, do no harm. And then, and secondly.

try to do whatever good you can. But first of all, do no harm. And thirdly, have a good time. But obey one and two. That's right. Don't forget. The fourth rule is don't forget one, two, and three. Okay.

So the second question that I ask all my guests relates to Arthur C. Clark, and that's the monolith question. So is there anything in the laws of physics? As Feynman, you know for sure, because you wrote about this in Feynman's rainbow. Feynman had the so-called cataclysm question, which is, if in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures. What statement would? So I want to ask you if you could put that some statement on a monolith and that would be launched into space. It's funny, I did this with

Androian, Carl Sagan's widow, and she said, I did this on the Voyager 1 record, golden record. It has my brain waves and NASA launched it on a four billion year journey to the stars. But anyway, what would Leonard and Ladna? What would you put on a monolith to last for all time, essentially, or to communicate discoveries, something brilliant about humankind? Well, I guess that what I would, okay, I would recognize, you know, I would put down something recognizing that our knowledge is provisional, that, that, you know, Newton thought he had the answer,

and he didn't, Maxwell thought he had the answer, and he really didn't because then Plank came along, And then, you know, we keep revising our answers. So I wouldn't, you know, if I'm an answer that question with the atom, he said, you know, the idea of the atom is the most important, you know, idea. I don't know how you state that. But so what I would say to them is, here's, you know, here's what we know now if I could get that.

And so, you know, I would put down Maxwell's equations for light. And I would put down, I would probably put, I would put down non-relativistic quantum theory or maybe relativistic quantum theory. I don't think I would put even QED. That's what, QED is an asymptotic. You know, it's non-QED, you know, it has mathematical issues. You'd stop at the DRAC equation. I would stop at the DRock or even before that. Shordinger.

These are the principles we've discovered as of now. So you'll know what we believe now. And I wouldn't go as far as, you know, the QED, which is the, you know, for people who don't know, it's the quantum electrodynamics, the theory of the quantum theory of elementary particles being created and destroyed electrons and positrons and so forth. And that works extremely well, it's 12 decimal places, et cetera, but we know that mathematically it has issues. So I wouldn't put it there.

I would stop at the last place where we're pretty solid. You know, I would certainly wouldn't put strength. I don't want to put things that we're speculating about. But these are the things that we feel we know. They're probably wrong too. But this is where we are now. And, you know, good luck. And, you know, if you're so fucking, excuse me,

so in frigging advanced, I want you to find me in my death four billion years ago or in heaven somewhere and tell me what the final answer is. That's what I would call. It will reconstitute you in there. or cosmic bisquick. They'll have some bisquick out of you. Yeah, my thing would be,

don't eat me or, you know, go somewhere else. But that's an actually very, very deep excursion. Thank you, Lenny. That was very, very impressive and all-encompassing. I think intellectually honest, as I said, I love Kamran Vafa. You just want to hug the guy. He's a mensch.

But putting that, you know, basically on a monolith, to me means he's even going beyond QED to saying M- Theory, string theory is the ultimate theory of nature. And I agree with you 100%. It's far too provisional, at least at this stage. But that's part of my mission on this podcast is to talk to brilliant theorists like yourself and Ly Comran and Shelley Glashow, etc. And really understand what makes them tick and survey the landscape, a literal landscape of theoretical physics, so that someday we can think about experiments of everything. We spend a lot of time on theories of everything. I want to do experiments of everything. Okay. So the last one,

question. Now we're going to go back in time. I just took you forward in time a billion years. Now I'm going to take you backwards in time, 20 years or 30 years. And that relates to the so-called third law of Sir Arthur C. Clark. Clark. So the podcast, when it comes out, you'll listen to it. It has Sir Arthur C. Clark's actual voice saying any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And so we have that as part of our Arthur C. Clark Center here that I'm co-director of. His second law is for every expert. There's an equal and opposite expert. I like to use that in faculty meetings.

And his last law, his third law, so-called third law, is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the name of this podcast, into the impossible podcast. I want to ask you, what thing about life when you were 20 years old, 30 years old seemed impossible, but then you did it. And what kind of advice would you give to your past self to go and have the courage to go a little bit into the impossible? Well, I've had, you know, as you know, quite a checkered career.

And when I was, almost everything I've done I thought was impossible. But people at least told me that it was. So when I was studying out in physics, I was told that there were no jobs for theorists. It better become an experimentalist or just do something else because you're wasting your time. time and and then I did I managed to get a job as a theorist and good thing because as an experimentalist with only these things thumbs I wouldn't have gone very far then I you know I I stopped and decided I wanted to I'm I've always done physics and I can you know publish throughout my career no matter what I was doing but but I took a break from academic physics turned it into a hobby and I said you know

and I had a tenured position offer and I turned it down and I said no I'm going to write in Hollywood and People said, you're crazy. And then I wrote for like nine years in Hollywood, Star Trek to Next Generation, McGiver, the Gary Shadling show, The Old Show, Nightcourt. I made it allowed decent shows. So that was supposed to be impossible. At some point, I quit and I said, I'm going to write books for a living. And my agent, Susan, if you're listening, she seemed like, what?

And that's so, you know, that's, so I don't, I guess I would say that, I wouldn't tell my, I would just say what I, what I've learned from all this is that, that, well, maybe I just haven't found the impossible yet. And the important thing is to follow your passion and your dreams. And don't not do it because you're afraid. Don't not do it because you think it's not possible. Because look at the different things that I've done. And I really don't have any particular talent than any of it.

But I managed to keep doing this and that and do different things. But I just keep pushing. And I always have a plan B. You don't want to be homeless on the street, have a plan B, but shoot for plan A. That's my advice. Reach for Plan A, for Plan B, but have a planet backup beneath you. Yeah, but when you're tired of that, you'll find a new Plan A. Leonard Milano, thank you so much for going into the impossible.

Thanks, Brian. It's been fun. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.