Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Martin Rees Predicts the Future of Humanity and Science! (#366)

Episode Date: November 11, 2023

What’s written in our stars? Here to read humanity's horoscope is none other than Lord Martin Rees!  Lord Martin Rees has played a huge role in my career and is an inspiration to me and millions of scientists around the world. There is literally nothing beyond his purview, and our conversation bore this out -- we covered everything from A to Z: artificial intelligence to zoology! Nothing was off-limits – we even shared our mutual and controversial distaste for alchemy and astrology! Lord Rees of Ludlow, the Astronomer Royal, is the Co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and an Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics at Cambridge University. He is the 38th Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of ‘On the Future’ and 10 other books and the 60th President of the Royal Society. Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) Judging a book by its cover: On The Future (01:48) Reading the Queen's horoscope (03:08) Do physicists envy mathematicians? (06:46) Why is Einstein so often a target of criticism? (10:21) The steady-state of the universe debate and cosmology's earlier days (15:56) Martin's prediction that the CMB could be polarized (22:02) Theories of Everything. Do we need them? (29:12) Complex vs. complicated (37:30) There may be some benefits to the pandemic! (56:09) What do you think about blockchain and Bitcoin? (57:56) How coins got their ridges (59:51) What is your ethical will? (1:16:14) Outro (1:26:10) — Additional resources:  🥗 Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. 📝 With a MasterClass annual membership, you can take one-on-one classes from the world’s best for $10 a month with your annual membership, get unlimited access to every class — and even better, right now, as an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off when you go to MASTERCLASS.com/impossible. 🧑‍💻 Visit LinkedIn.com/IMPOSSIBLE to post your job for free! 📚 On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Lord Martin Rees: https://amzn.eu/d/48JcB1Y  ➡️ 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

It's a symptom of what's wrong with society that so much of our effort goes into making things secure. If you imagine what fraction of our economy goes into computer security, safety, air security, etc. Things that we would not have to do at all if you could trust each other. Blockchain may have advantages, but of course downside is that its main motive is to provide security, which you wouldn't need to bother about if you could trust people. is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors. Today we are speaking with a man who is,

I call him the biggest mensch in the multiverse. It is Lord Martin Rees, astronomer royal, a friend of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, long-time influence, inspiration, and really, in some ways, the father of my field of C&B polarization, as I'll explain as we go on.

But first today, Martin, welcome. Are you in Cambridge right now? I'm at home at Cambridge, and great to be with you, Brown. It's great to be with you. I always cherish our conversations. Today we're going to be talking first about your book on the future, which came out a couple of years ago. But the reason for this is that Lord Reese was one of the recipients

of the Arthur C. Clark Foundation Awards recently for the future, along with Ted Chang and Fabiola Giannati of CERN. And it was an occasion to get some time with him. I could not resist. So first of all, congratulations on winning the Arthur C. Clark Foundation Award. Thank you very much. And that was about the future. And I think your book was really kind of a cornerstone theme.

I read it when it came out. I reread it. And I really do want to talk about it. Usually, Lord Martin, we review the first thing I always say is I judge all books by their cover. And this cover is perhaps the most sparse cover I've ever seen. So we won't talk about the cover, but I do want to talk about the title. You are known for provocative titles. And in some cases, your titles get changed depending on where they're printed.

So first of all, can you explain what is the meaning of On the Future and The Prospects for Humanity? What drove you to create a book like this? Well, as you mentioned, I did have a book about 15 years ago, which I called Our Final Century, with a question mark, which raised issues about long-term threats. The publisher's cut out a question mark, but when it was published in America, the title was changed to our final hour. And I interpret that as being that you guys want instant gratification and a reverse. Instant annihilation. And this was a more innocuous title. But the theme of the book is that we are in a very special century.

And I guess that's what we'd be discussing. Before we begin, I do want to mention this honorific that you maintain, which is Astronomer Royal. And you once told me, and in fact, you say it in the book, but I'm going to tell it the way you told me that most of the time people think your job is to read the queen her horoscope. And I love that line. And I'm hoping you'll tell me what I am. But I, but I once went to a horoscope reader when I was dating my soon-to-be wife of 14 or so years from now. I should remember that. But we were dating and she wanted to see some, you know, astrologer. And the astrologer asked me, what's your sign? And I said, well, you know, I'm a Gemini, I think. And she said, okay, well, this is going to happen to you. There's going to be, you know, fluctuations in the stock market. There'll be uncertainty in the middle. East. And at the end, I said, you know what, I'm actually born in September. Isn't that a

Virgo? And the astrologer said, yeah, but it doesn't matter. Your horoscope's the same. And I wonder, you talk a little bit about in the book, for the first time, I feel like I have a kindred spirit in that you're kind of not antagonistic towards Carl Popper, but the notion of the demarcation hypothesis and how that has become synonymous with what is good science. I wonder, could you speak a little about your views on pauperism. I talked to Lenny Suskin about a month ago, and he called it the paparazzi, and don't get obsessed with the paparazzi. Tell me, what are your feelings about what constitutes science in the context of astrology, astronomy, etc.? Well, I mean, I think it's got to be something which is subject to empirical test and which is progressive, et cetera,

and astrology isn't because it's mumbo-jumbo and you can't really test it and hasn't survived the test have been done. But the proper scenario, which of course has been very popular. I mean, most philosophers are unduly contemptuous of, sorry, most scientists are unduly contemptuous of philosophy. Hawking in particular was outrageously dismissive of philosophy, completely unjustifiably. But the philosophers who scientists have liked include two, I guess, in particular, and one of them, is Karl Popper, and his idea was that to be a scientific statement, it's got to be refutable. If you can't refute it, then it's not science. And there's something in that, because, to take an example, I mean, reincarnation,

which is an idea held by many people, but there's no way in which you could refute it to their satisfaction. So that's the reason why reincarnation is not science. but refutation is of course an important part of science but it's not infallible I mean I quote an example in my book that supposing that the Michael and Morley experiment that's the experiment which shows that light goes at the same speed

at any time in the year even though the earth is going around if that had been done in the 16th or 17th century it would have been used to refute Copernicus people would say that clearly the earth does not move And so that is an example showing how you can't be convinced of a refutation unless you're convinced of the grounding of that particular argument. So it's fuzzier than Popper tried to maintain. But nonetheless, he pointed out that if you can't find any evidence against a theory and reoccurations an example of that, then it's not really science. Yes, I want to run by you an example. Another example and get your impressions about it, and that is the proof that the Earth is not round from the reddening of sunlight at sunset or equivalently in the cosmic microwave background image or the observatory that's behind me in my Zoom background.

Yes, yes. the very thick optical density of the atmosphere, which is indicative of a flat, planar atmosphere, which means that the Earth must be a flat, planar object. So, yes, and I think, and I wanted to ask you this for a while, I've asked that of Sir Roger Penrose and others, and that is about, you know, falsification and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, that I have noted sort of an envy, you know, Freud would probably call it a mathematician envy as his want. And it's ironic if Hopper wasn't talking about cosmology or astronomy. He was actually a proponent of the steady state, as you know, for some time. But he was irritated at astrologers

and even psychoanalysis, as you talk about in on the future. But the impression that I get is that we physicists are antagonized or perhaps we are envious of mathematicians because girdle showed what constitutes mathematics. But there's no equivalent for what constitutes physics. And I wonder, is that because physics is by nature provisional and is subject to imperial update? I mean, Isaac Asimov once said, you know, if you think the earth is flat, you're wrong. If you think the earth is a perfect sphere, you're also wrong, but you're less wrong than if you think it's flat. So I wonder, do we feel, as physicists, inadequate, envious, perhaps tension and anxiety, because we can't refute things so easily as, say, Gertl showed in mathematics?

Well, it may be true, but of course, you're asking the obverse of the most common question, which is physics envy, which many other scientists have, because compared to most other sciences, which deal with things more complicated than the single atoms and molecules and Newtonian gravity, Physics is simple and straightforward, and therefore it is easier to get clear-cut results in physics than in most other sciences. The subject matter of physics is simpler. So normally people say that it's the other subjects that are. And, of course, the way in which you can gain confidence in a science, even when it's not one that lends itself to clear-cut refutations, is if a whole set of arguments in the science,

embeds together in a consistent story. I mean, I think if you look at something like a continental drift, for instance, and tectonics, that was an idea, and what was convincing about that was it explained lots of hitherto, surprising and disconnected facts, they all look together. And Darwinian evolution is another case. You could refute it, I suppose, if you found some, few, bones on the lower strata and dinosaur bones or something like that. So you could refuse it.

But most people would say that the strength of Darwinism is the huge volume of data, which it links together in a consistent way and offers a framework for interpreting. So I think science is a search for patterns and unification in diverse data. And, yeah, that reminds me. I sometimes joke that my house is so old. that there's a nuclear reactor and it's covered up by some dinosaur bones. And that just blows people's minds. But speaking of Gertl, allegedly he believed until his deathbed,

according to some young person who emails me all the time about the rotating universe hypothesis, that the universe is rotating in at least Gerdl's conception of the cosmogony. And then even on his deathbed, he said that he wondered, is the universe still rotating? And you must get a lot of these emails. I get a lot of them. I was joking with Adam Reese, who was on the podcast a couple of times this year.

And I said, you know, Adam, I get all these emails, you know, as I'm sure you do. Einstein was wrong. I can prove it if you help me with the maths because I'm not so good at maths. But if you help me, I'll share a portion of the Nobel Prize with you. I get those emails. And Adam said, yeah, how do you think I got my Nobel Prize? So what do you make of the fact that there are so many people that are so interested in proving, you know, Stephen Hawking right or wrong or proving Einstein?

But no one really comes up and says, I think Boltzman was wrong. Or Maxwell was wrong. I mean, Maxwell was actually wrong about many things. But nobody seems, they always seem to want to take down Einstein. What is that compulsion that people have in your... I think, you know, they want to attack the biggest targets, don't they? and Einstein is one, but Darwin's one. But I also have had letters from people saying Newton was wrong.

That's a good, because I was head of Newton's college and President of the other sideway. I agree. So there's people who are slightly more original who want to go back and prove Newton wrong, not a minute to show Einstein was wrong. But, of course, showing Darwin was wrong is, of course, a much more popular pursuit. Yes, of course. You know, of course Newton was wrong in some ways, but he hasn't retracted his some of his blunders in alchemy and in theology.

And I guess that brings me to another point, I often find that the most famous scientists on Earth right now, to the extent that anybody knows a scientist, they might think that Stephen Hawkins, I usually say, I want to write to you about Stephen Hawkins, and I say, well, first you have to spell his name right, or the Nobel Prize with an L-E at the end. But I want to know, you know, when people think about

theories or scientists, rather, they think about theorists. They think about Brian Green. They think about Michi Okaku, Stephen Hawking. They might think about you. Why is it that there's such an over-appreciation, in my opinion, an overabundance of kind of association with scientists as being theorists, such as yourself? Well, I suppose they like to think of the idea of the great mind understanding the universe, etc. But of course, it is a very misdemeanor. leading view of science, because, I mean, if we look at our science, then it's owed at least 95% to advances in instrumentation, isn't it? We are no wise than Aristotle was. In fact, we're less wise than he was, and the only reason we've made progress is by having better data, really.

And so it's a subject which is led by observation, and the observations only improve because of better instruments and now better computations as well. So the armchair theorist of course gets exaggerated a claim because there are very few grants at science where he or she makes a role comparable to that of the experimenter. And I'm curious that you said that we are less wise than Aristotle. I feel like I don't know something that Aristotle said from heavy bodies fall faster than light bodies to, you know, notions about the steadiness of the universe's endurance. I don't know a single physical principle that he was right about. He was brilliant when he came to philosophy and social psychological.

I'm saying this. He wasn't right, but as an intellect of range, he was clearly very high IQ indeed. Yes. Probably high enough. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the Impossible Tiz Eye, your fearful host. Professor Brian Keating here with a tiny little homework assignment before we get back to the episode. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, either following it or subscribing to it, depending on your podcast, catcher of choice. I did some research of my own and found out that only about half of you are actually following or subscribing to the podcast.

So please do that. And for some extra credit, if you're looking to boost your position on the grading curve, please leave a rating or review. It really helps us out tremendously. Do it. Do it now. Before you forget, let's go back to the episode. And that brings me to another question. Tomorrow night, I'll be speaking with Giant Narlocar, who is a wonderful figure. Did you overlap with Giant and Fred Hoyle? He was about three or four years ahead of me, but of course I did overlap with him. He was working with Fred Hoyle as a postdoc when I was a graduate student. And of course,

I've seen him ever since. And in fact, I did a Zoom public lecture to Yucca in Puna, which he set up just a month ago. Oh, wonderful. Oh, well, I'll send you his, send him your regards and vice versa after I talk to him. But I'm curious, he still maintains in aspects of the steady state theory, the quasi-steady state theory, ferocity. And it brings me to my next question that, you know, I've seen a lot of times, and you know from being one of my most prominent endorsers of my book losing the Nobel Prize, that, you know, we've had to retract many experimental

results that achieve great, great notoriety and great public attention. I always joke that the announcement occurs on, you know, above the fold on page one of the New York Times or the San Diego Union Tribune here. And but then the retraction, if it's ever published, occurs, you know, on page 17B of the Saturday morning edition that nobody reads. And so I've seen a lot of experiments retracted. I have yet to see a theory retracted, you know, just fully divorced. Even Jeff Burbage, who I have the honor of having his office here at UC San Diego, you know him very well. And he was, and he was, he was the holder of my office before I moved in after his death in 2010. But, but he went to his grave, believing in the, in the veracity of

the study state theory, too. So what is it about theories that become so, so endeared? you know, to their conjecturers that, and you've had many of these instances of creating theories. So first, what is it about a theory that holds such permanence in the heart of his or her, of its creator? I think what you're saying is one category of person is like that. And they do get obsessed with the theory. And indeed, an experimenter who spent 10 years building an instrument is going to probably have an exaggerated feeling for the importance of what it will discover,

otherwise it would be motivated. So it's not surprising that people get committed to a theory. And, of course, as Plank famously said, that theories survive until all their proponents die off. Right. That's true of some of them. But people do change. But it is very interesting because if I mention someone else,

my PhD advisor was Dennis Sharma. And he was someone who he was the most prominent believer in the steady state theory, apart from its free inventors. Bondi Golden Hall invented it, and he was a great support for it. When I started in 1964 as a graduate student, he was a believer in the steady state theory. Yes. And I think I helped to talk him out of it because one of my student papers was with him,

which was some of the new evidence against steady state. But he was someone who had to believe something strongly in order to be motivated to work on it. he was like a lawyer and he would have this thing and what do we say if they find that you know etc so he had to be committed but if I look at my own attitude I think I'm genuinely not like that at all I'm quite happy to work at the same time

on two contradictory theories on the grounds that I want to know the answer and by running the two horses against each other and seeing if one stumbles then that's the way to decide which is the best So I'm very happy because I want to know the answer to explore two theories. That's enough motivation for me to know the answer. Whereas there are some people, and Dennis Sharma's example,

had to believe that something was almost certainly correct in order to follow up its consequences. And as you say, those who've got a great commitment to a theory are going to be those who are reluctant to give it up. And if we go back to Nalikab, he was a student of Fred Hoyle. And Fred Hoyle, actually, he was such an inventive man. He had lots of theories. And he didn't really have all that much stake in any one of them, I don't think. So he enjoyed the debate. And there was another debate going on at this time, which was the first evidence against steady state,

which came before the micro background from the distribution. of the radio sources, which are now quasars, and Martin Ryle, who was a radio astronomer, built an interferometer, and he showed evidence that there were more of these exploding galaxies as well, which now call quasars, far away than there are nearby, implying that there were more in the past than there are now. And this would be inconsistent with steady state because at all times the universe should look the same, whereas it is consistent with an evolving universe. And there was a long debate between Hoyle and Ryle, which got a lot of public interest in the UK. But it was interesting because Hoyle was someone who enjoyed debate and he didn't get upset by it, whereas Ryle got really, really upset if his work was criticized. And to be fair, he was right.

But the point was that he'd actually built this world's first intrameter using appiciniscences techniques, and he'd built the thing himself and worked for years and years. And so he got a huge investment in this project. So it's not surprising that he was going to be rather committed to its results, and to have them sort of disparaged by an armchair theorist was upsetting for him. Yeah, and of course, he in some ways, had a later laugh, although maybe not the last laugh, with the recipient of the Nobel Prize. And was he the Astronomer Royal? I forgot. He was for a time, because the history of that job is that until 1960, it was the person who ran the Greenwich Observatory.

Yes. Which was a real job. But then when that became a museum and people started going to Hawaii and Chile to do observations, they kept the title, but kept it as an honorary title. and indeed Martin Ryle was a holder of that. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host in style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube ice, and crushed ice.

Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd. only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. The C store online for details. Yeah, I believe Margaret Burbage, my late colleague here at UC San Diego, was she was director of RGO, the Royal Grands Observatory, but she wasn't Astronomer. And then that caused her in some ways, beneficially for me to come to San Diego eventually and start my department. So thank the Astronomer Royal recipients or deciders for that, for me, if you will. So just one last thing about, you know, these theories. I wonder just speculating,

you know, when I build an experiment, it's not me building an experiment. We literally have 300 people working on the Simon's Observatory and pictured behind me, whereas a theory can be done by one or two people. And so it's much more associated with one's identity, I would say. I mean, I bleed and I sweat and I cry over all my experiments, but, you know, it has to be a collaborative endeavor. It's too big to be done individually. Whereas I think, think you can still do theory today. And I want to circle back in a 2018 interview, you said one of your character traits, which I take as a good trait, is that you're impatient and you like to multitask in the sense that you like to work on many different things at once. And in some sense,

you remind me of Jim Simons and that you like to hedge your risk, your downside risk. And of course, that's a lot of what this book on the future is about. We'll get to that in just a second. that's a little hard to see. But getting back to, I want to go back to 1968, when you came up with the idea that the universe might be, the CMB might be polarized. And I want to remind our listeners and viewers that this is only three years after the discovery

of the cosmic microwave background itself. And at this point, the antisotropies of the microrate background had not been understood or measured in any way. Even the dipole had not been measured. And here was Lord Reese, as I believe it was part of, was it part of your PhD thesis, Martin? As a postdoc.

As a postdoc. So you conjectured that it might be polarized if the universe were behaving in an interesting way. And because sometimes I feel like even incorrect theories can provide very important touchstones for experimentalists like myself to pursue, even though the ultimately the cause of the polarization in your model was not the correct one in that I believe you ascribed a potential polarization to an antisotropic expansion of the universe expanding as a quadrupole distribution with a quadrupolar asymmetry in its expansion rate, I believe technically, that that would produce the conditions necessary for polarization.

We now know that's not what causes the polarization, but nevertheless, it wasn't discovered for another 32 years. So you spoke once about, you know, kind of being impatient and then moving on. So I want to say, is there a value in theories that ultimately might not be right, but they can be used to impell experimentalists like me? I think so. Just to expand a bit on that, the reason I did this was that there was a great deal of interest at that time in anisotropic models where the expansion was fast,

faster in one direction, in the perfect it direction, and there was something called the Mixmaster universe, which expanded fast one way than the other. And the motive for this in the late 60s was provided by Charlie Mizner, who's a theorist of Maryland. And the argument was it was called the Horizon Problem that different parts of the universe in the standard model don't causally connect early on. And this is one of the things that the inflation idea solved 20 years later. But over in the UK, we were aware of the horizon problem, 10 years at least. before Alan Guth was. And the arguments being discussed then

were that the expansion may be anisotropic and the Russians had ideas like this. And so I was familiar with these models for Anastrop Universes and in those models it's fairly easy to see that the radiation

would be polarised. And then I said at the end of my paper that you get this for other kinds of variation, but I was only thinking at that time of these models where the entire Hubble expansion was fast in some directions than others. Yeah, and I wonder, even in the quasi-steady state cosmology, they had this notion of the sea field, which continually created matter

so as to preserve the density and the overall appearance, which I remember Jeff Burbage talking to me about was presaging some notions of the constancy of dark energy. I disputed that. I do take a little credit, because once I, I gave a talk about our experiment polar bear, which is a precursor to the Simon's Array, and Jeff was in the audience. And usually when a cosmologist would come to speak here at UC San Diego, Jeff would kind of harumph and say, oh, cosmology, really, you know, and his great booming

British lion voice. But this time, I showed a picture of our detectors. And he said, and I couldn't believe this. He said, wow, that is really cool. And I just thought, you know, he's gone Californian. I I mean, to talk like a surfer, but there was something about experiment that he really loved. And of course, he wasn't an observer. He was a theorist. Margaret was the observer of the duo, and she was a Titanic figure in astronomy. And, you know, as you kind of hinted to before, Plank about, you know, theories advancing. He said something also, you know, theory or science advances one funeral at a time.

And yet I still believe there are valuable contributions, even in these things like Narla Kar and and so forth. But the problem is somebody needs to tap them on the shoulder, so to speak, and say, you have this amazing gifted mind, but I think it could be used in other directions. And I want to turn to that now. I've done a lot of... Sorry, were you going to

say something? I was going to say, going back to Nalikaa, Hoyle was very keen, and the thing is very sad was that Nalikar was a almost completely contemporary of hawking and Carter, etc. in the same building.

Fred Hoyle never appreciated the work which Hawking and Carter were doing, classic work on black holes. And Nalikar had such great loyalty to Fred Hoyle, but he never got involved in this, whereas he would have been fully able to do important work in the nature of black holes, you know, but whereas all the other young people followed the lead of Roger Penrose and use his techniques to explore black holes and this was all done in the late 60s

with this group in Cambridge playing a big role. Nalika, I think out of loyalty to Fred never got involved. And if you look at his later books, he talks about cosmology and he talks about the micro-backgrounds and all that, but he has a chapter at the end where he will feel out of loyalty.

He's got to put in a chapter on Steady State University. Yes, I know. I'm going to talk to him about that very issue. tomorrow when he comes on the show. And yes, there's problems and speculations on cosmology, one of his more recent books. And yeah, some of it, it's curious. It's novel to hear, at least from my perspective, that Hoyle was at least maybe less loyal or less passionate, because I always had the impression that he was more embittered than Narlocar. But it sounds like, and I'll talk to giant about this tomorrow, but the question of, you know, whether or not, you know, the loyal

to a theory and loyalty to an idea. And that takes me to my next question about the proliferation of theories of everything. So I've had a lot of conversations over the last six months with folks like Stephen Wolfram, Eric Weinstein, I'm going to be speaking with Julian Barboor, as well as Garrett Lise and others with claim new theories of everything, as well as people that are in more traditional fields like I talk to Sheldon Glashow and I've talked to Frank Wilcheck about this provocative question. I like to pose to my honored guests or my, the guests that honor me, I don't know, I do honor you. But the point is, do we need a theory of everything? And the reason harkens back to what you just mentioned about, about hawking and Penrose, and I talk, I asked this of Sir Roger as well. I said, I always find that it's kind of like this uroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. We say we need a theory of quantum gravity because we don't understand the properties of singularity. at the center of black holes or perhaps a singularity at the origin of time itself in the so-called Big Bang. And the question of, you know, these things must be unified because we need a theory

of gravity that's quantized because we can't understand singularities otherwise. Now, going back to our earlier point about falsification or maybe even empiricism, we can't ever access the singularity at the core of a black hole. We don't know if it's real. We don't know it's real. We don't know its entity, we don't know it's nature, its properties. It's, it's firewalled off literally. I mentioned this to Lenny Susskin. And he sort of agreed that actually to him the most interesting part of the black hole is not the singularity. It's the event horizon or what he calls the stretched horizon. And then talking to Sir Roger, similarly about black holes, but also about the origin of the universe, which you know, I'm sure, he doesn't believe in

a quantum, you know, Bing Bang, a singularity in time. And neither does my friend in your friend Paul Steinhart. So my question is, if God, I know you don't believe, and you don't actively affirm a belief in God, but God hands me a letter, you know, and says, Brian, read this to Lord Martin, and it says there was no singular Big Bang. It's more complicated than that. It's either classical or eons or what have you, or bouncing. And then they also say there is no way to observe. God says, you can't observe what's happening at the center of a black hole. So in that case, if you knew there were no real examples that we could ever probe, would you still say we need a theory of everything?

You're wrong in assuming we could never have any evidence for it, because it's clear, as you say, that we could understand the Big Bang better if we could understand context where clearly gravity is important and quantum theory is important, things very high density, etc. Now, the problem is we can't do experiments in those regimes, but if we in principle had a theory which could describe the conditions right at the beginning of the universe and inside a black hole, and if that same theory predicted the masses of all the elementary particles and the relative strengths and all the fundamental numbers of physics, then we'd know there was something in it. And it's a heresy to think that you have to be able to test all the consequences of the consequences. You have to be able to test enough consequences to get confidence in it. And then you take serious predictions when you can't observe. So to go back to black holes, we take what Einstein's theory says about the inside of a black hole seriously,

even though we can't observe it there, because we've been able to verify Einstein's theory in many other contexts outside the black hole. And so likewise, we could have a theory, which does give us a deep insight into the Big Bang and unification, and incidentally, into dark energy, which I think is going to need a similar sort of theory. And we could gain confidence in it if it manages to explain the standard model on all the arbitrary numbers in that. If it gives formula for those, then that would be a huge achievement, and we take the theory seriously. But having said all that, the phrase theory of everything is a very unfortunate phrase, because what we've been talking about now, and what I'm saying we could like to have, is a theory that unifies the four forces of nature, as it were, unifies the gravity for the very large,

with the very small, and so in Orboros, when the snake eats his tail, it can cope with that juxtaposition, as it were. That's right. But, of course, according to the theory of everything, is misleading because if you think of all the other sciences, biology, chemistry, everything else, none of them are held up to the slightest extent by the lack of this theory. Quantum theory or even nuclear physics is pretty irrelevant to chemists and biologists. And so the main challenges in science, or some of the main challenges in science, are the challenges of complexity in biological world. And

so even if we accept that everything is a solution as Friedrich's equation, etc., that's not the way we understand them. And I think this sort of extreme reductionism is very misleading. Let me give a one example

of this. Of course, lots of people think that living things have special vitalism and all that, you know. And Sir Roger and Stuart Hammeroff have this Yes, yes. But the main point is that every science, we go from physics to chemistry to cell biology to organisms all the way up to societies, each science at each level has its own irreducible concepts. And let me take a simple example. It doesn't involve vitalism. It's less controversial. Fluid mechanics. It's a well-defined subject. where the concepts are turbulence, viscosity, etc.,

and you work out and understand how waves break and all that and when flows go unstable, and it's a serious subject and all that. But the people who work on that subject, they treat the liquid, the water, as a fluid continuum. They don't care it's H-2O. and even if you had a massive computer which could solve Sweden's equation for 10 to the 30th atoms in a flowing stream,

then that solution wouldn't give you any insight. The insight comes from the level. And so as you go one step up from atomic physics, you get things like fluid mechanics, which are scientists of their own right, which have their own concepts, and no one denies that's

a flow of water is a solution as a very good equation but it's not helpful to be able to do that even you can solve the equation and of course most of us would say

that's true of living things as well yeah I mean there's a famous quote or phrase attributed to Dirac you know he said something like you know my equation explains most of chemistry and all of chemistry and most of biology or so

and I always thought you know in 9th grade biology class. You know, if I say, let me get the relativistic Schrodinger equation out and solve it so I can dissect this frog. Some big problems. The frog would have bigger problems. It doesn't give us any insight. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Right. Yes, it's true, but not useful. I want to give a little break to recognize our guest, Lord Martin Rees, author of many books, including just six numbers on the future, our final hour slash century, whichever comes

first, I guess. And I want to thank my listeners and viewers. I want to encourage you to like and say, subscribe and comment on the video. And please leave a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this so that we can continue to get great guests like Lord Martin Rees, who just having such a ball with. This is such a wonderful, delicious treat for me. So going back to this question of complexity and things that are complicated, so to speak, I always make the distinction. Like getting a grain, putting a grain of sand on a pile, you know, that's complex.

but it's not really complicated. You can describe it in a very short amount of text. And you go through in here, this Russian gentleman whose name escapes me right now, but he has a rubric or a way of delineating and calculating complexity as the shortest computer code needed to describe that system. So a system of 10 to the 28th particles in this giant sandpiles, very, you know, a lot of particles, but the underlying forces, as you were just saying, Lord Martin. are very simple to understand. And yet, we have examples of potential theories of everything. For example, Stephen Wolframs is very reminiscent of the game of life, which you talk about

as being simple in some sense, but, you know, having exhibiting complexity, almost reminiscent of life. But I wonder, is maybe, and I asked Stephen about this, and I confess, I didn't fully understand his answer, but I said, well, if it's truly a theory of everything, does that mean it's going to get out, you know, bells inequality? is it going to get out, you know, EPR, is it going to get out, you know, the collapse of the wave function, or is it going to unify SU2 with SU3 and you want, what is it going to do?

And he said, yes, I don't understand how something that is like cellular automata, like the game of life, can exhibit the principles that originate these things. And I want to take you back to these earlier kinds of suppositions about the multiverse, and how the universe could begin. And they always start with the laws of physics. And the question I have is, where do those come from in these model? Is it necessary for a theory of everything to explain bootstrap how it came about? Or is that asking too much as we don't do of biology, as you said?

Well, I mean, some people would like to be able to show that our universe is uniquely self-consistent in a way and that the laws constrain it in such a way, if we call it, or must predict the way it is. Some people, I think maybe Roger Penrose think that's true. But, I mean, I think what Wolfram is doing, it's not conceptually different from what everyone thinks, which is that very, very complex things like animals can be produced by simple laws. That's all that Conway was doing with his game of life.

You point that you can't get surprising complexity by, iterating very simple laws. And that's qualitatively the same as what happens in most of chemistry, isn't it? Whether Wolfram's theory does incorporate quantum theory completely, I don't know. It may be a different theory. So now going through your book, I noted, well, first of all, I want to ask you, are you a pessimistic optimist or an optimistic pessimist? Well, I mean, I think I would say I'm an optimist about the power of technology, but a pessimist about politics and human nature in that I think the gap between what technology would allow us to do and what will actually happen is getting wider and wider,

and that's an indictment of our ethics and of our politics. And do you feel there's any hope for out overcoming this, or as Carl Sagan said, it's dangerous to have a society whose technological capacity exceeds its wisdom and how to use that technology. Well, it is dangerous, and Carl said that, and H.G. Wells said that the sense is going to be a race between education and catastrophe, and that's true. So I don't know how it would pan out, but the world is getting much more difficult to govern, obviously. I always used to joke. And I think I asked this of Sir Roger Penrose, the first time I talked to him. But if somebody, oh, no, I asked this of Freeman Dyson.

That's right. And I said, Freeman, if somebody, because he was kind of a contrarian, as you know, and I said, you know, if somebody tells you I've got good news and bad news, which do you want to hear first? And his answer was kind of surprising. But I want to know, first from you is I don't want to bias the experiment. So if I come up to you say, Lord Martin, I've got good news and I've got bad news, Which do you want to hear first?

I think I want to hear the bad news first. I think he did too. I think he viewed wanting to minimize the number of surprises, but also have the extra time to deal with the consequences of the bad news. What about like somebody says, Lord Martin, we've got this wonderful movie. You've got to see it because at the end, you know, they want to spoil it for you. Do you want to know the spoil or do you want to have the surprise yourself? But if it's a movie, I want to surprise. Okay.

But if it's the stock market, I assume you'd like to know the insight. So getting back a little bit to theory versus experiment, which is something that we explore a lot on the Into the Impossible podcast, I have this notion that theory and even theorists are abundant. And whereas experiments are extremely hard to do, and you talk about the LHC in this book, you talk a little bit about the Super Collider, you know, which is canceled. And I brought this up to Barry Barish. I said, Barry, it was good thing for you that the Super Collider was canceled because he was working as one of the leaders of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993 was canceled. And it ended up putting

him on a path to go to work for on LIGO, whereas if he had, where he eventually won a third share of the Nobel Prize in 2017. And yet, if he had stayed with the Super Collider and they had discovered the Higgs, that we know for sure that he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize because no experimentalist got any share in the Nobel Prize for that. year. So I said, it was good for you. And he said, I don't like to play games like that. And we moved on to other topics. But I want to ask you, when do you stop a theory? In other words, I know sort of that we lose, we win in experimental physics, such as the cosmic microwave background. We win very slowly with time. We only win as the square root of time in that we have

to take four times as much data, four times many years to get a two X improvement on the signal to noise. When do you know when to turn off a theory or turn off an experiment? Is there any kind of rubric that you can help us with to make these decisions? Because they're only getting more and more complex, expensive, and demanding of resources, most of which being the intellect of young people. Well, I mean, I think in terms of experiments, you know, the follow-up to the LHC is going to be delayed by, I would guess, two decades. We don't know. And that's because people realize that there are other techniques of NIGO and underwater neutrino experiments

and all these things, which can do exciting science in related areas much more cheaply. So I think experiments do get more and more expensive and at some stage you have to jump off and do something else. But of course, theory is very cheap. You just need to feed someone

and then they can go on coming up with theories. And I think there's a question of whether, if you're a theorist, do you want to work on some popular theory, or do you want to strike out and come up with your own theory? And, of course, I think we're seeing a tendency now that more people are coming up with sort of rather more baroque and exotic theories. That's because, I mean, string theory is 40 years old now, and it's not clear, it's on the right lines or progressing. So there are lots of young people in that sort of field, and they want to do something distinctive and different. So what happens is you get a variety of rather baroque variants of any theory that are going to be developed. And this is just psychology. People want to make their mark, et cetera.

but I think it's not very satisfaction if you have a theory and no one else takes it seriously at all. But it's also unhealthy if there's a bandwagon effect and too many people are working on a particular theory. And I think that certainly was true of string theory 10 and 20 years ago. Perhaps somewhat less true now. Towards the conclusion of the book, you make a very provocative statement in some sense about where scientists should fit in. and I want to push back provocatively as well. So you say that physicists don't get better with age, they burn out. And first of all, I think there is kind of a misconception that, you know, you do your best work by age 30.

That may be true in mathematics. And I taught this conversation with Jim Simons about this as well as others. But in experimental physics, you only get better. In other words, talking to Barry Barish, he has brilliant ideas that will benefit the Simon's Observatory. And we recruit people, elder states, men, and women in this. We actually have a committee of the most distinguished men and women on earth, in my opinion, some very young and some older. And an experiment, at least, I feel that this statement is not true,

that scientists do get better with age. It's just maybe they're not as creative. No, it's question. I don't think I denied that. I said that what can go wrong is if the old ones don't stick to what they're good at, but go into some new field. And I think of Shockley and Fred Hoyle, people like that who go into a field they didn't know anything about.

And the reason for that is that they're still scientifically motivated. They want to understand the world, but they don't any longer get satisfaction from continuing on a plateau doing the work they're good at and benefit from their experience. they want to do something new, and they overreach themselves. I do say that if people are happy to go on a plateau and deepen their experience, that that's fine. Yeah, so you do say... They won't get better in their theories. And I do pose a contrast between mathematical physicists, et cetera, and say composers,

because for many composers, anyway, their last works are their greatest. That's right. Whereas aren't many scientists of whom you'd say. that. And the difference is because if you're a composer, you're influenced by musical styles when you're young, but thereafter it can be just internal development, where science is an inherently social activity, and you can't stay up to speed in science unless you're able to absorb new techniques and new ideas, and that's what we become less adept at as we get older. So I think that's a difference. But if you stick with what you're good at, then

you can at least stay on a plateau, even though you may not get to higher peaks. Yeah, I want to, yeah, just echo that. And it is true. You certainly said that eminent and elderly scientists get shielded, and I'll come back to that in just one second. But you made me think of this thing I've been thinking about with regard to, of all things, estate planning, you know, which is not as as unificent as it might sound, but just that many things in life are benefit from what Albert Einstein reportedly called

the greatest invention of the human mind, namely, compound interest. So one of those, I had a guest on Bill Perkins a few months of about a month ago, and he was saying that you want to accumulate memories just like money because your memories grow and compound, you know, with time. So the earlier you make a memory, the more time it has to grow. And I feel like that's also true with many things, but including at least the only discipline I'm familiar with, which is experimental science, that you kind of compound. Oh, I've seen that problem with this type of electrical conductor, and we need to use this because it's going to behave better at high altitudes. And you do compound, and just like compound interest,

you know, the last doubling period is equal to everything that came before it. And that might be why composers, their last work is their best because they're basically doubling in their last work everything that they've done up until that point. Is that really true for many scientists? I'm only thinking about experimental scientists. I think the point I was kind of make is that experimental scientist benefit from wisdom and age. You look at David Wilkinson, who is doing great work up until literally the day he died. But then you look at theorists and you look at some theorists. And yes, they tend to be doing the same thing they were doing when they're 40. You know, it has to have some interest rate associated with it or it doesn't improve, right?

But just like losing weight, if you want to lose weight, you know, 10 pounds or five kilos in a ear and you do so a 1% loss per day, you know, the first three months, you're going to lose less than, you know, a quarter of a kilo or something that you could undo by drinking one glass of soda. So, so it's very slow and it sneaks up on you. And just like you talk about exponential effects in here, the climate crisis, et cetera, which hopefully we'll get to in the remaining minutes that we have. But, but I want to just run a provocative idea by you. And that is that I think after a scientist gets to be a certain age, that maybe their best contributions could be teaching, and that could free up the younger researchers, you know, younger than me. I'm not arguing on my behalf.

I'm already almost 50, so that won't apply to me. But you talk about this problem of researchers not getting their first grant until they're 40 and starting their own, you know, and by that time in years gone by, that would be towards the end of their career. So my provocative thing is that we should only have theorist teaching because they certainly know all the classes. They know how to teach, you know, quantum electrodynamics as well as I do and maybe better. But, you know, their work is less dependent on getting grants and proposing original research to go out. And I once proposed this to my colleague, Kim Greist, and he said, I'll fight you if you, like, he was going to have a fist fight with me because he's a theorist. And I wonder, how do you feel about this provocative idea that

that we basically have the theorist in physics. I don't know about other fields is for them to solve, but get these older people that are distinguished and brilliant, but they're not as, it's not as critical to them to be out in the field or collecting research data as it is for a younger person than me. Well, I mean, I think that's one solution, but I think there are inherent problems,

which I guess my book, with academia now. And I was an article recently for a British magazine, and, you know, the editor makes up the title. And the title they gave me was, why I'm glad I'm not a young academic. Because what I was saying was that it's less attractive than it used to be when I was starting. And this is not the case. I mean, the worst situation is biomedical sciences in America.

That's where there was a report that you get your first grant in the NIH when you're 42 or 43. And to take an example, one of the members of that committee, the ex-president of Princeton, told me that she, by my age and she got a PhD in three years, then a postdoc for three more years, and then got a grant to set up her own lab. Now that's not possible because the demography is so different. Back in the 1970s, the number of people was going up. very fast, so the young outnumber of the old and those quick promotion. And obviously we can't have continued exponential growth.

But I do think that it's going to have the consequence for academia, which is very bad. And that's that the most ambitious and flexible people won't go into academia or research. There'll always be the nerdish element, people like me who will go into academia and pursue some obsession, etc. academia needs to get its share of flexible, talented people who want to feel they've achieved something on their own by their 30s. And that was possible in academia 50 years ago. But it's much harder now, given that the numbers are stagnant now. And indeed, it is aggravated by the fact that in America you don't have a retiring age. That makes it far worse, actually, because people in their 70s are soaking up lots of the money.

but it's going to be bad and what this is going to mean I think and I mention this in my book is that there will be a stagnation perhaps within academia and perhaps to be a resurgence of the independent scientist because in 19th century

you know Darwin and Lord Rale and people like that were great men but they weren't an institution they had the resources, they did their own stuff and of course we know there are people now who make a lot of money by the time They're 40 and they've got scientific expertise and I think there may be more of those people.

We know a few of them, but that's a bit more, who do very serious science. And so things will become perhaps like the 19th century when the best science is no longer done in universities, simply because it's a very hard slog in university to get to a position where you have independence. universe could change to do this and there's a row of government labs and things like that in some areas but I think we do have to bear in mind that if you have a very sort of slow promotion and people have to fill in lots of forms to get grant

before they can do anything, you're going to deter the people you most want to keep in. 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 back you talk a lot about in the book about the potential for a pandemic you know to to strike in the vulnerabilities that we have let's turn to the to the book a little bit more in detail now i found it so delightful of course we're talking with lord martin reese author of on the future and many other books uh including uh our cosmic habitat just six numbers

our final hour slash century again whichever comes first um so i i just devoured this book, I've got, every page is highlighted, so it's kind of, I lose contrast every now and then, but you say here on page 77, pandemics are an ever-present natural threat. And obviously, you know, this is crippled a lot of things in the world, but in the human tragedy, we have to say that is, and believe that it's been, it's been unbearable in some ways. But does it present us with opportunities? You were just talking about opportunities for people that are technologically minded, et cetera. I've found that I've been able to cancel a lot of in-person meetings, and I've been having to spend more time looking at data rather than turning screwdrivers.

Might that have a benefit, you know, five years down the road, again, ignoring the awful human consequences. Do you see any bright spot, you know, COVID dividends? Well, I think it would be in that sense. I think we've learned that a lot of the travel we've done is unnecessary. and we can work more efficiently, et cetera. So I think we're not going to go back to the old normal. We'll go back to a different one. But we could have learned those lessons without having a pandemic, couldn't we?

We could have learned already, and we probably would. But we learn those lessons more quickly, I think, than we would have done before. And you talk about the vaccine and how, you know, this is really amazing. I want to know who told you about the, you. You know, were you in Wuhan a few years ago? A little bit of Lordrease. But you talk about, you know, the instantaneous code for the vaccine that could be transmitted around the world.

And, of course, a lot of things have gotten better and tracing and so forth. One thing was kind of provocative that I must say I was surprised by towards the end. You spoke relatively negatively, I would say, about things like blockchain and Bitcoin. is basically, you know, you say that they don't really serve a useful purpose, et cetera. Do you still believe that? Because I can think of some ways that we could use blockchain or Bitcoin, even in the context of, you know, the virus and safeguards, et cetera. Has your opinion changed? Or if not, why do you feel that blockchain is essentially has negative implications for society?

It's a symptom of what's wrong with society that so much. of our effort goes into making things secure. If you imagine what fraction of our economy goes into computer security, safety, air security, etc., things that we would not have to do at all if you could trust each other. Of course, trust in that. I think how much of the economy is unproductive. And, of course, if you think the economy in general, then quite a large fraction of the financial sector is unproductive.

It's creaming off money from the rest of us and not producing anything. I think the way people work and the relatively important of different industries is certainly far from optimal. And I don't know about blockchain may have advantages, but of course the downside is that its main motive is to provide security, which you wouldn't need to bother about it if you could trust people. Right. But of course, you know this from your association with Cambridge and Isaac Newton, that, you know, Isaac Newton was master of the mint, and one of the most vexing problems that he solved was the problem of coin clipping. He did so very ingeniously by putting ridges on coins of precious metal.

I find it very, very, very kind of humorous almost that we still nowadays have these ridges on the edges of quarters, which used to be a quarter ounce of silver in America, and now we're like zinc and tin and aluminum, and they have no value whatsoever, but we still have these fluted or ridged edges that Isaac Newton provided, really solved that age-old problem involving trust and counterfeiting, where coins would be shaved down and the scrapings would then be accumulated enough to make a full coin and that would cause inflation, so much so that in the 1200s, as you know, the Jews of England were expelled because of this concern that they were behind this coin-clipping scandal. And yet this was solved by a physicist, essentially, who had a day job, you know, coming up with calculus,

and gravitation, et cetera. So trust issues go way back. I don't know that this is going to go away. Yeah, I agree. So the other thing that I found, you know, very provocative about this book is that you talk about the opportunities and you talk about how we can use sort of a type of risk management approach to solve some of these vexing problems.

And I guess, you know, first of all, my question to you is, you know, we look at something like, climate change, which you speak very vociferously about in this book, and convincingly, will always have different approaches to complex problems. I don't think there's a single solution. But what is it, you know, in your mind that we would do? If you were emperor, Lord Martin, you know, Lord in the Darth Vader sense, what would you enact, if you could, to start to address this issue? Because let me just preface this by saying, I find it very depressing when we say, you know, there's no solution. We have to cut off everything now. And I remind people that

back in 1800s, do you know what the worst problem is that threatened the financial industry on Wall Street in America, Lord Barn? It was the problem of horse manure that was gathering on Wall Street and preventing traders from going and peddling their stocks. So that was solved, right? It didn't involve, you know, making, putting horses on a diet or, you know, putting diapers on horses. It was solved by technology, naming the car. And I wanted to be. do we not hamper our children in the imagination of future generations by saying, we just have to cut out what we're doing now and not really think so much about maybe, you know, big, risky things that could have huge reward.

So where do you come down? If you could buy fiat, uh, may implement changes. What, what would you start with? Well, if we talk about climates, then I think the answer has to lie in new technology.

I mean, I would have thought most people agree with that. politicians won't gain much resonance if they promote sort of hair, shirt, policy that people have to deny things. But I think with new technology, then I think it is possible for us to move towards a system where we can provide affordable carbon-free energy for the world. And we ought to prioritize this. And I've been arguing certainly in Britain, in Britain, in Britain, We're a small country and we produce less than 2% of the world's CO2 emissions. So if we achieve our declared target of zero net carbon by 2050,

that only made 2% different to the world. But I would claim that our country has had more than 2% of the world's clever ideas of the last few hundred years. And if we had a huge investment in clean energy and, empty stores, batteries and all these things, so that we could make it easier and more for, say, India and Africa to leapfrog directed to clean energy, then we make far more than 2% difference to world CO2 emissions because, of course, the US and us, we can probably cut our energy needs by a factor 2 without any great hardship.

whereas countries like India and Africa, they're going to have to expand their energy needs to have any decent standard of living. And so not only is the population growing very fast there, but the capital consumption is going to be higher. So the most important thing is to ensure that those countries which need to develop can do so in a carbon-free way. And that can be done if the technology is available.

And so we should help them. We, I mean, the arms countries like the US and UK, we should help them by investing very heavily in the development of all the things we need for clean energy. And I include nuclear in this as well. So I think that's the way to do it. And it's hard to think of a more inspiring goal for young engineers than to provide clean and affordable energy, not just for rich countries, but so that India and Africa can develop a better standard. of living. So that's the line I take. And incidentally, a similar argument applies to food, because there'd be nine billion people in the world by 2050, and they certainly can't all eat as much beef as present-day Americans. It's got to be a slightly different diet.

That reminds me, I'm late for a barbecue, so we should hurry. Just kidding. And so we've got to have high-tech agriculture, sustainably intensively. farming of vegetables and also artificial meat. That's a great technology. And it's been advances just the week we're speaking. The artificial meat for American companies being approved in Singapore officially, this is first step forward. And these technologies are important. So I'm saying that the techic advanced countries can develop benign technologies in order to provide carbon-free energy and enough food for nine billion people in the world by 2050. So that's the article I would give.

I did do an interview with an author of a book, Chase Purdy, who wrote the book called Billion Dollar Burger about the quest to produce lab-grown meat. And prices come down from a billion dollars. They're still quite high. I want to finish up in the few minutes that we do have left. If you have a few more minutes, Lord Martin, I very much appreciate it. I want to ask, I'm talking with Leonard Mladen now, who spend a lot of time at Cambridge, working with your late colleague, Stephen Hawking.

And he talks a lot in his most recent book, which is kind of like a biography of Stephen Hawking's friendship with Leonard Milan now. And I wonder, you know, in terms of the partnerships that you've had with remarkable people, I want to get to Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, who passed away as well in a minute. But first with Stephen Hawking, the kind of, you know, collegiality is, I think, one or at least, you know, coming together has been lost in COVID. It is possible to save, you know, on traveling for a colloquium, but it's not possible to have the same colloquial kind of

interactions. And I wonder if that in your mind is going to change, you know, briskly with the advent of a vaccine or is this going to permanently affect science in, in my opinion, a very negative way. All the authors I've written about and you as well talk about your most, you know, kind of delightful moments or with colleagues. So will that be permanently ratcheted down as we go forward? I worry very much about this. And I think it's true that, you know, people like us can probably travel less when it's just for a meeting or something like that.

But thinking back to my own career, I benefited hugely from being able as a postdoc to visit domain centers in the U.S. and to get to know my contemporaries around the world and also have a chance to talk informally to senior people. Now, if your postdoc and there's a big Zoom conference, then you may get your 10-minute slot, but you get no feedback, and you get no chance to chat informally to senior people. So I think whatever we do, if we're in charge of research groups, we've got to make sure that the young people can travel in the way they used to.

I mean, the old people who already have the contacts can probably do their work remotely, if you know people already, but the young people need to have the real contacts. And I think otherwise I would share your concerns very much indeed. And when we think about colleagues outside of our own academic sort of silo, you must have known Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs who passed away. Can you say something about him and what your relationship might have been like as lords? I didn't know him well. I mean, I've read some of his books and I heard him talk.

and he was a very very clear speaker. There's one thing I found very hard to reconcile about him, which was his sort of general sort of ecumenical style in general, combined with his very austere intolerance style doing his job as chief rabbi. It was a famous case when he refused to go to the funeral of a more liberal rabbi, who was a national figure. It was a scandal at the time.

So I couldn't understand how he combined his general views with being rather sort of intolerant in his role as chief rabbi. So that was my perplexity had about him. He, of course, died very suddenly just about a month and a half ago. He was only in his just over 70, I think, wasn't he? Yeah, I think he was 72, very vibrant, and his children and his foundation carry on his important work. One thing he was known for that I do note that you are participating in as well as social media,

and actually you have a Twitter account, if I'm not mistaken, which I'll link to in this. I've had conversations with people. About six months, yes. Yes, yes. It's delightful, and I do. No, no whatsoever. Yeah, and I will put that in the show notes for this episode so people can follow you. But I've spoken with eminent scientist, Paul Steinhart, comes to mind where he views it as a very pernicious element.

Lenny Suskin feels the same way that it almost is, it almost is, it almost is, you. is kind of detrimental in the fact that it may stymie and stifle new ideas. Imagine you're coming up with this idea for CMB polarization in 1968, and you're giving a lecture and, you know, Fred Hoyle's there, Jeff Burbage is there, or when they're not there, but they tweet out, oh, look at this crazy idea. I mean, do you think of it as on the scientific front, obviously in kind of politics or whatever we could take or leave it, but do you believe it has a net beneficial effect? for scientific progress, or do you think it's detrimental?

Well, I think, more than any, outside science, I think it's definitely detrimental. I think social media, they hollow out the center and they amplify extremes, which is the reverse of what we used to have when we had all the news filtered through responsible journalists. But in science, I think I'm ambivalent. I mean, it can do harm. But I think, and again, this is an aspect of what I was saying earlier, about academia becoming less attractive.

I mean, if people are sort of constrained that the only thing that matters is writing a paper in a learned journal, and they will write a few papers per year, and that's it, you know. I think that's a pity. I think we're far better if there was far more blogging and interaction

and people got credit for writing good blogs and inventing new courses and things like that. I think it's unhealthy that in academia, the refereed paper is the only thing that counts. I mean, I agree that there's a risk of lowering standards if you value these other things too much. You've got to make clear that it's a different aspect of one's life.

But I think to actually encourage people who spread and popularize their science widely and engage with these issues, it can be done. I mean, for instance, in my college in Trinity, Tim Gower, she's one of the world's leading mathematicians. He's had a very effective blog, and he's done two things. First, he led the campaign against Elsevier, the commercial publishers ripping off academics with the cost of journals.

But also, he got a theorem that was proved collectively. We talked at the beginning about maths being something which is done in a solitary way, but he had some idea of a theorem that hadn't been proved, and he got this proved by he contributed about 70 different people on his blog and website. And so to encourage people to do that and try and make science of social activity is good. And I think the social activity of science are what are most attractive for me. I mean, I've enjoyed having collaborators being in a place where ideas are buzzing, etc. It becomes a bit solitary if you have to work just on one narrow thing.

theme. So the interaction is very, very important. One thing that's very prevalent on social media now are the presence of artificial intelligent bots. And I want to ask you about artificial intelligence, but maybe a question out of left field. Your feelings of the Nobel Prize are well known, at least to me. You criticized my book, not in your blurb, thank God, but you criticized my book. And you said to me something like, you wish I had focused more on the cosmology and not at all on the Nobel Prize. But I want to ask you pertinent to artificial intelligence, what do you think are the chances that an artificial intelligence could either win a Nobel Prize or create something that would be perceived in physics of being Nobel worthy? I think we had just recently the

protein folding success of the deep mind people, and that's an example. And I think it's quite likely that if string theory is the correct theory, we may only learn that through an AI, having worked through the complicated 10-dimensional geometry. So you can well imagine that the geometry could be coded in such a way that the computer, with the amount of speed, could explore all the options just in the way it's done with protein folding. And as I said earlier on, we'll only know that a theory is called.

correct if it spews out the right mass of the proton or strength of gravity, etc. But it's quite conceivable to me that a theory like string theory involves very, very complicated mathematics, which no human being could do in a lifetime, but which nonetheless could be solved by a machine. And so it doesn't mean you give them a prize, but they would be an aid without which the work would not have been done. So I think that's completely on the cards. Very good. Okay, I want to finish up with questions that I ask of all my guests who come on the show.

And they are really centered around big questions, final questions that in some sense do harken back to Sir Arthur C. Clark, the namesake. of the centre that I co-direct. Did you know, Sir Arthur? I forgot. I didn't. I extend emails with him, actually. Like the jet of M87, and it was artificial. I have emails, but I never actually met him. But his profiles of the future, of course, which is the book we're celebrating, was a big inference on me. Yes, yeah. We have designs to update that for the future. And if so, we will include you. I am of that, I have no doubt. Well, we'll get to Sir Arthur. influence on the final questions after this first question, which I ask of all my guests, and that involves something in Hebrew. It's called an ethical will, a Zava'a. And it is related in

some sense to Alfred Nobel, who gave away his material goods, but he also had this kind of heterodox component that the winners benefit mankind, and that is non-material, immaterial, and sort of ethical in nature. And I want to ask you, if you were to put something in your ethical will, not your material will. And that will undoubtedly, your material will undoubtedly contains nothing but blockchain and Bitcoin after today's conversation. But I want to know, what would you offer in terms of wisdom or values for not only your biological offspring, but your ideological offspring, of which I count myself as one? Going back to my concerns expressed in the book we've been talking about, I would say we've got to

realize that the inequalities in the world need to be reduced. There's inequality within countries and inequalities between the wealthy northern parts of the world and Africa and other parts. We won't have a peaceful world unless those are diminishes. So I think any money I was able to leave, et cetera, would go towards those causes to reducing inequalities because it's an ethical indictment. that the wealth of the two million richest people in the world could double the income of the bottom billion is not happening. I wonder, you know, because you do mention that and you mentioned the, you know, income inequality or just wealth inequality.

Do you have a practical way to, you know, to administer that? You know, for example, I look at there's Michael Atherton was a star cricket player and he's known for, I don't know, how do you say it, hitting many centuries or I don't follow cricket. You can't tell, but never one is very wealthy. And I just wonder, how would we do it? We have short stops in America that make 100 times what I make as a university professor. And they're not even that good. How do you go about doing that? How do you distribute income?

How would you do it, again, as Lord of Empire of the planet, not just of the British Empire? Well, it's accepted as it's getting worse in that the top point 1% is the only segment of the population in the U.S., which is better. off in real terms of 20 years ago. I think this is true. So something is, in my view, going very wrong, and it's almost as bad in my country. And I think the tax system could do something about this. Very good. I don't believe anyone needs such a huge incentive to keep them working. So the next one question I asked my guess, does relate to Sir Arthur C. Clark, and that is connected to the movie 2001 of Space Odyssey, where these primates or hominids on the

plains of the savannah of Africa come upon this enormous monolith. Are you familiar with that scene? Yeah. So then, and then later on, and they don't know what to do with it. So they hit it with a bone or, you know, something which makes me hungry for the barbecue that I'm missing. But, uh, but then later on, it makes an appearance on the moon and space, et cetera. And it's clear it's meant to represent some sort of a time capsule, something that humans are meant to encounter when and only when they are able to benefit from the wisdom or the knowledge or the or something contained within. And you talk a lot in this book about potential cataclysms that could occur. And I want to remind you what Feynman said, it's so-called cataclysm question. He said, 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 contain the most information in the fewest words? And so he gave an answer about atoms containing, you know, being the building blocks of everything. I want to ask you, what would you put on your monolith, a billion-year-lasting time capsule that encapsulates maybe all of science or all of your accumulated wisdom, perhaps? Well, I think Feynman's answer is the one I would give. I mean, that's the best. But I think to phrase such differently, if you ask me what I've changed in my views about from being young to being pretty ancient now, more amazed at the mystery and wonder complexity of the universe and the world, especially

biological world, because most people, you look at an insect or something flying around, and you think the common thing. But if you just think of when the insect flapped its wings once, all the series of chemical reactions that have to go on and how it's got to find out then the amazing complexity in even what we think of a very humble manifest of nature, I don't think when I was young, I appreciated that. I don't think most people do. I think if you think about animals and plants, you don't realize that if you think about them in the way that Feynman is recommending,

which is in terms of basically chemistry, it's amazing the intricacy that's involved. And so I'm more and more amazing. the complexity and wonder and mystery of even simple things. Yeah, me too. I think about that often. When I think back to when I was younger, something sad would make me cry or make me emotional.

And nowadays, it's much more likely to be something good or beautiful, as you just mentioned, that, you know, especially having children, etc., that brings me to the state of emotion because it's so rare, precarious, unlikely, unentropically favored that we experience goodness.

And I think that, the pandemic has taught me that reinforced me that a notion even more so to appreciate the grandeur and the beauty of the world. Of course, we always have to balance that against the tendency to worship nature, the Gaia hypothesis, et cetera. But I thought it was interesting. I interviewed Andrew in the summer, the widow of the late great Carl Sagan, who endorsed your book as well. She's a writer and producer and director of Cosmos. And she talked about your ability to be as a prophet, essentially as a prophecy of being a lost art, but no better person than you to take a multi-dimensional meditation of one of our most distinguished and wise scientific minds. I couldn't agree with that more.

And it remind me to tell you her, I asked her, what would you put on a billion-year lasting time capsule? And she said, you mean what did I put on a billion-year lasting time capsule? Because she- Oh, cool. Yes. Yeah, she recorded her rainwaves for the Voyager one golden disk, so-called golden. disc. I thought that was amazing. I had the honor of giving the first Carl Sagan Memorial Lecture. That's Bornell. You set up for the Carl Sagan Center, and she was there to share it. This was three years ago. Oh, wonderful. Yes. And her daughter has recently become an author and wrote a book

for small creatures such as we, and I had both of them on the show at different times. So it's my first mother-daughter guest appearances on The Into the Impossible Podcast. I call them the first family of the cosmos. No pun intended. No, they're great. In fact, I remember I first met them when they were doing the first Cosmos series in about 1980, wasn't it? Yes. The Cambridge there, and I was already there.

Wow. Yes, I would have loved to have gotten to know, Carl. Unfortunately, there aren't many of them, as you point out. He was unique almost. Maybe there's one other person. But speaking of one other thing, I want to bring up the last of the three questions, which is Sir Arthur C.

Clark had these many laws, and one of which, which we open the show with, is an actual recording of his voice saying any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So that was his, some people say it's the second law. I don't really care. I call it his first law. His second law is, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert, which I have found to be true in some context.

And the last law is the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little bit beyond them into the impossible. And you hinted at this before, but I want to ask you just in summary, what thing about life or science mystified you as a young person, a 20-year-old Martin, before you were a Lord, that you would give advice to, and what would that advice be to your former self to go a little bit into the impossible? What would you tell a younger version of yourself in terms of life advice? Well, I think what I would tell any sort is,

to pick a topic where new things are happening, new observations, new techniques, more power of computers. So you can do things the old guys never had a chance to do. Otherwise, you'll be getting stuck on the things they try to do and fail. So you've got to go into a subject that's changing fast. And if I were to predict what that's going to be, it's going to be the interface of computing and biology and astronomy. And I would encourage them to think about alien life, what might be out there and of course, one of the most exciting areas in science,

of course, as you know, is exoplanet research. In 10 years, we probably know if there's a biosphere on some of them, and you might learn something even more exciting. So I would encourage people to work in a field where there's new techniques, new understanding, and that's, as Carl would be working on if he was still alive, one of the most exciting ones. Absolutely. Well, Lord Martin, Reese,

I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy schedule. You mentioned to me in passing that you were working on another book. Is that true? Yes, what I'm doing. One is going to be a sort of self-facing autobiography. I'm going to sort of talk about the big problems of science, including the ones we haven't yet solved,

but try and humanize it, not with my own story, which is very boring, But by talking about some of the eminent scientists, I've had a chance to meet. Oh, wonderful. Starting with Dirac and going on to Freeman, Dyson, and many others. So I think I can personalize it because I've been lucky to have a chance to meet and learn from a lot of those people. So I'm doing that. I was doing another rather boring book on the Organization of Science and how we've got to make sure that science

still provides a vibrant career for young people and how research should be organized and how university should be changed and all that. So that's a sort of bureaucratic book I'm writing. I would love to help out in any way possible. You've been a huge influence on me personally as a man, as a human being, but as a scientist as well, anything I could do to ever to help you out.

Please do let me know. And I can't wait to read the autobiography. Just don't be like Charles Barclay, the famous NBA basketball player, in America who said he was taken out of context and misquoted in his autobiography. I hope that doesn't happen to you. Lord Reese, thank you so much for going into the impossible, and I look forward to talking to you when your next book comes out. I hope you will discover primordogravagravagination of waves. I'll do my best. I'll do my best. Thank you, Lord, Lord Martin. I want to encourage my

guest to follow Lord Martin on Twitter. He is Lord Martin, Reese, I believe, on Twitter. Let me just looked that up. Yes, Lord Martin Rees at Lord Martin Rees. He also has many, many books, as we've discussed. I want to ask you all to encourage you all, I should say, to please leave a rating and a review on iTunes of this podcast into The Impossible. Subscribe and share it with your friends so we can get more great guests. We're going to have Ray Weiss on the podcast in the next few weeks, Joe Dunkley, who is a fellow member of the Royal British Empire, something like that. She's coming on soon, Giant Narlocar, I already mentioned. And then We have John Preskill coming up in the new year and many, many other great guests and trying to get.

And I, Preskills into AI now, isn't he? He is, he is. He's into AI and quantum, quantum entanglement, all sorts of things. He's spent the money he got from the bet with Hawking very wisely, and we'll talk about that. As Roger Penrose says, you know, no matter what side of a bet you took with Stephen Hawking, you could always be sure of winning it because he changed his mind so much. but we'll have on Leonard Miladno as well, who wrote the biography of his friendship with Stephen Hawking

and many, many other great guests coming up. And I want to thank once again Lord Martin Rees. Have a wonderful rest of your night, and please be in touch about your next book. I can't wait to read it. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere

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