Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Michael Shermer & Brian Keating: Part 1: How it All Began: Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse, and the Nature of Scientific Proof (#150)

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

SAVE 25-40% on SKEPTIC Magazine Subscriptions 1 year/4 issues 25% off print subscriptions (now US $22.50. Reg. US $30) 40% off digital subscription (now US $8.99. Reg. US $14.99)Digital subscribers get the current issue instantly, and three more issues follow as they are released throughout the year. Digital subscription can be synchronized to your favorite handheld devices: https://www.skeptic.com/magazine/app/#sync-devices Subscribe to the digital editionhttps://pktmags.com/keatingSubscribe to the print editionhttps://shop.skeptic.com/subscribeThen enter coupon code at checkout: keating Thanks to our sponsors! https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible http://betterhelp.com/impossible Shermer and Keating discuss: cosmology and Intelligent Design, the fine-tuning of the universe, the multiverse and theism: many worlds or one God? How does the Intelligent Designer or God as a disembodied mind interact with the physical universe? If the origin of the universe and its fine-tuned nature points to an intelligence or mind behind it, why don’t most cosmologists, physicists, and astronomers accept that conclusion? What are laws of nature? Can you explain the origin of the universe by laws and rules of things in the universe? What came before the Big Bang? What caused the bang that gave rise to our universe? Why there is something rather than nothing? inflationary cosmology, What is gravity? What is quantum gravity? How did the Big Bang theory win out over the Steady State theory? the difference between Popperian falsification, Kuhnian paradigm, and consensus science, Is string theory physics, metaphysics, or mathematics? What shape is the universe? Open, closed, or flat? What is dark energy and dark matter? What is time? What is infinity? cyclic universes and the multiverse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome, everybody, to part one of this fascinating in-depth discussion between Michael Shermer and Brian Keating about Brian's recent cover article in Skeptic magazine, How It All Began, Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse, and the nature of scientific proof. You have the cover story here it is, because I'm out of actual physical copies. Maybe you have a physical copy there of the latest issue of skeptics. So there it is. Yeah, in the beginning. Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse, and the Nature of Scientific Proof. So when I commissioned you to do this long, I don't know, many months ago now last year, actually, you know, this was before I even knew that Stephen Meyer was writing this book,

the return of the God hypothesis, or that Mitchie O'Coccu was coming out with a book, the God equation. Note the similarities of the covers. So after you finish with your Galileo book, you need to write a God book. and have some cover like that. So, you know, the topics you cover in the cover story of skeptic really have nothing to do with theism and God and religion. That wasn't the purpose of it.

You know, I just wanted to know what's the latest on the biggest questions, where the universe came from, and, you know, why does it appear to be fine-tuned? And, you know, what's the shape of the universe and what is time? And, you know, all those great questions, which to me, those are scientific questions. and you're a scientist. But you know, it's, you don't have to dig very deep to realize, well, they do have theistic implications because you can't help but wonder, well, where did it all start? And therefore, is there something like a sentient mind behind it all? So let's start there.

I mean, you just had Stephen Meyer on your podcast and I listened to the whole thing. It was great conversation. And so for an outsider like me, I'm a social scientist, not a physicist, so I don't really know. kind of trust you guys, the experts, to tell me what's the latest debate and is there consensus on this theory or that theory or is there no consensus and so on? So when someone like you reads Stephen Myers' book that makes a really strong case for behind it all, behind the Big Bang, behind the fine-tuning, the cosmological constants and all that, if he had such a convincing argument, you know, why don't you convert? That is to say, why don't you go,

oh, yeah, he's right. I'm now atheist, and maybe I'm even a Christian because, not in this book, but elsewhere, they then go from the design universe and the designer to, you know, Jesus really died for your sins and the whole thing, and you become a Christian. So the fact that you and other professional scientists who would read his book or his previous books or other books by Bill Dembski and others in the Intelligent Design Movement have not converted or become theists. Why not? How do you know that? Actually, I'm late for my church. I converted not only to be a theist, but now I am converted from Judaism to Christianity. No, I didn't do that. And actually, I told him that because he, Michael, that book is huge. You're holding up

Stephen Meyer's book. And when he, I received it in my mailbox here at UCSD in December, mid-December, or no, early December. And it said, Dr. Keating, I love your work. I love it if you would consider endorsing this book. And oh, by the way, it'd be great to have it by next Thursday. I was like, okay, well, at least you gave me seven full days to read. You know, it's like 80 pages a day, the way that Stephen writes.

I said, absolutely, I can't do that. I'm happy to have a conversation about maybe doing it. But I need to have the following conversation with you, Stephen. I said, I have a problem with people like those of your fellow folks that travel in ID and in so-called Christian apologetics. And that said, I'm Jewish. I'm a practicing Jew. I call myself a devout agnostic. And I can explain what that means.

But the fact is, a lot of times I'll hear the following set of logical syllogisms, that everything that began had a beginner, everything that began had a purpose. and therefore Jesus. So in other words, the universe had a beginning. The universe must have had a beginner, namely a God, and therefore that God had some purpose, and therefore the God is personal, and the God also formed in the form of the tripartate God, Jesus Christ, to not only exist for the creation of the universe, but also for my own personal redemption. I said, I'm a Jew. I don't accept that. I accept that Jesus existed. I accept that he, we even know who his rabbi was in the Talmud, you know there's no better source of documentation of ancient Judea and Samaria than the Talmud. We know who his rabbi was. We know who that guy's rabbi was, et cetera.

There's no doubt that he existed. The question of ours to his faith claims and the actual theaithistic, theistic implications of believing in such an entity. So I said, along the way, I'm going to tell you that I read this as a cosmologist. And I find oftentimes with William Lane Craig in particular, that it's sort of this, it borders on confirmation bias. It borders on manipulation of evidence to support a conclusion. And that conclusion always ignores the existence of alternative cosmologies, of which there are many. And in this article for the cover issue of Skeptic Magazine this quarter, I want to flash out the fact that it is by no means settled that there was a Big Bang. Now listen, I said a big bang because it seems to me that if there were multiple big bangs, that doesn't give more support for a creator.

It might even give less support for a creator. And I wanted to bring to bear the full brunt of today's modern understanding of theoretical cosmology and potential alternative stories to the Genesis 1-1 narrative, which, by the way, Michael, you should know that was resisted. I'm sitting in the office of a man by the name of Jeffrey Burbage, who passed away 10 years ago, 11 years ago. Jeffrey worked with Fred Hoyle, and they were long-term proponents of the steady-state model until his death. In fact, their number one protege, one of Hoyle's foremost graduate students, his name is Giant Narla Carr. And he lives today, thankfully. He's in Pune, Pune, India. And I interviewed him from my podcast into The Impossible.

And he still believes in the steady state, and he still believes the big bank are believed in. If you can believe it, somewhat owes to the fact that it completely. with Genesis 1-1. So listen very carefully what I'm saying. They are saying the quasi-steady-state and steady-state theorists, which are the principal alternative to the Big Bang, their foremost proponents believe that my colleagues in the cosmology wing of this university believe in the Big Bang only because they're overwhelmed by the Genesis-1-1 narrative. What could be more kind of ludicrous to a practicing cosmologist? And yet there are many alternatives to this very moment to the state. standard origin story that has a single big bang.

And it's actually one of the most interesting areas of cosmology to work in. The question is, can we prove it? And I thought it would be fun to talk about proof and the limits of proof. Because that's sort of the outcome of this discussion. And, you know, you say kind of dismissively, oh, I'm just a social scientist. You're much more than a social scientist, Michael. You understand the currency of science revolves around the centuries-old scientific method, which has at its core

some level of confrontation of a model or a theory with evidence. And nowadays, Michael, what's troubling me so much, I had on Mitchie O'Caccoe, I know you did on your podcast. I pushed on him as a physicist. You pushed on them in really interesting ways

that kind of complimented with aliens and with, you know, traversing your avatar at the speed of light. I thought you did a wonderful job in ways I could not. But on the cosmological side, we are left with an essentially infinite number of possible universes according to both the multiverse and string theory. And I said, I find this dangerous. I find it dangerous for the scientific method. Yeah, interesting. Just to put an extra point on that, someone like a Stephen Meyer, although he

hasn't said this to me, but others have. Well, Schumer, if you understood the quantum physics, or if you knew the equations, or if you understood inflationary cosmology, which you don't, you'd see that, you know, I'm right about this particular argument. Well, you could say that about me. And you could even say, well, and you're a public atheist. Of course, you're not going to accept these arguments for theism. Yeah, well, you can't say that about you, Brian, Keating, because you're not a rabid, militant atheist,

and you are a cosmologist. And you certainly can't say this about, say, someone like the head of the Human Genome Project and National Institutes of Health. What's his name? His name just escapes me right now. No, no, not Francis Crick. Not Francis Crick. Anyway, he'll come to me.

You know, he's an evangelical Christian, and he headed the human genome project, right? So he understands genetics and complexity of life and so on. There are atheists and atheist cosmologists. So in other words, I kind of lean on this consensus theory of how science works, that, you know, were scientists who had been... Francis Collins. Francis Collins. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, Francis Collins. Thank you. It's hell getting old. Anyway, you know, when you talk about something like, you know, consensus science and climate science or the Big Bang cosmology or the theory of evolution, you know, it's not like these guys are all meaty on the weekends to get their story straight because those intelligent designers or those liberal Democrats are going to try to destroy American economy so they have to have this global warming thing.

You know, they work independently of one another and in competition often for grants and journal space and so on. So they're trying to debunk each other such that an outsider like me can go, okay, the fact that they've reached consensus is a signal to me that, you know, they're probably going along the right track here. By contrast, if things are just kind of, if the steady state and Big Bang theories were still kind of 50-50,

and you guys couldn't make up your mind after 50 years, I begin to think, I wonder if there's a problem here. Like, again, the string theory, why I pushed Michio on this topic, and how can you test it? Because, you know, you guys have had decades and decades, and there seems to be no consensus. You know, is there a conceptual problem here with how you're approaching it? Again, I don't know anything about string theory, but I can kind of see how science tends to work. So that's why I wanted to ask you that, you know, that kind of big question, if someone like Stephen Myers has such a convincing argument, why aren't science?

going, okay, then he's right. We have to follow this track. Maybe you don't have to become a Christian. You could, you could become a theist, something like that. To give him his fair shake, you know, I personally don't believe many of the people who profess to believe in theistic explanations, truly believe in theism, based on behavior of, you know, people that I witness, not to say that I'm literally holier than now in any case. But I think, you know, there's such an extreme, you know, almost like unconscionable burden. Like I once thought, like, how could a view? vegan brush their teeth, you know, like, you're killing all these microbes and, you know, it's like, I think, you know, ridicule out absurdium certainly would apply. But I think, you know,

in Stevens case, he, you know, I think he is obviously very convinced, but he also has the intellectual honesty, at least to admit that he can't prove it. And I push back in several different directions. So one is the, the lack of unanimity, I would say, and lack of a dearth. In other words, there are many plausible alternatives to the, you know, the standard Big Bang model. Second of all, even the models that he espouses in the book, well, sorry, even the models that he espouses in the book have serious lacunae in them that make them

either untestable, unprovable, unverifiable, and subject to the multiverse kind of out paradigm. But they're tentative in a way that they cannot even be expected to have falsifiable evidence against them. Now, I thought it would be interesting for us to talk about Carl Popper for a second. You're not a physicist, but you know Carl Popper has enormous influence on science, even though, you know, and Stephen actually, you know, brought this out because I did push back at one point and we did talk about Popperism, and I knew this, but, you know, by the demarcation, you know, assay, by the statement that you can judge if a theory is scientific via the ability for it. be falsified, that that is the sine qua non is no longer held by even philosophers of science, let alone should be held by scientists. I claim that's because that it is held sacrosanct,

Michael. I claim that's because physicists, remember, did you ever hear like, well, you must have heard of penis envy, and I know we can say such words, but there's also something called physics envy, where some of the sciences had envy of how rigorous physics can be. But actually, I think physicists have mathematics envy. Because we cannot prove, the boundaries of what we do or do not know in the gerdellian sense, in the sense that we don't have an incompleteness theorem for physics because we don't prove things. I never go out and prove things. That's not what I do. We just disprove things. So physicists, in lieu of that have resorted to Popper, and they kind of have this, even though Popper himself said it's sometimes

very useful for a theory to remain untestable, maybe for some time, because it allows a hardening, kind of an annealing of the true theory to come out. My question is, we live in reality. Although many of our listeners may not believe that, we have to get jobs, we have to get grants, we have to teach students. And in so doing, we need resources. And those resources can only be allocated in a finite sense. There's a science I always say, Michael, lately I've been saying this.

And again, you've been so influential on me as a podcaster, as a thinker. and I'm, you know, delighted to be a part of skeptic now. It's funny, you know, having an article in skeptic and also a video for Prager University, I think that that might be unique, although I'm not quite sure in the same month. But nevertheless, you know, thinking about, you know, what is the ultimate limit of what we do? I say nowadays, science is not an infinite, is not a finite game. It's not a winner takes all game where I'm right, therefore Michael's wrong, and then we just go on. But funding sure is. There's only so much funding. There's a finite amount of funding. There's a zero-sum funding and just like there is for

podcasts. I mean, we can only listen to one podcast. So how do you divide your attention, the most valuable commodity of all? And how do you divide these resources? And so in reality, string theory and inflation, these twin pillars of modern-day cosmological physics now are sort of dominant for almost 40 years. And to the exclusion of almost any other paradigm, receiving funding, attention, and perhaps the resources that it needs to provide. So should it be surprising that we find ourselves in a situation where these are touted as proven? And I find that, again, kind of dangerous from the progress in physics that I hope to agenda. Yeah, I think of just to close the door of how I opened was, I think of these kinds of arguments that intelligent design creationists make as vastly superior to the old arguments made by the young Earth creationists, say, in the 6th, and 70s and in the Gish Gallop when Dwayne Gish would plow through 300 slides and then give you

five minutes to respond. Those kinds of arguments. You know, these guys have greatly improved on that. And yet, I think they're good arguments if you already believe. That is, if you're already a theist, particularly if you're a Christian and you believe that, you know, that a sentient being of omniscient and omnipotent power, you know, create the universe and us and cares about us. and so on, all these arguments are pretty good.

I mean, it's like, yeah, yeah, they're very reinforcing in a Bayesian kind of way. I already believe, so I'm piling up more and more confirmatory evidence for my beliefs. And then to the Bayesian thing, I think Paparian falsification is just one element of science. Scientists do reason in a Bayesian way, where you guys are trying to update your priors, so you run an experiment, and the experiment comes out one way or the other. If it comes out in a positive way, that kind of ups your prior to the credence of your theory being true, true with a small T, no capital T's. And I think what's particularly confusing to a lot of us, again, outsiders, is that the areas you working in, that you work in are so sort of abstract or, you know, non-concrete. So I'm going to read something to you here from Stephen Pinker that he wrote me in a, in a,

in a little group email. After I had Mitch Okaku on the podcast, a couple of my cycling friends who listened to the podcast emailed me, commenting on what I just said. This stuff is all so abstract, you know, Higgs boson and the inflationary, this, and the flatness of the universe,

or what, what? You know, and so Steve made this observation, which, you know, he's just so good at this sort of thing. He says, it seems to me that any ultimate theory in fundamental physics is going to be hard to test, because at some point we're bound to ask questions that just happen to be inconvenient or impossible for mortal humans to study for practical reasons.

For example, you can't build a particle accelerator the size of the solar system. But the universe wasn't created for the benefit of scientists, and it may be our bad luck that we don't have the means to build labs to test every theory. That's when elegance, parsimony, consistency, scope, etc. are the only criteria we can apply. And then he makes a comment because we also discusses. the nature of consciousness. It also seems inevitable that at any level of depth, the theory is going to look pretty abstract, almost vindicating a kind of idealism where the only reality

is the math. Sorry, I'm still continuing with the abstract physics. One wouldn't expect a theory to add a note at the end of its equations. Oh, and there are 80-bitty little tiny bits of hard stuff out there corresponding to the seventh term of equation 39. And then he says, as a cognitive scientist, I'm always mystified by claims that consciousness can only be explained by some highly abstract or counterintuitive or uptruse theory in physics. That would be called for if ESP existed, but as Michael is documented for decades, it doesn't. 100% of consciousness depends on photons, striking rods and cones, vibrating sound pushing against eardrums, neurons, transmitting chemicals across synapses and computational networks, etc. If consciousness is

source directly from fields, here he's referring to like quantum fields, based on one theory. Why do we have to turn on the lights and open our eyes to see? Such a great comment. So here I'm wondering, you know, are we at a point, you guys, you physicists, theoretical physicists and comologists, you're just kind of bumping up against the wall of all we have now is math, because we can't really test these super abstract theories. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking. maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing.

It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at Redfin.com. Own the dream. Well, there I've got good news and good news, because actually we can test the alternatives to say inflation, which produces this, you know, resplendent, extravagant, multiverse, and the cosmological. So I should say, let me take a step back.

There's two different types of multiverses at minimum that physicists talk about, and one of which is one in the cosmological sense, that just as we have multiple planets, we have multiple stars and galaxies, et cetera, there are multiple universes. So that's just the evolution of the cosmological principle, the Copernican principle. So that's something that almost seems natural that there should be other universes. And of course, there's nothing, even in the bounds of ordinary cosmology, that precludes there being a universe right next door as some one quipped once. You know, there's a heck of a universe right next door, let's go. But there could be a universe that's literally, you know, one light day away from our observable universe's boundary, the light cone from which we can receive information during the next day.

and we'll find out about it, splashed across the front page of the New York Times tomorrow, the Santa Barbara News Press or the Union Tribune. There's another type of multiverse, which is that there are universes separated in space and or in time, and they're separated in many different ways by not only their differing physical phenomena that take place.

In other words, there could be so many that, you know, I host a podcast called the Brian Keating Show, a new host one called The Into the Impossible podcast. On the other hand, there could be universes where there's six dimensions of space and one of time. There could be universes where the speed of light is slower than our speed of sound, et cetera, et cetera. So there are limits, by the way, to the existence of life forms like ours in the so-called weak anthropic principle sense. But let me ask this question. I've been thinking about this one a lot because I don't think this has really been addressed.

I asked Mitchie Okaku about this. And I said, you guys always who talk about the string multiverse, which is the latter form of the multiverse that I just spoke about, you always talk about that as having, you know, the different mass of the proton, the speed of light, the nuclear force will change a little bit. But what's to prevent the laws of logic that modus tollens applies or not in another universe? It seems to me that if you can let everything change and that two plus two could be five in another and another universe, then it's basically hopeless. Because in that case, you could never potentially test the non-existence or prove the non-existence of such a universe because we would not only lack the experimental tools. You know, what Stephen Pinker's talking about is enhancements to our own sensors. So I did a podcast with Deepak Chopra and Leonard Malad now. And I talked about, we talked about like I called it sensors and sensibility.

You know, it's like what we see is what we interact with. And then, you know, Michael's claiming that we don't have any free will. because everything's foreordained in the wave function of the universe, whatever that means. And then Deepak's saying, no, there's all this quantum decoherence. And it's like, yeah, grudgingly, I have to say, you know, both of them are right and both of them are wrong. The problem is we don't observe the universe outside the universe. We are observing it from within. And so we are subject to certain basic tenets.

And the lack of our ability to gauge the existence of another universe may be due to physical limitations, namely the finite speed of light, the finite age of the observable universe, et cetera. So I think of these as cosmic chicken or egg problems. In other words, which came first, you know, the universe or the laws of physics? Because if you ask Lawrence Krause, who's going to be a guest coming up on my podcast for his climate change book, I'm, you know, if you ask him, you'll say, oh, the laws of physics, you know, and the Lincoln theorem, which he popularized in his book called a universe from nothing, suggests that the universe can emerge from this balance between negative energy and positive energy,

canceling out so zero means nothing means it can come from nothing. No, that's not actually correct. That's not an interpretation that even Valen can recognize. It's merely the statement that there had to be a pre-existing universe in the sense of the laws of quantum mechanics, the laws of mathematics, et cetera. What Stephen Meyer gets into is that only such things that have boundaries, conditions, what we call in physics, if you look at a pendulum swinging back and forth, Michael, you can't tell me where I started the bob of the pendulum. You can't tell me because you don't know the initial conditions. You just know the total energy in the system, but you don't know the initial conditions. Similarly, you have to know the boundary conditions of a system. You have to know,

what volume is it contained within? And what are the interactions of the measurement apparatus on the subject being measured? So for all these reasons, I find it very difficult to glean from the current book that we're discussing with Stephen Myers book, that because the universe started in low entropy, as many people, if not all people, believe that that is evidence of order, because that presupposes a pre-existing pre-order. And so I asked him, I said, Michael, why? I said, Michael, I said, Stephen, why is it that if you were alive, Michael, in the very early universe, apart from the first three minutes, the next billion or so years would have been the most boring, you know, in recorded history? It was nothing.

how hydrogen formed over here. That's about it for hundreds of millions of years. And then if you'll just think about us as our DNA, DNA didn't emerge for a very long time, at least on Earth. We don't understand exactly when the first humans that look like that. So in other words, everything was created by this mind with a purpose, according to you, Stephen, and yet, why was there, you know, billions of years waiting between events? In other words, the clock, you could have looked back and forth, and if you looked every billion

years or so, you'd say this is a pretty slow universe. He didn't have an answer for that. He said, you know, God can create the Hubble Deep Field. He can create anything he wants. So I found that very unsatisfying. Yeah, I did. I did too. I was surprised he didn't come up with something like this, which I've heard, that is to say to an eternal deity, you know, what difference does it make of us $14 billion or $14 trillion?

Eternity goes way past that. So, you know, whether it's 10 years, 10 million years, 10 billion years, 10 trillion years, they're just zeros after the one. and to an eternal being that doesn't really matter. You have a puppy, right? I have a puppy. I have a dog, yeah. You have a dog. So you got that dog when you're in your 50s or whatever.

Like, you could ask the same question. Like, I waited. It's not the duration that you demurred from making a decision or making a phenomena instantiate itself. It's the, it's the relevant time scale is the time scale. And when that thing started to take action and have effect that you as the designer, if you will, of that dog's particular life, had a purpose for. In other words, intelligence, you know, there are things that can appear intelligent,

but they actually convey no real information to us, right? It's patterns, like a license plate, like Feynman's famous license plate. Yeah, yeah. On the way over this lecture, I saw the following license, 6Q7, 4 TV. Oh, that's intelligent. No, it's not. It is absolutely meaningless. It was created by an intelligence, but so too with your dog, I would say what is the purpose

of your life up until getting that dog was getting the dog, which it would seem to be, if we are the pinnacle of creation, which I can actually take some stock in for practical reasons, not me personally, but nevertheless, why wait so long? Why create so many, uh, different universes? Your point is that if, if it's all here for us, why wait 14, 13.8 billion years or 13.7, I guess, you know, to create, uh, life forms and so on. Um, yeah, well, I have the same problem, too, as well as this problem, which I want to ask him about, and he started to go down that path, but then he kind of changed the subject. That is, how does, uh, how does, the deity, the intelligent designer,

how does God do all this stuff? And I would push it even more than this. It's the same problem that Descartes started with a dualistic worldview. How does mind interact with the stuff? Like to ghost hunters, I always

ask them, how does the ghost know to turn right at the hallway and open the door? And how does the ghost knock the picture off the wall? You know, the ghost is supposedly this non-material substance. It's the same problem we have with consciousness. How does a thought cause my muscles to move?

Well, you know, the synaps is, you know, and the neurons fire and so on. Yeah, but how does the thought cause the neuron to fire? Well, other neurons are firing. Right. Yeah, those are just physical systems. If you impute behind that a mind, how does the mind interact with the physical stuff? And so I would just ask, you know, like if God is performing miracles, how does he do it? Does it, you know, reach into the cells and, let's say, cure the,

at Mary's cancer, does he go into every cell in the tumor and reprogram it so that it dissolves and the tumor gets smaller? Exactly how does this happen? And, you know, the only answer you're going to get is, well, God works in mysterious ways or nobody knows or that's an unanswerable question or I don't know what. At some point. Similarly, to push back, yeah, oh, go ahead. No, no, good. That's it. Yeah, so the, yeah, exactly my feeling, you're echoing beautifully, Michael, but I also can push back because I've heard talks by, say, you know, Sean Carroll. And Sean will say things like, well, God is not a good theory. He, of course, is too smart to say there is no God, I can prove it. He'll say the probability of God is less than a few tenths of a percent, but the probability

of the multiverse he puts at 50-50, and it depends on what multiverse. I think he believes the multiverse in the Everettian many worlds conception is 100%. He believes that is the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. But nevertheless, just thinking, cosmological multiverse, and I'll say to him, well, what is the evidence for that? Well, he says, well, God could and should produce the simplest, most parsimonious universe first, and that would be an empty universe. In other words, the fact that our universe has stuff in it, stuff that can think of things, is now evidence that God is at least not parsimonious. And I say to him, well, and he says, yeah, just look at the Hubble Deepfield. And I said to him, I said, well,

Sean, you know, he was like, look at all those galaxies. You know, even if there is life there, we can never interact with it, and therefore it's pointless to our existence on Earth. So we cannot be, you know, most people think that Galileo showed we were not the center of the solar system. He didn't do that. He just showed that there are other rightful places that could claim to be the center of the universe, and that was enough to at least disprove the thought that we were the center of the universe, right?

So he said, well, those galaxies over there have no purpose to us. And if we are the pinnacle of creation, it can't be so that those other things exist for any purpose that matters to us because they don't do anything for us. And I said, well, Sean, the same thing could have been said about uranium in the year 1842. They didn't know about uranium and they didn't know about quantum mechanics and all these four. And by the way, two weeks ago I had on my podcast someone discussing a new potential fifth force of nature discovered at the large Hadron Collider. That's a force we didn't know about until 2021. If it holds up, which it may or Why not? But the point is that we can, we don't yet know the purpose for many things that scientists discover.

And again, I'm pushing back as the theist. And I said to, I said to, you know, to Sean, I have my upstairs professor colleague, she studies that galaxy over there in the Hubble Deepfield. And his response was, oh, come on. You can't be serious. Like, I was like, that's a purpose. I've just provided you one particular person in the universe for whom that serves a purpose. And you're saying that's not, that doesn't qualifies, well, so too does the evidence for the pre-existing Hilbert space that contains an empty universe in quantum mechanics that Sean believes in, that is enough to refute the existence of a designer who had a purpose for us specifically. So I find, you know, I like to give people a grief on both sides, Michael. I don't know. Is there a name for my condition? I like to push back on both the the theists and the atheist.

I think that makes me an agnostic. I'm not sure. Yeah. What is a, what do you call it, militant agnostic? I don't know. And you don't know. and you don't either, or something like that? Is that what you are? How do you define your, how do you define agnosticism? Yeah. So I define agnosticism, again, similar, you once told me you don't call yourself an atheist, usually because that means you're defining you by what you're not.

So I shouldn't define myself by what I'm not, but I will say that I know what like Michi Okaku is not. I know what the late great friend of mine, Freeman Dyson, was not. In other words, they would not go to the same church that Richard Dawkins does not go to. And so there was no functional way for an intelligent alien, if such exists, to look at Michio Kaku and distinguish him functionally from our friend Richard Dawkins. Right. So there's no way to tell in practice which one is which. And so we know that we are the sum of a lot of what impacts is. It's our behavior. I think you're a behaviorist to some of them.

I certainly am. And I believe that, you know, behavior is a manifestation of what our worldview is. And so Michio doesn't go to church. And he may say that he's agnostic, but I kind of feel, I wonder, I hope it's not true, that he is like Stephen Hawking. You know, Stephen Hawking put things like the mind of God at the end of his brief history of time. And so does Michio Kaku. And I think sometimes that's to not turn off theos. And I hope that's not the case for Michio. At least I know it was for Hawking, but I'm actually having, you'll like this guy.

I'll send him over your way if you're interested. Charles Seif at NYU who wrote Zero The Birth of a Dangerous. He just wrote a book called Hawking Hocking Hocking and it's about the business of Stephen Hawking and how he was a showman. That's clever. That's clever.

It's the first critical biography of Stephen Hawking as opposed to all the hagiography that exist around him. One of the pieces of hagiography was that he was a kind man and he didn't care if people believed in God. He was pretty militant in all of his books that God did not exist and he could prove it. And his way to prove it, Michael, was one, inflation to invalidate the need for God to establish

the universe. And two, string theory, or what's called M theory, which is what Michio describes. And that was to instantiate the laws of physics. And neither one of which is held as proven or ever could be, thanks to even the discussions according to their proponents, such as Alan Gooth and Michio Cucco. Here is what Leonard Milano writes in his memoir of St. Stephen Hawking. So here he is, Leonard is quoting Stephen, who typed this out to him. A law is not a law if you allow God to intervene, he said. That leaves two possible roles for God.

One is to choose the initial condition of the universe. We got rid of that with the no boundary proposal. I wrote about that in a brief history of time. The other possible role is for God to be responsible for choosing the laws and making a universe based on those laws. It shall arise in the last chapter of our book that it is not necessary to invoke God for this either. He's referring to the grand design that they wrote together. Hawking continues, I want to make my position clear without being violently anti-religion like Richard Dawkins, he continued. I have just been sent his book, The God Delusion.

If you want to see it, get Judith, I agree with most of it, but I don't think it is necessary to be so aggressive. And then at the end of the memoir, in the closing pages, here, Leonard recalls the day that that book came out, the Grand Design, and Stevens Secretary or assistant, whoever calls Leonard, and says,

have you seen the Times? She asked. The New York Times, I said? Yes, I'd read it. Not the New York Times. The London Times. Haven't you seen it? And Leonard says, Judith, who here reads the London Times? Well, Google it. Look at the headline. It says, quote,

Hawking. God did not create the universe. It's creating a furor. Then Leonard continues. That's wrong, I said. We said, God, is it necessary for creating the universe? Not that physics proves he didn't. Well, the press is all over it, and Stephen can't handle it all. We need your help.

You need to do some interviews. So, you know, he's basically saying, you know, don't put Hocking in the same category with Richard Dawkins in terms of how militant is. But, I mean, he was, you know, in this book by Charles Seif, Professor Seif really makes the case that he cultivated that image, but he was much more kind of calculating behind the scenes. Those two things that he talks about a brief history of time and a grand design, those are accepted 100% by the public and almost zero percent by practicing physicists. Really? So it's a total sales drop that absolutely. Well, inflation is not, is not,

essentially it's not provable in the sense that you could only, you know, you can't, you can't falsify it, as we said earlier. You could not show evidence that. that's inconsistent with inflation if inflation could have existed. So for example, let's say that there's evidence A. Evidence A will occur for inflation enough to provide supporting evidence for it. And if evidence A occurs, that means you can reasonably infer in a Bayesian sense that inflation took place. Well, there's a couple things that could happen.

One, inflation didn't happen, in which case you won't see evidence A. But also, it could be that inflation did take place, but it did so in a way that inflation as to provide noisy enough data that you can never detect it with confidence level greater than one. So in that case, you'd be in this no man's land and it becomes a matter of taste. That applies to the inflationary component that was he brought out. And actually, he didn't play a huge role in inflation. And this book makes out a big point that Hawking would write papers with people. And in this case, he wrote a paper with my colleague at UC Santa Barbara named James Hartle, the No Boundary Proposal. And in that,

I believe that they probably did, or Hawking, he would write papers and people would say, yeah, I'll be on the paper with you because it's going to get a thousand times more citations than if I write it by myself, knowing that Hawking would take all the credit for it. Actually, Andy Strominger is quoted in this book, who's a renowned professor at Harvard, saying that in his last paper in 2017 or so, he made that calculation and he decided to go with it, even though he knew he'd be written out of the history books for credit. But in the context of the No Boundary Proposal, if you read the book, as I did recently and again, I tried to read it when I was 18 when it came out. I couldn't understand it. Now I'm a practicing cosmologist. Not only is it like, I don't say trivial, but it's simple for me. And I'm not a theoretical cosmologist, by the way. I'm an experimental cosmologist.

But I was simple enough for me to know that he made a very, very almost disingenuous trick in that book. And that was in the calculation where he talks about. time not having a beginning and there being nothing north of the North Pole and that being a stupid question. He makes what Stephen Meyer points out is an exact accuracy. He makes a mathematical approximation. He converts the time domain into what's called imaginary time, which it doesn't have a physical existence, cannot be measured. It's merely a mathematical trick. If you remember anything about imaginary numbers, the imaginary numbers are a square root of negative numbers, which shouldn't exist according to normal experience with numbers.

We don't have a number that's the square root of negative 2. Such thing doesn't exist, but when you introduce a negative square root of negative 1, such things can't exist. Hawking does that, and he says, I'm going to do a little mathematical trick, but it's just a trick. And then later on he goes,

because of that trick, now we know the time is imaginary, and time could start with no beginning whatsoever, just like there's no beginning of the earth's surface. It's so disingenuous and the worst possible read of it at best. It's like a convenience. It's like saying, I'm going to do like some mathematical, you know, gibberish here. And then at the end, I'm going to say, I'll make a conclusion.

But I'll go back and I'll remind you, I still have to address that. He never addressed that. And so that is not accepted by almost any working cosmologist today. The first book, this brief history of time. And I ask you, did you come away from your conversation with Kaku being convinced that string theory or M theory is. And that's why we have the laws. It's basically the anthropic principle. You're saying there's an infinite number of universe, infinite, because the vacuum of string theory,

the lowest possible energy state that a theory can have is completely undefined within the theory. And here's where I don't like what Kaku does. Kaku says, well, it's not fair to ask that we test string theory today because we don't know its principles in final form. I know that you're not a physicist, but you know for sure that we don't have a final theory We have quantum mechanics either, right? We don't have, we have interpretations, we have principles, but you know, you and I wouldn't be talking if we didn't have the laws of physics that govern quantum behavior to produce the

transistors in the screen that you and I are conversing through. So it's very different to, you can't say that the lack of a underlying principle is a deterrent, an impediment to getting something useful, like a transistor that produces an image on a screen. Because we have examples where such things occur where we don't understand the principles. principles that govern them at their most basic behavior. So I think that is not an honest assessment of why we should not, why we should abandon the 400-year-old scientific method. I came away highly unconvinced.

Interesting, yeah. I guess I am too in that version of the multiverse, the string theory version, if I'm getting that right, where there's somewhere there's a version of you and I almost exactly the same in which I have more hair than you instead of vice versa. And that just seems pretty ridiculous. It seems pretty ridiculous, Michael. That's what I did. It seems pretty ridiculous.

Okay. It seems more likely if there's a multiverse that, you know, it's these other universe, other bubble universe is unconnected to ours. But then the atheists could reasonably retort like we do to them. You know, you need to be more specific in step two here, referring to the Sydney Harris cartoon with the two mathematicians at the two scientists at the chalkboard with the masses of equations. And then a miracle happens in the middle. you know, that we're accusing them of saying you're just making this leap of faith. There's no evidence for this. You're just believing it.

You're just asserting it. And they could then come back to something like this untestable string theory. You're just making this up, this multiverse thing. Now, but to make a slight point here to ask you this question, because Myers makes this point, as do other intelligent designers, you guys just made up this multiverse to avoid the inevitable conclusion that a deity is behind it all. And as I understand it, that's not where the multiverse comes from. It comes out of the equations or it's a derivative of some mathematics or something like that.

In other words, you weren't sitting around going, oh, crap, we're going to have to say that there's a God, and I don't want that. So I'm going to make up this stuff about the multiverse. Well, right. So exactly. It's funny because these are relatives of the so-called Copernican principle. So in the, I think it was the 500th anniversary of Copernicus's birth, there was a there was a kind of a fest shrift a party held for Copernicus in

crackow or yeah and so there there were scientists I think is Brandon Carter who came up with this proposal that he called the Anthropic principle that is sort of you know so the anthropic principle stands kind of opposite from the from the Copernican principle so it's kind of ironic birthday gift to get for for old Nicholas but nevertheless the the multiverse emerges from different phenomena than the string theory. That's actually true. So I would say string theory contains within it a more natural multiverse, which is called the landscape in the language of string theory, then does cosmology in the inflationary

multiverse. Because if inflation took place, you can have inflation without a multiverse, but you can't have string theory without some form of a landscape. In other words, there's more prolific, more extravagance in the landscape of string theory than the landscape of inflation. And part of the proof of that is that you can have string inflation. So, you know, what's better than chocolate or peanut butter, right? You put them both together. And in the case of, you know, the string theory, it's sort of even bigger in the sense that inflation can occur continuously for all eternity, whatever that means, in the multiverse.

and that produces an infinite number by virtue of the fact that given a finite probability to create a universe per unit time times an infinite time, you'll produce infinite numbers of universes. But in the string theory, it's actually impossible

to put in what this initial condition or boundary conditions are for the vast possibility of quantum mechanical states that string theory could produce. The problem for me as a practicing cosmologist who doesn't, you know, is open to either scenario is that, well, what if it is true that we live in a multiverse? So in that case, you know, is there any predictive

power? Like, can you even use, as I said earlier, the laws of logic? I mean, if there's a 100% probability that we exist in some other universe and we're doing opposite things, et cetera, like hair or podcast names or whatever, then then there is no prior. In other words, basically everything can happen that's not mathematically well defined. In other words, something that's mathematically well defined should be subject to a computer could solve it. But computers can't solve things that are unbounded. You get this not a number, like N-A-N, which I used to think was like NAN, but it's not,

it's, it means not a number. And so computers can't handle it. And so either the universe is not computable in that we can't encapsulate the full complexity of the universe on a computer, or the problem. is ill-defined in that you have a measure, a mathematical term of a density of probability that has no, is ill-defined. In other words, it doesn't operate on the normal laws of probability. And for that reason, I think it is true that it could be construed as almost hopeless. Like, if I tell you, Michael, you're the chief of the NSF. And I said the Sakaku the other day,

I said, you know, you've got, you've got string theory on one hand, and you've got, you know, effective quantum field theory on another. You got string theory and some alternative to it called effective field theory or Eric Weinstein has a geometric unity, et cetera, et cetera. You can only fund one, you know, what do you do? You're the director of the National Science Foundation. I think I think you should give it to both. But in this case, you maybe if you agree with him, that would be a huge raise for alternatives to string theory and a huge, huge, you know, tax on string theory. Because it's basically almost in every physics department in the in the country there's someone who understands and and works on string theory and there's people that you know that

believe in string cosmology and so this is where it gets very dangerous and I think you know people like Lee Smollin and others have written on this extensively that physics has stagnated in a lot of ways fundamental physics not not other physical physics has stagnated we haven't come up with a unified theory of you know so-called gravity unified with other theories Although, by the way, Michael, you know, people are really obsessed with the theory of everything, right? The T-O-E. But there's actually another theory that we also don't know, and that's called the Grand Unified Theory.

And my point, and that's where the laws of the nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and the weak nuclear force, combined together into one force, the same way that electricity and magnetism unify into one force. And then a theory of everything are those three forces married to the gravitational force, and that creates. creates a theory of everything. So we're kind of looking past the goal lines right now. We're kind of like celebrating in the end zone. We haven't discovered a theory of grand unification yet. And yet we're kind of obsessed with string theory as the theory of everything.

So I just wonder if we're not putting Descartes before the horse. Yeah, so the question is, is it just a really hard problem? And along the lines of what Steve Pinker commented, we just don't have a solar system size particle accelerator to figure out which is the right theory. a test, therefore, we're just kind of making speculations, or have you guys all gone down the wrong path, string theorist, whatever, gone down the wrong path? And there was that book like 10 years ago called Not Even Wrong, I forget the author's name.

Basically, he was saying string theory. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so that string theory is just completely off the rails and you've got to try something completely different. So we actually have a particle accelerator the size of the universe. It's funny when people say things like, oh, we just need a bigger particle accelerator. You know, 10 years ago, Michael, if I told you, would you like a particle accelerator that takes 10 to the 80th or 10 to the 20th nuclei and smashes them together at two of them together at the speed of light, you know, maybe 90% the speed of light?

You'd say, hell yeah, that would be awesome. And it's called, you know, a coalescing neutron star, you know, binary neutron star merger. And we detect them every day with with Ligo, right? So it's like people think too small. We actually have the most advanced thing we have. We have a particle accelerator that's galactic size. It's called a cosmic ray detector. We also have a potential detector of primordial waves of gravity,

which I talk about in this month's article, in this quarter's article, which is that we are looking for what is called the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation. And if we find a particular type of pattern of polarization, that would be indicative that not that the inflationary theory is right, but the alternatives are wrong. So it's actually a lot more hopeful than Pinker would lead us to believe in that we can actually make crisp falsification type tests, but not of the dominant paradigm. So that's the interesting thing.

There's no way to test the dominant paradigm as far as we could tell. And even by their own admission, even by the Alan Goetz and Andre Lindays, we cannot test the theory because any time, and as there's one of the founders of string theory, or one the greatest contributors of string theory who work with Ed Witten on the so-called Cyberg-Witton equations. His name was is Nathan Cyberg. He's at the Institute for Advanced Study. And he says, most string theorists are very arrogant, he said with a smile. If there is something beyond string theory, we will call it string theory. So it's, the alternatives are not, that's not the case. We falsified the steady state. We can

falsify the bouncing, you know, kind of revisitations, re-inclanations of steady state, and but we can't prove or even falsify the inflationary or string theory landscape proposals. So, you know, I ask you, well, putting on your good Bayesian hat, if I tell you that all these other things are falsified, you know, what, what prior do you ascribe to the dominant paradigm? That's one question. The other one is, if they're getting all the money, like, would you expect an alternative cosmology like Paul Steinhard and Neil Turok discussed, or would you expect or Roger Penrose, even winner of this year's Nobel Prize in physics, would you expect that they would have as much attention as the dominant paradigm, even though the other paradigm is not testable

in a falsification sense? In other words, if you were just an intelligent funding director, you might say, well, I'm going to put some money in the thing I can at least prove wrong. Not all of my eggs in one, or all my dollars in one basket to be proven possibly right or confirmed. Interesting. So you're saying perhaps string theory as the dominant theory is, has gone down the wrong path and that we should shift some funding over to these other areas. It's not clear that every incremental dollar that you put into string theory would have as much impact as exploring alternatives or, you know, thinking of tests that could potentially prove it. It's not clear that it's hurting for fun.

funding in that way. Yeah. And it's certainly not hurting for publicity, right? I mean, it's certainly not hurting for popularity and publicity. Well, this is Mitchgoe's book. It hangs on string theory. Well, we'll see. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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