Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Michael Shermer & Brian Keating Part 2: How it All Began: Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse, and the Nature of Scientific Proof (#149)

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 A Conversation with Michael Shermer and Brian Keating: How it All Began: Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse, and the Nature of Scientific Proof Thanks to our sponsors! https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible http://betterhelp.com/impossible In this episode, 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 to part two of this fascinating discussion between Michael Shermer and Brian Keating about Brian's recent article in The Skeptic magazine, How It All Began, Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse, and the Nature of Scientific Proof. I'm going to ask you back to that Hawking book, because I'm not seeing it, Hawking, Hawking, a very clever title. I've always wondered, is he really a world-class, one of the top ever physicists, theoretical physicists, whatever? Or does his condition and his heroic continuation of his work and life, despite these incredible conditions against him,

kind of elevate him into almost a godlike status? I used to see him every couple of years. He'd come to Caltech and give a public talk. You know, it was quite a show when he would show up at Caltech, you know, it'd be like, well, Stephen is speaking next Wednesday night at seven. All right. Well, like at two in the afternoon, there's people lined up, you know, out in the lawn, playing Frisbee and waiting, you know, for their free spot in the, in the, you know,

1100 seat auditorium. It's like, wow. And then, you know, he rolls down the aisle with his helpers in his chair, standing ovation just for showing up, you know, before he even speaks. And, you know, people are just hanging on every sentence. And, of course, I get it because, you know, his condition, his heroism and so on. But I always wondered, you know, Is he, you know, way up there in the pantheon of the greatest of all time, you know, Newton, Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, or not.

I just really have no way to judge that. No, no, and that's a big thesis of this book. It sounds like you'd really enjoy it. But the book actually goes through as a physics, his, it goes in reverse from starting with, like, you know, the movie about his life and maybe his final papers, all the way back to his 1965 thesis with Dennis Shiamah at Cambridge, at Oxford. I think he was at Oxford and then he was teaching at Cambridge. But no, it makes the case. And actually, Michael, as you're right, he would come to America. He didn't get there on British Airways.

I mean, he got there on a private jet. And oftentimes the private jet was so even not inadequate. He had to take an ambulance jet from Cambridge to Caltech. That's not inexpensive. So he had all these backers. There's a guy who backed him who had established a Stephen Hawking chair at Texas this A&M and he would have him come out. And then once he was working on his final papers with like Andy Strominger and others,

and every time he'd get approval from his doctor to come out on the ambulance private jet, which is much more expensive than a regular private jet, because there's only like one or two in the world that could actually do it. And so Andy Strominger talks about how they had to get him out. And the doctor said, no, he had gotten really sick. He had just had a flu, I think. this is like 2016, 2017, about a year before he died. And the doctor said, no, he's too ill to travel.

And then in the book, it says that his colleagues wrote to his doctor and said, if you don't let him come, it may cost a Nobel Prize. And I thought it was like, it was perfect for my book. Losing a Nobel Prize is all about how scientists worship the Nobel Prize as a kind of gilded, graven image that literally has Alfred Nobel's picture on it. And we have as much of a religious proclivity as any sad. secular humanist does, except we think it's all great because it's just wrapped up on this fun thing called the Nobel Prize. But it was funny to me that his doctor only let him go at great risk to his own personal health and maybe even the guy's medical license because of the potential to win a Nobel Prize.

Well, actually, there was no chance of him winning a Nobel Prize. He did a lot of good work. What kind of hampered him as this guy talked about. So for a while, I was kind of frustrated by Hawking because I heard him speak several times. I heard him speak only once in my life, and that was in the 90s in London at a Royal Academy meeting. And he gave a public lecture. And at the end, someone said, why did you write a brief history of time? It's rumored that no one's ever gotten all the way through it, not even you, and nobody understands it.

And in his computerized voice, I remember this distinctly, Michael. He said, because I had to pay for my daughter's college. And everybody laughed. It's kind of a cute line. But only now do I realize how much he had to go through. And Leonard Milano's book that you had, The Biography of Friendship, I had Leonard on my show, and I realized he had a form kind of Stephen Hawking Incorporated, as I call it, or Hawking, as Seif calls it, because he had to be turned over. Imagine being turned over every hour when you're sleeping to drain your tracheostomy and have fluid.

And like, you couldn't white, you couldn't do anything. You never had privacy. Your spouse was like your mother or your parent, like wiping it. It's disgusting. I can't imagine how much respect I have from on one hand. But it's impossible not to think that that didn't play into the. this. You know, he like literally he I interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson the other day and he said even during COVID, I couldn't go down the street with a mask on and not get recognized. And that's like

one of Neil deGrasse Tyson's, you know, biggest kind of frustration is just like he has no privacy anymore. Well, Stephen Hawking said, I can't like put, you know, put cloaking devices on my wheelchair. Like everyone's going to know who he was. Everyone always wanted his time. And so I don't begrudge him for doing a lot of things for financial reasons because he had he had to take care of it. Galileo, he had ex-wives and children, you know, from different people to support. And there was this constant need and terror. Who else was going to provide for him? But they're going to make do a professor.

One of the thesis of this book is that he's not in the pantheon of the great physicists. No, definitely not. No. He's, as I said, you know, the two biggest things that he claims are his reasons to not believe in God, the Hawking Hardle theorem and the M theory that he didn't contribute to, but popularized. Those are not accepted by the lion's share of practicing physicist. The work he did on singularities is very important, but then again, he kind of disavowed that to work on the no-boundary theorem, which kind of obviates the need for a singularity. And then the black hole hawking

radiation is incredibly interesting, fascinating mathematical work that suggests that, you know, black holes may emit light with an equivalent temperature of one trillionth the temperature of the sun that will never be absurd. So for those reasons, you might make an argument that Penrose, you know, did this great work on Black Holes with Stephen. And so since Penrose won the Nobel Prize, maybe Hawking would have. But Penrose made a numerous amount of contributions far beyond just the Black Holes for which he was recognized.

Hawking was much more narrowly focused. And I think, I think, you know, it's impossible to imagine how much he did, you know, with so little physical ability starting in the early 1980s. But certainly it was his esteem amongst the general public is far eclipsing of his contributions to most practicing. Like the amount of citations that he has to papers that he's done are very limited in the practicing work of physicists today. Interesting.

Let me ask this next question by prefacing it with a quote from Darwin. When the origin species came out, of course there was such some hullabaloo about its implications for theism and the need for a designer to explain life and so on. And so in the second edition, he addressed this question, is the theory of evolution by means of natural selection a threat to belief in God? And recall that Darwin's wife, Emma, was deeply religious, and he consciously avoided being too militant about his eventual agnosticism. He never called himself an atheist.

But here's what he wrote about his own theory. I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feeling of anyone. It is satisfactory as showing how transient such impressions are to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely the law of attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibniz, as, quote, subversive of natural and inferentially of revealed religion, close quote, from Leibniz. Darwin continues, A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the deity, to believe that he created a few original forms, capable of self-development into other needful forms, as to believe he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the actions of his laws.

So my question is, is it possible that there is a mind, a conscious being a god, an intelligent designer behind it all? And the way he created the universe, stars, planets, life, complex organisms, all the way up to us in sentience, is these laws of nature that scientists are discovering? That's how he did it. He did it through these particular laws, gravity, natural selection, and so on. And therefore, you're kind of taking out of the equation this sort of personal God. Well, you can still believe in that, but separately from that, this is how he did it. So in a way, back to the old natural theology arguments of the 18th and 19th century, studying nature is a way of getting at understanding God's mind because those are the laws we're discovering.

That's how God does it. Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point. And one not too dissimilar to the point I've tried to raise to my mind. which is this notion of kind of lethargy or slothishness of the deity. So assume the deity existed, he instantiated the laws of the universe. He even programmed in that, you know, carbon could form in the heart of certain types of stars from a triple alpha nucleus collision that lasts for a trillionth of a second of these exact chemicals.

And that would create carbon and then phosphorus would come later. and then G-C-T-A, you know, they'd all precipitate out in different forms. And it would all part of this God's plan still would have to be that the deity instantiates that at very early times. Because there's no, there's no sensor, there's no interaction, there's no on a continual basis. I don't think people believe that God is in there separating, you know, RNA and matching up pairs of DNA strands, et cetera. So it is kind of the clockwork. What's that? Yeah, right.

So therefore, the God that Stephen believes in, I said to him, the inescapable conclusion is a deist god. It's not a personal God. In other words, it was a God that established the laws that you and I would evolve. And so God created, though, let's just say, I stipulate that. I believe there was an intelligent, let's say I do. He would have had to do so at an extremely early time, billions of years before homocipians would exist. and then the form of Jesus Christ would come 2,000 years ago. So if that is true, then God established the laws of nature

by which we are to grasp his interactions with humanity extremely long ago. So how is that different than the deistic God, the unmoved mover or the first cause God? To me, it doesn't display any difference functionally. But, you know, so then, yes, so I think it's a very different thing. And I asked him, can you get, not can you get, you know, ought from is, but can you get, you know, Jesus or whatever, or God of Moses and Abraham? Can you get that from, you know, from is? In other words, the fact that the universe obeys laws of physics, the laws of biology and biochemistry and eventually sociology and political science and everything, can you get those laws, can you get a personal God from those laws? I don't personally see how you can, but that doesn't prevent me from looking. See, here's the thing I have trouble with agnosticism, even myself.

I don't believe that there's such thing as like a happy, super happy militant atheist. Like, just because you express your opinion really forcefully doesn't make it any more so that my opinion as a happy Buddhist, you know, whatever, right? It's just like, okay, that's just your form of expression. You yelling at me, you know, the God doesn't exist, doesn't help convince me any more than a, quiet reasoned argument would have us. So, you know, I like to think about, you know, what is the, where can science, where would God display his existence if he would? And then what would that consequence?

So we all talk about like, oh, that we'd settle for what Woody Allen called the divine sneeze. That's all I want a divine sneeze. And I hear that a lot from my atheist friends. They'll say, you know, actually I was reading a book recently. by Avi Loeb, who you know and you had on the show, right? You had Avi on, right? Yeah. So he said, oh, well, you know, if God really didn't want Abraham to kill, sacrifice Isaac, he wrote this in the pages of that trash pile of a magazine called Scientific American. Now, I'm just mad that you're not writing for them anymore. But anyway, he wrote this in Scientific America. I love Avi. But he said, you know, all God needed to do is give him like a modern-day iPhone. And he could have recorded.

And I said, Avi, come on, you're a Jew, you're an Israeli, you're Jewish like me. Did you not forget the story of the golden calf? He's like, no, of course I know that. You know, every Israeli, no matter how secular they are, Michael, knows the Bible, the Old Testament, better than any Sunday school preacher of highest intensity that you'll ever meet. Because they like get it in their public schools. They learn the Torah. But anyway, I said 40 days, imagine this, 40 days after witnessing 10 supernatural plagues.

devastate Egypt, the most powerful superpower country ever existed in human history at that point, and then split the sea, another miracle, and do all the 40 days after that, they melt down some gold and make an idol. And these are supposed to be Jews. I said, Avi, we're supposed to be kind of smart, you know, like 30% of Nobel Prize winners in physics at one point. We're Jewish people, you know, we make up a, I'm not a Jewish egotist. I mean, all you have to do is get in front of one of my fellow tribal members at, you know,

at a certain event and you'll realize that they're just human beings like everybody else. But I said, Avi, do you think human nature has changed? In other words, if tomorrow, you know, Stephen Meyer's book gets a blurb from God and it says this book is, you know, is my favorite book of all time. This is how I did it. A day later? Yeah. Right.

Do you think a day later? Well, that's like O.J. Simpson's book. Yeah. If I did it. But do you think a day later, anyone would still believe it or a week later? No, we'd come up with different explanations. I remember hearing in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, you know, it was very, very anti-religious. And there were, you know, there were people in that would work for the, you know, in the physics departments, et cetera, who would say things like, you know, the splitting of the Red Sea was just caused by a huge windstorm.

And there was a gravitational pull because there was an eclipse back then. And I actually had Richard Friedman, who's a dear friend, a dear friend of mine. He writes about, yeah. Yeah, I know him. But is that any better? Is that any better? worse than a miracle? I mean, so to me it's kind of, you know, it's kind of hopeless. Well, in a way, that would be a miracle. I mean, that would be how God would do it. How would God actually perform

the miracle of splitting the Red Sea? Well, he would generate up a super storm with strong winds and he would have an earthquake or whatever. And this one I'm getting at is this question of, well, how does God do it? How does the mind interact with the stuff? You know, how does it reach into the universe from wherever God is and stir the particles in some way to cause the miracle? or laws of nature or whatever. I just had on the podcast to philosophers, James Davis and Hunter and Paul Nettaliski. They wrote this book called Science and the Good.

It's a critique of myself, Sam Harris, Steve Pinker, and Jonathan Haidt and others that are kind of doing evolutionary ethics. And the entire book is basically a critique saying, this is why these guys have not explained the origins of morality, much less how to derive an ought from an is. Okay, so I reviewed the book, and I liked the book, and then I thought, I just had them on the podcast, so I did. We're going to release that in a couple weeks, I think. In any case, it turns out they're theist philosophers. Both of them, I had no idea. So to their credit, they wrote this book without ever once mentioning God or anything like that

or even their positions. So we spent most of the time talking about why evolutionary psychologists and ethicists are wrong. So I said, okay, then how do you think it happened? What do you think is the origins of morality. And in so many words, it was, you know, God did it. It's like, yeah, I know, but how? I mean, in other words, you know, it's kind of a God of the Gaps argument. And even though modern intelligent designers disclaim that, they said, we're not doing filling in the God of the Gaps. Well, you are. You're just saying in so many fancy words, God did it. Well, but how? And then if it turns out, you know, they have some argument, well, he used the storm to cause the sea to splitter, or he caused the quantum foam fluctuation.

that's how he created the universe. How is that any different from what scientists are trying to do to figure out how it happened? Right, and that's one of the problems I actually have with people like Mildegras-Tyyson and Michi Okaku, again, guess on my show. And so I say it with respect. Sean Carroll made this argument to me in person a long time ago. You know, Isaac Newton knew that there were these gaps in the Principia, in the theory of universal gravitation rather, and that the only way he could plug them, the instability, because gravitation is the only force that's only attractive. It has no repulsive gravity in the particle-to-particle sense,

the way that electronic charges do, et cetera. Nuclear forces can have repulsive forces. And so he plugged it, that hole, by postulating that God or angels kept the particles in place at certain times in their orbit when they're so-called gravitational resonances. And Stephen Meyer, to his credit, did the research. He was at Cambridge, after all, and he looked through the pancripia.

There's not once does Newton make that argument. And so you have to be careful with the God of the gaps on the other side. I feel like for the secular community to have more intellectual honesty than theist community, they have to have higher intellectual standards. And to me to let that slip, and Stevens documented this particular, like, that's a huge, that's a huge lacuna in their case as far as I'm concerned. Because I actually believe that for a very long time. And you can read it in Kaku's book.

He talks about it. Also, Kako talks about the famous questions of Thomas Aquinas. And you know those better than anybody. But one of those is like anything designed had a designer. And Michios just kind of glibly, he says, one of those is a good question, you know, where the universe come from. But then he says, oh, well, like, evolution explains the origin of life. And I'm like, actually, have you read Darwin's letter to Huxley? You know, like where he says it's as much rubbish to think of the origin of life as it is the origin of matter.

And it's like, no, the origin of species is what Darwin was talking about, not the origin of life. Those are hugely different things. And Michio just says, oh, no, evolution explains the life. No, there's not a single working experimentalist in the field of origin of life research, which is going on around the world that has ever been able to replicate even those little simple versions. of it. So there's a huge, I'd say disadvantage to trying to take on the Myers of the world. There's many, many obstacles, rather. There's one huge obstacle to accepting God, which is just like the implausibility, you know, and the, and the, and the hiddenness of such an entity if he does exist. But, but the other, you know, I feel like atheists have it, atheists have it really hard,

because we don't understand the origin of life. We're not any closer than we were a hundred years ago. You know, people talk about the Miller-Uri experiment. That was done in part. here. I mean, Yuri and Milner were both here in San Diego. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th.

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Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Yeah. Well, Robert Hazen has a nice course at the teaching company. I think it's like 24 lectures on the history of the origins of life research. There's actually, you know, a dozen different theories. Back to the consensus problem, you know, there's no consensus. There's not an emptiness or a lack of theories about how it happened,

including directed panspermia or just panspermia in general without the direction. But there's no consensus. So, okay, maybe it's a super hard problem. Maybe they're just not asking the question the right way or whatever. But again, what's the alternative? Well, you know, God just did it. Well, how? You know, did he use RNA to create DNA?

Because if that's how it happened, then we should continue with that research. Or did he use on some other planet to use some other self-replicating molecules that weren't either RNA or DNA? Okay, that would be interesting. but what exactly did the deity do or whatever. Anyway, so a more broad question, since you use the word agnostic, to describe yourself, you know, this word was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869, by which he meant not knowable in any kind of empirical or rational sense. There's no experiment you're going to run.

There's no set of clever arguments like the Kalam cosmological argument or whatever that everybody's going to go, oh, yeah, that's right. It's just not knowable. So, I mean, today most people use the word to mean, like, well, I'm agnostic about climate change. You know, maybe some new data will come in, and then I'll make up my mind and decide if I believe or if I'm still skeptical. No. So one position, I'm conflicted about this.

I tend to think we're never going to know, right? It's just we've all hit this epistemological wall. Maybe it's an ontological wall. Maybe we can never know. It may be an unknowable concept. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the kind of universe we have is the kind of universe that would imply there's a God if you follow Stephen, Myers' arguments, or to follow Victor Stanger's arguments in his book, God, the failed hypothesis,

he says, no, actually, God is a testable hypothesis, and he failed to test, and here's the 10 reasons why. And so I'm just curious what you think about that. Is this an unknowable concept? Is that what you mean by agnostic, or do you mean I'm waiting for more evidence to come in or better arguments? So I kind of got this from Freeman Dyson, who called himself an agnostic, but again, he was functionally indistinguishable from Richard Dawkins.

to tease him. I regret teasing him, you know, because he's such a sweet man. But anyway, we had a great kind of friendship that I think about to miss him all the time. But one thing he said to me is, you know, he said, Brian, there are two different things in science or in life. He said there are mysteries and there are puzzles. Like a puzzle, my kids can do a Rubik's Cube. I can never do a Rubik's cube without like taking apart, you know, and reassembling it. Actually, I could do it. I joke if you put, if you gave me a Rubik's 2 that was solved on five sides, I could get that sixth side, no questions asked. But, um, but that was a puzzle, meaning it was something that somebody smarter than me, if not me could do and solve. A mystery is something maybe no one can ever solve and is

unsoluble and insoluble given what we have as human beings. But that wasn't a problem, that wasn't a reason for despair, according to him. And it isn't for me. Because we all, you know, there is a part of life, even if you're religious, that you have to make up meaning, whether that meaning that you make up for yourself is based on, you know, what you want to have happened to you in the afterlife or what legacy you want to have leave to your kids. What I find so delicious about life is in practice. So I get to practice not just physics, but experimental physics. I get to build telescopes. I get to go and search and cool and interesting places. I get to interact with smart people from around the world and think for a living and convert food into brain, into, you know,

into writing into words that someone else maybe 20 years from now will encounter. So for me, that's the mystery aspect of it. There's no proof that any one of us is going to ever get the answer and get, you know, solve it. For example, it's not for lack of trying. I don't feel very convinced by, you know, kind of the militant atheism. And so I gravitate towards a practicing agnostic. The emphasis is on practice. So for me, I go to temple. For me, I study Aramaic and I taught myself Hebrew at age 30. You know, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church. Both my parents were born Jewish. Biologically, I was Jewish from birth, just the same way that, you know, I would say we were Jewish

in the same way the Panda Express is like authentic Chinese food. You know, it was just like cultural. Like we'd have, we'd go to synagogue. We used to joke, you know, two days a year on Christmas and Easter. But then when my mom, you know, remarried and she got married to an Irish Catholic man eating, I began, I fell in love with the Catholic Church. And I became an altar boy, Michael, this Jewish boy at age 13 when I should have been having my bar mitzv. I never had a bar mitzvah. Wow.

Instead, I had a, I was confirmed, baptized, and I was an altar boy. Until I learned from Father Monsignor Robert Skelty in Chappaqua, New York, I learned that you had to be celibate. And at age 13, that wasn't something I was super interested in. I don't know why, but what was the appeal of Catholicism at that time to you? I thought it was authentic, its authenticity, its seriousness, its lack of kind of frivolity. I didn't see people going there with like, you know, sandals and flip-flops and people laughed. It's a very warm religion.

It's very loving and open. There's an emphasis on food and drink. You know, it's like they're forbidden to have a sexual relation, so they kind of malew. in terms of drinking and smoking cigars or pipes. Anyway, it seemed very interesting to me. And it was part of an elite. And I loved that aspect of Catholicism until I learned about this guy Galileo and how he was mistreated by the Catholic Church.

And even by the 1980s when I was an altar boy, he hadn't been pardoned. He actually has never been formally pardoned. The Vatican did admit that they were wrong. By the way, it wasn't like the Pope, like the Pope was some expert scientist. have scientists to this day, Michael. The Vatican Observatory is one of the best eloscopic observatories on Earth. And there were a lot of things I liked about the Catholic Church's science in that LaMaitra didn't want to claim evidence for the Big Bang based on his Big Bang model that he ushered in. But that's moving aside from the point. So then I became an atheist.

I believed anything that did any harm to a brilliant intellectual like Galileo was not for me. And as I talk about in losing the Nobel Prize, I thought, well, Christianity is kind of Judaism 2.0. And by modus tollens, if I can refute the conclusion, then the antecedent must be refuted. And therefore, I don't need to study Judaism. And their thing stood, you know, until September 11, 2001. When I realized I knew almost nothing about the religion of my birth. And for some reason, this religion played a big role in the evolution of our universe and its current state. So I decided then and there I wanted to learn more about Judaism.

I wanted to have a Jewish family and to learn. And that required I learned Hebrew, which is really hard at age 30. What's 9-11 got to do with that because of their hatred of Jews and anti-Semitism and anti-Israel? It was more like, how is Israel? Why is this tiny little country that I previously had no affiliation for? Why was it in the center of all these events going on? at the center of the Western world and what role did it play in America's founding, for example, and what role did it play in the current political dynamic of that war, the Second Gulf War that then was becoming?

And it just made me feel like an ignoramus because I knew nothing about Judaism. It's one thing to be like to not be Jewish. Look, I don't know much about Islam or, you know, being Mormonism, but I do know about, you know, a little bit. more about Catholicism at that point than I did. I knew a lot of the arguments for atheism. I had read a lot of the earlier work. But for me, it comes down to practice. So as an agnostic who practices, not that I know that it's unknowable, but if you desist from the quest, like when you're out mountain biking or road biking, you know, like I bet sometimes you don't really feel like going out in your bike, Michael, but you do it anyway because it's part of who you are. And it's

influenced your entire character. So for me, it's had a wonderful influence. Michael, you know, like, once a week to have a day off where I don't send you an email, I'm not going to be on Twitter. I know you made fun of me because I took so long to get this article done. You're like, get off Twitter. I'm like, I'm off at 25 hours a week. But it is refreshing.

It is restorative. And so I said, you know, there's an accumulation of evidence that at least the activity of this life is beneficial to me. And then at worst, in kind of Pascal's wager, what's the worst that can happen? I laid this life, true to this religion. Maybe I never come to the firm belief that my rabbi has in the existence of God. But if I desist from trying, I know I'll never believe it. Like Richard always says, there's no such thing as a Christian child.

Like he says, he basically has called it like child abuse to say like your child or Zuckerman has said that. Like no one's born into a religion. Like no one's born to believe. But I know something, you know, from experience that actually it's extremely. extremely difficult to be born to atheist parents and to become religious. It's just that's just a truth. Like I think it's because of the way that atheism is sort of almost in opposition to an existing paradigm, that the practitioners, namely the parents, will really make it almost like a forbidden thing for their kids.

Not like literally, but the kids will get this perception that this isn't something for me. And I didn't want my kids to go through that. And so I, you know, I've left it open and, and they're, learning and I'm learning and it's continuing that as a lifestyle and who knows what will happen along the way. Yeah, I think here you're touching on the, you know, social and psychological benefits of religion that really have nothing to do with intelligent design theory or quantum physics or any of the stuff we're talking about, which, you know, you and I love these conversations, but the average person going to church or synagogue or whatever religious

service they go to, they're not going there to hear some arguments for the fine-tuning or the first cause, the prime mover, the Kalam cosmological argument. They're going there for the camaraderie and the social aspects, the food, free parking. You know, the kind of moral uplifting stories that much of the biblical stories convey. So, I mean, one of the things points I always make about mythic truths versus empirical truths is that, for example, if you're arguing, well, the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea, you know, the actual natural explanation for that is this windstorm or the earthquake or whatever. You know, I think if that's the route you're taking, you're kind of missing the point of the story. You know, the analogy I make is like,

well, were there really four brothers Karamazov in Russia in 19th century? And And it's like, you know, Dostoevsky just made this up, but it's not completely made up. There's a kind of a literary or mythic truth in the story about human nature, about human culture, human history, and, you know, the tensions that happen when, you know, kind of a backwards nation like Russia becomes modern and goes through these states. You know, that's, you know, it'd be like, you know, J.K. Rowling holding a press conference and saying, you know, this whole Harry Potter thing, you know, It's actually true. I didn't make it up. There really is this place and, you know, the nine and a half at the train station and there's this guy named Walter. No.

I mean, this would be absurd. You know, people would rightly think she'd lost her mind. But to even talk about that is to miss the point of the story, right? So I often think me and my fellow atheists, including things we've published in the magazine, we published back in the 90s an article that Jesus, this is before Dan Brown. it became popular, that Jesus was never really dead on the cross. He was kind of slipped into a coma, and they gave him this substance that put him in a three-day coma.

And so he's now in this cold tomb that kind of preserved the body for a couple of days, and he wakes up. And then he and Mary whisk off to, well, the theory was India at the time. I think Dan Brown set him off to France to have children and so on. But as interesting as those are, you know, I think you've kind of missed the point of the resurrection. story, you know, it has nothing to do with, you know, did he really raise from the dead after three days and so on. I mean, a lot of Christians absolutely think that has to be empirically true or else why bother being a Christian? You can just be a Jews say. Because Jews, they accept that there is going to be a Messiah. He just hasn't come yet because the story of Jesus is not

what the Old Testament predicts that, well, this is what Jews say, that, you know, that would happen and that's not who Jesus was. Okay, fine. But again, you know, there's a deeper point to the story about, you know, redemption starting over, you know, the oppression of the Jews by the Romans. And this is a common theme throughout history is that oppressed peoples tend to have mythic stories about a savior coming and, you know, like the Native American ghost dance that I like to tell, you know, in 1890 the closing of the American West. The U.S. government is suppressing these Native Americans, putting them on reservations and so on. And all of a sudden, this thing erupts, you know, the Dakota Sioux have this ghost thing.

in which they're all chanting for days on end about how, you know, the buffalo are going to return and the white man's going to leave. And they had these vests that they would wear that they believed would be impervious to a white man's bullets. And on and on, it's very much, I mean, this guy, Wavoka, he was very much a Jesus-like Messiah figure. And in one of my books, I have half a dozen examples of this throughout history were oppressed people. So that's what, to me, the story has much deeper. meaning to which someone like, you know, my fellow atheist would say, well, it's just not true. So it's a bunch of bullshit.

We don't have to even think about it. Well, you know, that's too simple, you know, kind of an interpretation of these things. I think it is. I mean, one of my favorite thing, you know, Jefferson had a Bible where he removed all the miracles. I'm working on my magnum opus will be a Bible with no violations of the laws of physics. And actually, going through it, there aren't that many violations of laws of physics. And in fact, there are very interesting kind of either their jokes, Michael, or like, you know, kind of insider, you know, kind of humor where you have things like the sun is created on the fourth day.

So it obviously can't be that they meant day. Now the question is, you know, what did it really mean? And, you know, and how do we interpret it? But I think they're, you know, again, I've said this in talks I've given, you know, looking at the Bible and expecting it to have anything to say about not just Noma or anything like that, But expecting anything to say about physics or cosmology or biology and inheritability is like looking at, you know, a transcript of the, you know, 2008 housing crisis, you know, kind of autopsy of forensic report and then say, oh, this is this is really going to tell me how to, you know, raise Labrador retriever. Like it has nothing, maybe the word Labrador appears in there once. But I make the point, you know, in one point I said, there's there's about 35 verses in Genesis 1-1. about, you know, through chapter two or three, about maybe the Big Bang or the origin of species,

you know, whatever. And then there's 35,000 total verses in the Old Testament, which is all I really know. And so that's 0.1%. So it's one of a thousand. So imagine you pick up a book and it's a thousand pages long. And it says, on the cover, it says, great, you know, basketball heroes on it. And then, like, there's 99, 99 pages of the, of the six, you know, really outstanding. Jewish basketball players that have been an NBA history.

And then there's one about, Lopron James and Michael Jordan and, you know. That's funny. And by the way, one of them was a convert. I think Stademeyer, but I don't know. Anyway, the point being, this is not a book about that. And nor is a brief history of time, a book about how I want to raise my kids. So, and not that I raise my kids according to the Bible,

but there are very interesting things about the Torah that, you know, would be a great, you know, part for three someday to talk about, not the science of the Torah. I really find those kinds of things, you know, ridiculous because it's clear it's not again the sun is created on the fourth day it doesn't take an apologist to say it obviously doesn't mean what we think it means but by the way i have to tell that to my religiously inclined you know uh jewish friends we'll say this is proof you know that god can do a miracle you know that he created it before the sun and the sun has had a very specific purpose it was

had to speak to readers 3 000 years ago or whenever it was compiled and written and had to speak to to readers today. And I always joke, you know, I kill for 1% of God's book sales. And that's serious because, you know, this thing has been relevant a lot longer than a brief history of time. A brief history of time. I hope it's out of date. I hope my losing the Nobel Prize is not read in 100 years because we know so much more about at least the physics. But, you know, I've often thought, you know, it would be a bad thing if science doesn't get overturned. But how much more so is it good that things like the Torah and the Talmud, which is the second holiest work, they've endured for thousands of years. There's a reason for it. And it's not just mass delusions of crowds. There is wisdom.

But that's not to say it comes up as easily as even string theory comes to certain people. Yeah. Brian, we've been going over an hour and a half. Let me just switch to the lightning round here and ask just a couple of quick questions. Back to your article for us. It's skeptic. Let's see if we can keep these short. What is gravity? Ah, so gravity is, yeah, gravity is the weakest of all the forces. It's in Sunsense, the most mysterious, not only because it refuses to be wedded to the other forces and some kind of theory of everything should such a thing ever exist. But it's also, it hides what it does in inscrutable places. So gravity is responsible for the large-scale features of the universe, but also the small-scale structure of the Earth, the size of animals, is related to the strength of gravity.

It's the poorest understood, the constant that governs gravitational interactions. Irrespective of it not being found a theory of everything, we understand the gravitational constant of Newton's law, capital, G. That's the poorest known of all the so-called fundamental constants of nature. It's very hard to measure it on small scales. It's even harder to measure it at the earliest times. And it may be impossible, Michael, to measure it in the situations where it is most interesting and relevant, i.e., at the center of a black hole, what's called a singularity, or perhaps at the beginning of time,

you know, which is a moment preceded by no other moments. Because those are firewalled off by the expansion of the universe, in one case in the Big Bang singularity, and by the so-called event horizon in the context of the black hole singularity. So it may be that singularities don't actually exist, but we'll never know because they're both completely inscrutable. Okay, let me ask you this question. when I drop this object, it's not being pulled to the earth by a force.

It's what? Push by space time, I think is how Michio described it. And even that intuitively doesn't feel quite right. Yeah, I heard that description. It's an interesting description. So what happens is gravity warps the paths of trajectories such that if the object will fall with what we perceive as a as a curvature or sorry, as it will take the shortest amount of time and it will behave as if it's being accelerated.

But there's no actual reason that the gravitational force that pulls on the phone when you drop it should be mediated by the same term, this charge that we call mass. There's no reason that mass should be the same as to push an object. The fact that they are exact agreement to 12 decimal places is one of the greatest mysteries of all time. And it's one of the ones that Galileo first perceived when he apocryphly maybe dropped the cannonball and a ball of wood off of the leading tower of Pisa. And we're still learning things about gravity every day. It's the most mysterious of all the forces.

And maybe we'll never be able to unify it. There's no law that says we will. What is time or space time, if you prefer? I only can say what time does. So time is intimately connected to change. In fact, that is maybe the most basic law of all of physics is that change happens and that change is, what clocks can measure. So our bodies are clocks. We have psychological time, but I actually mean

the physical degradation of our cells is a type of a clock. There are clops celestial events that occur. These are things that clocks can measure. And so time, and it's almost tautological. You can almost not separate the behavior of what we call time from the existence of clocks. And so it's no surprise that actually the first measurements of gravity by people like Galileo came about at a time when the first clocks were kind of coming together. And so for that reason, it's almost impossible to answer the question of time without referring to entropy, and entropy being the tendency of objects within a closed system to get more and more disordered from state function to state description.

So we don't have a great description. If the cellular disintegration due to entropy is happening at a certain rate, as a clock, why does it slow down if I'm at a high speed, if I'm moving at a high speed compared to somebody who's just stationary? Yeah, so that occurs because of what it's called time dilation, which is a distinction that you think of as puzzling because we don't have experience with things operating at the speed of light. So the notion of if you're sitting on a train and the train pulls away next door to

your train, it feels like you're moving, even though it's really the other train moving. That's a consequence of what's called Galilean relativity, which governs a behavior of things in motion at low speeds. Galilean relativity is the extreme limit and the low speed limit of Einstein's special relativity. So the theory of special relativity incorporates two changes that take place. Links get smaller and time gets bigger. You can close a barn door on an object that's nominally bigger than the same. separation between the barn door and its wall if this object is moving fast enough relative to the barn, which is stationary, but also things like muons, which have been in the news lately, they will live

longer that if they're in motion in the cosmos at high velocities, accelerated by a supernova explosion, perhaps, then they will on Earth, it's stationary in the laboratory. That's called time dilation. So, but the total interval, so in other words, the kind of the sum of time, the effects of time, the time gets lengthened and distances get contracted, they're conserved. In other words, the product of the time times the lengthening of time, the speed of light times the lengthening of time, and then the shortening of length, that you add those up, you get the same amount, and that's deeply related to the conservation of energy. So that phenomenon that you are witnessing is a byproduct of things in high velocity and the conservation of energy are most closely held of all physical laws.

Okay, what is nothing in this sense? Let's just ask it in the deepest possible way. You know, you have a box, there's nothing in it. So you take the universe, you take all the stars and planets and people and all the atoms and so on. But there's still ideas or logic or math or the laws of nature, whatever. those are, so you'd have to take those out, and there can't even be any sentience asking the question, and there can't even be nothing, because nothing is a concept for not to exist. At some point, I don't even know what I'm talking about.

Well, I think about, so of course, that's impossible to answer, but I will say something. You can get all the integers if you start with nothing. I don't know if you've ever gone through this. It's called Set Theory. There's a wonderful book called Naive Set Theory. It was my late father's favorite book, by I think Paul Halmosch with an umal out in there somewhere that your wife will appreciate. And the way you do it is kind of interesting because a lot of cultures, you know, think of God as one and then, you know, kind of everything else is emptiness. So it's really a foundation. The universe is kind of binary.

And I'm not going to get woo you know I'm not like that. But the universe is kind of binary in that you can get one starting from zero. And the way you do it is this. Michael, how many sets of zero bananas are there? The one? I don't know. There's one set, right? Yeah.

Okay. So, and then what does the set of zero bananas and conceive of no apples or a universe with nothing in it? How many empty sets are there? There's only one set that contains no elements. Okay. So, therefore, starting with nothing, you get one. Okay. And then starting with one and one, you can get two and four and six.

And you can get all the integers at least that way, all the rational numbers that way. Interesting. Yeah. So could you get a universe from nothing? In here, you guys start talking about like quantum foam and the fluctuations and the colliding brains. And again, I get lost pretty quick. So those are the mysteries, right? So they confuse us because they present as puzzles, but they're probably mystery.

Yeah, yeah. Well, Brian, this is an unbelievably fascinating conversation because we've dealt with pretty much all the big topics. Did we leave anything out? I think we went way beyond your cover story, which I really appreciate. All right, there's your next book. You have to put all this together and respond to all the intelligent designers and everybody else on the spectrum, as it were. I know.

I'm like an equal opportunity of Fenbush. What is your next big project? What are you working on? I'm working on the first audiobook translation, or not translation, recording of Galileo's dialogue. Yeah, you talked us about that, yeah, yeah. with, yeah, with Carla Rovelli. And then I'm working on another book called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. I've interviewed nine Nobel Prize winners and counting on my podcast, Into the Impossible, on YouTube,

Dr. Brian Keating. And I'm working on that book. And then I'm also maybe thinking of writing a book about the things we leave behind and what are known as ethical wills, what we want to be remembered by us, not monetarily, et cetera, but in terms of what impact we made on other humans to our wisdom that we've acquired. And those are kind of keeping me busy along with teaching. Like the environment? Yeah, the environment, but more like what wisdom. And I actually asked this of Andruyan, wife, widow of Carl Sagan, among many other people on my podcast, I always ask them.

I haven't, I didn't ask you because I started asking these questions after you came on my pod. You gave me my start in podcasting exactly a year ago. And so it was before I developed these patented questions that I now close each and every episode with. And so when you're on my show next, I'm going to ask you these questions. But one of them is what would you put in your ethical will? And another one is, how did you go into the impossible, which was Arthur C. Clark's famous line. The only way of knowing what's possible is to go beyond the limits into the impossible. So, yeah, I'm working on a whole bunch of different projects, but really the Simon's Observatory,

building this telescope in Chile with 300 of my closest and best and brightest scientist in the world. That's going to keep me busy for the next few years. Oh, that's your scientific project is that, the Chile. I didn't know you were working on that. Oh, interesting. That's my main project. What is the hope that it will detect or discover or see? Yeah, so we don't talk about what we want to discover,

else we get diluted by Nobel Prizes and such. But what we are designed to look for are the imprints of early gravitational waves in the infant universe if they exist. As I talk about in the skeptic article, those would be perhaps the only harbinger, the only imprimatur of inflation, which comes along concomitantily with the multiverse. And then, but also for clusters of galaxies, for the imprint, Michael, we don't know where magnetism comes in, comes to the universe. We don't know how it originated. So we talk about these highfalutin laws of gravity and string theory.

We don't know where the earliest magnetic field in the universe came from. We don't know what caused it. And that's one of the things we're designed to detect. And then the last thing is that I'm hoping to look for, not to discover necessarily, but it would be more startling to me, Michael, than discovering inflationary gravitational waves. And that's called Lorentz-Lerence violation. So Lorentz violation is Lorentz invariance is the symmetry, is the founding principle of physics. It basically means that I don't care if I do this experiment dropping my phone here in San Diego or in Santa Barbara.

It doesn't make a bit of difference. It's independence of location. It's independence of time. You could do it in 1600 or you could do it today. It will behave the same way. What if it doesn't? We actually can't test things over very big distances here on Earth at very long times on Earth, but we can with the cosmos.

And so that's what I'm looking for. We're looking for departures from the basic underpinnings of all of modern physics, namely Lorentz invariance, and if we find that, to me, that would be more interesting than discovering the origin of the universe via these gravitational ways. Yeah, that's fascinating. That's Lyle's principle of uniformitarianism. The past is the key to the present.

Maybe it's not. Maybe the speed of light was different in the past or gravity was different or whatever. Right. That reminds me the last thing I'll say about that Hawking, Hawking book. There's a scene in there where Hawking had a party and Cambridge in the, I think it was in the maybe the early 2000s or maybe not even that long ago. And then the next day he advertised the party. And he said, come to Cambridge at this time.

And he said, and at the party, he said, welcome time travelers. And so, yeah, all these things are very interesting. You know, can we discover that the laws that we already know that certain properties of physics depend on whether you're looking at them in a mirror or not, which is very bizarre. In other words, if I look at this Leatherman, you know, multi-tool falling down, it doesn't matter. You're actually seeing the mirror image of it. It doesn't, you can't tell that that's happening. But there's certain phenomena called in the weakened direction that,

violate this symmetry property called charge parity, I wonder, and my colleagues and I wonder, if the universe has kind of a handedness to it, if it has a preferred direction in space and time, that actually we assume it doesn't, only because we only have such limited distances here on Earth and limited timescales in the human life. But if they're looking as far back at the universe as we can with these powerful telescopes, we hope to reveal that symmetries have to be broken. That's where interesting things happen. You have, I don't know, do you ever see this thing, Michael, where they show a picture of Brad Pitt, who besides, you know, you and me was, was considered the handsomest man on earth by People magazine. Skeptic magazine had a different, a different handsome, but then they

take his picture and they just split him down the middle. Yes. And they just reflect once, and he's grotesque. He's horrible. He's disgusting. Even I'm better looking than him. And so symmetries when they're, so that means that broken symmetries are more attractive and appealing. So we're looking for those broken symmetry. So far we haven't seen it. It means that nature is startlingly resilient and impervious to all of our testing, but that just makes it more of a mystery to hopefully turn into a puzzle. That's why it would be interesting to come back a thousand years from now

or be chronically frozen and woken up and then go, oh, that's the explanation for that. That was so obvious. Why didn't we see it in the 21st century? Well, all right, Brian. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Great conversation. I'm going to...

Thank you, Michael. Thanks for listening to Part 2 of this fascinating discussion between Michael Shermer and Brian Keating about Brian's recent article in Skeptic Magazine, how it all began. Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse, and the Nature of Scientific Proof. Don't miss part one.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating, and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his

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