Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - (part 2): Max Tegmark & Eric Weinstein in Conversation (#106)

Episode Date: January 1, 2021

Max Tegmark and Eric Weinstein chat on the last day of 2020! Let’s say ‘good riddance’ with good friends and great conversation! We’ll talk a bit about Artificial Intelligence, Theories of Everything & the seemingly impossible challenge of building a positive future for humanity. Max thinks that, by improving the news we receive with the aid of machine learning, we can achieve a brighter future. Check out his new center at MIT: https://iaifi.org Find him on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/mtegmark Watch Max’s appearance on The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast in 2020 discussing Theories of Everything: https://youtu.be/3MX8EpvLwao Eric Weinstein, host of the Portal will share insights from Geometric Unity and thoughts on the meaning of it all!  Find Eric at https://www.youtube.com/c/EricWeinsteinPhD/ Watch Eric’s previous debate with Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/OI0AZ4Y4Ip4 Watch my most popular videos: Sheldon Glashow Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek  Jill Tarter  Eric Weinstein Sir Roger Penrose  Juan Maldacena’s First Podcast Interview Jim Simons Sara Seager Venus Life Noam Chomsky Sabine Hossenfelder Sarah Scoles Stephen Wolfram ‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA  Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize  ️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is interstingial for magic. Welcome to Dr. Brian Keating's rocking New Year's Eve with two of my good friends, Max Tagmark, Eric Weinstein. One question I was very curious to get both of your opinions about, and that's this issue of funding in physics. And I'm an experimentalist. You guys are theorists, mostly. Eric says he's not a physicist. Please, Eric, you're an honorary physicist now. We will...

That's up to you guys. It's not a lot of a physicist. You're a real physicist. Yeah, it's a real thing. Doing physics things. I'm very honored. I'd love to be, thank you guys. It's not for me to say.

Okay, fine. Anyway, you come down here. You're in my lab. You're a physicist. Anyway, we've talked about this, Eric, but I want to get Max's take on it. I feel theory is, in a sense, less costly.

In other words, it's easier to make theories. Just like it's easier. It's not easier intellectually, but there are more programs in the world than there are different types of computers. There's more programming languages than, than phone models, for example.

So I make the analogy that theory is kind of like software, and experiments like I do are kind of like hardware. And therefore, it's very precious. But I get a lot of emails, I'm sure both of you guys do. You know, I've got this theory of the early universe. I need to, you know, or of grand unification. Can you help me prove it? And I'll share, you know, my Nobel Prize proceeds with you.

I actually asked that of Adam Reese, and he said, yeah, how do you think I won the Nobel Prize in physics? But in reality, there's so many, there's a proliferation of it. Experiments are expensive. I am myself really at the whim of Jim Simons, whose generosity has granted me and my 300 colleagues on the Simon's Observatory, the privilege of building an experiment, which could potentially reveal evidence, more evidence, or some evidence in some cases, for things like the multiverse or inflation. I want to ask you guys, what do we need in physics that the tech industry does so well in software?

I had this idea of a Y combinator for physics. How do we get either more experiments to look at theories or use existing data from experiments, as Max has done, to investigate the consequences of theory? And how do we raise money for it for physics as a whole? It's our crown jewel of civilization, many people feel. So, Max, I'll start with you. How would you, if you were, you know, kind of responsible for raising funds, it seems extremely difficult. How do we do it to promote it for the net benefit of humanity? There were really two separate questions in there, right?

How shall we do the physics best given funding? And second, how should we get the funding? So for the first part, how should we do it? I think I really want to avoid trying to give some glib answer to it because, you know, It's a strength, not a weakness, that so many physicists around the world have different ideas of how it should be done. We want to try, look, not just all under the same lampposts, but search in many different ways with many different approaches. For the second question, how you fund it so you can have a healthy, diverse community of people going after this great mystery of how the world works, right? There I think, yes, it's great that there are philanthropists like Simons that will listen enough to scientists to actually fund them.

But I actually think it's also a big mistake as a species if we don't create institutions and governments which support science. There have been a number of very nerdy economic studies that have showed very clearly that investing in basic science is. the highest return on investment basically ever. And I mean, you're the expert. You can push back on this, Eric. But inventing the transistor, you know, just basic physics research has benefited so much in so many ways. Inventing calculus, you know, it didn't cost that much. But it's been so, so valuable.

So I think as a society, frankly, we have to think, and this comes back to the whole media question again, you know, There are much more people who have heard about the Kardashians than who can name three living scientists even, let alone 20, right? We created a culture where scientists are not, not only are they not particularly known about or viewed as role models or heroes, but they're even very actively attacked by a lot of folks with power for whom what the scientific what scientists are saying is inconvenient and I really think that if we can make one of the best things we can do for science funding is just create a less screwed up media landscape where

we actually appreciate how much we benefit from scientific research that governments will actually support it again it's it's pretty we spent two billion dollars a day or more in this country alone on military, right? If you could get a puny, puny fraction of that into scientific research, we wouldn't even be having to have this conversation about how we get funding for science. Eric has had an analogy to the military and calling theoretical physics the intellectual equivalent of SEAL Team 6. So Eric, how would you fund physics or how do you propose that we crack this particular nut? There are four basic arguments.

The first one that I like the most will fall flat, but it's Max's argument, which is, so I'm not ragging on Max. I'm saying he's got the best argument, but it just doesn't work. It's the greatest mystery in the world. You don't want to know how it ends. You're not interested in how the plot develops. That has to do with the fact that we have not brought people along. You can't understand, you know, the mystery of chirality, if you don't even. know what chirality is and whether or not we're going to solve it is not going to be interesting to

you it's like a murder mystery where we don't even tell people what this you know what the crime is so in part that's on us we should be making the greatest mystery uh accessible to the public but it doesn't seem to work then there's the military argument do you really want do you have any idea how powerful your physics community is and how much it is accomplished for you and you want you can have these guys for a pittance on permanent retainer to make sure that when something goes bump in the night, you've got the world's smartest people at your fingertips on speed dial. What is your effing problem that you're causing them to talk about funding?

I never want to hear the two of you talk about funding again in your lives. It pains me that working physicists are constantly in this conversation. Let me keep going with the arguments, though. The next one is an argument about the fact that physics has doomed you. since the early 1950s, 52 to 54, we are in the valley of death. If we do not figure out a way to become a space-faring civilization, you can kiss your indefinite future on this planet goodbye. Physicists, without the wisdom of gods, became as powerful as gods in the 1950s.

And we do not have a long-term plan for civilization. We've had 75 years of unexplainable quiet following World War II. two because we dropped two physics devices in Japan and scared the living shit out of every sentient being who's paying attention. And that is not going to hold. And so you were going to be in deep, deep trouble. But the last argument is probably the most useful one, and it's not one that I love, which is, let's talk about your beautiful taxpayer dollars.

They don't exist. Most of your taxpayer dollar is a physics dollar. And let me explain it. I'm going to start talking about some things. that come out of physics, whether it's electron shells, whether it's the transistor and semiconductor, as Max just talked about in semiconductor instructions that power your computers and the devices

that you're watching this on, whether it's the development of the electromagnetic spectrum, whether it's the World Wide Web that came out of CERN, I'm gonna keep going and going and going. And at the end, I'm gonna say, how much is left of your beautiful taxpayer dollar, dollar that you're so worried that you don't why should you spend it on us this is one of the reasons why I'm not accepting you guys calling me a physicist I don't necessarily even like your

community all the time but this is the most important intellectual community that has ever existed and it is intellectually offensive in the highest order to have it try to explain what it has done for you the old joke which Janet Jackson made famous is what have you done for me lately That's the punchline. Suck it up. Physics had signed the world's worst licensing deal in human history. Anytime you want to revisit that and say what would be a fair price for what we got out. I think we're repeating it.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Just let me get to the end of the effing ramp. Anytime you want to readdress how much physics has provided for you in that taxpayer dollar and you want to sign a licensing agreement in arrears that covers the World Wide Web, the semiconductor chemistry, blah, blah, blah, blah, electro-magnetic spectrum. Be my guest, and you will be watching physicists flying their kids around in multiple private jets, and you will be their private chefs.

Be quiet. Listen to what you've gotten from this community. It doesn't ask for much. Shut up, suck it up, and make sure that these people stop talking about funding, which is boring and it's also embarrassing. But if you want to let the U.S. be at the mercy of China, if you want it to live with nuclear weapons where we're not trying to get off this plan, if you want any of those things, it's because you're not paying attention.

Please find somebody who is and talk about this locally with them until you understand the situation a little bit better. Max, Max, a million. I'm going to put the million in there now. Max, go for you. I just have to say, you know, my favorite movie of all time is, of course, the one about your life. Life of Brian. We really should try to reenact this epic skit about what have the Romans ever done for us by saying, what is physics ever done for us?

So embarrassing. The internet. But besides physics, besides the internet and transistors, what has physics ever done for us? It's so ridiculous. You should. Yeah, maybe we'll do that. But I mean, I'll get back. My wife doesn't, you know, much to her chagrin.

Can't go back and say, well, you know, when I married you, you were, you know, 20 pounds lighter. And I can't, well, your cooking is so good, dear. No, I mean, we didn't sign a deal. There are no deals. So the question is, how do we go for? Hold on. Hold on. Yes, I want to get to immigration also, Eric, because we're talking to an immigrant, a dangerous immigrant right now.

But I want to get to that in a second. Because I do think there's a kernel of truth there. But let me just say this. We're making the exact same mistakes. It wasn't just the endless frontier. Cubits were invented by physicists. Guess who's using cubits? Well, quantum computing is using cubits. What is it doing? Max and I are going to talk later this year about artificial intelligence and some debt. We're making the same mistakes now. It's not only because of the endless frontier, Van Everbush, all these guys. It's built into who we are. We are not good because we don't get training in it, Eric. We never get training on the financial end of things that you have a preternatural ability to do, perhaps, or Jim Simons does. I don't even be training in economics.

Fine. You have a pred or natural gift then, but most of us don't. So the question is, what do we need? I made this comment. Someone in the chat room is suggesting blockchain. I thought about that too. Is there any application, a Y combinator for physics, where we put people that want to get the next qubit before it's too late. We're never going to back monitor. Forget it. We're never going to get a dollar for each email that was sent. That's not going to happen. But going forward, do we have to make them a same mistake that we made 45 times in the 20th century alone? I think I really don't want to have this conversation. I'll be honest with you. I'm embarrassed that we try to come up with reasons that we have to reason. Look, hey, public, you know who Einstein is. You know who Feynman is. You can't stop talking about them. I'm not, I'm not justifying it.

How do we go forward? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I understand that. There are lots of things we can do if we have funding to make the field exciting, inviting to get the talent. We have to compete for talent with things that actually pay and to have people constantly focused on their grants and all this stuff. We have devitalized ourselves. I don't think we need Y Combinator any of these things if we can save the system. I think, Brian, what your secret question really is, is assuming we can't save the system.

How do we go to blockchain? How do we go to Y Combinator? How do we do this? And I'm not done because I'm concerned that you guys need friends who are not physicists to explain what theoretical physics has done in a new way to people who are newly nervous about this planet. By the way, I forgot to throw in molecular biology, which was largely founded by who? Physicists, yes, yeah, absolutely.

It's so absurd that when we make the argument, it is as if we are insecure about what we have done. And I refuse to be insecure in front of the public, period. Do we need more people, Max? I mean, is it a lack of people that's holding back physics, five? I'm just talking about funding right now. I mean, is Elon Musk fundamentally limited by the computing power that he has or the number of bright engineers that he has? Look, many years ago, I promised myself to never ever pity myself.

And I think I've kept it. I think it's important to remember that physicists are not the only group on this planet who maybe don't quite get the resources that they think they should have that, right? There were more people who died of starvation this year than who died of COVID, and we don't even really read about it in the newspapers because for some reason, this is how media works, right? There were more people who died of tuberculosis this year and last year combined than have died of COVID this year.

We don't hear about them either very much because of the way the media works. So somehow, I think we, what's happening in science, that science, science has trouble with getting funding and also that scientists have their opinions not listen to very much is just a small symptom of a more broadly screwed up world. And maybe sometimes, just like in physics, sometimes the easy way to solve a little problem is to go and find unified theory, do it at a higher level. Maybe the easiest way to get science out of its screwed up situation is just make society itself a bit less screwed up. I don't know what you think, Eric.

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The truth is our sin. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N-EX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. I think what we could do is we could try, look, let me say something about your community that, again, you can't say.

The reason that physics is so powerful is that it does something that no other community he can easily do, which is that it gets the hybrid vigor of the dirt. If I go to Brian's lab where he's building telescopes, it is as gritty as you can possibly imagine to get clean results. You have to be welding things and soldering, all this kind of stuff. On the other hand, when I look at what's behind Max on his background, it is the purest, most beautiful stuff. It's like listening to Bach. It's just, it effectively, is this magical purity. And by getting the, you know, it's like you're combining these two most extreme things.

And there's something about this intellectual thought process that if I wanted to cure tuberculosis, believe me, I would actually go to physicists. If I wanted to cure problems in the economy, I would go to physicists. It's what physics does in training, if it works, and if we stop going the path, because I think physics training is becoming less valuable all the time, unfortunately, as we drift. But when physics works, the combination of purity and dirt and also the fact that so many problems are surprisingly simple once you get past the incredible hurdle needed to understand them. This is why the physics community is always at the scene of every great crime, you know,

for humanity. And so if we're stealing, you know, things away from, from malaria or, or famine or any things to make humans happier and better, you're always going to find physicists at the scene of the crime because there's something in the training that's fungible, which is why when I forgot molecular biology, can you imagine that your community more or less founded molecular biology, and I can't even be bothered to remember it while I'm listing all the things we've done? It's preposterous.

And because when you guys say it, it sounds like you're there with a begging bowl, I prefer to have friends say it for you. You need the Elon Musk's who almost became a physicist, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Yuri Milner's, whoever, to get together and say, hey, we need to agitate for our friends. If you guys do it, it won't work. We need to do it from outside.

It's called third party praise. So let me give you some applause right there. Max, do you want to have a follow up on that before we switch to another topic? If you guys have time, I don't know. How's your time going, guys? I love this, but it's up to you. I'm good for a lot. more of Max's. I just want to remind people to go to Max's new project to check it out. It's called

improve the news.org. Go to Eric Weinstein's channel on YouTube, look up the portal, subscribe to the portal. And if you're enjoying this live stream, just hit the thumbs up button, stretch your thumbs. Don't get carpal tunnel syndrome. It kills 800 billion people a year. Stretch your thumbs, hit the subscribe button, hit the like button if you're enjoying this conversation, because I'm having such a good time with these incredible, brilliant friends of mine that I'm privileged, to spend the time with because of things like the internet that we love and hate. And I want to turn now back to Max. You have a quick follow-up on that? And before we get to some talkless, some practical wisdom from the two of you? Yeah. So just to share a final thought on this

business about physics and science more broadly and how to get people to, how to get both get people listening more to it so that the world gets run in a more reasonable way. And And also so that we don't have to do so much begging. I think physicists, we have a certain arrogance, actually, which has harmed us a lot. And hope you. We forget that we're in a bubble and that we forget that there's actually a science of how you persuade people. There's actually a science of how to communicate. And other people have studied that at great length.

I would say that the average person who works making cigarette ads is much more scientific about the way they get their message out than the average physicist. And I think it comes not from stupidity on behalf of the physicist, but from arrogance. And that somehow, no, we're not going to stoop so low that we're going to be scientific about how we communicate. Right. Scientific about how we advocate. We have to get off our high horses. If you get invaded by Hitler's army, you shouldn't just say, well, well, you know, tanks are immoral.

We're going to fight them with swords. We have to be scientific also about standing up for ourselves and on our ideas and so forth. And part of that, another second mistake I think we make is forgetting that we live in a bubble and spending much more time in fighting within our community of physicists or within having one science pitted against another science for a few more tax dollars losing sight of the fact that there's a tiny

trickle of money that flows to all the sciences combine anyway compared to what goes into generic fruits of lobby, corporate lobbying and random waste. So get out of our bubble again. If we look at the big picture, it's kind of pathetic really that

have physicists, biologists, chemists, who together have built up most of the wealth of the world. And that is to be so incredibly navel-gazing and busy with infighting and old-fashioned and how they communicate that they have to come begging for money and people don't listen to them. Can we actually, can I just tell it? Yeah, go for it. A quick story from the malaria wars, effectively. There used to be a problem where you had a tiny, budget for certain diseases that affected large numbers of people who didn't happen to live where the

money was. And at some point, right now. Yeah. And, but there was a change back, I guess, in the 90s, maybe, 80s, 90s, where I remember Jeffrey Sacks taking my wife, P.L. Malani onto a phone call. And she was trying to figure out how to allocate this tiny little budget. And his point to her was it's immoral for us to be trying to do this.

What we need to do is to push the budget out and to stop accepting the constraint. And that's part of why I was a little bit resistant. I wasn't because Ryan was making bad points about Y Combinator. It's that I can't, I refuse to start thinking about this problem in earnest at this level. This is such a clear mismatch that the first thing is to cure. our society wants to spend more money on science, and it wants to spend less money on stupid stuff. And by the way, the really big problem, the really stupid thing that we did was around the SSC cancellation, the superconducting supercollider, where the arrogance of the community did not

play well in Washington as times had changed. And I highly recommend going back to like 1992, 93 in the congressional hearings and reading how pissed off Congress was. that when they found the National Science Foundation lying, and then they found the physicists buying too much art for their offices at the SSC and things like that. So it's very important that we also do our part to say, look, hey, we are going to spend some money on art, beautiful buildings and things that make us happy. We have conferences in beautiful locations, suck it up.

It's a pit and stop complaining. On the other hand, know that we are serious as a heart attack when it comes to using this money for things that really matter. Sometimes all of that kind of luxury promotes the idea. I went to a max conference in Banff. It's one of the most beautiful places, but that facilitated lots of people feeling that we could take the risks to do new things,

whereas if you're constantly keeping people at a minimal level of sustenance, necessity is the mother of very mundane inventions, but luxury is often the father to, real freedom to consider bold new ideas. And I really do believe that in part, we need to recognize that we pissed people off in the early 90s and we need to reestablish trust. And we have the basis to do it. I made that point to Barry Barish that had the SSC not been canceled by the venality of my fellow physicist, he would not have won the Nobel Prize that he left on the couch here

because he only joined Aligo because the SSC was canceled. And then furthermore, the Higgs boson, which was the primary discovery of the Large Hadron Collider, resulted in two Nobel prizes, but not to any of the experimentalists. And I wonder, you guys are theorists. I made this joke with Eric. He always hits me when we're in person. When I make it, but I say like, you know, do you really think of experimentalists as like, you know, the joke is, what do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? Well, you call him a drummer. What do you call someone who hangs out with physicists and experimentalists? Back in the 1900s, people used to say that Einstein was practicing Jewish physics.

He was doing theoretical physics. Real men did Aryan physics. That was experimental physics. Oh, how times have changed. There's a few Jews who have won the Nobel Prize, and some of whom are fellow experimentalists, like Ray Weiss, like Barry Barish and others. But the question is, to what extent do you feel like there is a difference of viewpoint

as to the importance of experimental scientists versus, I mean, I don't think some, you know, Bardeen looked at the equations of quantum mechanics and said, let me invent the transistor, which will then power all these cell phones. I feel like a lot of these discoveries are serendipitous in theory is kind of naturally serendipitous, whereas experimentalist, we kind of need to know what we're looking for before we set out. What do you think of the difference between theoretical physics, experimental physics max first, and then Eric, in terms of the difference in similarities that they may engender. I think experimentalists, experimental physicists and theoretical physicists have always had a

love-hate relationship with one another, where deep down there was a very deep respect both ways. And it's been a very, very healthy relationship as well, where experimentalists have discovered new things which posed mysteries for theorists to chew on. And theorists have sometimes taken giant leaps of and motivated experiments that wouldn't otherwise have done. It's quite obvious to me that if you had, if you eliminated either theoretical physics or experimental physics, the field as a whole would have gone almost nowhere. I think, you know, Brian, there are three sort of categories of experiments.

It's experiments that I don't find particularly exciting, but I'm glad somebody did them. Then there's experiments like the Cobalt 60 experiment that showed that the universe was left, right, asymmetric, where the effect is so astounding and the courage needed to say, I believe that this crazy suggestion is worth trying, where I admire the courage as well as the skill and the establishing it is so profound that I think it's, you know, top-level stuff. And then there's like weird stuff. I remember, I think, the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the particles or the fields that communicate the weak force or the W&Z particles. I remember the description of stochastic cooling, I think, which was what Simon Van Damir had contributed, where it was like, we're going to take a box where there are particles

bouncing around and we're going to keep nudging the box in precise ways so that it absorbs the energy from the individual particles and so that they will all get cooled by virtue of the fact that we can nudge this thing. I mean, it was the most mind-blowing description and part of what I hope to be helping Brian do is to distinguish that there's an experiment that has to be done. It was done. We're happy that it happened. There was an experiment that showed something absolutely astounding. It's a different sort of a thing which took courage. And then there's experiments that look like theoretical physics, but are even better sometimes because they're actually physically manifested, like stochastic cooling. And in part, I think that when we call it

experiment, we're not doing enough to talk about the taxonomy of different things that us theoretically minded people find amazing about what the guys who actually get in gals, who get, you know, down and dirty doing the actual nuts and bolt soldering and gluing. Yeah, when you think about, though, you know, who does a scientist, if you say the word scientist to an individual, they'll think of Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan. It's rare, if anybody, Richard Feynman, they don't think about experimentalist. And yet, you know, something like in my book, losing the Nobel Prize, I make this point, like 70% of Nobel Prizes have gone to Experimentalists since 19. 40. And from my perspective, you know, we need the kind of Brian Green's, Max Tag Marks, Eric Weinstein's of experimental physics to communicate how freaking cool it is because you can actually get something done in a day.

Let us help. As Albert Einstein, sorry, Albert Michelson, one of the first Americans to win the Nobel Prize, he said that experiments are like puzzles. The more you do, the better you get. And every time you do a puzzle, it's like the Rubik's Cube. I'm trying to get the inventor of the Rubik's Cube on my podcast. I'll let you know if I can get that done. The Kamran Vafa, a mutual friend of you guys, he was on the show. He wrote a book called Puzzles to Unlock the Universe, unravel the universe. And I asked him, what would you rather solve? A mystery or a puzzle? And it was a question I asked Freeman Dyson, the late great Freeman Dyson on this very show as well.

What it animates you guys? Is it the puzzle solving that I like to do, like working on my car, building a telescope, where I know there's a solution. Maybe I'm not a good enough experimentalist to get it done, but someone better than me can get it done. or a mystery that perhaps has no answer. Max, let's start with you. What do you prefer most in life? Mysteries that may not be solvable

or puzzles which have a solution that you can complete. I love both. I mean, if not being solvable, doesn't phase me. I'd much rather have any questions I can't answer that answers I can't question. We're going to go there on God in a minute, but keep going, yeah.

That is actually very much my mantra as a scientist. I also feel that the whole, distinction between experimentalist and physicist, the experimentalist and theory. It's kind of outdated and dissolving. First of all, you have a lot of people who work at the interface, like a phenomenologists, who try to connect it to. Then you have people like me. I spent five years building your radio telescope, and I've spent a lot of time working with you and others on experimental data, but I'm mostly a theorist. And then you have entirely new, different areas which are neither experiment or theory.

In astronomy, right, they are very, astronomers are very clear to say, I am an observer, not an experimentalist. And now we have a new field, computational physics, which clearly is here with us to stay. You know, if someone writes, if someone devotes 10 years of their career to do amazing supercomputer simulations and developing new algorithms for lattice QCD with the goal ultimately of computing the whole periodic table from,

first principles, right? That's not theory. It's not experiment. It's a little bit like being an observer where you observe inside your, it's frankly a new field. So I think we're probably better off not obsessing too much about artificial boundaries between are you this kind of businessist or that kind of business. Yeah, I also should say before Eric, you respond, but I always say that experimentalists don't have to be able to create new theories, but we better understand the theories that others have proposed well enough that we can make beautiful experiments. You know, our friend Sabina Hasinfeld, or she says, you know, beauty is driving physics astray. I disagree with her vehemently when she came on my interview. I said all experiments are beautiful. Even the ugly, you know,

chicklet and chewing gum and coat hanger ones, because they're all teasing out something that is going to reveal something about the universe, whether it be through a null result. as I'm used to coming up with, or an actual positive detection. These experiments have to have a certain symmetry, beauty, and naturalness about them in order to succeed. Eric, what do you think about this, you know, rather provocative? I think, Brian, you've been on this, and you've actually been very influential in the evolution of my thinking about this.

I hadn't realized the extent to which the theorists, I've been so focused on the fact that we seem to have appointed about six or seven people to talk to the podcast. public on behalf of all physics, that I was sort of not realizing that all of them tend to come from the theory camp, and they all tend to come with varying amounts of G-Wiz, which is partially good and partially not good. I'm not entirely against Wu and G-Wiz, but you need to do it in the right proportion. I think partially what it has to do with is the shock. For those of us who program computers now and again, sometimes you'll have a theory, and then you'll instantianteau. inside of the computer.

And when the graphic actually shows you what your equations have been saying, you have this kind of surprise. You may have written the code. You may have come up with the equations. You may have designed everything. But the computer reflects you back to you. And you're like, whoa, it works. It's real.

I mean, I think I was maybe almost the first. I think I may have been the first person to actually draw inside of a computer a three dimensional model of parallel translation that applies in economics. And when I saw it come up, I was just astounded. And I think it has a different beauty to it. I wish more theorists were doing some experiment, more experimentalists. And let me say the negative thing for the experimentalists. You guys cannot afford to be so light on the theory. If you're going to actually check our work, you need to speak the language of people who's work. I'm very worried that there's going to be a translation error,

and you're going to think that you're understanding what we're talking about with tensors and differential forms and bundles. But in fact, we need people who go back and forth. So I'm worried about the two cultures of CP Snow dividing experimentalists from theorists, and in part that's on the experimentalists. They're trying to get by with antiquated language, as if, you know, tensors are still, collections of numbers that transform according to rules, which is not a good way of describing

them in the slightest. With that said, I think that there are a small number of very interesting places where you see something that sounds like a theory that's actually experimental. If you look at Watson and Crick's discovery of the three-dimensional structure of the double helix, they went through a triple helix that they built a model of, which was an embarrassment to them. They also went to a situation in which they come up with. the double helix after the parts are machined and delivered to their to their uh the room in which

they're working in some sense the double helix was an experimental result and if i can pick out another one in the late 50s there's this really anomalous thing which i still can't quite figure out you guys can inform me the bohm erinoff effect was the last really significant discovery around plain old classical sort of electromagnetism now there may be a beam and a and some quantum interference and stuff like that. But we didn't understand that the electromagnetic field strength, which we thought was the real object, is not really the primary object.

It's the potential. And the real primary object is something called a vector potential. When it turned out that we had gotten to the late 50s without even understanding the most beautiful of our classical field theories in its totality, it indicated to me that what is the danger of having, the strict division of labor in the pin factory of science where you don't have enough people who are able to go back and forth. And I really look back to those guys like Fermi, you know,

who are great calculators, beta, who is a great calculator, people who did both of these things. And at a minimum, we need to be getting these people in the same rooms. And I have to be honest with you, there's a way in which I think theory has gone into a worse direction, even though I'm closer to it, because there has been so little in fundamental physics that's been propelling theory forward, except at the level of the framework. So we now have a much better idea of the framework of the theory. We haven't been idle, but we found very little that's profoundly new coming from the theory side since the standard model was put into rough final form as it stayed since in the early 70s.

And Max, what do you make in the fact that, you know, everyone sort of sacrifices themselves, as Lenny Suskin calls it, that they become Popper Azi. You know, they become overwhelmed by this notion of falsifiability first proposed in a demarcation criteria of Karl Popper, great philosopher. I haven't, I've told this to Eric, but I want to say it to you, I feel we physicists have math envy. You know, Freud called, you know, most people having certain. to other kinds of, I mean, people talk about physics envy, but actually, I think we have math envy

as physicists, because at least mathematicians know that there are formal limitations in the consistency of their mathematical formalisms. In physics, we're left with Popper as just like falsifiability. And I've made this case many times with only with Nobel Prize winners, because I feel like their reputation is so stellar. But then many of them don't want to, you know, risk losing the sheen on their gilded, graven image of Ler. Alfred Nobel. But anyway, I want to ask you, the fact that there's so much attention given to wormholes, given to black hole singularities, given to the Big Bang itself, given to your favorite, one of your favorite subjects, the multiverse, is this why you're going into like more

kind of hardcore or practical or experimental science? Because we can't ever see any of those things, let alone know that they're real. So why is it that, you know, that there's so many physicists that are overwhelmed with the notion of Popper, but yet are practicing and appealing to the public, the gee whiz, mind of God is inside the singular, you know, why is that? I guess there's a spectrum of questions in there. Yes. One of them is Popper, yay or nay. I promised to address that.

Yes. A separate question is, where do we draw the line between science on one hand and bullshit on the other? Yes. And I would first of all say, so I'm going to say something which might sound paradoxical. I'm going to defend Popper, but attack a lot of the people who claim that in talking about black hole interiors and multiverse are bullshit and saying they misunderstood Popper. So what Popper says is that, you know, if I tell you about a theory and you say, give me one possible experiment that could prove you wrong and I can't come up with anything

Then this is the scientific theory. I stand by that. I think that's perfectly fair and In fact there was a fascinating debate about evolution once between Bill Nye and someone else and Bill Nye asked the other guy if he could name one thing that would persuade him that creationism was wrong and he couldn't so their Popper would come down on Bill Nye's side that said though I still think many people have misunderstood Popper and can awake too crude view on it. Well, when we test in science are theories. So, for example, if you have an argument, you and Eric, about what's really happening inside of a black hole, you can never go there and measure it and then come back and do a podcast about it.

Does that mean it's all BS? No, it does not mean that. What you're actually testing instead is whether general relativity is correct as it stands, because general relativity predicts a lot of things you can never test directly with experiments, like exactly what happens inside the event horizon, but also predicts a lot of things you can test, like the perihelian shift of mercury, like the bending of starlight by the sun, like the whole Taylor Polestar like the expanding universe,

and so many other things that we study with great precision right now, including, again, the patterns on your beach ball behind you there, the micro background, right? And so in science, we have the situation that if you have, you cannot dismiss general relativity as being unscientific BS because it is testable. So if you fail many times to falsify it, proper style, then you have to start taking seriously all its predictions, even its predictions that you cannot directly experiment with test, like what happens inside of black holes. And this is exactly the mistake I think people make now analogously in other areas.

They'll take, for example, Alan Gooth, Rilinda, and other theory of inflation, and they will acknowledge that this is a scientific theory because it makes a lot of predictions. It makes some predictions even for the micro-backrun. It's had many chances they get falsified, and it's survived so far. So we have to start taking seriously also some of its other predictions

that we cannot test, which is that space goes on far beyond that beach ball, probably so far beyond that it's worth calling other regions parallel universes, for instance. So is that non-scientific? No, it's not. Inflation is a scientific theory. And a scientific theory, you take it or leave it. It's all or nothing. You cannot say, oh, you can go into Starbucks and say, yeah, I want this coffee, but without the caffeine in it, that's fine. But you cannot say, I want general relativity. I'm just going to opt out of the black hole prediction.

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I fear that I'm going to just put my foot in it, but I'm going to fall back on my wingman, Dirac. I don't know if you guys have heard of him. He says a couple of things that are widely quoted. It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. Now, that's clearly the sound of a crazy person in some sense. he goes on to say if there's not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged. So why is this?

Well, it's because he lived this. And one of the things that I'm really against is the promotion of the sanitized version of science with the scientific method and Popper not coming remotely close to how science is actually. actually done. So Max just talked about the anomalous procession of the perihelion of Mercury. The problem is, if I recall correctly, when Einstein first formulated this, he formulated it with Grossman in 1913, and then he reformulated it alone and put some specificity to it. In a weird way, the 1913 thing was better than his first go at being concrete because he said the Ricci tensor is equal to the stuff.

in the universe. And that equation doesn't even make sense because it doesn't have a particular equation that it has to satisfy work out. But it was good enough, if I recall correctly, to explain the anomalous procession. As a result, you can have a wrong theory that works with experiment. And then you can have the reverse situation, which is where Diorak was really getting this. He says, I might tell you the story.

I learned from Schrodinger of how when he first got the idea for his equation, the one that Max held up, he immediately applied it to the behavior of the electron and the hydrogen atom, that is the simplest possible system. And he got results that did not agree with experiment. This disagreement arose because of the time it was not known that the electron has a spin. And that, of course, was a great disappointment to Schrodinger, and it caused him to abandon the work for months. Then he noticed that if he applied the theory in a more appropriate way, not taking into account the refinements required by relativity to this rough approximation, his work. was in agreement with experiment. He published this first paper. He goes on to say that this wrong equation that Max held up is not in fact the equation that Schroenger had to begin with, which is now called the Klein-Gordon equation. So he didn't have the Dirac equation, which is relativistic or the Klein-Gordon. He came up with a wrong equation. It's called the Klein-Gordon equation because it was invented by Schrodinger. And it pains me to admit this because Klein was in Sweden. But the point that I'm trying to get at here is you can have situations. You can have situations. where you get agreement with experiment, your theory is wrong.

You can have other situations where your theory is right, but in a stupid way you don't have the instantiation right. And the message that I want to send, which is, of course, going to be treated as heresy by all of the people who are, you know, the people who have this energy that there is a demarcation problem that you can solve it, our skeptic friends

and our rationalist friends. No, that's not how this game works. The real way this works is that the true scientific method The scientific method is the radio edit of great science, and the way the great science works is every which way humans have ever come up with reliable understanding of their environment and their world, which may include dreams, it may include taking LSD in the case of Carrie Mullis, I don't know. It involves so many weird, crazy things that I'm just, I guess I'm sort of sad that we keep

trying to neuter and emasculate this subject, when in fact it's the messiness and the fact that you don't know whether agreement with the experiment is a death knell or, in fact, it's a false indication that you're on the right path. I think that we just need to grow up and grow out of both emphatic paparianism, usually misinstantiated because Popper wasn't as dumb as people claim. And we also have to stop fetishizing the scientific method when we have the caculies of the world running around figuring out benzene. You know, so many weird things contribute to our understanding of reliable information in science. We've got to be more honest that there is no such thing as the scientific method, the way you learn about it in school. Yeah, I think the way taught in school is frankly kind of silly.

The way I see it, my first postdoc mentor, Georg Raffelt, once said something that's always stuck with me, which is it's better to be wrong in an interesting way than to be right in a boring way. So, for example, Schrodinger's first failed, hydrogen atom, Einstein's first failed general relativity formulation. They were wrong in an interesting way. And being wrong in an interesting way is very, very valuable for physics. Second, I feel, and I thought that was a bit of the sentiment of what you were saying to Eric is, you know, humility has to be at the core of science, right? Not only should we be humble and acknowledge that everything we believe in might be wrong, even our pet theory that we just published, but we should actively seek out ways in which we can actually be proven wrong. It's kind of the opposite of a politician, right, who avoids saying anything or sticking in a neckout so that they can be proven wrong.

We should aspire to, we should really aspire to live dangerously. We should have the mindset that the more we force ourselves to live dangerously and have our theories potentially be proven wrong, right, the more likely we are to learn something interesting. Yeah, absolutely. So on that front, if you think about Linus Pauling, racing Watson and Crick for the, double helix, both of them came up with a triple helix with the sugar phosphate backbone on the interior with the nucleotides sticking out, if I recall correctly. So there are certain mistakes that may be canonical on our way towards the truth and that you actually have to go through the valley of error in order to scale the peaks of success and insight.

And what is absolutely important about this, and it goes back to the funding conversation, unfortunately, is that you need to have a tolerant enough community that people can afford to tell the truth and continue in their quests without worry that by stumbling, they will immediately, you know, there was this old thing in the concentration camps of death camps where if you coughed, you were gone. And so, you know, at some level, this zero tolerance for error is something that really bothers me. A lot of these great old stories, people made error after error after error on their path to becoming the people who put things in final form. And I think part of what's going on is that the one thing I'm going to quibble with, I loved what Max just said. I think it was great. But I do have a caveat, unfortunately, because I think he's going to say it better than I can't. We have to stop fetishizing humility because clearly this is not a trait that most people associate with the theoretical physics community, to say the least. What really is going on is that physicists and great scientists need two separate facilities.

They need absolute pathological self-confidence and arrogance. You need to be able. Apparently, Eric Lander used to call in like 100 biologists mathematicians and say, me what's wrong with my idea. They would tell him what's wrong with his idea. He'd say, thank you. I was worried that there was something really wrong, but none of you came up with it. Can you tell a hundred of the smartest people that you value their opinion, you're all wrong? Yes, that's absolutely important. You have to have the arrogance and you have to have the humility, which is what Max was saying. The real trick, which we don't explain to people, is regulated expression of arrogance and humility, just the way, like with the operon,

in the pajama experiment, sometimes you're expressing something, sometimes you're repressing it. And I really think that part of the problem is that some of the people who are incredibly modest and incredibly humble, what we need to do is to get them hyped up on their own brilliance. Other people who are insufferable and don't really seem to, I think it's clear enough. I think the basic point is arrogant people need more humility, humble people often need more self-confidence, and we can't keep extolling one virtue over the other. So on that note, I do want to take some questions. We've had a couple hundred dollars worth, maybe even $1,000 worth, which is going to go to your Jen's favorite charities. We're going to split that down the middle.

I want to thank people for asking these wonderful questions. Let's do a couple of quick ones, and then I want to get into a... a couple of topics that I'm interested in just because how often do I get to get my two good buddies together and a council of the wise. I want to ask, first of all, a question about aliens, which has come in from one of my listeners, but I want to twist it to something I'm interested in that Max has thought about a lot, which is the so-called simulation hypothesis. I had on Jill Tarter this past week or last week talking about this signal from Proximus and Turi that was supposedly picked up. She was rather dubious about that. But this question of whether or not we exist as the, as the Life 2.0, and whether or not Life 2.0 ever becomes fully like Life 3.0 is my question. What are your current thoughts, Max, about the simulation hypothesis? First, maybe State would Bolstrom, you know, meant by this. You know, you've talked about this a lot. But how much credulity should we have in this? And then I'm going to ask Eric about the ethics and the moral.

morality of a simulatable civilization. So in what ways would they not be or be like gods? First, Max, simulation hypothesis, your thoughts, current status. All right, so let me first explain Vostrom's simulation argument and then explain why I think it's flawed. So the basic argument starts by saying, well, if we're a blob of quarks and electrons and our conscious minds are ultimately all about information processing,

right, then surely if you were actually simulated in a computer so that the information processing was exactly the same, maybe you're in, suppose you were in some future super advanced computer game or whatever, you wouldn't know the difference, of course. So maybe we are in a simulation. And then Bostrom goes on to say, well, in this universe of ours, it's likely that eventually artificial intelligence will advance and we're going to help life spread into much of our observable universe. There's going to be massive amounts of computations and simulations and perhaps way more simulated minds than real minds.

And therefore, if you're a random mind having these experiences, you are simulated. So you are probably living in a simulation. He's more careful on that than lists all the caveats also. So there's nothing flawed with what he wrote. But I think the conclusion that we are probably living in a simulation is false. and to see where it starts to go wrong, just note that suppose you buy it and you say, okay, we are all in a simulation now

having this conversation. We can make the same argument all over again that, oh, in our simulated universe, there are going to be all these future doubly simulated minds and they're much more of them, so we're probably double simulated. And then we can repeat and say, actually, no, we're simply, oh, quadruply, oh, we're simulated at Google Flex times. Yes.

No, no, flex, flex, flex, flex, flex, and you start to get a sinking feeling that there's something rocking here. And there is. Yes. The big mistake is that it doesn't matter at all how many, whether they're more simulated or real minds in the universe that we think we're in, what matters is what's going on in the basement universe, right, where maybe there is the original simulation. And if we're simulated, we have no clue what that universe is actually like. So we should have an open mind about this as anything else. But I would definitely not jump on the bad wagon and say, oh, we're all simulated.

On the other hand, if you're still worried that maybe you are simulated, the conclusion is pretty obvious. You should live a really interesting life so that the simulators don't get bored and shut you down. Tag marks wager, an update of Pascal. Eric, what are your thoughts about simulation hypothesis? Is it valid? And what, if any, obligations would a master simulator have to his denizens or her, it's denizens, let's be honest. It's very interesting to me that when we talk, so there's the simulation hypothesis and also the rogue AI, AGI hypothesis.

And we don't really connect these. So as the simulators, we are terrified of creating the gallum, the Frankenstein monster that comes after us and out competes us because we are like ants to its godlike intelligence. And on the other hand, if we are the simulated, we're terribly frightened that we are going to have the plug pulled out, which these are the same stories in some sense, but we're on both sides of them and we're telling them from the point of view of we're scared in both cases. I never hear us say, is it ethical to pull the plug on the AGI? Because what are, you know, are we, do we have the right to kill something off that may intend to kill us? And what are our obligations to the simulators? So I think that our narcissism is clearly on display in the simulation hypothesis. I do think, though, that in part, what it does is it takes the loss of risk.

religion that we associate with Nietzsche and the inability to construct God and to reconstruct it inside of the one sector of the economy that still seems to be behaving as if it didn't know that everything came crashing down in the early 70s, which is the computation communication sector. And so weirdly, like if you look at what's happened in physics, we've all moved towards information, you know, maybe the university is made of information. Well, it seems pretty clear that this has to do with the fact that Silicon Valley, which is now evaporating and reconstituting in Miami and Austin or whatever, that this Silicon Valley ethos has pervaded our philosophical thinking, our scientific thinking, maybe it's an attempt to get money out of Mark Zuckerberg. It's unclear,

but I do think that it's very unlikely to my way of thinking, given the importance of the calculus and therefore the continuum in most things that we do, that it's very unlikely to my way of thinking, it would be harder to simulate this world than to build it. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I'm not very excited about the simulation hypothesis, because the easiest way to simulate it is to construct the actual thing that you're simulating. And I think in that framework, we just haven't thought enough about it. And we're sort of reaching for the most obvious hypotheses.

The last thing I wanted to say is that if we stopped calling it the simulation, and started calling it the effective theory. We distinguish it now, thanks to you guys in renormalization theory, that higher-level theories that aren't true, we now call effective because they're still useful. We haven't dispensed with Newton. We just call him effective rather than fundamental. So we don't know what a fundamental theory actually looks like. But if you imagine that the classical world is in some sense like a simulation,

we have a quantum existence, and the quantum existence is hidden from us. and we stumble around as mesoscale phenomena in this classical world that doesn't really exist but kind of washes out of the quantum. If you wanted a hypothesis, I think that that would be kind of a really interesting thing. Does that get to you philosophically? If it doesn't excite you, maybe the idea is that you're really here for the science fiction rather than the science. I don't know.

Yeah, that is something I've thought about also. Yeah, do we, if we, right before we pull the plug on Max's super AI simulator, is it going to scream and what would that do to us is it like cooking lobsters which i i don't know anything about that but uh max you want to have a quick follow up before we start to wind down or are we good to go with that sure sure i think uh there's been some amount of self self criticism uh here so in that spirit let's be honest we are not that ethical as a species even though we love patting ourselves on our head and pretending we are right we um i've done a lot of horrible things in history And even today, we're still not that ethical.

Why else is it that we've talked so little about the people who died of starvation in this year of 2020 and of tuberculosis? Then we have talked about the fewer people who died of COVID, right? It's because those people were poor and we didn't feel our ethics applied to them as much as the richer people who died of COVID-19. That's the sad truth. Why do we talk so much less about the suffering? of factory farm chickens and pigs than, you know, that we talk about good-looking actresses or whatever. It's because, again, we're not maybe as ethical as we'd like to be.

But being, sort of shifting a little bit to optimism, I think we should aspire, certainly to become more ethical. And maybe, and I would say actually by far the greatest ethical dilemma is what we're going to make of the whole cosmic future. Because, you know, on one hand, we have an. technology now that we could drive all life on this we could drive humanity entirely extinct if we wanted to which would perhaps wipe out you know enormous amounts of positive experiences in life for billions of years throughout much of our universe right or we could get our act together

and and help life spread from this planet and flourish beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors for billions of years in this amazing future and this to me is the ultimate ethical dilemma. What are we going to do? Are we going to squander this future or are we going to seize it? And I would like to end with Freeman Dyson, whom you just mentioned here, because he was not only an intellectual hero of mine, but it was so inspiring that he would hang out and have lunch with us,

lowly mortal postdocs back when I lived in New Jersey. And he used to point out that, look, you know, you ain't seen nothing yet. you know, life today in our universe, as far as we can tell, is still this puny perturbation on what looks mostly dead, right? And yet intelligence has this power to completely transform the physical world. Look what intelligence has transformed Earth since it showed up. It's, and with artificial intelligence, it could even happen quite soon that much of what we see out there starts to come alive. and our universe starts to really wake up and fulfill its potential.

I find it incredibly inspiring to think about how we here in our lifetime on our little spinning ball in space, you know, actually have so much influence over the whole future of ethics and positive experiences in the cosmos. And that's the reason, honestly, honestly, that I spend so much of my time on the Future Life Institute and other to try to make sure that we steer the technology towards making the future awesome. Let me just ask you one question about that. Assuming that Einstein more or less holds into whatever the fundamental theory is and that the constraints that we've come to live with under Einsteinian relativity, like the speed of light, continue to hold, and assume that humans have to live under that, do you think, given how far other good stuff is, away from us that realistically we are going to be able to figure out any way of bootstrapping

our way someplace interesting out of our relatively isolated solar system with very few habitable surfaces? Yes, absolutely. I actually geeked out on that in a big way in chapter six of my book Life 3.0, where I just asked the question, what if we shift from having our technology limited by our own intelligence? to instead having our technology limited by the laws of physics, how much better could we do? And yes, you're completely right.

There's still limits. And presumably there's still a speed limit, speed of light, et cetera, et cetera. And because of dark energy, there's a limit to how many atoms we can ever access out there. But the limits are just mind-blowingly far above what we have now. So first of all, going to other solar systems as a walk in the park. with our official intelligence going to other galaxies is also working in the park

you can and I put I had a lot of fun making to some nerdy plots to see how much of our problems can we actually get to there are galaxies

that you can see right now at very high red shift where sadly if our current understanding of cosmology is true it's so see but not touch because they're going away from us

so fast at an accelerating rate that no technology will get us there. But a significant fraction of the beach ball behind Brian Keating is in play for us. And I would really hate it if our Earth-origining life spends its entire future just on this little spinning ball. I can't stand to think about it. And I can't, I personally want to get off of this and visit the neighborhood. But my feeling about this is that I'm hoping against hope.

that we have a way of going against Einstein and I have to say that even now I can go against many many people but if it's deraq and Einstein I really really don't like it um thanks thanks for that answer yeah well guys this has been just a thrilling thing for me I always say on my channel you know Sam Harris has this thought experiment you know if you could go into a chamber and there was a button you could push and it would instantly teleport you to Mars and you'd survive and come back and the only catch is right before you push it, they have to kill you so you don't have two copies of Brian Keating lying around. Would you push that button? And a lot of people would. And I thought about it and I said, you know what? Actually, I have that ability to teleport

right now. And it's called my children. And not only my children, but of biological nature, but also my ideological children, those that I influence. And I want to just thank you two for being influences to me. Ideological, I'll call you guys cousins because you're not that much older than me, if so at all. But I want to thank you guys for going into The Impossible. It's now Champagne o'clock where Max lives.

Actually, I've been on champagne this whole day already since the crack of eight. I want to just remind people go and look at improve the news.org. It is one of the most fun and delightful pieces of actionable intelligence that you can use to make 2021 a business. better year than 2020. I had so much fun with it. Please go to Eric Weinstein's channel on YouTube and also subscribe to the portal. Please stay tuned for this to this channel. We're going to have Deepak Chopra in conversation with Frank Wilczek, facilitated by me. That was pretty fun. And I'm going to have both of them individually as well, as well as John Preskill is coming up not too long from now.

and I had Giant Narla Kar, who is a giant of cosmology. As Max will know, was one of the fathers of the steady state universe. I think it's important to listen to our elders. As I've listened to you guys who are barely older than me in this universe, please like and subscribe to the Brian Keating, Dr. Brian Keating's YouTube channel. Also, Into the Impossible on iTunes, wherever you get it, the portal. Max Tag Mark's universe, it's one of the most delightful places in this corner of the multiverse. And now, I can say with quite a good deal of confidence,

that I'm closer to knowing the mind of God. Thank you, boys. Happy 2021, Shanatova. Everybody out there, I wish it be a healthy, happy, safe new year for everybody. Shanatova. Thanks for having us. Thank you. And got new o'er.

Indeed it will be. Bye, guys. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com.

Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to Imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director, produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.

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