Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 2 of 2 Lawrence Krauss: The Physics of Everything (#171)

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

Lawrence Krauss is an internationally known theoretical physicist and bestselling author, as well as being an acclaimed lecturer. He is currently President of The Origins Project Foundation, and host of The Origins Podcast, His wide research interests have focused on the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, including the origin and evolution of the Universe and the fundamental structure of matter. Among his numerous important scientific contributions was the proposal, in 1995, that most of the energy of the Universe resided in empty space. Krauss previously served as Director of Arizona State University's Origins Project, and Foundation Professor for a decade from 2008-2018, and also as Chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from 2006-2018. Prof. Krauss has held endowed professorships and distinguished research appointments at institutions including Harvard University, Yale University, University of Chicago, Boston University, University of Zurich, University of California at Santa Barbara, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), Case Western Reserve University, Australian National University, Arizona State University, and New College of Humanities. In 2008 he created and served for a decade as Inaugural Director of the Origins Project, a national center for research and outreach on origins issues. He has written over 500 publications and 10 popular books, including the international best-sellers, The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. Among his numerous awards are included the three major awards from all 3 US physics societies and the 2012 Public Service Award from the National Science Board for his contributions to the public understanding of science. Support our Sponsor LinkedIn Jobs! Use this link to post your first job ad for FREE LinkedIn.com/impossiblebiOptimizers for better sleep https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 🏄‍♂️ 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.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to part two of this special two-part episode of Into the Impossible, featuring Brian Keating's fascinating, in-depth discussion with physicist and prolific author Lawrence Krauss. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I wanted to just read to you a statement that I got from Kamran Bafa when he was on the show. I asked him, I said, Kamran, you know, one of the knocks against strength theory is that it doesn't have it doesn't make predictions that are testable and therefore cannot be falsified. And then he went into the black hole entropy that it can be reproduced to show the degrees of freedom that Beckinstein.

In a two-dimensional black hole. In a two-dimensional black hole. Which we don't live in, by the way. Exactly, right? So I mentioned that. And then he said, okay, so I said, come on, come on. Then he said, so for example, if you take an electron, it has a mass. And if you compute the mass of the electron in the fundamental units of physics, which is

plank mass. It's a very tiny mass and plank mass, something on the order of 10 to the minus 23. It's a very tiny number. So you say, great, do we have any prediction that the electron should have been this small without knowing that there is an electron, just by knowing that there is electric charge? And by knowing that there is dark energy in the universe, you find a bound on the electron mass from string theory. You found that it's bounded on the upper end by 10 to the minus one and above 10 to the minus 31 on the lower end. Okay, so Lawrence, what do you make of that? What would you give cum run if he takes your takes a clock i mean he's basically saying the electron mass is prediction it could have been 10 to the minus 32 of the of the plank mass but it's not it's between

10 minus 31 and 10 the minus 1 big range but it's a prediction it could be wrong could be falsified i don't think it's well look i don't think it's worth getting hung up because the theory is just so premature that i'm not worried about its predictions because i don't think i mean what he's giving is just a dimensional analysis argument, which is fine. Basically, if you have a, if you have the string coupling constant of the plank mass, ultimately, if you combine things, you're going to get some numbers. What saddens, so it doesn't bother me that string theory hasn't, I just think it's such an, it's not, it's not a well-defined theory yet, I think. And I mean, it's got a lot of great ideas and maybe it'll relate to the real universe at some point. It's, as, as I like to,

to say, and this is a joke of Franks, you know, it's promising, but it's been promising and promising for a long time. But, but, but, but what really disappointed me the most to tell you the truth is the one thing, if string theory predicted a cosmological constant, it would have been great. But in fact, not only did not predict a cosmological constant, but generally, it has a hard time even existing with one and, and, um, without a negative one anyway. And, um, and so, so, and that's the one, I'm personally convinced that we won't understand the energy of empty space until we have a quantum theory of gravity. I suspect they're intimately involved with each other. And so the one thing that I would want a purported theory of quantum gravity to tell me something

about would be the cosmological constant. And as far as I get only the string theory, nor for that matter, loop quantum gravity have had much of anything to say about them and certainly didn't predict them, generally find that generally string theory would suggest that what we're seeing now is a temporary aberration of will ultimately be a negative cosmological constant

anyway when I see a proliferation of anti-string theory not your work necessarily books by Peter White Sabina Hassanfelder yeah yeah but I but let me make it pair I don't think I've ever

yeah my book hiding in the mirror is anything if anything it's a I wrote that book to praise string theory not to bury it. Right. But you do hear these crimes that string theory is effectively sucking the oxygen out of physics departments. And I don't know. It used to be more. I think it was.

And it certainly, there's no doubt it was in the 1990s. It was. But I think the, you know what happens? It's the wonderful thing about rats and a sinking ship is that the minute, the minute there was the possibility of new experimental data, either at the Large Hadron Collider or in the universe, what you saw, I mean, there's a certain subgroup that were lost forever to physics. And I used to see them.

When I was at Caltech, I gave a colloquium once at Caltech. And it was when Ed Witten was being courted there. And as I say, he was a friend of mine and we had lunch. And then right before the colloquium, I was with another friend of mine, Mark Wise, and we were walking towards building. And all of the young string theorists were leaving. And it was right before my colloquium.

and Mark said they never come to physical. Because for them, physics is, you know, it's just something way below the plank scale and it's not of interest. It's not, it's like, you know, it's like botany. And so for them, everything that was relevant for what you would normally call physics was not interesting. There was a subclass of people who felt that way, that, you know, if it was below the plank scale, it really wasn't interesting. But what happened is for the bulk of, for many young people who were not lost, the minute there was experimental evidence, the minute there was experimental evidence of anything interesting. Everyone started to think about that.

So you had string theorists start thinking about cosmology or the Higgs particle or other things. And so, but it did for a while skew seriously. And as chair of a physics department at that time, I was very aware of it. It seriously skewed the appointment of young faculty and the ability of young people to get jobs and physics who weren't string theorists. And that was sad. That was unfortunate. Again, you're lucky that you didn't weren't in that generation. That's right. But again, then I have people like Michi Okaku coming on and saying, no, because I asked him, I was like,

where in string theory does one find the muon G-min G-minus-2 anomaly? Where do I find the large Hadron Collider Beauty results? These anomalies and so forth, where do I find Hubble Tension? And he says, it's all there. And I said, what do you mean? He says, you just have to tell me the vacuum state. And I say, well, why is it my job as an experimentalist to tell you what the vacuum state is of your theory? And yet, on the same token, the swamp land, et cetera, it seems hopeless, Lawrence. And I'm wondering, why is it that you get so much attention for people like, you know, Cocko with the God equation and Stephen Hawking even talking about M theory as if it's proven, as if all physicists accept it. Because it sounds profound that everyone wants the next best thing. after Einstein. And Stephen, I think, I mean, to his credit,

he may have talked about those things, but his work was generally, you know, calculational and involved things that you might be able to, at least in principle, predict. And relevant. Obviously, black hole evaporation is profoundly important. I frankly do have a problem with Micho Kaku,

and he knows it. I've done it many years ago at this radio program. We've been on programs together, but I think he inappropriately, he misleads people about string theory. And I don't, and I have, and I, and I don't, you know, I don't, look, whenever I'm talking about science, I'm sure I lead to misconceptions to people, but I don't knowingly lead to misconceptions. I try not to knowingly swindle people. And I'm not saying he's a swindler, but I believe that that people, that knowingly statements are made that are, that I think are not.

justified and and and and it is true he's it but he's absolutely right in principle if string theory were a theory of of of of space and time then obviously in some level and a theory and a complete theory that from which all the forces of nature were derivable then obviously it's in there because every you know if it really were a theory of all the forces of nature then all the things we measure must be a part of that so so it's It's a totology almost. So, of course, in principle, it's there.

But first of all, A, we don't know how to do it. But more importantly than that, we don't know if it is. We don't know if this incredibly fascinating area of mathematical physics is a fundamental description of our universe or whether it's a mathematical tool that allows us to understand many other areas in physics. And that's the most important question. I don't really care about at this point whether it makes predictions that you could test, because I think we're way away from that.

The question we really have to address is that there's no evidence yet that it is a theory, that string theory describes our universe. Right. So I guess I, and I want to, we're going to go off of Kakou in a second, but I did ask him one thing. if you were the president of the National Science Foundation, you have a portfolio and you have to balance your portfolio. How would you say the portfolio should be balanced given that there is, you know, tremendous overinvestment to some people's minds into string theory and, you know, dramatic underinvestment in new models like Stephen Wolfram's model, Eric Weinstein has a geometric

unity proposal, and, of course, twister theory and so forth. So how do you balance the proposal? Now I made you, you know, a director of the NSF. What do you do, Lawrence? It's fine to say, let a thousand flowers bloom, as the, you know, individual once said. But how do you balance a portfolio and given that? What you, I mean, look, you do as peer review. I think you, you, you know, and you have to, look, first of all, by the way, it doesn't really matter because it's in the cost of string theory or, I mean, by the way, compared to the other things you said, string theory is on a wholly different level compared to the other ideas you talked about. I mean, it's not really fair to put string theory on the level of those other other left field

things you talked about. String theory is really well motivated from a fundamental direction. But they're the Xeroxing costs associated with the large adburn collider. I mean, they're just in the noise. You could, you know, in fact, by the way, that's the way it's normally done. When I was at Harvard, the theory group, the only, reason the theory group was funded was because they were combined with the experimental particle group so that basically they were getting the the breadcrumbs that were that was being thrown

up by that because experiments are so expensive theory itself is pretty cheap but nevertheless what you have to do at some level and is broadly have groups within within physics assess what are more likely or less likely and I do think it's really important to fund a variety of options. But as the editor and the publisher of the New York Times once said, and I've quoted, actually he wasn't the first one to say this, I've since learned. But he used to say, as Salzberger once said, I like to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out.

Ultimately, it's reasonable to fund things, but you've got it, but they have to fall within some range of, that the community views is realistic, well-motivated, well-defined, and I don't think So when it comes to particle physics, particle theory, there was a time when I think string theory is probably getting the lion's share of money and people who weren't doing string theory complained,

but to be fair, it was so attractive that you generally had the most capable young theorists working on it. And so it was attractive enough to drive. I mean, these people were voting with their feet. So look, you know, it's always a hard thing. It's like asking, first of all, it's not a zero-sum game, right? It's like when people say, should we fund the Large Adron Collider or should we fund raising poverty?

And the point is that it's not one or the other, okay? And if it were, we'd be in a really sad situation. It's not one. And so I think that what you can do is you can, if there's a lot of interesting intellectual work going, you might expand the pot. Or if there isn't, you might contract it. And frankly, there have been times over the last 25 years

when I've often thought we probably are funding particle theory too much because there wasn't much of interest going on in that area. And it's an attractive nuisance in that there aren't, you know, There's as few spots to become faculty in high energy in any academic. We had a search last year before COVID. We had 400 applicants for one position. Yeah, I mean, well, listen, I remember when the Superconduct Supercollar was canceled, that was a year before I became the chairman of the case.

And I was, I moved there because I was given 13 new faculty slots to build a department. And I'm very proud of what it did there. But within three weeks, I got 200 applications from experimentalists. from the superconducting superglary, all of whom were really good experimentalists, many of whom would stake their careers on this, had left their jobs at tenure jobs at other institutions, and now had no options.

And I couldn't hire any of them, because the point was, you know, what can they, what are they going to work on? You know, I mean, if I were, it was different, I was trying to grow a department, and I had to hire people who were going to have an impact on an emerging field, because they had to be very strategic there.

If I were Harvard, I could always hire an extra experimentalist in that regard because I didn't need it to, but it's, there is, there are so few people, as you say, who get jobs in universities, and I have concerns about how that process goes. One, the main thing ultimately, and this was my guide when I was a chair. And so I didn't care if someone was a string theorist or not. Whenever I've been on a search committee, my feeling is you always hire the best person, namely the most capable intellect, who may be doing something now, but the point is

physics evolves. So even if what they're working on now is interesting, in three years it may not be. So you hire someone who you think will be able to move with the field and continue to be a force. And so I think that's ultimately because I believe in meritocracy. I think academia should be a meritocracy. That should be the only requirement that comes ultimately that comes down, to things. And then it doesn't really matter the field that people are working in. It's how, it's their quality of their intellect in a way that matters more than anything else. So we'll get to meritocracy and science and elsewhere. I just want to remind people, I'm talking with Dr. Lawrence Krauss, author of many books, including his most recent book,

which we have yet to get to, the physics of climate change, a universe from nothing, that greatest story ever told. Adam, all these physics of Star Trek. He is the proprietor of the Origins podcast, which is a must listen to. I've poached many of his guests. He's also a director, founder of the Origins Project Foundation, which I'll put links to in the show notes. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. and entertain all season

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savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. But the last thing I want to say just before we move from really the hard science, the big picture questions, I've started to think a lot, Lawrence about, you know, how I can rekindle a little bit of that, you know, a millie or a nano-galaleo, and recreate what he called the asser, Il Sagittori. And that was to like, what does an assayer do? An assayer doesn't own any gold, but he has a rock and he takes what is purported to be gold and he rubs it on the rock. And in so doing, he provides value of untold, potentially untold wealth, or he crushes the dreams of people that thought that they got this gold from their, you know, great uncle or whatever. So that was what he did. That's what an assayer does. I'm wondering,

are we missing things now? People tell me to test my theory, you know, Stephen Wolfram is on my podcast. He's talking about bronchial space and this, bronchial, not like your chest, but branching space and sort of how you could test it. And it would require, you know, it could actually be falsified, but it requires, you know, advance Lisa. I was thinking. And I said to him, I said, you know, what if you tell me you need this future collider. Okay, there's no target. There's nothing natural, but bigger is always better. And what if I said to you, like 10 years ago, I'm going to give you something that can crash two atoms, two nuclei together. And they each have 10 to the 58th neutrons, and I'm going to crash them together at half the speed of light. Would that test your theory

of everything? In other words, we have phenomenal, you know, energy scales accessible to us. Why aren't we, are we missing something? You know, Newton, as you talk about in a, you know, sorry, the greatest story ever told, you talk about how he was right about light. He proved that light going through two prisms was not diminished any more than going through one prism, right? And I was thinking he proved the color theory of light in a lot of ways. And that is a quantum, at some level, it would be something that Feynman would have recommended. In other words, what low energy phenomena are we perhaps overlooking because we always have this bigger, better, greater, farther, faster, higher energy frontier to pursue?

Well, look, you're not alone. And I don't think. I think a lot of people, and in particular myself, and I mentioned the work over the years of Frank Wilczek and I, when we work together, have been looking at ways to use. There are two extremes of physics. There's the energy frontier, but there's also the sensitivity frontier. And in the atomic physics domain, sensitivities are achievable now with not, you could call them tabletop. They're not really tabletop, but they're not LHC scale experiments. But most of them occupy a single room or two. And you can achieve sensitivities looking for things at one part in 10 to the 18th,

sometimes 10 to the 20th. And so the question, of course, is there's two ways to detect new physics set up, new fundamental physics. My fundamental, I mean associated with the fundamental forces of nature. I don't want to have this big argument about whether what's, Fundamental. No, I agree. Yeah.

But one is by probing directly those scales, and because of quantum mechanics, to probe, physicists don't build bigger machines because they want to spend money. You need, quantum mechanics says the more energy you have, the smaller the regime you can resolve with your microscope. It's just that simple. If you want to think of it, the smaller the wavelength of your probe, and the wavelength goes inversely with energy, the more you can probe. matter on smaller, smaller scales. So we have to build bigger accelerators to to detect things on

smaller scales. But the other way that phenomena at small scales can be manifested is by very, very weak effects at macroscopic scales. And so you, a very interesting, and it's an area that's growing all the time, is to look at ways that we might use ultrarsensitive experiments to probe for very rare processes or very weak effects that might be new. And so, you know, that's a vibrant area of physics and one which I've run a meeting, several meetings about, one which I've worked on, the one in the last papers I wrote was on exactly using lasers, atomic clocks, to try and probe for something called axions. Because I'm fascinated. I actually came up with that idea.

I was giving, as you know, because I came to UCSD to give this math lecture. For many years, I gave more public lectures at a number of meetings. And this one was a metrology meeting in France, and they wanted a cultural talk on cosmology, if you wish. And so I was there. And then after my big talk, which had opened the meeting, I listened to the talks. And of course, a lot of it was highly technical. but I told myself, I should try and make the most of this.

And it was there when I began to appreciate the incredible power of metrology and atomic clocks and to be able to probe things. So I think, you know, and the point is you never know if you're missing something, right? All you can do is try and this is what I was going to say to you about the National Science Foundation. And I know the director of National Science Foundation, he worked with me in my old university. ultimately what people don't realize a theory we talk all about these theories but physics is an empirical science all of science is empirical and what should drive the science is experiments not theory and generally that's what does happen so that's where the money should generally go the amount of money that should go into theory

should always be a small factor compared to the amount of money that goes to experiment and so my feeling has always been that you should do the experiments you can do and whenever you have come up with a new technique, it's worth exploring it because you never know where it's going to lead. And people always say, what to me, what's the next big thing? And I always say the same thing. If I knew, I'd be doing it, right? Okay. So we obviously are missing things because that's why experiments surprise us. And that's why we, and I, as I often say, I'm, I'm surprised every day and I'm, and some days I'm surprised that I'm not surprised when I hear new, new results. So, so we keep opening up new windows on the universe, and that will guide our understanding of the universe, not, generally,

not what theorists do. Theorists provide, you know, a framework, and there are clear counter examples where theory has changed our worldview. Gallia was an example, and obviously Einstein was another. But generally, it works the other way around, and people don't realize that. And one thing I've, you know, been curious about is why are there so many popular science, popularizations, popularizers, how we want to say it, dating back to Newton and to Einstein. And, you know, I actually have one doll, so I've got Carl Sagan. Here's Carl Sagan. Here's Galileo. You saw him. I'm not sure Newton was a popularizer, by the way. Newton was detested the public.

Yeah, I hate it. Yeah, anyway. But I have had one, I do have one finger puppet, and here's Einstein over here. I think I have that same set. Okay, go on. But then I have one that's been a guest in my podcast, and that's no. Oh, okay, there we go. That's great. So, yeah, maybe we'll get a Krause, though. But I'm going to ask you, why don't start sticking needles in it?

I'm fine. Well, they go on my thumb. Yeah, okay. Anyway, I don't want to even go there, but go on. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. The question I have is, why are so many, why is there such a surfeit of popularizers of theoretical physics, either Brian Green, you, Lisa Randall, Jan 11, Katie, Free, you know,

there's so, so many, and there's almost nobody who's an expert. environmentalist like me. Because theory is sex. Let's face it, theory is sexier. It really is. Is that the hype? It's the hype? No, but it's also the tradition of the lone scientists sitting in the room late at night thinking about the universe. And it's so easy to make hypotheses about grand hypotheses where if you're an experimentalist,

you actually have to do something. And the devil, if you're an experimentalist, is in the details, as you well know, with the experiments you've worked on. And so, and that's not what tends. to get press because the press generally, you know, just reproduce the press releases of the people writing books. And that doesn't get to capture in people's imaginations. And it's sad because I actually have tried in my books very carefully to point out the experimental basis of things, because it really is the heart of science. But I think it's just that it's the reason I became a theorist. It's sexier.

You know, I was an experimentalist. I worked, I mean, when I was an undergraduate, I worked in summers, in projects of high energy projects. And, you know, I'd spend, and then during the year I had part-time jobs, and I'd spend eight months trying to fix what was then, you know, what's called a spark chamber. And, you know, and just, I mean, the things that would occupy me for a long time that would take forever to do almost nothing.

And it certainly turned me off. But I admire tremendously. Now, now that I'm older, I certainly almost feel wistful that I, because I find, I mean, I've been now involved. I've seen, for the last 30 years, I've proposed experiments, many of which are being done. And I'm wistful. And for the first time, actually part of an experimental collaboration. But I'm almost wistful that I'm not experimentalist because the difference between a theorist and experimentalist is that an experimentalist actually does something. I mean, has something to show for what they've done.

done, whereas a theorist has, you know, just has ideas, and there's no priority really on ideas, and though we always try and have that. And it's just, my respect for experiment has increased exponentially from the time I, graduate, in fact, when I was, to be fair, I was an undergraduate, I did two degrees, one in mathematics and one in physics. The reason I did that at my university was it got me out of an experimental class. Okay. That's, I mean, it wasn't the only reason. It was, to me, it seemed a most challenging option at the university I was at, and so I decided to do it.

But one of the many virtues of it was that I didn't, I was, I opted out of the experimental class in that. And sadly now, I wish, not that wish I'd done it, but I think people don't appreciate because we all talk about it. I mean, you and I have been talking about that because these ideas are fascinating. And there's something that people can relate to without knowing details of statistics or diodes or, I mean, and so even though there's an incredible intellectual baggage that really is required to get any kind of adequate understanding of theory, you can build it up in a way

that, but I think to really understand that the guts of an experiment, it requires a lot more intellectual baggage that very few people are willing to carry to get there. My late father used to say that to be an experimentalist, you actually have to know the theory at least as well as a beginning ground student or something. You don't have to come up with new theories. That's not a requirement that I put on my experimental graduate students, but you should at least be conversant in it unless

you just want to be a technician. There's nothing wrong with technicians. We need them. But if you're not going to think about the big pick. And I wonder, Lawrence, is that I find, you know, I make a joke, people are like, why are you doing this podcast? You know, is just to make the tons of money that YouTube sends us every month for a creator. No, you know, and I say

actually, why I'm doing it is because on my day job, which is to co-construct the Simon's array, the Simon's Observatory, it is usually involving people I have to talk to. In other words, it's people, you know, and it's very long-term. I mean, we won't complete the observatory of the array. You know, it takes decade, you know, to complete these experiments, they go on for decades. But a podcast is kind of instant gratification. I can talk to people I want to talk to, not the, you know, plumber that's, you know, telling me that there's this leak in this Frion thing at 17,000 feet, and I might have to get on a plate. But instead, it's, you know, people I want to

to talk to, and not that I don't, you know, like those people. It's just, it's a, it's a drain. There's a lot of experimental physics is sitting around bored and then terrified when something doesn't work. But I wonder, is that partially why you started your podcast? Is that to get the instant gratification of talking to some of the world's leading intellectual lights? Well, I, look, podcasts, I've been doing, I, well, first of all, I'm fortunate because my field allows me into gratification, right? I mean, there are two types of theorists. There's some theorists who work on one thing for 30 years, and I don't want to put that down any way, because it's very important. But I've always, I've worked in everything from geophysics to, you know, to black hole physics,

to some mathematical physics, to, you know, and so for me, I love, you know, I get instant gratification by learning a new thing and working on it. And then, and then I go away, which, you know, which, which actually I've talked to Frank about this, strategically is not so good because when you write the first paper on a subject by the end in 20 years, it's never referenced anymore because everyone's always, unless you continue to write papers on, but that doesn't

matter. So I already get a lot of, as a theorist, I can get quick gratification that way. But it's more, no, it's deeper in the sense that, first of all, I've been doing this for a long time. Even before I created the origins project

to the last universe, even at at, even at case, I'd built an effort to try and bring different people from different areas together because I find that symbiotic relationship between knowledge at all levels, interesting. But then I expanded it. I mean, then it was still mostly what you would call academics. But then what for me was the driving factor is that I believe science is part of our culture, not that I believe it, science is part of our culture. It should be more integrated in our culture. And that means it's culture. And therefore, for me, it's a matter of bringing people from all aspects of culture together.

And I'm fortunate, and you've been fortunate by poaching. But I'm fortunate that for some reason, I realized when I was doing the origins thing, that I had a very broad rolodex, if you want to call it that, of people of significance in Hollywood, in different areas of academics and even politics and journalism. it just happened over time because I've been involved in a long time. It just wasn't any planning. And so I thought, we had discovered, I ran large panels,

but then we discovered that one-on-one dialogues were fascinating. And I did one with early on with Chomsky, but I'd, Alan Alda, and I did one with Johnny Depp and others, and that people are fascinated by being a fly in the wall. And as one of my public, one of my, my, my, my, um, my, um, my, um, my, um, my, um, my, um, my, and so what they want to hear are the people that they want to hear from. And so my feeling was if I could get them together, but not just some superficial thing, to create a dialogue that would be different. That would be the kind of thing they couldn't, people couldn't hear about everything

that that person was thinking, put it in perspective and which is why I tried to prepare so much for all of my, the podcast, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, would be something that people might like. And it would also, frankly, archivably serve a very useful purpose because in the future people will have that to work from. But you're right in one sense. And this is the sense that I think people don't realize why people do science. Most things I do because I want, because they make me happy, right? And most scientists aren't scientists because they want to save the world, even if they're saving the world. It's because it makes them happy. they like what they're doing.

And you're absolutely right. The podcast gave me an excuse to go around the world and have in-depth dialogues with people who I may have had as friends generally, but in-depth dialogues that I wouldn't have had otherwise. And so really, in some sense, of course, it's for me, even though I think it provides a more useful purpose. Yeah. So some of the eight other Nobel Prize winning guests that weren't influenced by you that I've had on my show, for the same reason, I've written a new book that's coming out

in September, just distilling those conversations into chunks of actionable information. It's called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner because I felt like it would be a shame if, A, as you said, there wasn't archived. B, the transcripts are kind of meandering and it's hard to keep, as you know, as a host and a guest. And when I'm meandering just now, you're getting an in-depth class on that. But I wanted to distill it into chunks of actionable information. And some of the things were really inspired by things that surprised me from the guests.

In other words, I talked to Barry Barish, and I said, Barry, you know, one of my audience members asked me, asked me, you know, like, do you ever have the imposter syndrome ever in your past life? And he said, what are you talking about my past life? I feel it now more than ever. Yeah, sure. And a vignette that you and David Gross spoke about last week on your pocket. And when they win their Nobel Prizes, they have to go up and sign this ledger that says, yes, I received my medallion. You know, Barry left us here in the couch over there when he was visiting.

but you have to sign this ledger and it's impossible not to be curious about who came before you and he looks through it he sees fine men okay miriam mayor we'll get to in a second and then he gets to this guy it gets to to Albert and he said I've never felt more dramatically inadequacy uselessness and and imposter syndrome well and I said yeah go ahead well no way you finish and then and then I'll jump in I said you know what I did some research Barry and that's actually inspired me to actually take his words and put it into a book along with the eight other laureates including frank shelley and many others but um but i said you know what uh barry you know who else had imposter syndrome einstein he thought newton was the greatest uh intellect the greatest contributor lawrence to western culture Einstein called newton and you know who newton of course uh worshipped more than anybody and before whom felt the imposter syndrome lawrence do you know who that was what scientist that was was it gal a i don't know no jesus christian Yeah, I was going to say, Jesus Christ, yeah, I was going to say because he didn't, yeah, I should have known the answer because there's no human that, no real human that Newton would have felt subservient to in any way.

So, yeah, I want to get that, you were going to say something when I, meander down. Look, it's easy to, how can I say this in a way that sounds right? if you ever achieve a level of fame at some level of celebrity, and for one reason, another, because of whatever I've done at some level, you realize that you, and this is what I think a lot of Nobel laureates have to come to grips with, because until they win the Nobel Prize, they, I mean, in their own community, they're well-known, but they're not well-known outside their community. And then, and then, frankly, they're not that well-known outside their community afterwards. it's just a little blip, but, but, um, you have to not believe the press clippings.

Because every plus clipping, there's not, you mean, if you're a theory, if when I, when I go give a talk or when I see anyone, anyone else, they're always presented as, you know, when I see it blurb the book, as the next Einstein, the next blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're, and, and it is really easy when that's happening. Because you know you're not to get that imposter syndrome. You know, you know, hey, the, I'm being described as something I know. know I'm not. And maybe I'm just a complete fraud anyway. And I mean, I think I think anyone, I certainly have felt that many times and we won't say rightly. But, but, but, but, uh, I think it's,

if, if you don't probably, then you suffer from the Dunning Kruger syndrome. Because, because, um, I mean, it's part of the problem. I mean, you, you, you know, you, yeah, I, how can I say this again to you, losing Nobel Prize? There's this fixation on Nobel Prizes in the first book and the second book that is unfortunate in a way because, first of all, I've known almost every Nobel Prize winner in physics over my time anyway, and in many other fields as well. I'll probably know 50 Nobel Prize winner, maybe more.

But, you know, it's just a prize, and suddenly it instills this stuff. And, you know, it's for work. And the person, you're suddenly, the person who won the Nobel Prize is seen as some, is elevated to some level when it's the work, and the person may or may not be worthy of being elevated

that level. They did some work. It may be an accident. It may have been other things. Right. Look at Fritz Haber. Look at, yeah, look at Shockley. Whatever, but, but so we is as a society that public tends to label Nobel laureates as if there's something special. I think it's a form of religion.

It's a form of almost secularism. Yeah, yeah. But in general, It's really recognizing work. And, you know, that was one thing, speaking of philosophy, because I used to read a lot of philosophy and ancient history when I was younger. And I almost went, when I almost took a road scholarship at Oxford, I was going to do physics and philosophy. Thankfully, I didn't do that.

But the ancient Greeks and Romans were really quite different. They separated the work from the artist. And so they revered the work, but they didn't revere the artist. basically say, you know, well, they thought it was a divine inspiration and that this person had had more or less had just happened to be the vessel of the gods. But it was like, yeah, big deal. And we've gone the opposite direction in some sense. And it's a cult of a cult of celebrity. We live in. And so because of that, I would suspect that many people, after getting great adulation and recognition, most people who are at all self-critical wonder,

you know, ask themselves, you know, or quickly realize they shouldn't believe their plus clippings. Yeah. Yeah. Except for Frank. When I talked to Frank, I said, did you ever have the imposter syndrome? He said, no. It was basically the opposite. Yeah, well, Frank, I've known it for 40 years. Yeah, he had to wait for. you know, 30-something years until he actually received it. And I thought that would be excruciating. But yeah, I mean, part of the buck is not. Let me tell you. I don't know what Frank said, but I've lived with it. Okay, every year, I'm sorry, Frank.

Yeah. Every year, Frank and I would have this call because we were extremely close friends. And he, I think wouldn't talk to many people about it. It's hard if you think, it's, it's hard. And what you shouldn't, and the point is you shouldn't fix it on it. But it becomes harder and I was very, very happy, not only because the work deserved it. And I actually was a nominator for the Nobel Prize, and that was one of the things I had nominated. But in fact, everyone I ever nominated for a Nobel Prize, by the way, won one. But anyway, not that, but it may have taken 10 years for that to happen, but, but, um, it, it relieved a kind of tension that could have, that for some people, it could, it could really hurt

them as scientists and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, that's, that's what I wanted to dispel. In my first book, you know, was written from the perspective of someone who was told when he was hired that he was hired because he thought the chairman who was father, Nikolai Bassoff, had won the 1964 Nobel Prize for the Laser. He said, we hired you and we were only going to give you tenure if we think you're on a short track to a Nobel Prize. And even after Bicep 2, people say things like this. And I just think it's a charade in a sense because, you know, again, we should venerate the people. I actually think that the people are more impressive than the institution.

A lot of the prestige of the Nobel Prize has come because of the people that have been awarded it. And I think it's interesting when you think about how society is sort of venerating this. And by the way, you mentioned the Dunning Kruger effect. I just want to point out that I am perhaps the world's greatest expert in the Dunning Krueger effect, because I studied it for a little bit. I want to turn out to meritocracy, which will. Well, let me just say one thing. I think, I don't want to focus on Nobel Prize too much, but I've been strongly involved in following it and, as I see, nominating,

and then at the Nobel Prize ceremonies. And one of the things that amazes me, no, it doesn't amaze me. It's the reason the other, all the other, there's a profusion of prizes. And I remember when Fred Cavley talked to me early on and was at the Nobel Ceremony with me once when he was trying to emulate it with his Cavley prizes. I said, Fred, don't waste your money. It's never going to be a Nobel Prize. But the difference is, and it's a waste of time, but these people are willing to do it,

that they spend a full year. They spend the day the Nobel Prize announced, they meet the next day starting for the next year. And what's amazing is they could have blown it so many times and generally having. Now, there are a million people who deserve the Nobel Prize that didn't get it. But there aren't that many people who got it who didn't deserve it. There's some. And by that, I mean, not as people, but I meant that. but the work. And they do an incredible job of vetting it, which is why all these other prizes

are so subjective and peripheral. They just sort of throw names in a hat and they, and that's why one of the many reasons. I just think there are far too many prizes in science. But I will say that they've generally done a good job. And it is surprising, on the whole, given that the work is what won the prize, not the person, that remarkably, but not, completely, but remarkably, a large number of people who won the Nobel Prize are also really good scientists. Not everyone. Yeah, no, that's true. But it's amazing that correlation is kind of, it's kind of good. And I do think that that adds, at least, that history at least adds something to the validity. But, you know, but my friend Martin Reese is totally opposed to the Nobel Prize.

Oh, I know. He hates it. Yeah. He's right now that this notion of three people is, is just kind of silly in science. All the laureates rail against that that I've interviewed. Well, after they win. It's easy. It's easy. Anyway, I don't see you like turning it down. You know, all the Nobel Prizes except for chemistry and physics have been rejected.

Oh, shit. Yeah, no, I'd take the Templeton Prize. If they gave it to me, I'd take the money and then I badmouthed the prize, but I take the money. That's what I say. I say, if you want to find out if Keating's a hypocrite, just get me the Nobel Prize and see if I turn it down. But turning now to that topic. And also your celebrity, your prolific following Twitter, elsewhere, you get half a million or so followers, et cetera.

You know, there's a line in Animal Farm where the pig talks to Benjamin the donkey. And the pig says, Ben, you got this long tail. It's so beautiful. You're so lucky. And Benjamin the donkey says, yeah, the good lord gave me a tail to swat away the flies. but to be honest, I'd rather not have the flies and not need the tail. Do you wish you had a pig-like tail? Or do you wish you didn't need a tail that you have?

Or, you know, the kind of fame, attention, celebrity, scrutiny, criticism. Look, it's first of all, it happens, right? So it doesn't see to me that, I mean, there are good things and they're bad things. And I've gotten to do many things that I would never have been able to. to do otherwise. I mean, tremendous, and including many of the people I know, that I would never know otherwise. So from a personal perspective, it's been wonderful, especially in modern times, if you have any celebrity, it's also awful. I would like to think that I wasn't driven by that, but I also realistic enough to know that I probably, you know, at some level,

probably craved some attention. We all do, but I, you know, so I know, but I think that I like to think I did what I, what I've done what I've done because I think it's worth doing. And I've been, on the whole, I would say I've been pleased by the opportunities that I've had. And moreover, it's not a choice. I guess that's the bottom line. I did what I've done, not because I chose to do it.

I didn't have a choice. I, I, I, just like I bounce around in physics, I'm interested in a lot of different things, and I'm not, from a personal perspective, what a, I guess a traditional academic in that sense. Academia itself has never been enough to lure my sole interests. And so, in fact, one of the reasons I, you know, when I told about physics and philosophy, one of the reasons I hesitated about doing a PhD in physics was because I'm very political, and I'm very interested in people, and the kind of physics I was interested in had nothing.

to do with people. And it turned out, I was, but there was no plan. It turned out I was able to mesh those two things, my interest in science, my interest in people, because of the popularizations I got involved in. But it wasn't, there's some people I know who are very systematic. In this regard, my friend Neil deGrasse Tyson is incredibly systematic. So life, he knew what he wanted, what he wanted to achieve and what he had to do to achieve it. And in my case, I just basically, it's an accident. But I do know that if I, I didn't really have a choice, I think if I hadn't been writing and speaking, I probably wouldn't have been able to focus on physics. And if I hadn't been able to do physics well enough to be able to achieve some level of whatever the word is, credibility, I guess,

then I wouldn't have had the opportunity to do the writing and speaking. So I think it wasn't a choice. anyway. And there are a lot of people that, you know, whenever I want to damn one of my guests with faint praise, you know, because got some new theory about something, I'll say, they know the history of physics really well. Because you can get away with a lot if you just like spew, you know, kind of historical platitudes and then throw in an equation or two. But, you know, I'm going to interrupt you again. One of the reasons I love writing books, and I've written a lot, and I guess I'm on my 12th now. But is that... Show me your hands, Lawrence. What are you writing now?

I think you're writing something right now. I am, but I can't show you my hands because I'll, it's like poker. But one of the things I like about it is that I is, is it, well, I learn a tremendous amount. But I also learn history because you can spout. In fact, just this morning when I was writing, working on a new book, actually, I, I, I read something I wrote and I said, is that really how it happened? And then I started to go back and discover what I've always said about is totally wrong. And so when you put it on paper, at least when I do, I don't know about other people,

it has a level of seriousness, which it doesn't have when you're just lecturing or talking. And so I've been able to learn a tremendous amount of history just by writing about it. Because then if you write it about it, it's like teaching. I mean, if you write about it, then you have to learn it. Yeah, but I think the contrast with what you do and what I try to do is, you know, there's different types of content creators, and there are those that document what other people have done. then there are people that document what they themselves have done. I think the latter is always more interesting to say, you know, like even to expose your own

warts and failures and flaws and your thinking process and the wrong turns, because that's the problem I think, and I'm going to get off to Nobel Prize, I promise, but that we present, you know, physics as done by Nobel Prize. I mean, my freshman lab classes are, you know, for them or, you know, Nobel Prize winning experiment. I used to do at, at Case Western, I would do the Michelson Morley experiment. Of course. And one day I did the category of it. By the way, I'm always pleased to say I had the chair that Michelson had when I was, oh, wow. Oh, that's great.

You know, Sean Carroll has the desk that Feynman had. So other guests on the, but I do say, you know, it kind of distorts the way that history is done. It's not written only like it distorts the physics process. It doesn't distort history. It's not lying. It's just that's not the way science proceeds. It proceeds via millions of wrong turns. And finally there's a path that works the right way.

But I want to stick on. By the moment probably didn't work at his desk. So it's okay. That's right. The strip club around the corner. Well, anywhere else, but it's desk. So it doesn't really matter. Anyway, what was that going?

Okay, I want to turn now to meta-scientific questions. And in particular... And one of my favorite books, by the way, is my book on Feynman. Quantum Man, yeah, I'm going to put a link to it. I work pretty hard on that book. And actually, you know what? If you're a member of Audible, you can download that book for free. So that is a free book that you can get if you're an Audible member, so I can listen

to it again. Oh, good. I can download it and listen to it. When you were here, you signed many copies of it for my undergraduate who got the highest score in my cosmology. class. So I gave away one of those, and I kept one with your signature on it in the corner over here in Jeffrey Burbage's old office. Oh, that's nice. It was a labor of love, and it was a joy. And you there's a famous picture of him with you chatting. Yeah, but yeah, but you had long sideburns.

You had mutton chops, I think, at the top. Well, I had long hair. Very long hair. I was young. Anyway. So the next kind of pivot, if you have time, I know, I can keep talking all day, as you know, I'm a New Yorker. Yeah. But I want to ask you, certainly questions from my audience. I've got about 13 questions in my audience. But before I go there, I want to talk about something, a term that I believe you coined called the ideological corruption of science.

And I want to be a kind of steel man against that. So I'm at UC San Diego, which is the home of the late great Maria Gephart-Mayer. When she won the Nobel Prize in 1963, the La Jolla, or sorry, the San Diego Evening Tribune ran the following headline. San Diego Mother wins Nobel Prize. And that's really funny until we realized that Andrew Lang's widow, ex-wife, Francis Arnold, when she won the 2018 Nobel Prize, the initial headline on JPL, I tweeted out and she responded to it last week, was mother of JPL Flight Tech wins Nobel Prize. And she was laughing about it. She liked it because it gave credit to her son. Anyway, I'm here at UCSD. We only have

our physics department named after Maria Geppart mayor because Johns Hopkins was to was to sexist to give a tour and they would only give a position to her husband and so we uh we said we give a position to you Maria and your husband and he kind of came along as a spouse a lot which happens a lot nowadays and back in the day of course you know Einstein was forbidden for winning a Nobel Prize when I hear folks like Heather McDonald say on this podcast you know what do you think that like physics is systemically racist. There are no Nobel Prize winners because systemic racism exist in the Nobel Academy. I said, Heather, do you think physics is time translation invariant? In other words, do you think the greatest minds of human history would have been the greatest minds in any other

generation? And she said, yeah, and I said, well, a hundred years ago, Einstein, there was meetings by folks like the Aryan chief of physics, you know, Bernd-Lenard and others that said, no way in hell is Einstein getting a Nobel Prize. Only is getting it if he does something related to non-Jewish physics. So I want to ask you, Lawrence, what makes you think that nowadays, not just the Nobel Prize, but hiring faculty decisions, tenure decisions, postdocs, graduate students, all the way up the gated inter, you know, the kind of academic hunger games that I call it? What makes you think that we're so meritocratic in that that's actually the best way to go about things? Well, well, because, again, I like, I'm an empiricist. And Einstein, you know, you know who Einstein was, right? You actually

talk about him, you have a puppet and all the rest, in spite of the fact that he was a Jewish physicist who had problems at the time. And the reason was his work, ultimately, he was he and his work overcame it because that's the way science works, because science is a meritocracy. The problem I have is that, of course, there are always biases at any given time, and you're absolutely right. There's a time, the world is not time translation invariant. but I find it interesting because I think in a piece, I think, I don't know if I wrote it, I guess I probably in that piece for the Wall Street Journal I wrote,

I don't think I talked about there. I think I may have talked about it in a companion piece for Colette because I was allowed to have longer space. But when people talk about systemic racism, first of all, I've been chair of a physics department, I've been in physics departments and involved in hiring for a long enough time to know that if anything, it's quite the opposite. I mean, the craziness of even the defining the way it was I talk about in one of my articles

that I, when I was chair of physics, I tried to hire a really good black physicist who was someone I know in respect to a condensed matter physicist from University of Illinois at Urbana, who was tenured. And he wanted to come, his wife was going to come to K. actually is. And so he was going to be a trailing spouse. And I desperately tried to hire him and and was not able to because he wasn't a minority. He wasn't, he was from, he was from the Hamas, I think. He was, he was not African American. And, and so that arbitrary definition was just ridiculous. But, but the example I used about this problem of claiming systemic racism and, and, and how

and how to resolve it was the anti-Semitism of the scientific community, which not only Einstein dealt with, but Feynman dad did deal with. And I use the example of Feynman. Feynman was applied to graduate school at Princeton and nearly didn't get in because basically the head of the physics department said, you know, how Jewish is he? Yeah, exactly. And talk to the chairman of the physics department at MIT, who basically said, he's not very Jewish, you know, in looks or in, you know, whatever. And so he, he, he, they allowed him in, okay. But what happened then? Okay. They didn't have to do a quota for Jews. What happened is, Feynman became the best, one of the best scientists of his kind. And then you have the next generation, you have Steve Weinberg and Shelley Glashow.

And what happened was that, that the Jews who came in, into physics, not all of them, but some of them became the excelled and became the leading physicists of their day. And that anti-Semitism just went away because of the quality of their work. It was the quality of their work and their quality of their intellects that allowed them to overcome what were real institutional prejudices of the time, institutional prejudices, which I would say are much more explicit than any claimed institutional presidencies against race right now. Okay? I cannot imagine, nor would have ever seen anyone saying, you know, we can't have that person because they're black.

It's just not the way. Moreover, while anti-Semitism was true in academia, it was true in society, racism is absolutely true in society and has been as a part of America since its creation and it's a reality. But the way to cure any, quote, problems of diversity is not to cure them at the level of a professor. That's just too late because, again, and Heather, I don't know whether Heather's talked about this, but I know other people have. The people you're hiring are already very privileged in general, most of them have gone to first-rate undergraduate schools and graduate schools. And it's not really diverse, okay?

Where we have to confront problems of diversity and inequity is at the social level. I lived in Cleveland. You were there as a graduate, and Cleveland was a travesty. When you were there and when I came there, the inner city of Cleveland was a problem. I went into inner city schools in Cleveland. My wife at the time volunteered in them. And I saw that what these young kids had to overcome. Cleveland didn't have a tax base.

So these kids in the schools weren't getting textbooks. So when I was chair of physics department, I made a point of saying, okay, there was a school for the arts right next door, which did serve a lot of inner city kids. We donated all of our old physics equipment to them because they didn't have enough money to buy, even to have a science lab in that school.

And so that's where you have to deal with the problems to try and overcome what may look like a demographic inequity or democratic incompatibility. But it's so ridiculous to say 13% of America's blacks, therefore, we have to have 13% blacks in the physics department. And, you know, because where are you going to stop? you can say, what's the percentage of redheads? What's the percentage of people who were taller than average? If you really think those things are significant, and I would argue that what Martin Luther King said is much more important to me, the quality of intellect.

And so I think that this notion that there's systemic racism, first of all, it flies in the face of everything I have observed. And people are going to say, well, look, my supervisor is black. Let me make that clear. My graduate supervisor was black. So I've witnessed, and I've, and when I was a graduate student in Boston, I remember I was going to, I was going to move into an area at Boston, Bunker Hill, I guess. And he said to me, you know, if you move there, I won't be able to come visit you. And it really, you know, because Boston was an incredibly racist and maybe still is, but was incredibly racist at the time. And so I've seen, it's not as if I, I'm ignorant in it, of, uh, of, uh, of, uh, I'm ignorant in, uh, uh, of

this. I've been involved at every stage of university levels, and this notion of systemic racism is just nonsense. Well, it's also, there's a natural time lag in that it may not be racist now, and it may have been racist in the past or more racist. Let me, let me go back to your favorite subject, the Nobel Prize. Yeah. Okay. When I was at the Nobel Prize ceremonies, what the nope, and I, and I'm sure they're not standing by this now, but I wish they were, I was so impressed because at the beginning of the ceremony, there was a woman, one woman on the stage, one woman had won the Nobel Prize. And the head of the Nobel Committee said, you know, you'll notice that there's one woman winning the prize, okay? We hope that that will change. But Nobel Prizes are generally given

for work that's 30 or 40 years old, whether you like it or not. And like it or not, that's the way, you know, there were very few women in these areas. We hope that 40 years from now, they'll be be as many women as men on this stage, but we're not going to impose that now because there is a time lag. And that's the point. There will be as in each, as each barrier gets broken as as as as you overcome social inequities, though those will feed into the system. But again, and yeah, here's where I'll get hate letters. Well, I get them anyway. Maybe you'll get them now too. But, you know, when people say, when I look at a gender in academia, and again, I was chair, I would hire the first women in the physics department when I was chair at case. And, but when people say,

well, look, there's more women at the assistant professor level and not as many at the full professor level. And you said yourself, well, why is that? One of the reasons is there weren't many women on the faculty. And there weren't many women in that stream before. And to get to the full professor level, you have to have been an assistant professor. So you would expect in an evolving situation to have a better demographic at the assistant professor level than you have at the full professor level because things change. And that's, but, but somehow to say, no, no, we need, we need, we need to look, we need to bean count at the, at the full professor level, because it's not the same as it is as a junior faculty level is just to misunderstand how academia works.

And I often feel like there's this tautological, again, Uroboros issue, you know, with Ibrahim X. Kendi and to be anti-racist. And, you know, one of the things you probably don't miss about academia is that, you know, how much of our time is dedicated to the unfalsifiable accusation that we are racist. And I, you know, I've had eight black scientists and, and I don't have them on because they're black, Lawrence. are awesome scientists and I want to talk to them. As I said, I don't have anybody on that I don't have something that I want to learn from and converse about. And so it's done about and we

no, it's academia. Look, I'm so happy to have retired because I really do think in the United States academia is largely a lost cause right now. The quality, I want to ask you about that. It is just going to compare to the rest of the world is going to continue, I think, to be challenged. Let me put it that way. One thing, you know, I do love about academia is not only for me, but for my children and my and my wife we get exposed i mean i had students learns from Uganda Saudi Arabia every continent including Antarctica which i don't know if you had any students from Antarctica but but the point being that you didn't have any students that grew up in Antarctica i'll tell you that i've one that might have been conceived on Antarctica well that's not going to talk about yeah

yeah well that's that may have happened but uh but you know certainly in experimental physics you know i would love nothing better than to discover an island that Harvard hasn't discovered where there are African-American citizens. That's why United States. I've written about this in a different context when I've written about politics when people talked about immigrants and immigration, when I've written to try and encourage

and not discourage them from allowing Chinese or other graduate students to come to this country. And I'm not the only one has done it. But the reason the United States continues for the moment to be dominant in many areas of science, is because we're able to recruit the best young people from around the world, some of whom stay in the United States, and some of them go back to their countries and do good things.

And when that stops, and when they go to other places, and I can see it's happening now already, the primacy of the United States will decline. So it's only been both the gross national product, and the quality of American educational institutions and research institutions has only been possible because it could, if you want to use your term poach, if it could, because it could attract the best young people from around the world, some of whom stay. Yeah.

I saw, you know, a recent post from, I think it was from Cambridge, you know, university. And it was, you know, taking Newton, you know, not calling them Newton's laws and, you know, how do you teach them? And then they were showing in Beijing, you know, it's like, here's our Isaac Newton's laws of the universal gravitation, or my favorite thing nowadays is, you know, two plus two equals five can be correct because the notion of right or wrong is somehow white. I've written about that. Yeah, white supremacy. You know this as well as anybody. You're in California. That's where they're talking about it, in fact, by the way. That's where. And getting rid of calculus and getting

and getting rid of advanced placement, you know, AP classes because they're inequitable. It's just ridiculous. No, I agree. And that's why, you know, you're kind of a mystery to me because, but I do want to say, you know as well as I do that some of our best students that we've even come from, say, from Nigeria. I've had phenomenal. Not one university, I looked at this, not one math department in Nigeria teaches anything other than two plus two equals four. So in what sense is it? And anyway, I love the one question, if I could ask Abraham X. Kennedy, one question, it would be, why are you an anti-Semite? You know, why are you not doing anti-Semitism? Actually, I'd ask why are you a racist is what I'd ask. No, he'd say he's not because he's doing anti-Semitism. No, no, he's a racist. He's not doing anti-Semitism. He's

Definitely not doing anything. You're absolutely right. When it comes to Judaism, that's, I mean, I have to say to this, I've never really identified as being Jewish until recently because I've a well-known atheist, among other things. And Judaism largely means very little to me, sorry, because I know you're more religiously. No, I know. But because of the anti-Semitism, and I've seen it happening with me now too, but because of the anti-Semitism that's happening, I suddenly want to identify more as being Jewish.

because of just my natural contrarian tendency. I want to talk about your article, which was the ideological corruption of science, is the headline in the Wall Street Journal. And you open up by talking about the American Physical Society, whose president is now my good friend, Sylvester James Gates, who not only has been on my podcast, but his daughter's been on my podcast.

She's the second ever African-American female to graduate from Harvard University, a place you were a fellow at. I mean in physics, not to graduate from Harvard in physics. PhD in physics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. PhD physics, African-American woman. I knew Jim, I knew Jim Gates, by the way, when I was a student.

And so he was at Harvard and I was at MIT and then we were Harvard in the Society of Fellows. So I've known for a long time. You wrote this in 2020 and in the summer, you know, following the George Floyd killing, et cetera. And the title of a video kind of above it is opinion, the left consumes the left. So everything you're talking about, you know, if I just, you know, covered up your name and your Twitter profile and some of your past interviews, you know, people think you're like a rabid, you know, right winger or, you know, conservative now, like everything you're aligned with, and people like Peter Bogosian, who's been a guest in the podcast and as a friend. And Noam Chomsky,

you had a conversation with Noam three weeks ago on Origins podcast that was just, you know, really shocking, terrifying. But it's like, Noam, didn't you call the Republican Party the greatest terrorist organization on her? You know, it's like, and I'll talk to anyone. No, I'm trying to right-wing pundit now, which breaks me up as someone who's always thought of himself as a incredibly left wing. I've had on my show, I've had Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles, probably people you don't care so much for it. I had Lawrence tribe.

No, well, I mean, no, I've become much older and more tolerant as time goes on. I want to ask you about Judaism, because you brought it up, and I'm going to ask about it. I often use you, and I, with the utmost respect, Lawrence, I always say, you know, Lawrence is so bright, but, you know, when it comes to Judaism, and I haven't pointed out, you know, I don't send you typos and things like that that I think. But, you know, if Lawrence, if my 10-year-old comes up to you and says, Lawrence, you know, I found that a professor, Crowe, he'd be very respectful. I'm like his father. But anyway, he said, Dr. Krause, you know, you are amazing. But, you know, there's logical flaws throughout a universe from nothing and are, you know, philosophical or even mathematically. You'd say, get out of here, you know, 10, 12-year-old kid. You don't know anything. You don't have enough experience generating wisdom. You might have Wikipedia. Well, I don't think you'd say that. Especially a 10-year-old. I'd want to hear what they have to say. It's the adults. I'm not so interesting. My 10-year-old will blow your mind.

Okay, fine. I love when kids come up with things to see, as I say, as I say, the adults would bother me. Yeah, the thing I'm getting at, Lawrence, is that I want to know if you're anti-religion, if you're anti-Christian, I don't really care so much about that. But the point I'm trying to make is- I'm not anti any of that. I'm just, I'm an apotheist.

Yeah. I mean, God means nothing to me. Right. So, and you talked about this with Woody Allen on your show, and he's famous for saying, you know, I'll settle for a divine sneeze. My point that I'm trying to make is that, your education in Judaism to the extent you had it. I was bar mitzvah.

Yeah, you were bar mitzsche. I was just going to say that. And that was probably the culmination of your Judaism. I wasn't bar mitzvah. That's when I be, oh, you weren't. Okay, see, for me, I wasn't. I was an altar boy. I want you to know that that turned me into an anti-Semite for a while.

Yeah, bar mitzvah. Exactly. Yeah, the whole experience was so disgusting that I, I wanted nothing to do with it for the longest time. As it did for my father, who was a militant atheist himself, a toym you coin a term i think you coined um and are proud of but but the point i'm trying to make is i know i've argued that militant atheism is a is a is a is a um oxymoron what does it mean you throw papers at buildings i don't know what it means to anyway but okay milton pacifist yeah yeah anyway uh but but the point is um you know your formal education you know might have culminated

with your bar mitzv probably certainly did i didn't know that you were turned off from your barma from from Judaism at that point. But in other words, what about you, and one of my audience is asking this question, what about Jesus, the most famous Jew who ever lived? Are there things about Judeic faith that are emulatable? Are there principles? Are there, are there, is there redeemable aspects of it? Or is the entirety of it shaped by this experience that you had as a young, as a 12-year-old, 13-year-old? No, look, first of all, I was growing up to revere this. My mother convinced me of being Jewish involved questioning and wanting to learn and all these things, which I, you know, I buy into that somewhat. I mean, I don't think it's certainly unique, but there is a,

but I think the notion of questioning, the Talmudic notion of questioning, is wonderful, because for me, questioning is everything. So I'd say if you, you've had to pick one sort of thing that I really do think is culturally Jewish that is enviable, or that, that, that derives from the religiosity, is an enviable. It's the Talmudic basis of questioning, of trying to work through questioning because that's the basis of understanding. So I would say that that's a very noble thing. But the rest of the whole religious basis of Judaism, I find completely ridiculous. And the notion, but having said that, I will point out that I'm no expert. Yeah. And in fact, I may know as much about Islam as I do about Judaism in some way.

I was just going to say, you know, my, do you know, I call you when you're not around behind your back, I call you a devout Israelite because not a Jew, but you know what the word Israel means in Hebrew. What does it mean? It means fights against God. Okay. Yeah. Because Jacob, whose name would later change to Israel. Anyway, the notion, and it's the opposite is Islam. What does Islam mean in Arabic? It means submission.

So they're completely diametrically opposed. One is submit to God completely, and the other one is to fight and wrestle with as the Talmud does. Yeah. Well, in principle, yeah. But let's not pretend that the Old Testament isn't as violent and horrific as the Koran. I mean, stone your children if they disobey you. I mean, it sounds nice, but the difference is, and I would say that, again, it's not a very profounder, deep intellectual study that I've done in this regard. But the difference is that Islam is 600 years younger.

So 600 years ago, they might take that nonsense literally and do the worst possible things. And now we say, yeah, but okay, we don't, you know, that's okay, but we don't buy that stuff, which we have a kind of gentler religion now. And so I just think part of the problem of Islam is that they're in the phase of taking all the nonsense literally, including the invective, including a hatred and invective. That's, that's endemic to all. sacred text, including the New Testament, I would argue. Let me just say about the stoning. So that's very interesting, and I wasn't planning to go on this way, but I do want to

point out that no, so what the stoning says is that the parents may not stone their kids. And they're, oh, big deal. But back in the ancient world, as is in the current modern world, the notion of honor killings was predominant. For the first time in human history, Judaism took the power to kill your child out of the parent's hand. Now, the parent has to take the child to the Sanhedron, then the Sanhedron. There's no record.

And you know the Talmud, the Germans and the Assyrians, everybody has used the Talmud to skewer the Jews because there's no book that's more anti-Semitic than the Talmud, you know, saying how awful we are and how bad. But anyway, it's the point is. And same with like divorce. Like people think of the treatment of women. And it's true. They had, but there was a first time in human history when a woman could be an agent and be

self-deterministic and could get a divorce. And if the man did not give her a divorce, he would get stone. Well, it's made hierarchical. Well, they were smart. I mean, there's a good reason to be matriarchal. I mean, the one thing about the Jewish religion is that I've always enjoyed, or at least appreciated it seemed to me, or at least the culture, is that it's based on thinking intelligently about how to get around things.

And it's smart to be matriarchical because, you know, 10% of fathers aren't the fathers. And you know who the mother is. Yeah, yeah. But look, I'm not saying that, look, these were ignorant pets these were the by to the extent that the bible was written in any time it was a time of a ignorance and be violence and hatred and and it's characteristic of that so having understanding that is not to demean the jewish religion which arose out of it it's just to say it came i mean we shouldn't we shouldn't revere these ancient books that are

are really written at times that happily, science and other things have allowed us to overcome. Although I think Shakespeare is quite excellent, and those times were times of endemic poverty and ignorance and illiteracy. We look for what we do, and I've always been a student of history. And actually, anyway, first book I was working, I was a history book. But the, we should appreciate and understand the history and and the wisdom of the fact because basically things don't change, the more things change, the more they stay the same. So it's worth looking for the gems of wisdom in Shakespeare, and it's worth looking in the Bible for things that are gems of wisdom about the human

condition, perhaps. But it's not worth claiming it's a sacred text anymore than it is to say Shakespeare's, because some of his plays stink. Okay? No, that is. And so, it's not a... Sacredness is in anathema, and that's the problem. And so I guess I grew up in an area, you see, I grew up in an area that was completely Jewish.

I didn't know there were, I thought Jews were the majority until I was 12, and then I moved to an area where there were no Jews. But I was always brought up with this kind of a feat view that somehow it's something special and wonderful about Judaism. And I guess I try to rebel about that. Of course I appreciate many of the cultural aspects. But I also understand that there are other equally laudable cultural aspects that have nothing do with Judaism.

No, I just always do rail again. I mean, there is, my dream is to adopt the Havrusa mechanism with you where the two partners sit down and they take one, Suggia, one passage, one equation, basically. and they just beat each other up about it. And the goal is not to look. During the Holocaust, there's famous stories about Rapp. By the way, that's the way I have always proceeded my research with my students.

That's exact. And the way it was when I was with Shelley Glashow when I was at Harvard. Yeah. You sit in a room and you argue and you complain and you, and that's fun. Yeah. And there is wisdom. I asked Andrewian, as I'm going to ask you in about 10 minutes, you know, kind of the immortal words of wisdom that she wishes humanity would adopt.

and she quoted from the book of Mika, and she's a devout atheist, as you know, and Carl Sagan, a humanist, rather. I know her. And she quoted, except for, you know, act justly, love mercy, and, and that's it. The last word for those of you who don't know in Mika is walk humbly with your God.

But anyway, I do want to ask some questions from my audience, but before I do that, so anyway, my dream, if we are together, is to take you to a Shabbat dinner because it's almost impossible not to enjoy that. And second of all, to study the Talmud together. Yeah.

Yeah. My favorite, when I was at MIT as a graduate student, I guess when I was alone and I thought, well, okay, I may as well explore my roots. I went to, I went to Passover, Seder put on by the rabbi, whatever the official people are at MIT. I figure what that group is called. But anyway. Hill out.

Hill L. That's right. And it was a really enjoyable experience. One of the, one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the, my favorite things was the, the, the detailed question of, you know, he held a wine glass. This isn't a wine glass. If I, if this were empty, well, maybe, no. Yeah. Well, maybe, hold on. I got a scotch bottle. You know, this one from the, so he said, why, why do we hold the wine glass like this? And everyone was discussing in these guys. He said, because if you hold like this, all the wine goes out. And I thought that that was, that was,

anyway. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's much more practical. There's, there's, It's very hard to imagine that, you know, secular. And I've spoken at the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago, which is one of the foremost oldest. And I've spoken to churches and synagogues. The one synagogue I wasn't allowed to speak. That was an Orthodox synagogue in Cleveland because I indicated them that I was going to say the world was more than 6,000 years old and they wouldn't let me speak.

Anyway. Yeah. So I personally don't know, and I believe that. But the rabbis that I traffic in and, you know, this is not something, you know, because we can get into that on our next. conversation. Okay, sorry, I'm distracting. I want to first ask you about hype. So we talk about hype, but I want to ask you about artificial intelligence. The claim is that artificial intelligence is going to eventually produce, you know, artificial Galileo. And I've actually

worked with, since I now have the text, all one million words of his dialogue in printed form, not for the first time to make the audiobook, I am going to put it into GPT3 and see if I can teach him QED or, you know, whatever. But just see what. But just see what. what will come out of it because I think it'll be interesting. But my assumption is that just because computers can beat any human at chess, it doesn't mean they can create the game of chess. In other words, they can't, they can solve a Rubik's cube? Can they invent a Rubik's cube?

But in the essence of physics, the claim is that it's just a, you know, Max Tagmark has written about this, you know, it's just a matter of time before we have artificial findment. And I claim that will never happen because, you know, first of all, okay, go on. Let me, yeah, I was just going to say the, the, when Einstein, do you know what Einstein called the happiest thought of his life, not fantasy, but the happiest thought of his life, Lawrence? I seem to remember it, but remind me, as in no sense of it. Because that if you were in free fall, you'd experience zero acceleration. Gravity would be equivalent to acceleration. He called that the, now, how can a computer, and that's what led to GR, you know, in some sense. How can a computer, A, know what it feels to free fall?

B, know what happiness is in this context, and C, how can they take that intellectual leap? If you're just taking data from Newton and showed the perihelion and mercury anomalously advances, how would you possibly get from that, you know, lacunae in the data, to a new way of thinking about a fundamental force? So those are my opinions. What do you think about the prospects? I think you're being short-sighted, but I also think these other people are being ridiculous. I mean, first of all, anytime you hear people predict things about things we don't know

anything about. They call themselves futurists often. That's when those are people you shouldn't listen to. And almost invariably they missed the important stuff. I mean, we were supposed to be in flying cars in the 1950s, but when they talked about 2000, but they didn't talk by the internet.

But I think what's clear is that you're making presumptions based on the present of what of what, well, first of all, we don't even know what intelligence is in some deep sense,

but you're making the assumptions that, you know, I can't input all of the sensory data input that you'd feel in free fall. And, and, and, and you're, so for me, I see no barriers, ultimately, to what you would call an artificial consciousness. But the problem with artificial intelligence is not artificial in any sense. It's really mimicking in some way the intelligence that it's creating an electronic version of a system that arose haphazardly by biology. And biology did it very effectively because it had a long time to do it. So I don't see any barriers to ultimately what you would call computers being conscious.

I ultimately don't see Computer Feynman is not the way of putting it, but what I am interested in in general artificial intelligence in those using those language, which I don't like, precisely for the same reason I think that Feynman was, which is I would like to know what, an intelligent computer, what physics questions an intelligent computer would find interesting. And there's not, it's not at all clear to me that they'd be the same questions.

To me, it's just like wanting to know about an alien intelligence. I would love to have an alien intelligence, because I'd like to learn a lot about what they've learned about the world and how they think about it, because it would illuminate, presumably, potentially a completely different way of thinking about the world than I'm used to. So I don't see it as, say, a threat in that sense, nor do I see it as, is a panacea. I see it, I think, in the long run is kind of inevitable, but not in any, but I mean long run. I don't think all AI is an area that's incredibly hyped. You're absolutely right. Computers compete people at chess, but they can't, but robots can't yet really effectively

fold laundry. And so, you know, this notion of, you know, around the corner, that's going to happen, I think is ridiculous. But I personally don't see it as a problem. And, you know, And the example, I wrote about this once in an article that was going to be in a book, but they removed it on AI a few years ago. Anyway, it doesn't matter where it was. I find it fascinating that Plato and others, going back to Plato in full circle, around the time that writing was first invented, totally decried writing because they said it would ruin storytelling.

Storytelling would be over because people wouldn't have memories, they wouldn't be able to do this stuff. And of course, it didn't happen. So what it did is it changed things. And I think that as computational systems become more capable in different areas, it will change things. But I don't see, I guess I don't see the same bear. I think you're just imposing the present on the future.

Who knows what the origins of creativity is, except it's making connections at some level between disparate things in some way. I don't see any barrier ultimately to a computer with sufficient input from a variety of things to be able to not understand how happy it is to fall in the absence of gravity, or even sense it in any sense that we sense it. Because I was just listening to actually a wonderful, I like Bill Bryson a lot, and I was listening to his book on the Body, and he points out a very important fact that we feel pain in the, everywhere we feel pain in the brain,

not in the fingers, not the ones that are being burned, it's in the brain that it's created. And it's created because of a whole bunch of biochemical reactions, a related to sensory input. And I don't see that electrochemical reactions or electrical reactions related to similar sensory input can't create the same feelings in that artificial brain. But that's my opinion. Yeah. Yeah, I've thought about that.

You know, if you want to teach some pain, you know, blow a capacitor here and a resistor there. I mean, it's a mechanism that was developed. And so why wouldn't they? I mean, it may not, who knows? I mean, it's this whole, it's this fundamental physical philosophical question, which none of us can never really answer, which is how do I know that your pain is the same as my pain? How do I know that you're green, even though I'm colorblind, that your green is the same as my green? I'm writing a new book.

What is it like to be Thomas Nagel? under the pseudonym A-bat. My nickname, my name is going to be A-Bat. Okay, Lawrence, we've reached the lightning round. Okay. First, I'm going to ask you some questions from my audience, then the lightning round. Then we're going to close up.

Good. Because my wife is going to be very angry because we were going to go by acting out at the river behind our house in a moment. All right. So this could be a lightning. One word answer. Is Jesus Christ a good role model from my viewer, Emmanuel Kant? Emmanuel Kant is my...

Wow, it's very, very... Wow, he's a frigate dead guy. He's very prolific. So, is Jesus a good role model worth emulating, he has? Not particularly, no. I mean, some of the things... Look, I don't know what you mean your role model. I think that...

What's the very mean? No, I mean, he's said certain things. Well, he's purported to have said certain things that are certainly worth appreciating and respecting. And but no, I'm not, no, not particularly. Okay. Would you like to sit down and have a conversation with your fellow countryman, Jordan Peterson? Oh, yes, and I have and I will.

Okay. Yeah, in fact, I have, in fact, for this, I just had a long conversation with Jordan Peterson that's going to appear on his podcast Monday, I think. And he's going to be on mine. Yeah, because I'm very become very magnanimous as I've gotten older. Yes, that's right. You've mellowed, man. You've changed, man, since you moved to Canada, the Great Mello North.

Next question. Age will do it. Anyway. Do you feel like it was fair of your assessors to fail you in your first PhD Viva on the basis that he knew maths, but not physics? This comes from Rajiv Gungel. He recently said, although it was traumatic, he learned a lesson. Oh, absolutely. You think it was true?

Yeah, absolutely. And it was incredibly important because I was, because physics is phenomena. And if you're not in touch with phenomena, you're not doing physics. Great. Easy question from listener, AJ. What happened before the Big Bay? My answer is potentially it's a bad question. Okay.

How can an average person of the reasons I said earlier, time may not have existed. So it's not a good question. And the other answer is, I don't know, which is a answer that we should all use more often to almost all questions. Sorry, go on. Should we trust the same government that makes us, you know, missed COVID at first, denied it, then has gone into complete, you know, opposite direction. Should we trust the same government that enacted various suppressive and also amplification of information? should we trust them to tell us what to do when it comes to climate change, which we didn't get to talk to. Yeah, you didn't.

In my new book, you didn't even plug it. I'm going to plug it. I'll give away a copy. How about that? No, we never trust anyone. No, look, that's the reason I wrote the book. The point is, educate yourselves at some level. And as a point of the book, almost anyone can understand the fundamental science

behind climate change. And the really basic predictions, it doesn't require supercomputers. is to understand the basic science behind climate change. And it's fascinating science. And my point, there's no policies recommendations in my book. The point is to say that policy, first you have to understand reality, and then you can decide on policy. And so the point is that obviously don't trust anyone,

try and understand it, and then impact on government, because what governments never do is lead, what they always do is follow. And I learned that from Noam Chomsky when I was a graduate student about Vietnam. Ultimately, the way governments respond to climate change will depend upon the public, and it will only be rational if the public has a rational, ultimately rationally demands policies. Okay. Anyway.

Next question comes from Lucas Patterson, who asks, can we sacrifice our policy? politicians to an active volcano to save ourselves from climate change. And if so, who would you choose active politician? It has to be active politician, active locale. Let me just say this. Politicians are politicians. And that means they have very specific jobs. And of course, part of being a politician involves doing things that a lot of people would not want to do in order to get elected.

But I will say this, and maybe because I'm influenced because I was just speaking to a congressional aid the other day. One of the things I'm very proud of is my foundation, and I'm not profiting from this in case anyone figures out. But we sent copies of the physics, climate change, to every member of Congress, raise money to do it. And because why? Because we want them to just, again, it's not a democratic issue. It's not a Republican issue. It's not a left or right issue. It's just a science.

and then they can decide on policy. But I've testified before Congress, officially on one occasion, me and Buzz Aldrin many years ago on the future space exploration. I've lectured to, I've given what they're called briefs before Congress and congressionalites.

And every time I do it, I come away, more impressed with the people working hard on behalf of people than I am when I listened to the news or watch the news. So I will say that on the whole in Washington, there are many people, and in Canada, in Ottawa, and other places. There are many people working very hard on behalf of what they think is right. And so let's just say that. That's helpful. And that reminds me of a joke. What's the opposite of the pros of something? The poetry of something? No, the pro.

I know. When you said pros, you didn't get my joke. Okay. I got the Okay, anyway, what's the opposite of pros? What's the opposite of pro? We're finished. It's almost finished. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What's the opposite of pro when somebody says you want the pros and the-

the cons, obviously. Right. So what's the opposite of progress? Congress. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Last couple of questions. I know you're busy.

I apologize. Blame it all on me, some... Can I tell... Now I was going to tell you my one joke too, okay? Go for it. Because it's related to your questions about Judaism. him and the questioning thing. You probably know this joke about this grandmother takes her grandson to the beach.

And he's sitting there and he's playing at the beach with his ball. And a big wave comes up and swallows him and takes him out to the, and disappears. And she looks up, she goes, God, God, please, he's a wonderful young boy. He shouldn't end his life this way. Please, please, don't kill him. The big wave comes back and lands him back on the beach. And she looks up and says, he had a hat. Anyway, all right, Lawrence.

Well, we have reached the end. Now I have the final three questions. If you'll indulge and give me some of that good Christian forbearance that you're known for. And these involve things related to Arthur C. Clark, who is the namesake of the center, which I co-direct, that hosted you many years ago. And the first one is going to take us to the biblical age of 120. And it involves a so-called ethical, not material will, but your ethical will. So Alfred Nobel had partially established an ethical will by ensuring or hoping to enshrine that the benefit to mankind would be the greatest accomplishment of the laureates. So anyway, so he had one, the famous ones go back to Jesus and Barack Obama wrote an ethical will.

It's called a Zava'a in Hebrew. Anyway, what would you like to convey in wisdom or knowledge on ethical imperatives when you spring forth this mortal coil at the biblical age that Moses achieved? of 120 years. That's a question I can't answer. I don't really think in those terms. I am, I, um, I have no, um, I have no, um, I have no, uh, I have no legacy or if you want to that I would want to leave other than the work that I've done during my life. That's all.

Okay. Nothing. All right. Next question involves a monolith spotted in two, a space odyssey, which is some kind of a time capsule. Yes. And this question relates to Feynman's question of if in some cladoclysm, all scientific knowledge would be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures.

What statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? You wrote a book about it called Adam, that was his answer. What about humanity discoveries in physics is most impressive that you would use as sort of a talisman to put on a billion-year-long Arthur C. Clarke-Clark-like time capsule. Okay, let me, this is going to be a problem with all your questions. It's a fundamental, it's a personality problem of mine. Maybe you can call it character trait. I don't think hierarchically.

I never have. So I don't think of most this or most that. I like a lot of different things. So I rarely list my favorite book, my favorite. But, but, you know, so, so to pick one thing. But you say, what thing would I put on a time capsule? What piece of information about the first? physical universe do you feel encapsulates the most amount of information in sort of the most

compact form, as Feynman said. Yeah, Feynman wrote about that at one point, what he put in... The atom. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I think, I think, let me, there's, I could have argued something else. You know, I might have said the statement from Galaisa where he says, but yet it moves, would maybe be the, because from there you can build all of physics. So it's the seed from which all of physics builds. So that's one thing I might say. But I think the other thing I would say, and I've written about this for undergraduates, actually, is the Hubble Cons and the expansionary, because basically every major feature of our universe comes from that one quantity. You can understand the age of the universe, almost everything from that one-dimensional quantity. So the expansion

rate of the universe is, in my mind, the most important global quantity describing the universe. Okay. Excellent. All right. The last question. question Lawrence relates to the title of my podcast and that is a saying of Arthur C. Clark, which takes us backwards in time. He said the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of this podcast. But I want to ask you going back in time to a 20-year-old, 30-year-old Lawrence Krause, is there any advice that you would give yourself to help you have courage and so forth to go into the impossible? Well, as I say, I mean, I'm, I'm a

My job has been to think about the possibilities, which means to find out, you know, how to turn the possible into the possible. So that's what I, my job has been that way. But the advice I'd give myself and I tend to try not give too much advice would be the same advice I always give young people, which is don't let the bastards get you down. I think I had a t-shirt like that when I was a kid, except it was turkeys and I was an elephant, but I didn't wear it because I got teased for being fat. Lawrence Krause,

director of the Origins Project Foundation, a nonprofit, which can be accessed at the websites in the video description below or on the text audio description. Also the proprietor of the Origins podcast. Lawrence has been fun. We should catch up more often

than every nine years. Yeah, wow. It's been, no, it's truly lifel. I wouldn't have spent two and a half hours with you if it hadn't been. And I'm pleased that you did your homework, which is always,

to me, the first step of, of quality. But it was great. Yeah, I kind of miss you. I'd like to, yeah. So I should come to, I should come up there. You're not allowed here right now because you have to be quarantined like I am.

They're spiting us. All right, Lawrence. Have a great day. Sorry I kept you so long. We'll probably break it into two episodes. Okay. Have a wonderful rest of your day. You have to apologize to my wife more than me.

I will. Just send her my way. I haven't missed her opportunity. Yeah, okay. Tell you what, Lawrence, when you guys come and visit in January, I'll probably be able to make it up for that. Okay. Okay.

Okay, take care. Bye, bye, be well. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to Part 2 of this special two-part episode of Into the Impossible. Please support the show by subscribing, rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We love hearing from you. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating.

That's DR. Brian Keating. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list at Brian Keating.com. Into The Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Brian Keating and Stuart Volko. Pay off your home. Travel for Life. Drive a Ferrari.

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