Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 2 of 2: Quantum Physics and The End of Reality with Sabine Hossenfelder, Carlo Rovelli, and Eric Weinstein hosted by Brian Keating for the Institute for Art and Ideas (#245)

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

We imagine physics is objective. But quantum physics found the act of human observation changes the outcome of experiment. Many scientists assume this central role of the observer is limited to just quantum physics. But is this an error? As Heisenberg puts it, "what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning." In all our studies of reality and nature then, the observer plays a role -- not just in quantum physics. Should we recognize science can never access reality independent of the observer? Should we re-define science not as uncovering objective reality, but as uncovering the functions, limitations and structures of the mind of the observer themselves? And if we cannot remove the observer, might quantum physics help us to understand the observer - as Roger Penrose suggests consciousness "reeks of something quantum mechanical." Sabine Hossenfelder is a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray and regular contributor to Forbes. She is known for her popular YouTube channel Science Without The Gobbledygook Eric Weinstein is an American podcast host, managing director of Thiel Capital, doctor of mathematical physics and member of the "intellectual dark web". Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who works mainly in the field of Quantum Gravity. Carlo's popular science book Seven Briefs Lessons on Physics has been translated into 41 languages and sold over one million copies. In 2019 he was named one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. Brian Keating is a groundbreaking American cosmologist who works on observations of the cosmic microwave background, leading the BICEP, POLARBEAR2 and Simons Array experiments. To join Brian's mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php The Institute of Art and Ideas features videos and articles from cutting edge thinkers discussing the ideas that are shaping the world, from metaphysics to string theory, technology to democracy, aesthetics to genetics. Subscribe today! For debates and talks: https://iai.tv For articles: https://iai.tv/articles For courses: https://iai.tv/iai-academy/courses Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php Join Shortform through my link Shortform.com/impossible and you’ll receive 5 days of unlimited access and an additional 20% discounted annual subscription! Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast! On Apple devices, click here, scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast https://apple.co/39UaHlB  On Spotify it’s here  on @audible_com it’s here and other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast  Please join my mailing list; click here https://briankeating.com/list for your chance to win real space dust!! A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Producer Stuart Volkow P.G.A. Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to part two of a special two-part episode of the audio version of a video debate between Carlo Revelli, Sabina Hasenfelder, and Eric Weinstein that we had on the 25th of July, 2022. And I was honored to be the host of this talking point. And I want to make sure that you subscribe to the Institute for Arts and Ideas YouTube channel, IAI's YouTube channel. We'll find this. And you'll be able to communicate and also find information about when I'm hosting future episodes. This is their most popular ever live episode as far as they have told me. So it was a real debate, as you heard in the first part. If you listened to Part 1, if you didn't, go back to the podcast feed and download it.

It's audio only. It's on my YouTube channel. And I want to ask you all to leave some feedback while you're there. Leave a rating or a review. If you can on Apple Podcast, you can do both. On Spotify, you can leave a rating on Audible and all sorts of other podcatchers. You can do that. So in part one, we talked about the redefinition of science relating to the uncovering of objective reality and what limits the observer's quantum mechanical brain must play in this whole process.

And we heard a lively debate from folks about that very topic. And in this second part, we get into some discussions of alternative approaches, including upcoming guests on both the YouTube channel and the podcaster Roger Penrose, talk about consciousness, reeking of, quantum mechanical origin. I want to talk to him and Stuart Hammeroff about that. In this part of the episode, I also took questions from the audience. So again, subscribe to the IAI YouTube channel. While you're there, subscribe to my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating. And you can leave questions for the future guests that I have on the show. As I said, I have Sabina Hasenfelder coming up. We already recorded that. But future guests like Mick Bostrom and others, you can leave questions for as well. So please do that. And now sit back and enjoy part two of my special debate

on the origins of quantum reality with Eric Weinstein, Carlo Rovelli, and Sabina Hassenfeld, they're all past guests on the Into the Impossible podcast. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pot bay doors, please, help. A man who had a huge influence in my life, which is Sir Roger Penrose, who's lately gotten his emperor's new clothes, have kind of dovetailed into not only a discussion of an alternative model for the origin of the universe, for gravity, etc. But also of consciousness itself,

venturing into actually making and conducting experiments on systems at room temperature and so forth. And these involve also called microtubules and other things with Stuart Hammeroff, also friends of many of us on here today. But of course, as I said in the very beginning, Sir Roger, you know, mentions that this whole issue, you know, as he says, reeks, and I can't do his voice.

I mean, none of us are British, unfortunately, but we could do it. So he says that consciousness reeks of an observer. And so it seems to be, again, not to rehash this all, but I think, you know, this notion that, you know, Carlo has stated on other occasions that, you know, there's a relationalism to both to these issues. And I wonder, as an experimentalist, I actually salute the work that Roger and Stewart are doing to actually try to do, you know, we have this canonical kind of quantum experiment. you know, paradigm of something being perturbed. But I wonder, Carlo, is there something that we could do that make the measurement

independent of the observer? Is there anything that we could use? Maybe it's a cosmological experiment, as Sabina might have been hinting at. But do you agree with Sir Roger that this, you know, that consciousness is so deeply embedded and it almost cannot be extracted from this issue? No. Not at all. It's good to explore extreme ideas and somebody can explore extreme ideas.

It's never bad if somebody explores it. And if a Nobel Prize and you have one of the smartest people around and they have proved that black holes are generic and you have invented speed networks on which my work based, I'm listing the achievement of Roger Henel's. If you're great scientists, you're free to explore extreme ideas. So I have an immense respect an estimate of Roger, who is a great friend and a lot of my working based on his mathematics. But this extreme idea he has been exploring

that somehow conscious is directly affected by quantum mechanics to be understood of quantum mechanics, I find it totally unconvincing. And I'm with Sabina here, and I would say with the majority of my, large majority of my colleagues. This doesn't mean dismissing somebody who explored extreme ideas, but I definitely... Can you elaborate on that? Why can you, for the audience, again, there's 1,500 people at least, Washington is probably

more like 2,000 or 3,000? Can you elaborate? Why do most of our colleagues, as you claim, which, you know, Roger might dispute, why do they dismiss it? Well, for the reason, Sabina said so simply and clearly, because the measurement of quantum mechanics we're talking about, it suffice a piece of an analysis of an, apparatus made by metal and copper, copper and glass to collapse the way function. So it's not to do with consciousness at all, zero.

It seems pretty obvious to me. I may be wrong, but I also may be wrong that the Earth goes around the sun for what we know. So again, that's an idea which I think is a fringe idea. It has much more traction on YouTube and on Facebook than in their scientific conferences. Having said so, let me go back to the main debate because I think we are mixing two things here. One is that whenever you do science, you're doing science as a human with the limitation of a human, as a existing being, which has a perspective on the world, would look at the world from from a culture, from inside a language,

all sorts of limitations which are ours. This is generic about science. It's true, and it's the reason for which we should understand science, as our best ways to address reality, but not as the absolutely unquestionable, ultimate certain statements about what's real and what's not real. That would be silly. It's not. It's human.

It's the best we can say about reality, where reality is what we say about it. So that's about science in general, but then we should not confuse this with quantum mechanics specific. Quantum mechanic has a measurement problem, which is puzzling, and it has puzzled everybody for long, some period more, some period less,

and it's still puzzling, because quantum mechanic doesn't give us a picture of what goes on there between one measurement and the other. So the community is sort of split. there are those who says well who cares it works very well and we do all our current technology with it then those who tell to fill up the dots say okay so quantum mechanic doesn't tell but i add something maybe there is a hidden world of hidden variables as is called of things happening that i can add to the theory nothing really

change in the prediction but it gives me a sense of what is going on or others maybe there are many multiple worlds we only see a sort of emerging little picture of a multiplicity of universes, which are beyond what we see. That's one group of people. Another way of solving the puzzle of quantum mechanics is to really think that, to really take a very strong instrumentalist perspective. I don't want to know what's happened there. I make a series of measurement and I don't ask what happened in between.

I think that there is a third way, and I've worked all my life on a third way, like many others, which addresses directly the question of observer, which is a following. I think that what science is, in fact, what reality is, or matter, the best way we have to think reality, we can think reality now as at the light of our experience, what we know, is not that reality is a set of individual self-standing object with properties, but rather that reality, that every object has property only when interacting something else. So not with us as a human, not with us as a living being or as a human or as a male or as a white male with PhD, I don't know, but as physical systems. So systems affect one another, interact with one another, and that's when the properties come about.

So the fact that we describe an atom through its interact with an apparatus has nothing to do with us, as observer special, has to do with the fact that we describe an atom through its interact with an apparatus, has nothing to do with us as observer special, has to do with the fact. that this is the best way to defending reality, how things affect one another. So there is a deep relational structure of reality revealed by quantum mechanics. And that's one possible perspective on quantum mechanics is the one I and a part of our colleagues consider particularly interesting.

Well, Sabina, you've had conversations about Hammeroff and Penrose. And what Carlo just said, I'm not going to give them an opportunity to correct me when I'm wrong, but it did have some kind of, I would say, pan-psychic adjacent maybe views, that consciousness is all participatory. Where do you fall? I mean, obviously, you've spoken against it and that it sort of doesn't fall in the purview of traditional science. Talk about Penrose and Hammeroff, who you've criticized. I'm actually supportive of them.

They're doing experiments, which is what I do. They're trying to take the role of the observer out by putting people under sedation, you know, in the case of Hammeroff and, in the case of, of my students when they go to my lectures. But why do you criticize Penrose and Hammeroff? Or what specifically do you criticize them for? And then how do you react to Carlos' thing that smacks of reeks of pan-psychism? No, I'm not a pan-psychist at all.

I know, I'm just joking. At all. At all. Okay, I was about to say it doesn't sound pan-psychistic to me, but he beat me to it. So, yeah, first let me say a few words in defense of, so this isn't working, great.

So this is my book, which you've already seen earlier, which, yeah, that is, which has an interview with Roger Penrose exactly about this topic, so you can read what he said in his own words. And also my next video, coincidentally, on Saturday, will be about what Penrose's argument actually is. So in a nutshell, he says,

consciousness can't be computable, therefore something weird has to be happening. And he puts the weird thing into quantum mechanics because that's into the measurement process because that's the only thing that we don't understand to make a long story short. He doesn't say that consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function

or something like this. It's rather the other way around. He says that the collapse of the wave function is responsible for our experience of consciousness. And this has a lot of, has been criticized for the obvious reason that quantum effects are generally fragile, and it's kind of hard to see how they would play a major role in the brain. And Penrose and Hammerov have countered this by saying,

so this was an estimate, which I think was done by Max Tickmark, and you find it on the archive. And they have rebutted this by saying, well, you can't make an estimate using quantum mechanics to constrain a theory which isn't quantum mechanics, right? So this makes sense. So in principle, it could be internally consistent. I think there's some mysterious stuff going on in their explanation, like even if you believe all this stuff with the coherence taken in the microtubles that collapse every once in a while.

What's it got to do with consciousness? I don't know. So this is like this little last rick where suddenly a miracle happens. it's going to do something with consciousness. But yeah, I mean, God, who knows? Yeah, I mean, I think we don't really understand consciousness. It is conceivably possible, like quantum effects play a role in the brain. Maybe they actually do play a role for consciousness.

I don't know. My friend Tim Palmer, who is also in the book, I have interviewed him as well. So he has pointed out that quantum mechanics is a source of noise, and noise quite possibly plays a major role in our brain. It's not just something that you sometimes need to get out of what you could call a local octagon if you want. Your balometers, right. Yeah, no, so if you get stuck with your computation, it's also that noise, it doesn't, I mean, if you think of stuff like sarcastic resonance, maybe,

you can actually use it to amplify a signal. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. Well, Eric, I can hear the audience, you know, kind of getting frustrated, rolling their eyes at all of us, agreeing with one another. And I'm counting on you, but I want to ask you a question, Eric. What is the most, you know, kind of quantum mechanical question? It seems almost tautological that an observer observes something

and has an effect on it ever since the double slit experiment, which is, you know, some of the canonically, most classically, to mix metaphors, experiment in quantum mechanics. So for the audience members that are getting fresh, what are they talking about, what do they argue about, what do they agree about, where do you fall on this? Do we have to think of the role of the observer or not? It seems patently obvious to me, but what do you have to think to opine here? You're muted, Eric. All right, I'm unmuted now.

Couldn't hear you. We could observe you. That was preemptive. Look, I hate it. I just can't stand the whole discussion about consciousness and quantum mechanics. And then somebody will mention mushrooms and say mushrooms are from outer space and they're aliens. And maybe we need psychedelics to perturb the consciousness to explain the quantum mechanics. And I feel like, okay, now we're off in recreational philosophy land because we don't have work that's working for us to be doing.

Right. And when you had Penrose on your podcast, you explicitly said, I'm not going to talk about consciousness. Why did you do that? Because honestly, it's boring. Look, it's not that interesting compared to things that we actually are good at and we've done. And there's a weird thing where people want to talk about consciousness and quantum theory because they understand neither. And then the idea is, well, maybe, maybe it'll be better if we just mix these two things. You can picture a kid with a chemistry set with two vials of things they don't understand,

putting them into an Erlenmeyer flask before the house blows up. I think that in general, we love Penrose because he's willing to make such a completely crazy and insane statement in theory, and that what we are short on in the community is courage. We all have crazy ideas, and in general, we try to make people regret the day they were born when they make the mistake of sharing them. So I think it's a terrible idea. I think it's wonderful that he's shared it. I think that there's some interesting things to note about us as non-reliable narrators, as literary theorists would call it.

So, for example, Sabine is very focused on the community, but she also isn't sure that the community exists, right? And so you have these paradoxes where she's convinced that she exists. She can't necessarily prove that the rest of us do. That's an example of these sort of fundamental tensions that we have when we try to operationalize these things and explore them. In the case of quantum, you can ask the question of which of the body's systems are quantum aware. So I believe that we know that cephalopods, in the case of cuttlefish, use polarized light and may be doing quantum mechanical

measurements with their eyes. I have it on the authority of Nima Arkani Hamid who explained to me in his office that geckos are in fact using the Kazimir effect. Lucca Turin is focused on olfaction and the idea that the brain is using quantum mechanics in the nose and the olfactory bulb in order to discern different sense. We're not nearly as interested in all of those things being quantum mechanical as we are in consciousness being quantum mechanical. And I think this gets back to the narcissism issue. If we want to talk about quantum effects in biology, we've got a bunch of stuff where we're on pretty solid ground.

And if we want to jump to quantum consciousness, I do worry that what we're hoping is that the problems of consciousness and the problems of quantum mechanics will miraculously kill each other in a Mexican standoff, which is yet to happen. Thank you very much and for being so succinct. So we have audience questions that will be coming up in just a bit after our final topic, which I'm going to throw to Sabina, which has to do with looking into the few. future into your crystal ball, you're so perspicacious, and you love to think about these big picture topics. And you've thought and talked about, you know, the nexus of quantum mechanics, quantum physics and cosmology. Is it another, you know, kind of opportunity for, as Eric said, you know, to put two things together that we don't understand, maybe one will come out? So first I want to ask Sabina about, are there, you know, potential fruitful avenues that we can

learn about the cosmos, from the cosmos, about the quantum. In other words, in my field, we talk about learning about inflation, we talk about quantum perturbations, gravitational waves. Carlos has written a beautiful new book about GR, et cetera. But I want to ask you, is that really true? Is there any manifestation in cosmology of the quantum? Or is it just extrapolation and essentially modeling that might be going too far? Well, there should be, right? In fact, it's a problem. principle, it should be possible to see imprints of quantum fluctuations in the C and B and people have calculated what they would look like and exactly what you would have to look for. The problem is just it's beyond current measurement precision and it'll probably remain so for a long time.

So yeah, I mean, as you've noticed, as you mentioned in the beginning, I've worked on quantum gravity for some for a long time and this is one of the possible observables of quantum gravity that you can look for it's one of the very conservative i should say there are also less conservative ones like you know probably um that near yesh of shawdi has this idea um that you might be able to see echoes in gravitational waves emitted from black holes because the black hole horizon might have a quantum structure. I'm not terribly convinced of this, but I mean, you can look for it.

It's there in the data. And then I guess, I mean, there are obvious things to say, like if you look back further in time, you'll be able to learn more about the quantum processes that happened back then. Though maybe cosmology is not the best way to do it, because you might prefer to build a bigger collider. and bang things into each other.

Very good. Now, Carlo, you are one of the world's experts in things revolving in quantum gravity. Is it, well, first of all, how do you react to what Sabina said? And then second of all, can we have a theory of quantum mechanics without a theory of quantum gravity?

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While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, US-only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Of course, we do have a theory of quantum mechanics that works very well. It's the best theory we have. and quantum gravity we have tentative theories. I work on theory. I'm very keen of it. I'm very enamored of it, but it's far from being an established theory.

So we don't have a quantum theory of gravity on which there is agreement. We certainly have a quantum theory. I agree with a bit with a bit. We have a lot of quantum phenomena in the sky. In fact, we wouldn't not understand the sun, without quantum mechanics, who would not understand supernova without quantum mechanics, who would not understand helium abundance in the sky without quantum mechanics. So quantum mechanics is used not in the laboratory just for small things,

is used enormously to understand it. It works fantastically well. Let me say a few things about the previous discussion, just to express. First of all, I insist I'm not upon psychists at all, zero. There's nothing cycle. There's nothing cycle in nature of cycle. It's the name we give to the kind of things that humans do. Psycho is the kind of things that we give to the kind of things that humans and maybe cats do. Right.

Is that mysterious? No, it's not a particular mysterious. I never understood the mystery of consciousness. It's like the mystery of life. 50 years ago, biologists were talking about a lot about the mystery of life. Nobody does. There are open questions about how life developed first, what is the actual detail of how information goes through.

The same with consciousness. Nobody can say what consciousness is. Consciousness is the name we give to what we are confused about. We cannot put in a clear. We want to understand memory. We want to understand emotions. We want to understand desire. We want to understand friendship.

We want to understand love. All this is a good problem. Conscious is not a good problem. It's just the name we give to all the things which we know how to address. Maybe we haven't figured out. So consciousness, in my opinion, is a non-problem. Quantum mechanics is a fantastic theory, okay, about which we have some confusion.

And I, this is the only thing I disagree with my co-panel friends. I don't think we are going to understand it better when we change the equations. Okay. Max on equations, people were very confused about it. They were not understood by changing the equation. They were understood by Einstein arriving and say, oh, look, they're invariant of the Lawrence of the formation, and T prime is what clocks measure.

Wow, now we got it. Okay. Even Copernican theory once after Newton became clear. Okay, we got it. There's no reference frame. The velocity is relative. It's very hard to digest, but then we got it. I think quantum mechanic will understand it in the same manner.

We will understand that it's telling us that reality is different, that the way we thought before, it's subtler, it's more relational, nothing to do with psycho at all, and it's more beautiful, more beautiful than quantum mechanics, more life, it's more interesting, it's more intelligent. Very good, yes, thank you, Carl. I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. I was just saying, yes, you meant.

Well, I did mean, I should say that, you know, to say that everything participates in consciousness, I guess my question to you, and maybe all of you, is, you know, if the observed plays a role, then it should be that there's something non-fungible, not NFT, but there should be something non-fungible about the human experience as opposed to, like, removing an electron. I mean, all electrons are fungible. All, you know, protons and pions, my favorite and most delicious particle, are fungible, right? they only have three properties. And Sabina's written and we'll talk this week when she comes on my show about mathematical universes and tag marks ideas.

But if there's something non-fungible, then that seems to be interesting. So I guess, Eric, you know, again, we focused on a lot of stuff that I don't think you were, you know, super. I think I misledged you when I asked you to come on this. But I want to ask you, where do you stand? Are you in the shut up and calculate or shut up and measure for those experimentalists out there? where should the future go? Look into your crystal ball and tell us what is this? I mean, we talk about entanglement all the time.

I know that frustrates you. Where should we be going if you could set the tone? And then we'll take questions from the audience. Well, I mean... Are you asking to? This is for error to respond. Sorry. I mean, roughly speaking, it's this mug.

And we should be talking about what we know of the structures. No, no relativity. What? No, no relativity. Maybe it's on the back. Maybe it's on the back. Apology. No, I mean, we should be talking about our core theories and why this 50 year, when we begin

to incorporate, and keep in mind who's on this panel. Carlo is central to the loop quantum gravity effort as a founder. Savina has been absolutely central to talking about some of the excesses of the string community and trying to bamboozle the world as to how beautiful everything is while their theory hasn't managed to ship a product. Right now is the time for courage to go back to the things that we stopped looking at 40 years ago when the string revolution came in and told us that anybody who didn't understand that the Green Schwartz anomaly cancellation was going to immediately lead to the theory of everything and dancing and rejoicing was an idiot. And they were wrong.

And we need to now reconcile with the fact that we've had a 40-year catastrophe in the field. When we have that, when we recognize that the leadership of a small number of individuals was misguided and that we get back on track, there's an enormous number of people who've never had a go at trying to say where the field should head. And I guess what I think is that I'll just make a very simple observation. Physics is about the physical objects in physical reality. And we found out that these things are described by an incredibly beautiful framework known as bundle theoretic differential geometry and topology.

At present, if you think in terms of bundles, you generally don't think in terms of particles and fields that we encounter. And if you think in terms of particles and fields that we encounter, encounter, you don't bother with bundles. Something very bad has happened sociologically. And if we were saying, instead of trying to solve cool sounding questions, we would get back to work immediately with a large number of groups pursuing very different indications of what is likely to come next, as opposed to not dealing with the elephant in the room, which is that we haven't done much of anything for 50 years. that's a huge statement and one of that I'm prepared to back up.

I believe that when it comes to the quantum, the most important thing that nobody discusses here is something called geometric quantization, which said that Hamilton, who has one of the great two frameworks in the business with Lagrange, didn't go far enough that the Hamiltonian structures are actually predictive of a quantum theory, That is that the relationship between position and momentum

forms something called a curvature tensor of a line bundle whose sections provide a Hilbert space on which we do quantum theory. And we've had tremendous innovation in the frameworks of physics with zero innovation essentially proven in the physical systems that those frameworks are supposed to analyze. So my belief is that we would do well to get off of this topic, get back to work and listen to a bunch of people we've never heard from saying, well, what went wrong with super symmetry, grand unified theories, extended objects, asymptotic safety? What are the new things that we've forgotten to do?

Who has an idea? And then that kind of a community, we're waiting effectively for certain people to retire. I'm not sure what we're doing. We should be holding a conference that tries to say, here are the 73 ways that we might go differently from the period when we only really, had one or two guiding lights. I'll just say it very clearly. Quantum gravity is not clearly the question we were all supposed to be working on 40 years ago. And I don't even know whether Carlo and Sabina would agree with me. But my feeling is that I'd much rather know why are there three generations?

Why is nature flavor chiral? Why these particular internal quantum numbers? What do we believe is the pattern of the masses? Those are the questions that excite me in the way that consciousness and the brain seems to excite up. Okay, well, I'm going to get to something exciting for me. I do want to get Carlo and Sabina's response to that. But you did have an event with Brian Green on this very channel with Sabina and with Michael Shermer

about the theories of everything. We're not going to talk more about that, but it does show the level of interest in the field. By the way, there's thousands of people watching this online, guys. This has really been such a smashing success. Hit the like button and subscribe to this channel, please. If you want to see more of these with same speakers, different speakers, different host, But I want to take the host prerogative and kind of modify a question from our audience now. And that comes from a person whose name is Sir Great, which, you know, I'd like to be known as that.

I try to ask my kids to do that. I'll call me that. He's asking, or she's asking, I guess, oh, what does the G-minus 2 muon experiment say is about reality? I want to rephrase that. I want to ask two questions, starting with Sabina and then Carlo. We see these measurements. Eric was just talking about, we should have a conference. Well, like they did.

It was called Shelter Island. and they brought together experimentalists. What are some of the exciting experiments that people are doing? You talk about fifth forces and stuff on your channel and in this wonderful new book, but shouldn't we be really kind of confronting existing data? Do we need new data? Do we need new ideas? And I'll have a follow-up question for Eric on this very topic.

But, Sabina, experiment, physics, new forces. Do they fit in to the framework of reality, quote unquote, like G-minus 2 and the LHCB experiment, and etc. Okay, so you've totally lost me there with the question, but let me just say something. So we need both data and ideas to say the obvious. And right now we're getting you data from the Web Telescope, which I think is really, really exciting, and I think all astrophysicists are excited about this. It can really tell us something about how dark matter works, it doesn't work in the early

universe with the formation of galaxies like because the the standard dark matter paradigm says that galaxies should build up very gradually so basically there shouldn't be any big galaxies way way back at very high redshift and this is something that the web telescope will allow us to tell now the question was about the mu and g minus two what does it tell us about reality i've no idea the only thing we know is that The prediction from the standard model for the value of the G-minus 2 is if you're standard deviations away from the measured value. I think it's now at 4.2 sigma or something. That's the discrepancy.

However, those calculations are really, really, really difficult. It's not just quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and there's a lot of nuclear physics, hydronic physics and stuff going in. And I think a lot of people, including me, think there's probably something wrong. Maybe that's too strong to put it. Something weird with the calculation going on, they're probably underestimating their uncertainty. And if they're misjudging the uncertainty, then the discrepancy might actually be much smaller. Yeah, so I think I'll stop there.

Yeah, Carlo, when we see new data, do we have to ask if that it can be reconciled but with already understand about quantum mechanics, or do we have to come up with a new theory of everything? You're a peculiar situation in which physics has been, at the time, they pass by rarely. Usually, I think physics has been in a different, different situation at ours. For instance, when I was a student at university, there were zillions of data. say the strong interactions and nobody could make sense to them. There was very, very rough ways of making sense of them that worked very badly.

Today, we are in a funny situation in which this set of fundamental theories that Eric showed on here, his capital, without gravity, is psychological process. There is no indication, almost, I'll come to the almost in a moment, but anything we measure escape of those theories. So we're going to ask, okay, so what found this theory? Maybe some unification. Why those numbers and the constant? Why the cosmological constant? Why the future? So I can ask this question, it's okay. But we don't have what scientists usually have, which is dead to explain. But we do have some. I agree with Sabina that G-minus 2 is not very convincing.

my bet on G minus two is exactly what Sabina is saying, namely that the theoretical, the experimental calculation seems reliable. The theoretical, not at all. In fact, I have friends in QCD on the lattice that have arguments to say that the theoretical calculation, it's very complicated, uses the indirect things, and it probably trust itself too much, and it might move toward the experiment. is very tempting, especially since for 40 years, we have heard experimentally say, oh, we see a deviation from the standard model. They have all come back.

They have all being reabsolved. The standard model is extremely successful. So I would take our successful theory for what they are, successful theory. Like Einstein took a Maxwell theory, an extremely successful theory on which to build more. and address the open questions. And there are open questions.

We don't know what dark matter is. This is an open question. It's real. These are the data which we don't understand. We have 23 of dark matter, which means non-reliable. But there is more. For instance, we have this beautiful picture of black holes in the sky, right? We're amazed by this.

The picture is actually the plasma super hot that rotates a blank of black hole, which is matter spiraling and falling into the hole, right? We essentially see the matter fully. Half an hour after that, it goes inside. We know genetic, so we know what happens inside the horizon. We know it goes to the center, and then we know nothing. We don't know what happened to all that matters. We have a whole, everything falling in.

We have no idea what happened going in. This is a perfectly well-posed physical question, because most likely, I mean, those are big black holes, stay there forever. It's very possible there are small molecules, produces, we don't know, we're not sure, producing the early universe and there might have ended up their life already. So that's physical to understand. There's stuff in the universe we don't understand. And we have tools to try to do theories about that, try to expand our

theories about that. So I'm very much with Eric that we sort of wasted 40 years running big theories like screen supersymmetry that has have most likely failed. And the problem was not to explore those theories, not a beautiful theory, extremely beautiful theory. They were worth exploring. The mistake was that everybody was doing that. There are few courageous people and others who were trying other directions. I am pretty confident in loop quantum gravity.

I'm just coming back from the big loop quantum gravity conference in Leone, it was fantastic. new result, new attempt. Do I know it's right? No, I don't. If I have to bet, I bet on this, of course. But there are, and I hope that two quantum gravity is going to tell us, for instance, more about the universe, what might happen closer to the big bank or inside the black holes. And perhaps even for dark matter.

These are the interesting open questions for this. Not consciousness. Let consciousness to the neuroscientists. Yeah. They're good enough. Yeah, although if you leave it to Stuart Hammeroff, he'd sell you, he already has the answer. Last question before we start to wrap up and just so appreciative, and I will give you all a proper send-off in just a minute. As questions about, again, about Sir Roger Penrose, this is about gravitational collapse of the wave function.

Sabina talked about in terms of consciousness and perception. We're not talking about that now. Eric, and then Carlo and Sabina. What is this notion of gravitational collapse? Does it perhaps provide any illumination? First, maybe Eric, if you could explicate it a little bit based on your wonderful interview with Roger. What is it and what are it's promising and its drawbacks features? Well, since I didn't have a book to promote, let me promote a theory.

I think that maybe the most interesting model of how gravity is harmonized with the quantum, without being quantized in the most direct fashion, is that gravity is the engine of observation. And so my claim has been that if you imagine that space time, as we are told, is doomed. My favorite candidate is to replace the four dimensions, one of time and three of space, with those four dimensions together

with those plus ten additional dimensions of Einstein's theory for his symmetric two tensor. And then what would happen is that you would have a 14-dimensional structure and every metric would be a bridge between that 14-dimensional world and the four-dimensional world. And then what you would have

is that every time you chose a metric that is gravity, you would pull back different data from something that looked like a multiverse. And you start to understand that the real problem, this is the thing I was hoping we were going to get to us,

so I'm going to squeeze it in here because I don't think we did. The big problem in this area is trying to go after every theory that you've never thought of as if it were something called hidden variables. And then you want to prove something, which is that no hidden variable theory can exist that blah, blah, blah. It's an attempt to knock out your competition from the get-go, which is that you're going to speak about all the theories that haven't been discovered. Now, if you think about locality, if you're listening, let's say, to a whole lot of love by Led Zeppelin, and you're doing it on an old style record, you may hear a skip where suddenly it jumps a track

in your two seconds, rather, in your future. Now, that's a local operation on a phonograph, because the phonograph is a two-dimensional surface, but in time, it's a non-local operation because your stylus skipped a track. The issues with locality, with unitarity, with stability, all of these things that quantum field theory has to take into account, is that if you're not in the proper theory,

you can't really evaluate them. So my personal belief is that gravity has to be harmonized, but not necessarily quantized, and that gravity may be the observer, and the way in which you avoid a Schrodinger's cat problem between a superposition of two quantum planets, let's say, is that whatever gravity field you throw up always pulls back data from, a different space to the four-dimensional space that we perceive that is compatible with where the stylus landed on the record, where the record is the 14-dimensional option. Okay, great. Carl, I'm sorry, we only have 30 seconds if you'd like to respond to anything you've heard today

or the specific question from the listeners about Penrose's gravitational collapse of the wave function. 30 seconds, please, I'm sorry. I feel like, you know, Einstein have a couple two or three wrong papers, and I feel like if you keep asking me about the two or three wrong paper by Einstein. I mean, look at the fantastic things what you Penrose did. It's marvelous. Look at spin network. Look at tiling. Look at quasicrystal. Look at gravitational collapse. Look at the twistus. I can't even remember that. It's a marvelous amount of science that Pemnios does.

Why looking at the only two that don't make sense? Okay. Yeah, that's true. The Einstein could have had a good career if he didn't have those blunders. Guys, I want to thank you all so, so much, and I want to just enter now. We're in the, we're in the spin zone now. We're going to increase the angular momentum because I do want to promote the work of this phenomenal panel of friends and guests. Starting with Carla Rovelli, has written so many books, is such a gracious, generous person, spent 10 hours last summer recording of the voice of a 400-year-old dead Italian man named Salvayati for me and all the riches that he will get from that project.

But his book, Helgeland, is not to be messed. I did interview with him. You can find that on Dr. Brian Keating YouTube channel. We've done three or four interviews so far. He's a phenomenal and gracious human being, one of my favorite thinkers, original thinkers. I want to thank you. You can find him on Twitter at Carlo Revelli.

Next is my good friend, Eric Weinstein. It can be found at Eric R. Weinstein. You can find many interviews. He's my most frequent guest on The Into the Impossible Podcast, or Dr. Brian Keating YouTube channel. He has a website, Eric Weinstein.org. You can find out of a Geometric Unity there and other places and join and watch wonderful videos and animations. He's available at Eric Weinstein on Twitter.

And then last but certainly not least, Sabina Hasenfelder, who has a wonderful new book, which I've read and devoured. And I love the beautiful butterfly on the cover. I'm going to ask her about that when she comes on this week onto the YouTube channel. And she can be found as KDH on Twitter. and she has a newsletter, which I subscribe to, and you should all subscribe to. Speaking of subscriptions, if you do subscribe to my newsletter, Brian Keating.com slash list, and you live in the U.S., sorry you folks in the UK and elsewhere, I will send you a piece of space dust, a piece of genuine 4.3 billion-year-old meteorite sample

from the early solar system. And that's at Brian Keating.com slash list on Dr. Brian Keating on Twitter and YouTube. And I want to thank you guys so much and thank the audience for the wonderful questions. Remember, hit the thumbs up button. haven't already. And leave a comment. Do you want to see these speakers back again? What else would you like to learn about from the wonderful Institute for Art and Ideas? And I want to thank you all so much. Have a wonderful rest of your day. And tune in next time. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Well, that's a wrap on part two of two. A wide-ranging debate with my friends, Carla Rovelli, Sabina Hossensfelder, and Eric Weinstein. my most frequent guest on The Into the Impossible podcast, followed by Sabina, who has a new book out called Existential Physics. I just did a recording of an interview with her, and later in the week of July 25th, when I recorded the live video that the audio you just listened to was attracted from.

Anyway, subscribe to the podcast and the YouTube channel. You won't want to miss the interview idea of Sabina. And surely Eric and Carla will be guests as well in the future. For now, I just want to ask you for a repayment option. You owe me exactly $0, but you can really help me out by leaving a rating and or a review of this podcast, wherever you're listening to it. Every podcast app nowadays allows you to leave a small constellation of stars. I hope it'll earn five stars from you. But if not, I hope you'll explain why, and you can explain why and leave a rating as well as a written review on Apple Podcast.

As just this week I got from the United States from Autophysm, who wrote understandable and wide-ranging physics. Dr. Keating is jovial and always self-effacing, and he lets the guests make their points. You'll learn a lot from the podcast. And so I really appreciate that. You can leave a review, as I say, a written review on Apple Podcasts only. Give me some feedback. I didn't have any ads in this episode, unlike other episodes. But I hope that you will pay me back, at least with that one request, which is to leave a rating or review.

So for now, I want to thank you for going into The Impossible with me, my special guests, and staying tuned for future episodes, Nick Ballstrom, Bernardo Castro by popular demand, and many, many other great thinkers and writers who have honored me by agreeing to come on this show. And it's really because of the feedback and the size of the audience, which has grown to over 100,000 people. I cannot thank you enough. But I only ask for one thing, which is those ratings, reviews, subscriptions on YouTube. All these things are free. You don't have to pay for any of it.

And I might even send you a chunk of space dust if you subscribe to my mailing list and live in the U.S. I give away meteorites, I give away copies of my books, audiobook, with Carlo Rovelli, called The Dialogue by Galileo, et cetera, et cetera. I know you're going to enjoy it, and I hope you'll do me that favor. And for now, I'm wishing you a magical rest of your week. And thank you for going into the impossible with me, Brian Keating. Take care. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's

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