Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Paul Halpern: Flashes of Creation (#177)

Starting point is 00:00:01 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome, everybody, to another sure-to-be thrilling and fascinating episode of the Into the Impossible podcast, because it features my friend, my inspiration and muse in some of my writing, and that's Paul Halpert, is a professor at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, the author of many, many books, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the fellow of the American Physical Society. He lives near the cradle of our democracy in Philadelphia. Paul, how are you doing today?

Starting point is 00:00:40 I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me back on your show, Brian. This book is so fascinating. I thought I knew most of the stories in it. I thought I understood the stakes, which could not be bigger. It's really the creation of all that is. Yeah, the matter that matters. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:00:57 The matter that matters, the protons, the neutrons, the croutes. the croutons that are so important to me. And a lot of it takes place here in La Jolla and San Diego where UCSD is located. So it's delightful. And thank you so much for giving me an acknowledgement in the book. I don't deserve it, but I will take anything I can get from you because you are one of my inspirations when I write, Paul. Thank you so much for coming on.

Starting point is 00:01:19 This book will definitely get into all the details of it, although I never like to give it away. It's out today when this video comes out. It's sure to be a bestseller. And for all the right reasons. This book characterizes the struggle to understand the universe in its first and earliest moments and to understand the contradistinction between an eternal universe or a steadily evolving universe in a static, steady state, perhaps, from all eternity till now. And really, it humanizes the characters that made this so important.

Starting point is 00:01:53 So the first thing I always love to ask, Paul, as you know, from being on the show before, is the title and the cover. We call this judging books by their covers. You're never supposed to do it. I know now I have a prior for you because of all your great books, but for my audience, why is this book have the title that it does and the subtitle and the cover design? Well, it's interesting. I'm especially proud of the title of this one.

Starting point is 00:02:17 I came up with that, and Flashes of Creation has a double meeting. So one meaning is the idea of how was the universe created and how did the matter come about in the universe, how were the chemical elements created? And the two people I talk about in the book, George Gamov and Fred Hoyle, had different ideas for how the chemical elements are created. And surprisingly, it was a combination of both of their ideas that turns out to be the real story. George Gamma brilliantly discovered how the hydrogen and helium in the universe was created, particularly how the helium was built up during the Big Bang. Fred Hoyle looked at the higher elements beyond that and discovered how all of the other elements

Starting point is 00:03:06 were created in the cores of dying stars and released during supernova explosions, which is remarkable. And these were insights by these two men. They were mavericks. They were people who went by their gut feelings. And that's the other meaning of the title, flashes of creation. They would get a flash of an idea and go with it. And Gamov got so many ideas. ideas when he was at George Washington University, he would call Edward Teller, his colleague, every single day in the morning and come up with another crazy idea, and Teller would often dismiss the ideas. But every once in a while, he stumbled upon something. He went with it, and then within a day or two, he'd come up with some new theory. For example, his model of

Starting point is 00:03:53 alpha decay, he developed overnight, and it's still used today, which also can be used in the reverse manner to see how protons and alpha particles and other particles can be used in colliders to be aimed at targets. And he developed those calculations like very, very quickly. So these flashes of creation of both figures in the book were very, very, very important and drove them toward amazing creativity, but as I show in the book, sometimes they'd be way off. And Hoyle was especially very stubborn with his ideas and kept going with them, even beyond when they were feasible at all. Like beyond when the cosmic microwave background was discovered, he kept coming up with new ideas for why it wasn't the Big Bang. It was something else, which alienated him from people.

Starting point is 00:04:52 The cover was designed by the wonderful people at Basic Books Heschette, and that is kind of a rendition, an artist's rendition of the Big Bang, which nobody can really imagine. Yeah, well, talk about that as I've been focusing in some solo episodes lately on competitive models that still exist to the singular Big Bang, the origin story that Gamma really supported and, and, uh, really doesn't get the attention that I think he deserves, although he was extremely well-known, at least by a scientist standards for his popularization, Mr. Tompkins series, 1, 2, 3, Infinity. These are wonderful books that really set the stage for people like you and me to write popular science books and accounts and so forth, although he's such a master of it. You mentioned already the CMB. I was not planning to go there, but I do so soon. Of course, I'm going to go there. It's my, it pays the bills around here. But I didn't know this, that La Jolla might be the origin place for where the CMB took, first, first, was predicted perhaps.

Starting point is 00:06:05 So you say, you say the most notable face-to-face encounter between Gamov and Hoyle took place in the summer of 1956 when Gamov was working as a consultant for the defense company General Dynamics here in La Jolla, California. He invited Hoyle for a visit, while driving along the C.C. side enclaves, sunny streets, and Gamovs, Cadillac, which is kind of funny, they had an animated discussion about the temperature of space. Their discourse anticipated in some ways, Penzias and Wilson's discovery of the CMB radiation. And I just thought that was so delightful that we have this connection here in my adopted hometown of La Jolla, California, to this amazing prediction. But I guess before we get into the nuts and bolts of that prediction, set the stage for these two men.

Starting point is 00:06:54 They were similar and they were very different. They were family men, but they were also subject to their own biases that eventually had, not catastrophic, but negative implications on their children that they loved. And in some cases, in both cases, collaborated with, right? I mean, both men collaborated with their own children. I think it's wonderful. But they also had, you know, as they say, great men, great women can have great flaws too. Talk about them as human beings.

Starting point is 00:07:22 Well, they both were interested in conveying science to the general public. They grew up with a great love of science, a great love of nature, a love for astronomy. They both looked up at the skies. Gamov looked up at the skies over Odessa and observed Haley's comet when he was a child. And Hoyle went out into the countryside and had this moment of epiphany when he looked up at the stars and decided he wanted to be an astronomer. although that took many twists and turns. He originally was going to pursue chemistry and went to physics,

Starting point is 00:07:56 and then finally discovered that he was interested in supernovas when he met up with Walter Bodhi and was interested in that story and turned to astrophysics. Both of them actually turned to astrophysics relatively late in life, career-wise, because they were both more interested in nuclear physics and other fields in the beginning, but then found that astrophysics and cosmology were great areas of application for those fields.

Starting point is 00:08:26 But in terms of their children, I had the privilege of interviewing all three of their children, which was very exciting. Unfortunately, Igor Gamov passed away recently a couple of months ago, but he was an incredible person and very, very animated, and he was very proud of talking about his dad. and so were Liz Butler, who was Hoyle's daughter, and Jeff Hoyle. Jeff Hoyle collaborated with his father on science fiction novels.

Starting point is 00:08:58 Igor Gamov continued the Mr. Tompkins series almost until his final year through comic books. So they were very proud of continuing their parents' legacy. And another interesting thing about their children is that both Igor, and Liz Butler were rebels. They turned away from science for a while, and then they went back to science. And that shows the power of their father's influence. So in terms of their personalities, both of them were very self-driven. They both had a love of Hollywood, I discovered. They liked different kinds of movies. Hoyle loved mystery movies. And as I show in my book, there was a mystery movie, a horror movie, The Dead of Night that inspired, helped inspire the steady state theory.

Starting point is 00:09:49 Gamov, on the other hand, surprisingly loved cowboy movies, and his nickname was Joe, cowboy Joe, spelled GEO. So if you hear someone talking about Gamov, who knew Gamov, they talk about Joe and say, wait a minute, Joe, G-O-E, no, G-E-O, which was short for the Russian for George Gamoff. And he adopted that nickname when he was working with Nealz Bohr in Copenhagen. And there's a funny story about that because he and Boer challenged each other to a duel because they had an argument over why heroes win battles in cowboy movies. When the villain has the advantage, because the villain is evil, the villain comes up and will do a sneak attack.

Starting point is 00:10:43 but they demonstrated this using toy pistols, and it turned out that Boer, who argued for the hero, ended up being first. But anyway, Gamov continued to love cowboy movies, and that's when he adopted a name Joe. And his son became kind of a cowboy, had a ranch out near Boulder, Colorado. Make every get-together chill.

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Starting point is 00:11:43 Yeah, where he relocated after many years at George Washington. And I think, you know, when I read the book, by the way, you're equal in your storytelling ability equals only your research ability. This book is so thoroughly researched. And again, I'm sitting in the office, not this moment, but my office, as I told you before in our last interview, is Jeffrey Burbage's old office. So I'm privy to all of his old notes. And so, I mean, his daughter, Sarah, as you know, and you quote in the book, they took his notes in the library here, has Margaret's notes.

Starting point is 00:12:17 But every now and then I'll find, you know, a scrap of paper with his handwriting on it or a photographic plate of a quasar that Margaret took, you know, before you or I were probably even born. And you just dig into the history so thoroughly with historians, you know, ability, scholars' insights, but also. as telling this story as a storyteller in a way that physicists like me can really appreciate and learn something. So I don't want you to respond to that, but I just want to be equally or appropriately effusive because it's so much fun. I don't have that much time to read books about stuff I already know, right? I read this book. I learn so much and it's just such a treat. I want to go through one theme that stuck out to me, and maybe it wasn't intentional, but the interplay with Bob Dickie at Princeton, my late,

Starting point is 00:13:08 great grand advisor, David Wilkinson at Princeton, and other characters, and kind of the twin aspects of the 20th century in which these two, the milieu in which they were operating. And it was kind of after World War II. And at both the kind of nuclear and the atomic age shines through in their work, obviously in the fusion processes that take place in both Hoyles and in Gamov's work, but also the influence of radar and radio astronomy and telecommunications and communications in general. That was always known to me, and David Kaiser, our mutual friend at MIT, as pointed this out, along with their mutual fascination and the origin of life. In other words, in how life could have come about,

Starting point is 00:13:55 and that was sort of related to, you know, Roswell and all the stuff that would go on in the 40s and 50s. And that was another aspect of the atomic age, the post-World War II milieu in which they grew up. So were these men, you know, except for their scientific claims, were they ideological brothers in arms? I mean, would they have in another world, another universe in the multiverse? Would they have basically been, you know, two sides of the same coin? Well, I'm not Doug Adams, but I tried to delve into my book about life, the universe, and everything. Yeah. I love that expression.

Starting point is 00:14:30 And interestingly, both Gamov and Hoyle were fascinating. by those topics. They wanted to unravel not just the origin of everything, not just the origin of all matter, but also the origin of life. And Gamov was more successful than Hoyle because Gamov contacted experts.

Starting point is 00:14:52 He contacted James Watson and spoke with him about, you know, the genetic code and came up with this idea of using combinatorics to understand how amino acids are created from genetic material, which was a brilliant idea, and was incorporated by the geneticists. So they still give a tribute to gamma for that. And Hoyle was somebody who turned to the idea of life later on, but it wasn't so successful

Starting point is 00:15:27 because he was not so much relying on experts. He came up with a little bit of a strange theory that all diseases came from space or come from space, which some people were offended by that and put off by that, understandably, when he talked about, you know, for example, AIDS coming from space and Legionnaire's disease is coming from space. People were like, what's going on here? He seems, you know, way off. Something's wrong. And that was in his later years.

Starting point is 00:16:04 Right. So he did enough brilliant stuff in his earlier years than we can dismiss his later years. Yeah, he seemed to be always guided by his intuition, whereas, you know, you seem to portray Gamov as much more methodical in a way, although he seems more mercurial, more mischievous, etc., famously adding people to papers as to make a pun. I mean, you can't even imagine such things happening today. Beta is not a bad co-author to add if you have to add somebody. But the thing about Hoyle, I felt like the more he got entrenched in his beliefs, the more he became a scientific community outsider. And that maybe made him kind of suffer from maybe confirmation bias or some form of paranoia

Starting point is 00:16:51 that everything's out to kind of oppose him. And even I talked to Giant Narlocar earlier this year, who you point out is a Titanic figure still to this day in India. and his wife, Mangala, is just equal in every way to him. And I just had such a delightful time talking to them. I miss when they would visit here. I hope they will again. But Giant still maintains the steady state.

Starting point is 00:17:13 Quasi-steady state is viable. The Big Bang has serious problems. And I wanted to point out, and you mentioned this in the book, the classic story is that the CMB killed the steady state. But you point out in the book, in 1972, Weinberg's gravitation and cosmology, he basically talks about the steady state as having all these virtues because it's falsifiable. It's not like Genesis 1-1, all the reasons that Hoyle didn't like the Big Bang or additional reasons that Hoyle didn't like the Big Bang.

Starting point is 00:17:41 Hoyle certainly wasn't malevolent, but I don't believe that the general community of cosmologists is correct in assuming the CMB killed the steady state. In fact, as you noted, and I note in my book, the Dickie People's Rolls in Wilkinson paper never mentions the Big Bang, not at all. It only mentions the collapse of a previous cycle. And of course, who is more knowledgeable about this than Peebles and Dickie, obviously? So anyway, what do you make of this notion in the popular culture? Is it just a shortcut? Is it a crutch that we use to just have a nice, just-so story, as Rudyard Kipling called it, that the CNB killed the steady state? Yeah, it's very simplistic to say, you know, Big Bang won, Fred Hoyle lost,

Starting point is 00:18:25 end of story, because he pointed out correctly that there were some conceptual problems with the Big Bang, especially the Big Bang theory as known in the 1960s. They had to resolve the issue of the Hubble constant, pin that down, pinned down a number of the cosmological parameters. originally when in 1948, when Gamow was advocating the Big Bank theory, along with Alfred and Herman, the age of the universe was estimated to be a couple of billion years old, which is much younger than the stars.

Starting point is 00:19:06 So that was a big problem. I would say that's like finding out your father is younger than you. It's a little disconcerted. So until that problem was fixed, steady states seem much more viable. And then there were all these problems with the flatness problem, isotropy problem, and so forth, that were resolved, as most cosmologists think, by inflation. Of course, there's alternative ideas, cyclic cosmologies, and so forth. Yeah, when inflation came about, as I show in my book, Hoyle sort of claimed a triumph. He said, look, the inflation people are talking about this exponentially. expansion phase, well, that's what I was talking about. Instead of talking about an inflatine field,

Starting point is 00:19:55 some field driving inflation just for a fraction of a second, why not just have a creation field, which was Hoyle's idea, slowly creating matter over the eons continuously. Then you don't have what's called an inflation, the graceful exit problem. Why did inflation stop? Hoyle was saying, well, inflation didn't stop. It was really steady state or quasi-steady state that new matter and energy is very, very slowly being introduced into the universe and the universe is expanding

Starting point is 00:20:29 and it existed forever. Some people think Hoyle should have adopted some form of the inflationary universe and said, you know, okay, inflationary universe is similar enough to steady state. I'll just go within eternal inflation. But Hoyle still didn't like the idea that even the idea that the observable universe has a beginning because he thought that that was not testable. So he wasn't willing to say, okay, maybe the observable universe has a beginning as a bubble in some kind of greater universe, which would have been a logical leap for him.

Starting point is 00:21:06 But he wasn't willing to take that leap. Yeah. And it was maybe because it was so antithetical. Although, as you point out in the book and many of the listeners who already know, Hoyle had come up with the idea that in some sense provided at least one of the nails in the coffin of the quasi-steady state theory, which is that helium production in stars was insufficient to generate the observed 24.5% helium abundance in our universe. And he knew that and he wrote this wonderful paper with Taylor that you, that you call it. out. And so he wasn't afraid of torpedoing his own ideas. And he wasn't afraid to go out on a limb.

Starting point is 00:21:46 As you point out in the famous Hoyle miracle, the resonant 13 M.EV resonance of carbon, a beryllium that allows for us to exist. I mean, that was as his daughter, as you got her quote, you know, he predicted it on the basis of his own existence. So it's kind of like an update to, you know, Cogito ergo sum. I'm carbon, therefore I exist. Talk about how a great, you intellect like him was so scientifically, had such scientific integrity that he could dismiss an idea or he could promulgate another idea which could be fatal to a previous idea and yet be so stubborn, so resolute that they would continue to put out books and books and papers and so forth about an idea which by the, I would say by the, you know, FIRAS experiment and by WMAP,

Starting point is 00:22:35 it had become impossible to believe in the Whisker Theory of Thermalization of starlight. So what did you take away from him? I mean, is he just so complicated that, you know, be bound to have some nutty kind of ideas or to hold on to ideas far too long or suffer from confirmation bias? Or do you think there's a grain of truth like you were just hinting out? I mean, there are kind of, I wouldn't say, you know, real DNA. Maybe there's some RNA of inflation and even dark energy, right? Let's be honest. I mean, that's just like some kind of, you know, creation field of energy, right? So there are some elements of that in there, but still, he wouldn't fully adopt them.

Starting point is 00:23:14 What do you make of that with Hoyle? He's very different than Gamov, I would say. Well, very interesting, Hoyle's last paper, I think published right before he died, 2001, was actually a joint paper, but tried to explain dark energy. So he kept up with stuff, although by that time he was impaired. Sadly, in his final years, he had a tragic, tragic accident where he was hiking near the house where he grew up in and somehow slipped down a ravine and injured himself very badly. He was unconscious for a long time before he was rescued. And that interfered with his cognitive ability in his last couple of years, but he still had to join all.

Starting point is 00:24:06 authored paper at that time, and his book was released around that time. One thing that I found out from his daughter, that was a factor in his later years. So you see a sharp break between Hoyle up to the 1970s, and then Hoyle in the 1970s and later, because even in the 1960s, he was willing to admit that the Big Bang could be right. I mean, he sort of briefly, was pro big bang, you know, well, we have no other explanation for the helium abundance. You know, we need something to explain where all the helium comes from. So maybe the big bang, and he said maybe little bangs. But the problem was in the early 1970s, the institute that he founded in Cambridge was closed,

Starting point is 00:24:59 that was converted into something else. And he was very upset about it. And he left Cambridge early before he was eligible to retire and went off to a mountain top in a very remote part of England, the Lake District of England. Now, his daughter said that at that point, he had a lot of connections in the United States. He had connections at Caltech. He had connections at Rice University. So he could have easily gone to Caltech or to Rice University. And then, of course, at San Diego, there was the Burbages. He could have probably gone to San Diego.

Starting point is 00:25:40 So he would have been very much more productive and much more integrated into the mainstream astrophysics community if he had moved to the United States. But his wife, Barbara, put her foot down and wanted to stay in England. And he loved nature. He loved the wilderness. He would have loved and did love the time. he spent in Southern California, that would have been great, or he could have, you know, spend time other places in the United States. Like Gamoff, he loved frontier areas, he loved wild areas, but he wasn't allowed because it was his wife's preferences to resettle. So they went to Lake

Starting point is 00:26:23 District, and there really almost no one could visit them. They could visit maybe in the summer, come all the way up there, visit for a couple of days. But there wasn't this regular commerce. And some of us remember the days before email and the internet, you would have to go to a university library to look for paper journals, and then you would have to mail your articles to people. So if you were in a remote area where there wasn't access to a university library, you would have to rely on your own journal subscriptions, which took weeks to get to you.

Starting point is 00:27:02 So you would not be able to keep up with everything. And that's the problem. Hoyle couldn't keep up with the astrophysics community. So he started just going with his gut feelings. And he was writing a lot of books and started to think about, you know, odd ideas like the idea of germs from space, the idea that a fossil in a London Natural History Museum was faked, was forged, which he had no real evidence for, but he began to be grouped in with creationists, which was supremely ironic because he was not religious at all and didn't really believe in the beginning of the universe, but creationists

Starting point is 00:27:47 started to love him because he was questioning Darwin's idea of evolution on Earth and looking to space. So some creationists were like, you see this top scientist is saying Darwin is wrong. And yeah, and then there was plenty of scientists who would be happy to throw him under the bus, including put him in league with creation on Earth creationists. I will say that I did recently provide a blurb for a book by Stephen C. Meyer, who is a Cambridge PhD in philosophy of science. And he wrote a book called Return of the God Hypothesis in which he asserts that, you know, Hoyle kind of came to, and he's a, I would say he's an intelligent design advocate and not a young earth creationist by any means. But nevertheless, he claimed that Hoyle,

Starting point is 00:28:36 in large part, due to not the archie optics that you mentioned and not the germs from space, but really the fine-tuning, the Hoyle miracle, the beryllium resonance, that that was kind of indicative to him that the universe was tuned. And the quote is something like by a designer. Did you come across any of that kind of in your scholarship along the way, Paul? One has to be careful, and I'm always careful when researching what people say in their later years compared to what they say in their earlier years. And a lot of physicists, including people like Heisenberg, Einstein, and so forth, in their later years that become more philosophical. And they say, oh, well, philosophy drove me to these conclusions.

Starting point is 00:29:21 And I think Hoyle came up with the residence idea, the Barillium Residence idea for Carbon 12. And it was a hunch. And there isn't anything written by him at that time, which makes use of the Anthropic Principle. But then in the 1980s, the Anthropic Principle became extremely popular. There were books out on the Anthropic Principle, Anthropic principle, and a lot of people started making anthropic arguments.

Starting point is 00:29:51 And just for viewers out there who don't know what the anthropic principle is, the idea that the conditions in the universe were fine-tuned in such a way that we are here, that intelligent, conscious life is here, and if they were slightly different, then you wouldn't have conscious entities. And that's when Hoyle said, okay, well, if it weren't for this carbon, beryllium carbon resonance, then carbon wouldn't be created. There wouldn't be any life in the universe and wouldn't be here to talk about it. So he made that argument more later in life. And he said that, wow, I was the first one, he said, to use anthropic reasoning.

Starting point is 00:30:34 And maybe we don't know what went on inside his head. So maybe that was in some primitive form going on. on inside his head when he came up with that idea. But it's not shown especially in his writings from that period. It's shown more in his writings afterward when he looked back with hindsight on his earlier work. And throughout the book, there are these brokers, these middlemen, these kind of supporting characters, some of whom go on to greater fame, renown, accolades, than even Gamov or Hoyle, and we can debate that. One of whom is, Willie Fowler, and of course the other one is Martin Ryle. And, you know, these two gentlemen

Starting point is 00:31:16 went on to win Nobel prizes and get great renown. And in some cases, you know, superseded what Hoyle did at least in attention. But I would say in terms of their, you know, kind of contributions to our understanding of the universe, to popularization of the universe, as we know it, they really don't compare to either Gammon or to Sir Fred Hoyle. And, you know, what's curious to me, me is, again, when we paint this picture of Hoyle, it's like, oh, you know, he was just this kind of dottering guy, too in love with his idea of the steady state and, et cetera. And even after it was known to be wrong, he kind of maintained it and added epicycles. And I've said some things like that in my past, too. So I'm not saying I'm holier than now or sanctimonious in any way.

Starting point is 00:32:01 But in reality, there really was no other way to think about things. I think, you know, there is this notion, and you talk about McKellar and discurs. covering this state of cyanogen that seemed to indicate that space was, you know, 3 Kelvin. And of course, Gamlov's team, it was, in my research, it was like every other year the temperature of the CNB would fluctuate, both because the age was uncertain by factors of two and more, but also because of, you know, some of the input parameters in their model were getting refined as nuclear processes became better understood. nevertheless, the temperatures varied from 5 Kelvin to 50 Kelvin.

Starting point is 00:32:40 And famously, of course, Dickie had some measurement, which he claimed that he had made it decades before Penzius and Wilson. But, I mean, yeah, to make of their predicament, I think we have to be more charitable, right? I mean, things were very uncertain, unclear. It wasn't an era of precision cosmology. One could say these two values differ by 5 sigma, and we know each one to the subpercent level.

Starting point is 00:33:03 So should we be more kind of, you know, gracious in our condemnation of people like Hoyle. And it's only in hindsight that we knew, oh, the temperature was 3 Kelvin, right? You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Starting point is 00:33:25 Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Yeah, that's true. We always look at science stories in a simple way. We say, well, this is how it resolved, and this person was right, this person was wrong,

Starting point is 00:33:55 but it was certainly unclear in the 1950s and 1960s, especially before Penzius and Wilson discovery, which side would win. And the New York Times, as I showed in my book, sometimes it would proclaim that some measurement proved that the Big Bang was wrong, because when experiments were being done at the Kallag Lab, Caltech, showing that Hoyle and the Burbages and Fowler's model of stellar nucleus synthesis was correct, And New York Times article said, well, that means the Big Bang is wrong. Of course, both could be correct, which is what turned out to be. The Big Bang produces the helium, cellar nuptychosis produces everything else.

Starting point is 00:34:47 But the simplistic article said, well, Big Bang's a failure. So people were betting on the two, and it was unclear, really, until the mid-60s. And then afterward, the Big Bang still had problems. And even today, we're still trying to resolve things. People like to think of a concordance model, but there's certain parameters we're still trying to pin down. So the story really never ends. Yeah, that's one of the delightful aspects of science.

Starting point is 00:35:19 I always say, you know, science is an infinite game that you can never win science, like you can win a chess game. But it is composed of a lot of finite games, you know, getting a PhD, getting a faculty position, getting a Nobel Prize. And one of those finite games, or two of those finite games, at least two of them, you know, Hoyle legitimately lost out on. And Gamov and even Alfer, until the day he died, basically. I mean, the year after he died, the Nobel Prize was awarded to a past guest on the show,

Starting point is 00:35:48 John Mather, and hopefully future guest, George Smoot. He could have, you know, certainly have been awarded. But talk about Ryle and Fowler, because, you know, I point out, no one's ever turned down a Nobel Prize in physics, but they've been a lot to turn down Nobel Peace Prizes, Literature Prizes, other prizes. So how come these two men, Fowler and Ryle, you know, would you speculate? Of course, they're not around to defend themselves. But what do you make of their kind of willingness to, you know, claim credit for stuff that other people did or not share the credit. Let me just say it like that. Let me say share the credit with what other people did. And in Gamow's cases, even kind of, kind of. kind of extends to the second generation because his student, Vera Rubin, she worked with him. I don't know if she was actually a student, but they worked together. And of course, she was overlooked for her own Nobel Prize. So talk about this notion of how these otherwise great scientists who collaborated, benefited from

Starting point is 00:36:47 collaboration with Gamov and how they were kind of all too happy to not maybe, you know, kind of share some of the credit that they did receive, unfortunately, with Fowler and with Gamow. Well, in Hoya and Gamow, sorry. Well, in the case of Fowler, that was kind of a strange situation because Hoyle was the one who came up with the original idea of stellar nucleus synthesis. And that was manifest in a 1946 paper. And Hoyle shared the idea with Fowler, and then they recruited the burbages and formed a team of four, a quartet. And as you, you know, nicely point out in your book, losing the Nobel Prize,

Starting point is 00:37:27 It's sad that the Nobel Prize in physics, in science, can never be shared by more than three people and can't be awarded posthumously. And as all these things you pointed out in terms of that, because the quartet should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Stellan New Therapeuticist, not Fowler. So there's speculation, and this is unconfirmed, but there's speculation. that Hans Beta was on the committee, on the selection committee, and maybe was the nominator, I should say, for that prize, and mistakenly thought that Fowler was the head of the team, since he knew of Fowler's work more. But there's a lot of speculation about that Nobel Prize

Starting point is 00:38:18 why Hoyle wasn't awarded it. And part of it may have been his advocacy for Jocelyn Bell-Bournell when Ryle split the prize with Hewitt and for discovery of Pulsars and Jocelyn Bell Burnell was excluded, which is very sad because she was the one who first spotted evidence for Pulsars as a graduate student. Well, I have a consolation prize for her, Paul. She's going to be on the End of the Impossible podcast on December 10th of this year, which is obviously everybody knows, is Alfred Nobel's death date and the day they give out Nobel Prizes. So stay tuned for that.

Starting point is 00:38:57 That'll be a great consolation for her. Yeah, I will look forward to that. I saw a wonderful program she did recently on astronomy poetry, and that was really fun. Wow. But she's amazing and really very animated, so I'll look forward to that. But Hoyle made the mistake of not just complaining about the Nobel Committee in that case, but also he complained about her being left out.

Starting point is 00:39:26 of the work, which wasn't true. She was listed. She was listed on all the papers, and, you know, she was recognized by the team. She just wasn't recognized by the Nobel Committee. But anyway, and then the other reason I speculate that Hoyle didn't, wasn't sharing the Nobel Prize, was because of all of its fringe beliefs. And some of Hoyle's collaborators said, well, maybe, he was excluded because they didn't want to award somebody who's talking about, you know, life coming from space and all these things. So it's a complicated situation. But certainly, Alfa should have won the Nobel Prize.

Starting point is 00:40:18 And I was thinking, at the time I was researching the book, I was, I interviewed Jim Peebles. And I was thinking, oh, he should have really won the Nobel Prize. And remarkably, a few weeks after I interviewed him, he won the Nobel Prize. That was incredible because I did research from the Dickey Archives and realized that Peebles was the one, the main person calculating the CMB temperature and saying, identifying it with the Big Bank, identifying with a hot fireball, as was said at the time. And Dickie kept saying, no, it's, it's thermalized energy from a previous incarnation of the universe. Dickie would not let go of the oscillatory universe model. He was a strong advocate of the idea that there was no singularity,

Starting point is 00:41:13 that the Big Bang was just really something that was a cycle, and that this CMB was evidence of a previous cycle. And when people asked him to give talks about the CMB, Dickie always said, go to Peebles. People's is better for that. And Dickie preferred to talk about his ideas about gravity, his idea of the changeable, of the changeable cause, no, changeable gravitational constant. Yeah. He was an advocate of what became known as Bronze Dickey or Jordan Bronze Dickey model of the universe. He preferred to look at alternative models of relativity rather than Cmb. So it was really Peebles'Bel's advocacy that pushed for that. So I was delighted when he won the Nobel Prize. And if I remember correctly, you played some role in getting Dickie's, you know, the famous

Starting point is 00:42:13 gravity group's location, historic landmark in physics. Is that right, Paul? Yes, we, that's, I got to know Peebles because my group, which was the APS Historic Site Committee, put a plaque in the building where they worked, which used to be called Palmer Lab, and now is the Student Center at Princeton. We had a plaque ceremony there, and Peebles had very specific ideas for where the plaque should be and what it should read and so forth, which is really cool working with him on that. He's the most avuncular person that I know in this wonderful field that I'm privileged to work in. Before we wrap up, I do want to talk about kind of modern incarnations, as Mark Twain said,

Starting point is 00:43:00 history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And speaking on the topic of Nobel Prize winners this time, we'll talk about Sir Roger Penrose. And Sir Rogers' 90th birthday was just last week. And we had a festrift, as they used to call them, for him remotely, sponsored by Stuart. at Hammeroff, upcoming guest on the podcast. And this was a wonderful celebration, but I was asked to speak about Sir Roger's conformal cyclic cosmology. And of course, Roger and Stephen Hawking made these great contributions to our understanding

Starting point is 00:43:35 of least classical general relativity in the context of singularities. And nowadays, well, I shouldn't say nowadays for Stephen Hawking, unfortunately, he's no longer with us, but certainly Sir Roger has abandoned this notion of a singularity. My friend and another fellow Paul, Paul Steinhart, at Princeton University, Einstein, Professor of Science at Princeton, has, along with his colleague, Anna Eges, who's an upcoming guest in the podcast, have a cyclic model. Neil Turrock had participated in on you. You spoke a little bit about them. But what do you think that Hoyle and even Gamov would make of these new reincarnation? you know, everything cyclic is new again. I have a woodcut that I showed from in my talk to Sir

Starting point is 00:44:22 Rogers' birthday gathering of this Egyptian cosmogony, which really is a cyclic cosmology of the universe. It's 3,000 years old. It's older than the account of Genesis in some way. So anyway, we think that where would this take Hoyle and Gamov? How would they react? Do you think? I mean, this is we can't, you know, this is kind of like a fan fiction. right? But we're such big fans of both of them, thanks in large part to your work. What do you think they'd react to these new models of cycles and collapsing universes and so forth? I think Gamov would have been open to the idea of previous incarnations of the universe. He occasionally talked about a kind of big squeeze, sort of squeezing matter from some previous

Starting point is 00:45:11 era. He didn't go into specifics into what he called the left. or the matter that made up the Big Bang. So he would have been open to that. And interestingly enough, the preprint of the original Steinhardt paper on cyclic cosmology appeared before Hoyle died. So I always wonder if Hoyle read it. I have no evidence that he read it. So he wasn't alive when the actual paper was published.

Starting point is 00:45:44 but it was called the Ekpriotic universe. And I always wondered what Hoyle would have thought of that. But I think he would have tried to mold it into some form of the quasi-steady state universe because he was very, very stubborn about holding onto that in his later years. But I found the early work of Penrose and Hawking was instrumental in convincing Dickie's group, Dickie to some extent, but his group, that there must have been a singularity in the universe because Penrose, of course, showed that Black Coles must collapse into a singularity, and then Hawking time reversed that to show that the Big Bang must begin in a singularity.

Starting point is 00:46:34 And I show in my book that Dickie kept writing to Hawking's advisor, Denisciama, well, you know, is there a way out of this? Are you sure you tested every possible cosmology, open cosmology, closed cosmology? Because Dickie really wanted to believe that there was a previous incarnation of the universe. That was a way out of the singularity. And Shiami just kept saying, oh, no, you know, Hawking keeps trying all these models. And it always starts in a singularity. That was sort of a milestone, a theoretical milestone, and understanding the Big Bang, just like the CMB was an experimental milestone, the discovery of the CMB.

Starting point is 00:47:24 And these both happened in the mid-60s and greatly revolutionized cosmology. I think Stephen Weinberg recently departed, sadly, who said that physics thrives on crises. and at the time, I think he said an addendum, you know, luckily there are no crises going on right now, or that's why, you know, physics is stagnating or something. Do you see the current epoch, Paul, as a time of crisis, as a time of opportunity as the Chinese allegedly, according to John F. Kennedy, at least his purported claim

Starting point is 00:47:58 that the symbol is the same or comprised of two characters, mean crisis and opportunity? Do you think that, you know, we're kind of in a state where we've become a precision science. We have no things to the fourth decimal place in some cases. We can have tension at the 5-sigma level. These are things that are unimaginable, even when I was a graduate student in the 90s,

Starting point is 00:48:20 let alone, you know, when Hoyle and Gamma were operating, what do you think they would make of it? Would they say this is a time for opportunity, or is it a time for crisis and stagnation, maybe? Well, it depends. If you like general relativity the way it stands, if you like the standard model of particle physics the way it stands, and you don't mind the fact that they're completely different,

Starting point is 00:48:42 then there's no crisis. But if you are really upset by the fact that those are completely different theories describing in one case three of the known forces, and in the other case, one of the known forces, gravity, then it's a supreme crisis because the two of them can't be reconciled. So it depends on whether or not you're philosophically okay with saying, we have some forces which operate using a field theory and another force, well, a quantum field theory, I should say, and another force that operates using a classical field theory based on space time as the field.

Starting point is 00:49:21 Then if you're happy with the separate theories, then there's no crisis. So I'd like to see a greater unity, but it might turn out that we have to be satisfied with what we have. And the last thing I guess I would want to speculate on or have your speculation on Gamov and Hoyle, you bring to the forefront the kind of inception or the nascent beginning of computers in the early 60s and late 50s, etc. That were made use of by these physicists. And part of the reason you attribute the Hoyle's decline in productivity was, you know, being on the top of some mountain in the Lake District. They probably didn't have, you know, T1, Internet, A, 3,000.

Starting point is 00:50:02 internet or T10 or whatever, gigabit quality service, I should say. So the rise of AI, of machine learning, what do you think that that impact would have been? I mean, imagine a counterfactual history where Gamov has a quantum computer and Hoyle, would it have made a difference? Or were these old-fashioned pencil and paper theorist? And the computer was mainly to check for people like Wagoner that you mentioned, who's a wonderful person I got the pleasure to know. I was at Stanford. You talk about the impact of computers and so forth. Do you think they would have made use of these, this technology, AI, physicists, et cetera, machine learning? Or would they have been just the same kind of just old-fashioned calculators that they were on pen and paper?

Starting point is 00:50:49 Well, Hooh got more adept with computers in his later years and was actually happy in his final years at Cambridge because they had computers at his Institute for Theoretical Astronomy. That was one thing he was very happy about. But he didn't have the computers in the late district, which is a big problem. Gamov was sort of in the early computer age where computers weren't used for cosmological calculations so much. You know, maybe calculating things like that military detonations and things like that. So he certainly was familiar with computers, but he did. He did things more as quick calculations.

Starting point is 00:51:36 I think if he had access to quantum computers, he would have told Alpha and Herman to learn how to use them and to do the calculations and to report back to them. Yes, and they would have been the richer for it, no doubt. Paul, I can't resist, if you'll indulge me. What are you working on next? I'm just so curious. Well, I'm working on a bunch of articles.

Starting point is 00:52:02 I have an article that I'm working on about history of MOX principle and a contribution to a volume on a history of experimental testing of general relativity in the 1950s and 1960s. So I was asked to contribute a chapter about John Wheeler's contributions to that. So I go from books to short articles, and I've been fortunate in later years. I get a lot of invitations to write things. So I am happy to work on those things and also sometimes contribute pieces to my own blog on medium, which is accessible through my Twitter page. And I spent a lot of time on Twitter, which is either incredibly beneficial or otherwise, I haven't decided, but it's been a lot of fun getting to know people on Twitter

Starting point is 00:53:03 and coming up with new things about Einstein and other people that sometimes surprises people. Yes, I love your Twitter feed, and lately I've been asking people, you know, what another counterfactual, my favorite lately is, you know, if Twitter existed in 1864 when a young Scotsman, James Clerk Maxwell, was coming up with four eponymous equations that would later bear his name, that were ultimately the first kind of quantitative unification of forces, fields, and so forth in physics, mathematically speaking, set the pathway for the Yang Mills field theory equation. But imagine he tweets out, you know, I've discovered these equations and, well, how does it work? Well, there are these gears and whirlpools and vortices and space and the ether.

Starting point is 00:53:51 People would have just mocked them. It would have been ridiculous. And that's kind of maybe one of the downsides of our modern communications age and why people like Steinhart has told me he's never going to use Twitter. He has so many ideas. And sometimes you don't want to kill them too young, right? Because they may bear fruit. And it's kind of maybe funny to think about what Gamov would do with a Twitter account.

Starting point is 00:54:14 But for now, I want to thank you, Paul, so much as usual, not only for spending your valuable time with me, but also for sharing your gifts of writing. I always write an encomium, hoping that somebody will read it. But since no one's going to read it, I'll just say this is what I'll put on my Amazon review when it comes out. I learned so much from this topic

Starting point is 00:54:35 that I already knew that this is the surest sign of an expert scholars touch. So Paul, I want to thank you for teaching me. You are a teacher of mine, and I appreciate you so much. I can't wait for your next work. I can't wait for your next appearance. And what I'd really love is to replicate the drive

Starting point is 00:54:50 of Gamov and Hoyle with you. We'll rent the Cadillac sometime when you're in La Jolla and we're on the seaside coast to a cave and just hang out. That would be fantastic. You could start your own show, you know, physicists and cars or something like that. Thank you for it. Thank you for other people. It's a bit of delight. Thank you so much as always. Oh, it's wonderful. Great talking to you, Brian. Thank you so much. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable. from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate

Starting point is 00:55:41 hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible. 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 Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buck slot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Paul Halpern: Flashes of Creation (#177)

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