Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Paul Halpern Synchronicity: Wolfgang Pauli & Carl Jung (#079)

Episode Date: October 9, 2020

  Paul Halpern’s latest book is “Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect.” Paul joins me to discuss the book as well as big topics like quantum entanglement and the meaning of life. Hear about how he balances his physics research, writing projects, and love for the outdoors. He also wrote a book about the science of “The Simpsons” as well as fifteen other popular science books. Find Paul Halpern on the web: http://phalpern.com. Subscribe to my mailing list to receive show notes for this episode: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 00:00 Introduction 05:56 Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli’s transformative relationship. 13:13 Balancing science and history to appeal to the masses. 18:40 How do physicists think about time? 25:29 Finding the meaning of life through physics. 32:10 Is it time to stop quantum entanglement experiments? 40:32 Quantum physics risks being seen as a pseudoscience. 47:35 What ethical will does Paul Halpern plan to leave behind? 51:15 What object or knowledge would Paul put on his monolith? 53:42 What did Paul think was impossible until he did it? Paul Halpern is a professor of physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He is also a prolific science writer. Paul has received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship. Buy Paul’s books here: https://amzn.to/333HLle Find Paul Halpern on Twitter: https://twitter.com/phalpern Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It is a great pleasure to welcome a gentleman who's been a great influence on me and my writing, but we've never met in person. We still have never met. We have to meet someday in person, Paul. But it's Professor Paul Halpern, who is a professor of physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He's the author of 16 popular science books. All of them are fascinating. And some of them are, are undoubtedly known to everyone out there in the audience, such as the quantum labyrinth, which is fascinating, and Einstein's dice and Schrodinger's cat. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. First question I have for you, Paul, you've done so much, you've written so much, you're an online,

you're an intellectual, you're a scientist, you're a professor. How do you think of yourself? What is the core element of who you are as a human being on Earth? Well, first of all, I wanted to thank you for inviting me on the show, Brian. And in terms of my own self-conception, I guess I always think of myself as being a person of ideas. I love to discuss ideas with people. And I also really love nature. And I have a mixed reaction to technology, as do I think many people. But I love technology, but I also love being away from technology.

I like kind of communing with nature, walking in the woods. bicycling and so forth. So that's about as much a part of me as doing highly technological things like that. Why is that? That's actually, I didn't expect that. Why is that? Why is that so intrinsic to who you are, or important to you? I feel like nobody should have one way of defining them. And I'm somebody who's always like to have different aspects of my personality. And I recall, for example, when I was back in graduate school doing my PhD program. I really narrowed my horizon doing a thesis, a very mathematical thesis on general relativity and cosmology. And then I started to feel really down and really isolated. And I felt almost zomified, just working on this mathematical project. And then I said to

myself, well, what's going on? And what was going on is I didn't have other aspects of my life. So once I got away, I had a bicycle at the time. I would bike. into wooded areas or bike along the shore of Long Island where I was, or write poetry, which wasn't particularly good, but it still brought me out of my mind, and I just felt much more balanced. So I vowed from that point forward never to be unbalanced, always have many different activities.

And that's sort of a key in some of the personalities in this book. And I think this book is a departure, and correct me if I'm wrong, from your previous books, it spoke loudest to me, and I couldn't put it down. I listened to the audiobook. I read the physical book as a companion, but I kind of feel like you're in my head. And that was important and appropriate

because I felt this is almost a book about not only human psychology, but also about friendship. And the first thing I want to talk about, whenever I see these books, and I knew, you know, when it has quantum in the title, you know, I talked to my friend David Kaiser,

who I'm sure you know, I've talked to many other physicists, you know, I've written interpretations of quantum mechanics. Actually, I told David Kaiser, I said, my first fear when I was reading quantum legacies, which is his book that came out this past year, was that it was not going to be another quantum interpretations book. And I looked up, I said, well, I wonder if that's an acronym, N-A-Q-I-B, not another quantum

interpretations book. It turns out it is an acronym, or it's a word in Arabic, and it means a person of great understanding. So in a way you are or not quib, but this book isn't really about that. It's really a book about personalities and friendship. Can you talk to me? What was the most surprising relationship that you uncovered in the research and writing of this book? Well, it was interesting to see all the different aspects of Wolfgang Pauley's personality because he could both be a hard-headed physicist and quite mean to people,

but then he also had this very sensitive side. and shows that no matter how hard-edged somebody is, no matter how rough, they might still have this very sensitive side and be vulnerable in some ways. And he was very vulnerable about his relationships. He, you know, his first marriage was a disaster, and he had a lot of trouble relating to women. And that's when he turned to Carl Jung.

And that became a kind of a friendship and unlikely friendship. between the two of them. It was more of a professional relationship rather than I would say, you know, they weren't really pals, but they got very close intellectually and had a very interesting dialogue between quantum physics and psychoanalysis. And that, of course, is the main thrust behind the title, of course, synchronicity. I always like to tell my guest that unlike the advice to never judge a book by its cover, I always judge a book by its cover. And not only that, but also, the title and the subtitle. So can you take us through the title? How'd you come up with it? It's the shortest

of all your titles, I think, in some ways, but also the subtitle, the epic quest to understand the quantum nature of cause and effect. So it's not about interpretations. What was the design, what are the design elements that went into it? And what's the meaning of the title and the subtitle for my audience? Well, first of all, I think it's a beautiful cover in terms of the design layout, although I can't take credit for that. I didn't suggest to design myself, but the designer at Basic Books Hachette did a great job with that. In terms of the title, I was trying to encapsulate this whole idea of a causal connections through time and this whole mystery that if you look back on ancient times, the ancient Greeks were debating whether or not light takes time to travel from the sun to earth or whether light is

instantaneous. And that meant a big deal because light was symbolic in ancient Greece of things like love and divine influence. There was a whole theological idea about light that if you were, you know, if light touched you, you were being blessed and you were given wisdom through light. And there's ideas in mysticism. You're probably familiar with Kabbalah where light comes down through vessels, and that's a symbolism of God's influence on both the universe and on human beings. Let there be light. Right. Right.

So light plays so much of a raw. If light is instant, then divine influence and any kind of causal influence can be instant. So you say something, and all of a sudden, thunder or lightning can strike, and that's it. But if light takes time, as we know, then certain things must take time. and if you wanted, if you were angry for some reason with the people on Alpha Centauri, you couldn't immediately. I am. I really hate those bugs.

All this guys got to send them a lot of followers. Five minutes later, the people on a planet near Alpha Centauri, okay, we're going to, we're going to affect your weather five minutes. We're going to send you some Kardashians as punishment. You would have to wait four years for light to travel there because that's how long causality takes. And yet, there seem to be in quantum physics now things that are not necessarily sending messages, but are influences in terms of a common core, such as quantum entanglement, that happen instantaneously or near instantaneously, as far as we can tell. And that means that you can have,

things are connected, a very long distance in space, but not necessarily need, the time for light to travel from one end to the other, for them to share information. And that's very interesting to me. So back to the title, well, if I wanted to make a really long title, I would say,

well, the history of a causal influences throughout time. And then I just thought, well, Jung, even though I thought Jung was not completely scientific in terms of his ideas about,

you know, day-to-day coincidences, I thought, well, it was really insightful of him to come up with that term to describe an a causal connecting principle. And science needs an a causal connecting principle,

a way to understand a causality as well as causality. So why not use that term and trace the idea of a causality back to the ancients and trace it forward in time and use the relationship between Pauly and Jung as kind of the keystone of the book upon it, which everything else is built, and then go backward in time, go forward in time. So that was my aim.

I think if I were writing this book, and that's the highest encomium that I could give, I wish I wrote this book, right? But if I were writing it, I would worry that, you know, I get caught up in a little bit of the, you know, dancing wooly masters dust and the Tao of physics and so forth. Because, you know, Young is not, as you say, associated with the highest levels of scientific rigor and, you know, paparian falsification, et cetera. And yet he influenced, you know, one of the most important. person who's really poorly understood of our time. How did you avoid, you know, kind of the

pitfalls of getting into the woo-woo aspects of, oh, everything's entangled in our hearts and so and so forth? And it's a very rigorous, but it's full of wit. And it's such a charming book. It's an emotional book in some sense. I was very moved by their relationship. And even aspects of betrayal and you treat them, you know, I'm sorry for such a meandering question, but in other books. And maybe to an extent, you know, I thought you pulled it off very well with Wheeler and Feynman in the quantum labyrinth. But, you know, there's a tendency to lionize physicists like Feynman and even, you know, Wheeler, certainly Einstein, right, as otherworldly. But this is a very human portrayal. And I guess how did you navigate between the shoals of kind of, you know, portraying them with all their flaws, but also really stoking the curiosity of the reader to want to learn more about the topics that these two men were. deeply invested in? Well, I guess over time, I've been writing for now 30 years, believe it or not.

So it's the 30th anniversary this October of the publication of my first book. Oh, congratulations. That's right. Yeah, time journeys. Yeah, I want to get into that. Which is really strange because I started writing when I was in my 20s. Yeah. And, you know, you can do the math about how old I am now. Yeah. You're on Wikipedia, unfortunately. You're 10 years older than me. That's all. But anyway, I know that a segment of my audience is going to be people who are very seriously interested in history of science.

There's a segment who are interested in just the science itself. And there are people who are kind of like, wow, I want to learn about higher dimensions. I read, maybe they read something that is pseudoscientific, but they're interested in learning more about the science behind it. So I feel like part of my job is to attract people who are interested in science, but also kind of interested in, I guess, some of the what would be called New Age topics. And to tell them, okay, well, this is where science stops. And you can have your faith. You can have your feelings. But this is a scientific method.

And if you want to learn science, this is what science says. And that's what I do during my talks. If someone asked me a question, I'm very respectful if they say, well, what is, you know, what does science say about the afterlife or what does science say about, you know, this matter of faith? I'm respectful of people for their faith, but then I say, okay, that's faith, that's religion. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about scientific experiments. So that's what I try to do to delineate it. So, you know, that was one of my goals in the writing.

and personalize it so that people who are interested in the personalities are satisfied. I try to put in some scientific explanations. And of course, no matter what I do, there's always going to be someone who says, too much history or too much explanation. I never know what the background will be to someone picking out my book. Like sometimes there are people who pick up a book, like, for example, my Feynman Wheeler book, they read everything that Feynman ever wrote, maybe read everything, the Wheeler ever wrote. And they're kind of like, oh, yeah, been there, done that. I know all these

stories. Like, Halperin's not putting in anything new. And then there's people who pick up the book, like Richard Feynman, I wonder what he's, you know, so who he is. I guess he's a scientist. And then like, you know, start reading it and have no idea who Richard Feynman is. But then learn something. Though I can't exactly have like different versions of my book, like, This is for the person who knows everything about finding. This is for the person who knows nothing about it. Then it will appeal to nobody. Yeah, so I try to make it on a level where a lot of people can appreciate.

I try to hit the middle ground. So it's someone who's interested, perhaps, in a little bit of about modern quantum entanglement experiments, will learn something, whereas if somebody is really just interested in the history, they can skip that section or skim that section and look more at the ancient history. Yeah, there are all sorts of books, you know, that have been written about, you know, not only the individuals, but then there's the, you know, kind of struggles within the individuals, Adam Becker's book, what it's real. And, you know, I always come away with a feeling a little bit of being, you know, still, still hungry after reading it. Because you really can't come up with a definitive explanation. Otherwise, we would have, you know, we'd understand all the loophole clothes. and we'd understand, you know, what alternative is correct and interpretation is correct, many worlds, Everettian, you know, et cetera. But at least, and this isn't a criticism at all, it's just at least we come away at a minimum,

you will come away from reading synchronicity with an appreciation of the characters, a very intimate, you know, kind of portrayal of the relationship. And most of all, the stakes involved are so high between these characters, And as I say, love, you know, unseemly character, behavior, even betrayal, notoriety, and credit. But getting back to the notion of time, the gears on the cover, I don't know if that was intentional, but, you know, the words become sort of like interlocking gears and a clock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really, you know, made me think a little bit about when I was doing research for my book,

about the Nobel Prize, that I was wondering, well, what was the first prize ever, you know, come up with? and why do people, you know, care about prizes so much? And it turns out, at least one of the first prizes I could find out was really the longitude prize, you know, trying to understand where on the earth's lines of longitude, a sailing ship was located. And that was very important and very deeply related, in fact, in, you know, inextricably related to measuring time, which is very difficult to do on a pitching deck of a boat. And I didn't include much of it, if any of it, in my book. But really, that longitude prize was attempted to be won by none of the other. than Galileo himself. And he had this complicated contraption of like a helmet with a telescope in it, to look at Jupiter's

moons. And a lot of it was done to win this prize. And, you know, a monetary prize, a prestige prize, which then later after centuries morphed into the Nobel Prizes, having some elements of inventions and discoveries. But at its most basic core, this is a conversation I think humans have always had, not only on like how you measure time and if two events are contemporaneous, but what is the nature of time? And, you know, it's not often I get to talk to an intellect like yourself. How do you think about time? I mean, what is time to you? If you have to explain it, not to your grandmother or whatever, but how do you, Paul Halpern, how do you think about what time is intrinsically? Because I think, unless you can explain

that, you know, notions of synchronicity are interesting, but you're missing kind of the forest for the trees, so speak, to use a bad analogy. Well, time is such a mystery for all of us, and we're always fighting against time and grappling with time and run out of time. It's very strange to me, and this is going back to my first book, Time Journeys 30 years ago. It's strange to me that there's so many ways of geometrizing time, like looking at time as a circle, looking at as a straight line. and then spiral and then there are ideas about psychological time,

there's physiological time, relativistic time. So time is obviously something that can be sped up or slowed down in different ways. There's, you know, of course, relativistic time dilation. But then, you know, the fact is if you're waiting for an hour, let's say in Disney World, You're waiting in an hour to go on a ride, and that might seem like to take forever. And then you go on the ride, and it flashes by like that, you know, because you're having so much fun. And it's just strange how the brain works. There seems to be a connection between events, how we're experiencing events.

And the more events we're noting, the faster time seems to go by. So if we're not really, you know, if we're kind of, you know, immersed in something, time really seems to whiz by. But then if our minds can't really hold on to anything and we're kind of like thinking about things and things aren't happening, then time slows down. So I've always been fascinated by this difference and why, for example, when you're on vacation, time might seem to whiz by. But then looking back on it, if you look back on a vacation,

you might be able to remember every single day because it's very eventful. But then you look back on like two weeks in the middle of a semester, and you're kind of like, oh, I don't think anything happened then. I know, yeah, tell me about a bunch of kids at home, and it's like the months fly by, even the weeks fly by the years, fly by, but the days drag on and on. It's like, when is it 7.30? These guys got to get in bed so I can

have some alone time with my wife. I remember, for example, my first trip to Europe, which was a six-week trip, and I remember almost every single day of the trip, and it kind of expands in my mind. But, you know, a comparable six-week period in early 2020, I don't know, I don't remember all the details. Time doesn't exist anymore during COVID. But, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a politically incorrect attribution to Einstein of time is relative, you know, sitting on a stove for a second feels like an eternity and talking to a pretty girl for an hour feels like a second or whatever. But was Young interested in the perception, psychological perceptions of time, or was he noted in this, more interested in the spooky action

at a distance aspect of synchronicity? Well, I think he felt that they were connected. He felt like he wanted to link psychological perceptions to physical ideas. Now, he wasn't really the person to do that because he never really had a serious background in physics,

but he was very interested in talking to physicists and bouncing ideas of a physicist going all the way back to his connection with Einstein. So in the early 1910s, when Einstein was teaching at the University of Zurich

and the ETH in Zurich, briefly, Jung had dinner with Einstein several times, and that's when Jung started to think about space time, and space time has many attributes, but in general relativity, you can think about the possibility of signals being sent backward in space time theoretically, because you can think of space and time as a block, this block universe idea. And Einstein didn't really talk about it too much, but Jung was really fascinated with the idea that maybe space-time, the fact that it's a whole, means that causality is an illusion

and that we can really contact the past, we can contact the future, and that two people can share an unconscious identity. They can share ideas, even though they're separate people. And I think Jung was fascinated with this, and that's why Jung was amazed, when Pauley wrote to him a quantum physicist and shared all these dreams with him. A lot of the dreams had some connections

with quantum physics, or at least with symmetry. And it was just this treasure trove for Jung of ideas. And that's when Jung further developed the idea of synchronicity, which he had come up with before he met Jung, but then really fully developed while, sorry, before he met Pauley, but really fully developed after he met Pauley, and then they bounced ideas off of each other.

I'm sure it was, you know, incredibly gratifying for Young to have this, you know, eminent physicist, you know, creator of exclusion principle idea, creator of the neutrino idea, to have such an eminent personality, you know, taking his work seriously, engaging with him. Maybe, you know, maybe it was fortunate that they did meet at that time. But I guess the question that, you know, I was thinking about maybe this connects to your first book, time journeys, a search for cosmic destiny and meaning. What is it about time that seems inextricably connected to meaning?

We talk about this, and there's a personal connection in my book, sorry, my reading of the book in your book, with a character who you mentioned in Dr. Andy Friedman, who unfortunately passed away this summer, and participated, actually the founder of this quantum bell experiment that you describe in the book. But, you know, and kind of feeling like, oh, we're always, we'll always be entangled and we had this entanglement. And a lot of the eulogies for Andy involved that very metaphor. What about, you know, physics is relative or related to or relevant to meaning? I mean, a lot of people would say there's nothing, you know, other than it causes me a lot of trouble to pass my, you know, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my. freshman physics class, how does physics or astronomy or whatever, how can that impact the meaning

of life? Well, there's this whole teleological idea in physics and also in theology. And even though people try to keep them separate, a lot of people think about the far future and they think, well, where is this all heading? And if the universe, for example, it ends in a cycle and, you know, know, there were some ideas in philosophy, in particular Nietzsche's idea, that we might someday repeat everything. And I don't think many physicists take that seriously, but imagine if we ended in a cycle and everything started all over again, and that somehow our atoms ended up, you know, just true chance, maybe after a number of cycles, in the same position. And we lived our lives again and again in this kind of eternal return. then that would have a profound difference compared to whether or not we live only one life.

And I think part of our motivation toward having goals and towards having meaning in our life, having a perspective, is this idea that time is fleeting and we don't really have a second chance and that we're trying to do everything we can in this life, trying to go for everything in, I know it's kind of a cliched expression, but in a bucket list, like checking off things that we need to do in our life because we know we're not going to have another chance. Whereas if those who believe, let's say, in reincarnation or in cosmic cycles, I think, well, I need to lead a just life, but the fact that I travel here or travel there really doesn't make a difference because I'm going to have another cycle.

I'm going to have another opportunity. It's more like, well, I have to build toward the next cycle. So I think if you believe that our atoms will come together again versus believing that everything is fleeting and will end up in like a state of maximum entropy, there's kind of a different perspective on the meaning of life. Yeah, it's funny that you bring that up because I was talking a couple days ago with Rabbi David Walpey, who's one of the more famous rabbis in America today. He's a thinker and author. And I actually asked him about that. I asked him if a bucket list is a Jewish concept. In other words, is that something that comports with Judaism?

And his answer is essentially no, although there are provisos that, you know, you are commanded essentially to observe in Judaism to not observe, but to partake of all the permissible pleasures. You know, you're not permitted to partake of a BLT, but you are permitted and you should command yourself in a sense to take a voyage to the Alps. You know, these are beautiful, you know, majestic wonders of the world. And really, in a sense, to cultivate and inculcate a sense of gratitude. And I wonder, well, as you were talking, I was like, do you have a bucket list, Paul? I don't really think about that. I think about the immediate future. I love traveling.

So I guess the closest for me will be countries or parts of the world that I've never been to. Like speaking of rabbis, I've never been to Israel, but I've always wanted to go there. Oh, yes. So everybody else in my family has been there. So it's kind of like, I'm the one left out. But I'd also like to travel to, you know, to Africa. South Africa is supposed to be beautiful. You know, parts of Asia that I haven't been to.

So many parts of the world. I have travel a lot. So traveling is one of my passions. and interests. And I've been to India once, but they're parts of the Himalayas and parts of India that I really would love to go to. So I guess that's the closest

that I have to a bucket list is seeing the rest of the world. Yeah. So an allied question that I asked the rabbi the other day about that is, what if time for you wouldn't be finite? In other words,

what if you took what my seven-year-old is working on assiduously, the never dying pill if he can get it through clinical trials, would you take it? Would you want to live forever? And you are the only one living forever.

No clauses where you get to say anything. So you wouldn't. That's an interesting question, but I guess the caveat is being the only one living forever. Yeah. I always think of that in terms of, I mean, this is a little bit hokey or far-fetched,

but there's an aspect of the many worlds interpret of quantum mechanics where everybody has their own timeline. And in everybody's timeline, perhaps at every junction, one's mind takes the timeline in which one survives. So if there's some kind of event, and this I should tell you, those who take quantum mechanics seriously, this is a little bit far-fetched and hypothetical. But imagine if every time there's a quantum measurement, the human mind takes

the version or branches into the version for survival. And that part dies off and part survives. Let's say, I mean, to think of a far-fetched example, imagine if you're near a radioactive material and you're either blasted with radiation or not blasted with radiation. Well, part of you would survive because one branch of reality would be the one in which you're not blasted with radiation. So you would survive that. So imagine if you kept surviving in your mind everything that happened. And then all of a sudden you realize, hey, wait a minute, I'm thousands of years old.

What's going on? But everybody else that I ever met has died because they were in a different timeline. So, I mean, that could happen. So if a thousand years from now, you're in your own timeline and I'm in my timeline and you think, well, I'm the only one left in the world and I think I'm the only one left in the world

will realize that this idea of, of quantum branching is true after all. Yeah, that's an expensive experiment, which actually brings up my next topic, which is, you know, we're at the point now where colleagues, such as my late, great colleague, Andy Friedman, and Anton Zilinger, Jason Gallicchio, David Kaiser, and others have been looking at ways

to close different loopholes and Bells inequalities. I kind of feel like we're at peak, you know, peak bells inequality or something. Like we've really closed so many of the, loopholes. Yeah, there are a couple more left, and you go through them in the most readable account to date. Sorry to David Kaiser. His book is less about that than some of the other attributes of the age of the nucleus and the age of the bit. But in reality, you describe this in a very accessible fashion. But I almost feel, I always felt like Andy was always talking about,

well, the next step is to go from these quasars at Redshift 2, you know, which is like three quarters of the way back to the Big Bang, basically. And he wanted to use patches of the CMB, which I specialize in, and do quantum and close certain loophole. But I'm like, it's kind of diminishing returns. Even if you, you know, it becomes a question of, you know, how, when do we stop these experiments and just, and just agree, you know, that these violations are all taking place? Are we at this diminishing returns point in your opinion or no?

Yeah, I always wondered about that. because some of the first entanglement experiments involved, like, crossing or teleportation experiments through crossing the Danube River. Right. That sounded really exciting. Wow, you can send information across the Danube River. But now it's like, okay, you can send it to a satellite. You can send information to, you know, exchange information about quasars and so forth.

It almost seems like people are trying to outdo each other. But, I mean, I can understand why people do this. and it's kind of, you know, let's establish once and for all that Bell's inequality works and, you know, that quantum entanglement is real. But I agree with you that at some point, you kind of have to say, well, we have to accept that there are no hidden variables. Yeah. Because I don't think anyone really, well, I shouldn't say.

I think there's a small subset of physicists who believe in hidden variables, but I think the majority believe in, uh, you know, that Bell's inequality applies and that quantum entangments real and that maybe there's some physical ways of dealing with it, but they would have to fall within, fall within, you know, satisfying Bell's inequality. And speaking about experiments once more, it's interesting to me to think back, you know, we kind of hold Carl Popper's demarcation, you know, philosophy up as the apotheosis of what is science and what is not scientific.

Leaving aside that question, specifically, historically, he was driven to kind of formulate that as a response to Freudian psychoanalysis. And I wonder, you know, reading the book, I mean, if Pauley, who obviously was, you know, such a titan of scientific method, you know, how he could maintain the cognitive dissonance that it must have taken to know that some of these things couldn't be falsified or proven in a sense. Do you think he just said, well, this is a topic for a future time, or was he willing to suspend it because of a form of confirmation bias? How do you square that circle between this eminent scientist overlooking, you know,

one of the hallmarks, the test cases for Popper, which is psychoanalysis being non-scientific? a dream analysis especially. I think Powell Lee was very careful. This was kind of a private venture. So he had this private life. He had almost or close to a breakdown around 1930, which is interesting because he proposed the neutrino that year. So he had these scientific breakthroughs,

but then almost a nervous breakdown around the same time. And his marriage. Because of his marriage. His mother committed suicide a few years earlier. Had this failed marriage. His wife ran off. with a chemist. He said, like, a bullfighter, I can understand, but a chemist? Why would she run off with a chemist? So because of that, this was a very personal thing.

He kept it very private. These were his conversations with Jung. And then he had a friend, Pasquale Jordon, who was a German physicist, who took Rhine's psychic experiments much more seriously. I'm Pauley at first kind of dismissed these, and I think he always was always kind of like, well, let's see how this pans out. Let me see. He talked to Young, he talked about symbolism. He was interested in these ideas, but he never published, you know, with one exception, he never published anything about these ideas. And the one exception was his work about Kepler's astrology and symbolism in Kepler's astrology. And he meant that as a kind of historical analysis based on Jungian interpretation. But Pali would not go to a journal, like a psychology journal,

and say, hey, wait a minute, like telepathy is real. He was not like that. He kept it very private. People didn't know that he was a patient of Jung until they co-authored this book. One was, one chapter was synchronicity and the other was Paoli's analysis of Kepler and then people said hey wait a minute they're collaborators Powell is a young secret patient and then they realize that so now it's an open secret that

that Paoli is a young secret patient but Pauley really didn't want a lot of people to know that. Yeah and I think to give him the benefit of the doubt it might not only have been because he was embarrassed or perhaps skeptical of the ultimate truth of what was proposing, but also because

there's this kind of halo bias effect that, oh, well, this great man, Nobel Prize winner, you know, uh, et cetera, he's doing this. And so now I'm going to confer onearned, uh, you know, a lure and and a prestige to a field. Maybe he didn't know would actually pan out.

So yeah, I think that's admirable. I didn't look at it as he was, you know, in the closet because he was, you know, scared of being exposed. But maybe as, you know, it's like they cut out Einstein's brain, right? And then it's not that much different. I mean, you probably know more than I do about it. But I want to just kind of start winding up by talking about what makes quantum mechanics so perplexing.

And, you know, why there are so many books? Why did you think this book, you know, had a need to be written, which I agree with it did? Why at this time are there so many books written about, you know, quantum mechanics, different interpretations, entanglement, reality, etc. What is the cause of that according to you? Well, I just wanted to add about the last point that I found in my research in the archives at the ETH, I found a letter, I'm not sure how well known this is, there was a letter from Ryan to Jung saying that he received a letter from Pauley posthumously that Pauley had doubts about Ryan's work.

Yeah, you mentioned that in the acknowledgments, right? Yeah, yeah, I was going to ask you about that. So Pally was, Polly had become in his final years, his final two years, more skeptical, I think. And he also didn't correspond with Jung as much. And I have hypothesized that maybe it was the fact that in 1957, Pardy symmetry breaking was discovered in the weak interaction. And Pally was a big believer in symmetry. And then he thought, hey, wait a minute, maybe symmetry isn't everything. There's a symmetry breaking.

and he started to doubt a lot of his preconceptions. And around the same time, I don't know if it's coincidence or not, that's when he stopped corresponding with Jung for a while, and that's when he wrote the letter to Rine expressing his doubts. But back to your other question about why it's interesting about quantum measurement and so forth. Well, the interesting thing is, in the 19th century, before quantum theory, you could very easily distinguish between psychic stuff, spooky stuff and real physics.

And the way you can distinguish is you say, okay, is everything happening locally? If the answer is yes, it's physics. Okay, everything in Newtonian physics happens locally. And then you say, is everything happening deterministically? If the answer is yes, it's physics. If it's random chance, then you say, well, maybe we don't really understand what's going on.

We need to look at all the components. Maybe the randomness comes from a lot of components. But if someone said, okay, this happened just completely randomly, no explanation, you might say, well, that's not real physics. If something happens here and then a mile away, something else happens, and there's nothing in between to explain what's going on, say, well, that's not real physics. So it was very easily to demarcate science from non-science in the 19th century. And then quantum mechanics comes along in the 1920s, and all of a sudden people are talking about this black box. idea. We don't know what's going on inside. You take a measurement, you get a result. You can have, take a measurement, one place, you get a result another place. And then it's kind of like, okay,

what science versus pseudoscience? And that's why I think Einstein kept talking about spooky. It's too spooky. It's too much like pseudoscience. We need to go back to real science. And Einstein really thought that quantum mechanics had adopted the language of telepathy, of pseudoscience, and that needed to quantify itself more. And that's why Einstein kept trying for a unified theory of nature that would supersede quantum mechanics and be completely local and completely deterministic. That explains a lot of the fascination

because you have these great quotes from these great minds and Feynman's quit that nobody understands it. And Einstein's quote about spooky action at a distance, I wonder, you know, sometimes, and you talk about this, I'll be talking with Juan Maldesana in a couple weeks about an interesting paper that you reference a precursor to in this book about traversable wormholes. And, of course, you know, many worlds and the multiverse, things that I'm involved with, Sean Carroll's written about. It seems to me that, and not with your book as an exception, and I tried to be a little bit of an exception in my book, but it seems to be like, kind of a little bit of overselling taking place in the works of, you know, Michi Okaku or even Brian Green or folks like that who are great respect for, but that we really have to make physics

like extraordinarily bizarre and almost, you know, paradoxical or else the public won't be interested in it. And I wonder your take on that. There's also proliferation of that, like, oh, there's a wormhole over here. There's, you know, teleportation over there. What do you make of that? Yeah, well, I have to confess, my second book was about wormholes. I know, I know. You started the trend again. You started the trend. I look back on it and I say, well, okay, wormholes are like subways, but then I'm kind of like, well, maybe it was a little being a little.

I did say, well, perhaps for civilization millions of years from now. And I said, well, you would need, you know, the amount of energy or matter of a galaxy to construct one. Right. I think I had all these caveats and escape clauses, but still, you know, I think the fact is that if you're going to trade books, okay, if you're not doing a scholarly book, people are saying, well, what's the angle? Why is this going to attract people? So I think there often needs to be a balance because, you know, if I wrote a book about Bianchi type nine, cosmologies and chaotic elements, which is, you know, my... That's a must read. That's a beach read. I'd be like, okay. I'm telling that to the beach. That's my PhD thesis, but, you know, if I said like, you know, if I phrased it like,

you know, chaos in the cosmos or something like that, it would be more likely to sell, but then when people find out it's just about an obscure universe model, they might not be so interested in it. So I tried to have a broad appeal at the same time, I'm hoping that every statement in the book is scientifically valid. I try to take care to say, okay, this is hypothetical, this is speculative, this is real science. So in some of my books, I talk about, you know, Everett's work, but I say, well, this is not accepted by everybody. And some people think it's very far-fetched to imagine, you know, millions of copies of reality and so forth. So, like, Sean Carroll's favorite scenario for media interpretation.

So I try to strike a balance, and it's not going to be for everybody. As I said, there might be people who want to talk about more far-fetched things, and that's not me. But then there are people who are kind of like, well, unless you're talking about the standard model that's been verifies for, you know, decades, you know, it's too far-fetched to describe to the general public. I can understand that. Yeah.

I just try to strike a balance. And you do it exceptionally well. So I want to conclude the conversation with questions that I ask all my guests. And I'm sort of expecting not to put too much pressure on you, but, you know, your answers will be really illuminating and illustrative. and maybe tap into a love of sci-fi. I know that you have a love of The Simpsons and you've written a book about The Simpsons and you've appeared in their 20th anniversary 3D special.

You have an IMDB page. It's pretty enviable. But I want to ask you some questions about your future and even your past. And so it's appropriate for a book about time and synchronization. So the first thing is about the deep future. And it's a question I've asked many people that have been guests on the show.

And that's this concept of a will, but not a material will, an ethical will, instead of material will. And the notion of what you leave behind is more important, the material things decay and fade away, people spend your money, whatever. But what you can leave ethically in terms of the wisdom that you've accumulated

is what I'm curious about today. So if you were going to leave an ethical gift for humanity, what would it be? What kind of wisdom would you include? And not technology. We'll get to that in a second. But what ethical or piece of wisdom would you most like to bequeath to humanity? Well, I think two aspects of my life that I would share are, first of all, I'm a great believer in having a balanced life and having goals that are personal goals that are not necessarily public goals. And right now there's been this big movement to try to put everything into social media and people describe all their activities and you know everything about somebody. I think people should be in some ways a bit of a mystery.

They should have aspects of themselves that are personal. Not everything should be public. So I really believe in having that kind of balance. And I also believe in trying to put yourself, oneself in other people's shoes. and one of my favorite songs, the song by Philoaks, There But for Fortune, Go You or I, and it's been covered by Joan Baez and other people. And it's a song about the fact that people in prison,

people who are starving, refugees, they all could be us. And I think people don't take enough time to think about what it would be like to be born in a country where there's famine, there's war and what those people must be like. And then you think, well, should we take in more refugees and people sometimes view that question selfishly,

like, oh my gosh, how would that affect our country? But then you think, what would it be like to be homeless and to have no opportunities and to try to raise children, for example, knowing that the children might end up poor and not have a job and then have this idea of going to another country. Well, I think about the perspective of refugees, and I would like my children and so forth to put themselves in other people's shoes.

And I'm happy to say I have two sons that very much feel like that and are always thinking about other people's perspectives. I'm really happy about that. I've said before with previous guests that I view children, and it's not just biological children. It could be adopted children.

It could be ideological children or graduate students as the only form of time travel, teleportation that exists because you get to teleport not only your DNA. I think that's relatively meaningless in the grand scheme, but your values. And if you can do that, you can achieve a form of immortality. Yeah, you might not be there, but a part of you will be. And that type of entanglement is anything but spooky because I think it's something that's that's unique to the human condition, that we have that ability to transmit our values

and teleport them into the future. And I think that's beautiful in what you just expressed. The next thing I want to do is express also into the future, but something materially that you've come across in your immense career as a scholar, as a Guggenheim fellow, and all the things that you've done in your life, inspirational to authors such as myself. But what piece of knowledge or technology

would you put in an obelisk of the kind that Sir Arthur C. Clark depicted in 2001, these machines used by an unseen civilization to store information about that would only be openable, you know, once humanity was able to go to the moon and actually unlock the secrets within. What kinds of things would you put on or in a billion-year-long-lasting time capsule? Well, thinking about that question, I think, well, what does a human race really need? What sort of, you know, technology does it need? And I wish there was a way, I don't know if this is true technology or through education,

that we could abolish war, particularly weapons of mass destruction. And that is, of course, a big fear. I share that fear with a lot of people. But this idea that the human race could wipe itself out, the fact that the human race could wipe itself out, the fact that wars go on constantly, and then the fact that even on a local level, there's so much violence and so forth. And I would really like to see humanity evolve and sort of the Star Trek-Intyreca way into global civilization or intergalactic civilization, if possible, I mean talking about the far, far future, that believes in peace, in respect, respecting other cultures, respecting other alien civilizations if they exist, and just being emissaries for understanding.

I know that sounds kind of hokey. Maybe it's... I don't know, actually. It's in... Oh, fashion, but I would really like to see the end of warfare, the end of weapons of mass destruction. No, you're in complete agreement

with none other than Jim Simons, Dr. Jim Simons, the world's smartest billionaire. Actually, I don't know, maybe you're a billionaire. You could be the world's smartest billionaire for all I know at the University of the sciences, they probably pay better than here. But anyway, I'm not complaining. Jim Simon said, you know, the most important science is political science, because if we don't

figure out a way to cooperate, we're going to obliterate ourselves. And that's the highest priority that he had as well. So you're in good company, Paul. Okay, great. Last question is, before we get to the spin zone, the plug zone at the very end, the last question is now we're going to go backwards in time, assuming that such a thing is even impossible. But Sir Arthur C. Clark had one of his three laws, the first one being any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The second one being for every expert, there's an

equal and opposite expert. And the third one was the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's, of course, where I get the name for the podcast. So I want to ask you, what thing about life might have seemed impossible to you as a 20-year-old, as a 30-year-old. Maybe someone said it was impossible. And you found out you did it because you went and had the courage to go a little bit into the impossible. Well, I think as a 20-year-old, I was very confined locally. I grew up in Philadelphia, so I'm the unique, unusual academic, I should say, that's ended up in the same a town where I grew up. And I traveled a little bit around the United States, East Coast of the

United States, but hadn't traveled too much and hadn't really met that many well-known people. And I guess I kind of imagined or, you know, I felt very nervous about, you know, traveling and meeting people from different cultures and meeting well-known people. And I kind of, I guess I was very, I mean, it was very humble. I was from sort of, you know, a quasi-suburban part of Philadelphia. And I didn't feel like I had the aspirations to be like somebody who could talk to well-known physicists and so forth. So I think, I think I was very careful, very early on in my career not to reach out to, to well-known people and so forth. And maybe, you know, in my early books and so forth, they would have benefited by me saying, I'll just pick up the phone and call Nobel Prize winners.

And I'm sure they would have answered me, you know, answered my questions, I could have written to them. And then finally, around little after 2000, on 2002, I got a Guggenheim Fellowship for the History of Higher Dimensions. I thought, well, I have this Guggenheim Fellowship thing. Maybe I can try to contact people who are well-known. And that's when I reached out to John Wheeler and had an interview with him. And it just felt great to be talking to him.

And he was such a well-known person. And I could ask him anything I wanted. And I just thought, well, this is, you know, this is something that I could pursue. So since that time, I still feel a little nervous approaching people, but I feel like I can reach out to people who are Nobel Prize winners or famous and talk to them, and I'm a lot less timid about that. That's really good. It's good to know, although it's a little depressing because maybe you could have had 17 books.

I think I saw your hands moving. I think you're working on 17 as we speak. You know, you're actually writing a book during this interview. It's amazing. Speaking of what you're going to be up to now, and I want to say, Paul, in all honesty, the way you describe talking to people like Wheeler, et cetera, I feel like that talking to you, your wealth of knowledge, your mensch, as we would say, and you do so much for communicating science to the public, but you do it in a way that doesn't dumb it down, and you have respect for

your readership, which is what I've always been told, is one of the most important things as an author, and you're a light unto the many of us who are aspiring to do better and be better with our writing. I want to thank you for that. I want to ask you a quick question about the University of the Sciences. I know little about it. I always thought it was like a pharmacy school. Can you tell me a little bit about it and then enter into the plug zone? Oh, wow.

My publicity people at the university, we're really happy with that question. We are about to experience our 200th anniversary or bicentennial. Wow. We started, thank you. It doesn't look at it over, you know, 100 to me. We started out as a pharmacy college, and we split off. from the Philadelphia College of Medicine, I think that's what it's called,

the doctors, the physicians, a Philadelphia College of Physicians, I'm sorry. And there were doctors, and originally they were the only ones who could say, well, what are the real medications? And then the pharmacists said, well, rather than the doctors just saying it from memory, let's put this down,

let's come up with a pharmacopoeia and a book about all the medications, that are allowed. Wow. And that led to the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, a bunch of pharmacists who said, okay, we can take control of our own profession. Now, flash forward more than 100 years later,

and they're like, well, let's add chemists. Let's add biologists. They kind of relate to it. And then finally, when I was hired, they hired physicists. They didn't have a physics major yet. But then they started saying, let's become a university,

which was very exciting for me as I felt like I felt like I didn't have to switch jobs because I started out in a pharmacy college and then my university switched became a full-fledged science university with emphasis on a natural as well as the health sciences

and then we set up a physics major and now we finally have a master's program in physics so I didn't have to do anything I could be a nerd. It changed around you. It changed around you. The university developed around me and now I'm teaching this year all upper-level physics students or graduate physics students.

And it's very exciting. So I really love teaching here. And they're great students, very friendly students. And we're a rare example of a university that's hybrid. So you can do things online or do things in person, depending upon the course. So I've been teaching my classes mostly in person, and then I'm giving a hybrid option or an online option.

for students who prefer online. So it's been fun. Very good. And tell us where we can find you. I love when people say, where can people find the book as if it's a great mystery that you have to derive? We can find the book anywhere and you should listen to it on audio. I particularly recommend that because it's you get the reader, you get Paul's words, but in someone else's voice, it's really well done and get the hardcover as well because it's actually a beautifully printed and bound book. I love the way Basic does things. T.J. Kelleher, I know him. He was your editor, I guess, for a little bit, maybe for the whole book.

Tell us, where can people find you on the Internet and in the limited amount, which I respect of social media that you do so exceptionally engaging? Well, I'm very active on Twitter. So check up my handle, P. Halper, my first initial and my last name. And I tweet a lot of History of Science things. So that's my specialty. Twitter. There's a Facebook page set up by a fellow writer that's a fan page for my books, but I'm not, I'm not active in that, but that has information about me. I don't have an

Instagram page yet, but I am very much on Twitter. Yes, you are. I always enjoy your photographs, your history, historical perspective. And I want to thank you again, Paul, for coming into the Impossible for venturing into The Impossible. And I want to keep in touch with your future work. And you're welcome back on the show anytime. It's been such a pleasure and honor for me to have you on the show call. Thank you so much, Brian. This is a great, great podcast. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to

info at imagine.ucsd.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at ImagineUCSD. Watch us on YouTube. Listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Vary, director.

Brian Keating, co-director. Patrick Coleman, associate director. Produced by Stuart Volko.