Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Sabine Hossenfelder Gets Existential Without the Gobbledygook(#249)

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

From renowned physicist and creator of the YouTube series “Science without the Gobbledygook,” a book that takes a no-nonsense approach to life’s biggest questions, and wrestles with what physics really says about the human condition Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is as scientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. On the other hand, the idea that the universe itself is conscious is difficult to rule out entirely. According to Sabine Hossenfelder, it is not a coincidence that quantum entanglement and vacuum energy have become the go-to explanations of alternative healers, or that people believe their deceased grandmother is still alive because of quantum mechanics. Science and religion have the same roots, and they still tackle some of the same questions: Where do we come from? Where do we go to? How much can we know? The area of science that is closest to answering these questions is physics. Over the last century, physicists have learned a lot about which spiritual ideas are still compatible with the laws of nature. Not always, though, have they stayed on the scientific side of the debate. In this lively, thought-provoking book, Hossenfelder takes on the biggest questions in physics: Does the past still exist? Do particles think? Was the universe made for us? Has physics ruled out free will? Will we ever have a theory of everything? She lays out how far physicists are on the way to answering these questions, where the current limits are, and what questions might well remain unanswerable forever. Her book offers a no-nonsense yet entertaining take on some of the toughest riddles in existence and will give the reader a solid grasp on what we know—and what we don’t know. Find Sabine on Twitter https://twitter.com/skdh Find Sabine on YouTube @Sabine Hossenfelder  I’ve partnered with Shortform who have kindly enabled for you 5 days of unlimited access and an additional 20% discounted annual subscription when you join through my link Shortform.com/impossible  Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php Join Shortform through my link Shortform.com/impossible and you’ll receive 5 days of unlimited access and an additional 20% discounted annual subscription! Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast! On Apple devices, click here, scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast https://apple.co/39UaHlB  On Spotify it’s here  on @audible_com it’s here and other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast  Please join my mailing list; click here https://briankeating.com/list for your chance to win real space dust!! A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everyone, and welcome to what promises to be an evergreen, fantastic episode of The Into the Impossible podcast, if I don't say so myself, and that's because of one of the most requested guests that you guys have for me is the guest on today's podcast, Dr. Sabina Hasenfelder, author of Lost in Math and her newest book, Existential Physics, a scientist's guide to life's biggest questions. She's making her fifth appearance on the podcast in one form or another. She is a phenomenal communicator. She is a scientist working at the boundaries of what is known about the cosmos, both in terms of fundamental physics, about what is known as determinism and free will, consciousness. And we cover all these topics and more, including

her thoughts on aliens, her thoughts on the simulation hypothesis, her thoughts and criticisms of past guests on the podcast, including Sir Roger Penrose, Max Tagmark, and others. And I have to get them all in a room and get them all to debate. Sabina is my favorite curmudgeon. I love her work and I love her mind and the things that she does with it. You're not going to want to miss this episode. And I do hope you'll share it with other people around the multiverse because her book is something that is not to be missed, not just by scientists, but as with her previous book, Lost in Math and her YouTube channel, it's really for the general public as well. And I think that this will really make it appeal to your friends who have interest in science and math, but are also just curious about the

universe and discoveries that projects like the James Webb Space Telescope and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may uncover. And she revealed some truly fascinating aspects of her thought process when it comes to all of these and her thoughts on free will, which, as I told her, I have to believe in free will. I have no choice. So for now, sit back and enjoy this voyage into the impossible with a renowned, delightfully, curmudgeonly, contrarian, Dr. Sabina Hasenfelter, author of a wonderful new book. You should check it out.

And don't forget to submit questions for me for future guests that are coming on the show like Sir Roger and others, like as well, Nick Malstrom, who we talked about as well, be a guest on the show. You can submit the questions to me on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, which I hope you'll subscribe to, see visuals from this episode and all my, other episodes. And you can also submit questions on Instagram or Twitter where I am Dr. Brian Keating.

And you can submit feedback for me on my podcast website, audio feedback, what's called SpeakPipe. You can leave a little voicemail. Not to leave your name or whatever. And I may play those questions for you on the upcoming interviews that I have. And that's at bryankeating.com slash podcast. And don't forget to subscribe to my mailing list if you live in the USA and you want to get a little chunk of space dust for me. But for now, sit back. Enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with the inimitable Dr. Sabina Hasinfeld. Enjoy. Okay.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please, hell? Who should I get on the podcast again? It's always Sabina Hasenfelder in the top one or two most requested guests. And she is our guest today, Dr. Sabina Hasenfelder, proprietor of the science without the gobbledygook empire all around the world. Joining us today from Germany, this is twice in a week. We're recording this at the end of July.

We were together for the Institute for Art and Ideas, live stream, which you can find. I'll put a link to in the show notes below. And that was a lot of fun talking about consciousness, quantum mechanics, the observer, all sorts of fun things. But that's only a small fraction of both today's conversation. and the wonderful new book that brings Sabina back, and that is called Existential Physics. And it is a phenomenal book that I read in hard copy. I read it in Kindle Form,

and your publisher was kind enough to send me the audio version, which is read by a wonderful narrator, Gina, I think her name is. Anyway, she's wonderful, the English version, at least. I hope you do the German version. Sabina, what I love to do recently, since you've been on the show four times, but I've only recently started to make this a patented trademark segment of the show.

I always begin by asking the authors who come on the show the meaning, the interpretation of the title of the book, of the cover design of the book, and especially of the subtitle of the book as well. So I'm wondering, can you do what we're never supposed to do and judge this book by its cover? Well, so I have to admit that the title wasn't my doing. my suggestion for the title was more than this, like the song.

And it was supposed to say physics is so much more than what we learn in school, you know, balls rolling down inclined planes and resistors and all that kind of stuff. And this title, existential physics is what my editor came up with. He wanted to get the word physics in the title. And I thought he has a point, you know, that people know what it is about. So I gave ground on this, but I insisted on my idea for the illustration, which was a butterfly fading away into some kind of particles. So I wanted to say, everything is made of particles.

Like this is what people always accuse physicists of, right? You want to reduce everything to the particles and that's bad, bad, bad. And so I was trying to say, it's right. Everything is made of particles. but that's not the end of the story. There's so much more to it because there's all this complexity and chaos also coming out of it.

And this is why the butterfly, it's supposed to allude to the butterfly effect. And of course, your first book was called Lost in Math. And I kind of was thinking about this book and maybe another title, if you publish with me someday, would be found in physics. Because I think, you know,

your first book kind of decried the situation of how, you know, physics is being almost over-artingly taken over by this love of beauty and symmetry and organization and thanks to math. And then this is kind of, yeah, things are blowing apart, the butterfly separating the chaotic nature, which is closer to reality, of course. And so, yes, and the subtitle is a scientist's guide to life's biggest questions. And the commonality between these two books, your two books, is that you're kind of a heroine in your own story. One of my episodes with you is called The Heroin's Journey because you go around the world and all your books, kind of like a journalist. And I thought we would start there, if you don't mind, talking about how you come to interview these phenomenal scientists and authors, Zia Morale, Sir Roger Penrose, to David Deutsch, etc. But the first question you asked them, Sabina, was very surprising to me.

You always ask them if God plays a role in their life. I've asked this question a lot of physicists. And I find it interesting that most of them answer. So what I ask them is, are you religious? That's the way that I put it. And they'll always say, no, but. And then after the but, there's the interesting part. and this is what I wanted to get to.

The only person who didn't do this was David Deutsch, who was just like, no. And Zia Morali, of course, she embraces God. She's not a scientist anymore. She did train at my alma mater, Brown University, for some time, and I do hope to have her on the podcast as well. But she's a devout Muslim, and she does practice, as you say, you're coming off the interview with her, coming off of Ramadan. So I thought that was interesting. But actually, you know, throughout the book, the book has many topics. And it's interesting how much physics has come full circle.

In other words, it used to be people like Galileo and certainly Newton and maybe even Einstein, although we can get into that, had this, you know, kind of overarching impact of religion on their life. So Sabina, a lot of the conversations that evolve around God, unfortunately, a lot of what people end up saying is, is basically some kind of, in my opinion, warmed over version of either I don't believe in it or I'm agnostic, you know, which I used to leave open as a question if my audience, if my guest would say that. For example, my first guest, Freeman Dyson on the podcast way back five years ago, four or five years ago, he said, I'm agnostic, but it's a great mystery and I love doing it. I said, that's great, Freeman, but what do you do, practically? How do you distinguish your daily

life from that of an atheist. In other words, if an super intelligent alien looked at you, he would say you don't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to. And so I'm wondering, how do you react when people, do you ever have this notion that they're not being either intellectually honest or that they really just don't want to come out and say I'm an atheist or they don't want to come out and say, as Stephen Hawking said, you know, that would cut book sales, you know, in half more than adding equations? Do you ever get the sense that they're kind of modulating their belief or lack thereof in a God or in a religion to either sell books or for some other purpose? Well, I would put myself into the same camp. Like I would say that for what my research is

concerned, I would say I'm agnostic. This is also what I write in the book. Like, I don't take sides. I don't know one way or the other. But if you're asking about the way that I lead my personal life. I'm not religious. I don't go to church. So for practical purposes, you can call me an atheist. Right. So this is the way that people think about atheists. So I don't know how other people do it. I often get the sense that scientists, physicists, which is the kind of scientists that I mostly deal with, they kind of replace this religious element that they've taken out of their life by some other kind of belief. There could be a multiverse or it could be the beauty of natural laws or whatever, have you. Yeah, I get that a lot too. In fact, I did a video for this, you know, they're mostly a

conservative talking, you know, network called Prager University. And I did what's a bigger leap of faith, God or the multiverse. And I did it because, you know, it's hard to reach, you know, a predominantly Christian audience, you know, that it's conservative and teach them about science. And I wanted to do that and two of the people I quote from are you and Paul Davies, but they actually distilled one of your online essays at Backreaction, your phenomenal blog, where I've been roasted at least once. I've been hosted multiple times, but I've been roasted once for my first book. We're not going to get into that. But we took an essay, or they took an essay, and they distilled, like, from Dr. Sabina Hansenfelder, here's all these commonalities between religion and the belief in the multivers. And you're not saying

they are a belief in a god, but there are certain similarities. And you're you're not saying, And yes, you bring this up when you talk about things like the simulation hypothesis, et cetera. And what do you make of the fact that so many scientists were religious, even 100 years ago, but now very few. I mean, in the U.S., 93% of the National Academy of Science does not believe or actively does not profess a belief in God, at least here. I don't know what it is like in Germany or Europe. But what do you make of this huge? I mean, that's a huge phase transition from almost 100.

percent universal belief to, you know, seven percent at best. What do you attribute that to? Well, to be honest, I think it's a mistake that the traditional churches, like the big churches make, like basically here, almost all people are either Protestants or they're Catholic, and they hold on very closely to these very traditional stories, which if you think about them too much. They don't really make a lot of sense. And I think this is what put me off from church. So I actually went to church for quite some time, you know, when I was a teenager because I was interested in it. And I like the singing. There was free food and the kind of stuff. And to be honest, you know, I like the social get-together, which at the end of my book, I say that science

leaves me wanting in that regard. We could do better when it comes to the the social aspect. But I think it's kind of unnecessary. There's key elements to this belief which I think people find attractive and expresses something that they care about, which doesn't hinge on the literal interpretation of certain phrases in the Bible, that kind of stuff. And so I think that what puts scientists off the religions is that there are just certain elements that they can't get themselves to subscribe to. Right. They want to believe that everything they do is rational, but I don't think a person who did everything rationally would appear very rational. In other words, I think we all have irrational

beliefs, and then some are more irrational maybe than others. And it's kind of, it almost provides an outlet for people. Like, we're going to combine things. You know, I was interviewed recently and someone asked me like, what do you want to discover with the Simon's Observatory? Or what do you believe? Did inflation occur or was there a bounce? And we're going to get into those subjects in just a bit with you because they feature prominently in existential physics. But I said, I don't want to believe in anything. Like I want to have evidence for something. Like I said, I always joke, I don't believe in gravity. I don't have faith in gravity. We have evidence for gravity. And one of the consistent themes in your wonderful new book is the power of a

scientific idea is that from which you can make calculations and you can make observations comport within the context of that particular framework. But I'm wondering, you know, to push back with respect, as I always do, you know, there are situations where people explain data using models that are completely wrong. I'll point out Kepler, right? Kepler used, you know, Tico's data and other observations. And he made it beautifully fit into this model. of the solar system that had, I got to put these in here, Sabina, because I bought these just for our interviews. So he had these crystalline, you know, spheres, and he had orbs, and he had pyramids and all sorts of cool things. And he got the right answers, you know. So how do you react

to that? How do you react to the fact that sometimes a totally wrong idea can still be consistent with data? Are we in danger of being too beholden to the notion that everything has to be, falsifiable and et cetera and Paparian. Are we too in love with these ideas lately in terms of our scientific pursuits? Well, you say it's a totally wrong idea, but the only reason we know this is that we got better data and it didn't fit to it, right? I mean, and this is exactly how science is supposed to work. So this is all well and fine.

I'm not sure I see the problem there. But, I mean, as you say, what I'm trying in my book is I'm trying to distinguish between what we actually know, what we can read out of the data, and where we supplement what we actually know with belief, which isn't wrong. But I think as scientists, we shouldn't mix the two things together. So you would say then that the lack of evidence for a multiverse or for a simulation hypothesis or many of the myriad things that we can get into, that is provisional. In other words, it could be the case that inflation took place or a big bounce took place or there's a multiverse, but we just we have to wait because we don't have enough data. Or are there certain things you can say are never going to be true no matter how much evidence we collect? I wouldn't say this, but when it comes to stuff like the multiverse, I can't even think of any evidence that could possibly support the hypothesis. So this is the big problem that I have with it.

So on a slightly more technical level, the issue I have with many of these ideas is that they make assumptions which are actually unnecessary to describe anything we observe. Like this is the big issue with the multiverse. You can say, well, there are all those infinitely many universes out there. But there's no way we can observe them, not just that we can't see them. There's no possible measurement that we can ever do to find evidence for their existence. Then I would just say, well, it's not a scientific idea, right? And so you're free to believe in it if you want to. They do whatever they want.

that's fine, but please don't pretend it's science. So you also say in the book you make commentary on some past guests, some upcoming guests, but it seems that one of the biggest targets for your ire or at least your bemusement or befuddlement is Max Tagmark and those people of his kind that like to promulgate these. idea of what he calls the mathematical universe, which is not only one multiverse, as I understand it, is at least four different kinds of multiverses, some of which I don't think are controversial. In other words, he says there are things we cannot see that are outside of our horizon. I don't think you would disagree with that.

You might say that that's not a multiverse, but at any rate, why do you say, as you do in the book, you know, that this kind of thing. it was probably done to sell books, and for that it was quite successful. Why does that particular conjecture annoy you, as you say? I don't think I say this in the book. I think I have one sentence in which I mention Max, which is something to the extent, I think he only came up with the idea of the mathematical universe to prove that he's a seriously weird fellow, which I think is appropriate given that he calls himself Matt Max, right?

So, you know, don't get me wrong. I really love him. He's cool. And it's a very thought-stimulating idea. And I think generally this is why people like the multiverse, because they like thinking about it. And there's nothing wrong with it. But it's a philosophical idea that all.

all this mathematics actually exists in some sense. It's not a scientific idea. I don't think he came up with this because he wanted to write a book and sell the book. It does really make a lot of sense, does it? Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, I agree. He has more integrity than that kind of characterization. But I would say, you know, one thing that people push back on when I, where I have these debates is, well, you know, didn't so-and-so demonstrate that you could see the impact of a,

of a bubble collision in our universe and isn't the, you know, the CMB cold spot, or couldn't there be other anomalies? Our friend Arvin Ash is doing a video this week on his wonderful channel called Dark Flow. And it's about possibly there's another universe pulling our universe towards it. And that's right. So there are people that say, no, Sabina, you're wrong. We can falsify the multiverse. It might take a couple of trillion years, but it's in principle falsifiable. What do you say to people that come up with ways to prove or disprove the multiverse using evidence? So for one thing, as you've probably seen, I address all those points in the book. And I've also a video coming up, which I already recorded in which I say, these are the typical

points that physicists always bring up to me. Like the first point is usually you skipped over this, Brian, which is black holes. We can't see inside a black hole. Then, yeah, yeah. The second one, But there are also, no one expects the universe to end beyond the cosmic horizon. Then the third one is what you just said. Well, you can actually see it. And there's a fourth one. Oh, it's simple. That's the fourth one.

So we can get to this if you want to. So the thing with the idea that you can actually observe it, I think this is what's called a bait-and-switch tactic. First, we're talking about this general idea of the multiverse with these infinitely many copies of you and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then suddenly you're talking about very specific proposal of a multiverse, which maybe, you know, the one with the entanglement. I think this is the one with the dark flow, right?

Or then there's the idea with the bubble collisions and so on. And look, those actually make predictions. And that's a slightly different problem, which is that physicists think that just because something is forciable, it's also good science, which I say, well, you've misunderstood pretty much everything about the basic philosophy of science. But also, I mean, if you just look at how it went with those predictions, well, no one's found any of this evidence. Like, they've actually looked for it, like these particular patterns. I think Will Kinney wrote a paper about this idea with the dark flow and the thing with the bubble collisions.

I mean, you know that they haven't actually found the signature, right? Right, right. And I think, yes, you're absolutely right. I mean, people say, oh, falsifiability means it is science, but I can prove to you that my astrologer, yes, I go to see an astrologer, you know, she made a prediction. It didn't come true. Therefore, it must be science, right? But what person you do call out by name is upcoming guest, Nick Ballstrom, who you say the simulation hypothesis, and I'm quoting, annoys me. Why does it annoy? you? How can a scientific idea or philosophical idea annoy you? Well, if they would just use it as a philosophical idea, that would be fine with me. But it has this, they're trying to give it this scientific flavor, right? And what it actually is, the simulation hypothesis, it's a statement about the properties of the fundamental laws of nature. And that's something which physicists deal with. It's not philosophy.

And so if you believe that you can actually encode general relativity and the standard model of particle physics on a particular type of computer, then you better tell me how you're going to do this. And it's not a trivial problem. Like, I mean, I mentioned some examples, especially when you're talking about chaotic systems and that kind of stuff.

It's not as simple as just saying, well, you know, if no one's looking into this corner of the world, I don't have to compute it. That's cheating, right? Please, please show me your algorithm and then show that it actually reproduces our observations. And of course, they don't do this. Like, they don't even get anywhere close. And this is why I say it annoys me.

Now, if you want to talk about it on this philosophical level, like, we may all be simulations or brains in a vet or whatever. I'm like, yeah, do what you want. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Homeman. Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill four-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. See homedepot.com

slash price match for details. Yeah, these are old questions. And I feel like we recapitulate all these things. Every 10, 20 years, it's said we have to rewrite the literature of what came before because it's expanding at an exponential rate. And therefore, you know, I think it just behooves people to want to make a contribution to it. And from there, I want to turn to another topic that I get a lot of questions about. A lot of my fans listening and watching you will want to know something you don't really talk that much about. You probably have a video about it. We'll get to your video over and your catalog in a bit. And that's aliens, which are in the news almost every day now, ranging from, you know, people like past guests, Tom DeLong, you know, claiming he has

recovered, you know, portions of an alien spaceship when he came on my podcast, which was quite quite interesting to go down the rabbit hall with him and find out. Actually, he can't verify exactly that he's owned it. Anyway, but he is, I give him credit. He brought a lot of this, you know, he was a musician for this band, Blink 182. He lives in San Diego, great guy, fun guy. But, you know, he kind of got this into the attention of the media about five, six years ago. And now it's risen all the way up to my friend and colleague and president of the Simons Foundation, professor David Spurgel. And David is now co-leading this NASA panel commissioned by the chief administrator on down to investigate the role of what they call UAP's unidentified aerial phenomena, but that could

include UFOs, objects, they could include evidence and data. Of course, I've had on Avi Loeb and other people as well, but I haven't asked you about this. Where do you come down? Do you believe that there are credible bits of evidence suggesting that earth, well, first of all, that aliens exist, other life forms exist. Let's start there. Do you think life exists outside of the earth? And is that a scientific question or is it a faith-based question? Well, we don't actually have any evidence that life exists elsewhere. So at this point, I would say it's a faith-based question. So if you want to know what I believe, I believe the answer is yes. That's mostly because of the question. That's mostly Because I think that it isn't as difficult to create complexity as physicists like to think.

I think physicists have somewhat of a bias, that everything is kind of simple, and then they think life is really, really difficult. So it has to be rare in some sense. I think that's not correct, but of course I don't know. Now, if you're asking about any particular type of evidence, I'm convincing, evidence, but yeah, I haven't really looked into it. Now, are you in the camp or perhaps not in the camp of those like our mutual friend, Eric Weinstein, who suggest things such as the fact that we should devote some substantial resources to the investigation of the phenomenon because it might reveal new physics that could then

be used to solve many predicaments that we have on Earth, namely, how do we get off the earth without, you know, as he says, you know, putting chemical oxidants inside of a phallic-shaped tube and shooting it to Mars, as our friend Elon wants to do. But would you say that if we did find evidence of not just alien life, like slime mold on, you know, on Proxima Centauri B, but if we found technological, intelligent life, that that would open up a new portal into physics, that we would otherwise be ignorant to. Do you think that's even a conceivable prospect for humanity? Well, it's certainly conceivable in the sense that I can imagine it.

If the question is how likely is it? I have no idea. I mean, I agree that this is something which we should investigate. Now, I think what you said was we should invest significant resources. Of course, it brings up the question like, how significant? What amounts are we talking about? And I'm not really in the position to make that kind of judgment. As I said, I haven't really followed it.

I would generally agree. Yeah, I mean, it's a really important thing. It's one of those things where the payoff could be so huge that it would be stupid not to look at it, right? Yeah, I think that's absolutely true as well. And yet, you know, the question of the level of, of fervor about it is kind of unmatched by the evidence. And I want to run an argument by you that I've used on other scientists that are,

you know, more involved with this, you know, phenomena and even the concept of it. And that's this concept called panspermia, which was originally, it sounds dirty, but it's not. Don't worry, we won't get our YouTube demonetized. But the concept was that life on earth, it doesn't solve the origin of life problem, but it solves the origin of life on earth problem. And that's by these little objects called meteorites. By the way, you can get your own meteorite if you subscribe to my mailing list,

Briankeeting.com slash list. And if you subscribe to Sabina's mailing list, maybe she'll send you like a theory or she'll tell you that you're full of gobbledly gook. But you should subscribe to that. Sabina Hasenfelder as a wonderful mailing list. We'll put links to that below. But the theory of panspermia

posits that life on Earth originated because objects like these. meteorites had chemical life, exist molecules or precursors to life, or even life itself, and they can survive and they can land on the Earth. And then that causes Darwinian evolution to sprout, right? So that's the theory. But I invert that argument. And I say, if that's true, then we should see life on Europa or on Titan or on some other moon or asteroid or something, because we've had life on Earth for four billion years. It only took a couple hundred million years for life to get kicked off.

And often Earth gets hit by meteoroids, and those blast off these same chunks of Earth, including life, and they should be floating around the solar system for literally billions of years. And some of them should have do land on Mars. We know that they've landed on Mars because we have stuff from Mars that land on Earth. Anyway, Sabina, this is a long-winded question. But do you believe that the lack of evidence of life from Earth, on another body in our solar system can provide some Bayesian prior on the existence or the

ability for panspermia to take place. In other words, for life to get spread throughout the cosmos as soon as it gets created. Well, of course, in principle, yes, but we don't have a terrible lot of evidence about microbial life on other planets. Like we've just about made it to Mars and maybe to the moon, but what do we know about the other planets? And then there's this whole issue about the habitable zone, right? If you're only looking at planets in the habitable zone, then this planet is it, right? So I'm not sure how useful this evidence is.

It's certainly evidence, and you should include it into your priors, but it's totally outside my research area. Yeah, okay. Well, that never stops me from just wild speculation. Something that is in your research area is, of course, cosmology, quantum cosmology, gravity, early universe. In fact, that's how we met. What is it? 13 years ago, my wife was pregnant, and I think you had just had, or you were pregnant at the same time.

We met in Sweden. You organized this wonderful conference on quantum gravity and observational evidence for quantum gravity. Often I hear in my field cosmic microwave background experiments, polarization experiments, the Simon's Observatory, there's a beach ball behind me. You're watching on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating or Sabina's YouTube channel, which is Science Without the Gobbledy Gook. We often talk about the dispositive evidence that detection of B-mode polarization, if truly primordial and not from dust, that that would be provative that inflation took place. So I want to ask you, first of all, a question that you aren't such an expert on, which is quantum

gravity. If I say a sabina, I detected a radio wave today, and that's proof of there being photons, you know, quanta of electromagnetism, isn't that the same as me saying I detected a gravitational wave at the surface of last scattering, and therefore there must have been quantum gravity from these primordial polarization perturbations? Aren't we kind of putting too much evidence on, as I hope, that we will discover something? But isn't it too much to say that that would be evidence for quantum gravity to detect classical size perturbations at the surface of last scattering? Yes, I think that would be too much to say. But I don't think that's what people are saying, right? As you correctly said, they are claiming it's evidence for inflation. And of course,

in inflation, the idea is that you get those waves as a relic from the quantum fluctuations and so forth, but from the B-modes themselves, you can't actually infer that this had to be the case. And as you certainly know, there are particular types of inflation where you wouldn't be able to detect them. And then there are other theories which are not inflation, which actually make the same prediction. So you get this whole what's called the inverse problem. If you make the observation, can you actually figure out what the correct theory was? But having said that, there are other signatures that you can look for in the CMB, at least theoretically, that would actually allow you to pin down that the original fluctuations must have been quantum in nature

and can't have been classical, sarcastic fluctuations. And the people have written papers about this like 10 years ago or something, around the time maybe that the workshop was stuff like this. And it turns out that it's just really, really hard to measure. So the current measurement precision just isn't there and it's probably not going to be there within my life. time. So Sabina, another theory that stands in contrast to inflation are so-called bouncing models or cyclical models. And I want to turn to that. That's part of a wonderful chapter in the book. And I never like to give away the book. I don't want to give away too much except to say that you

have to buy it. You have to buy it in as many formats as I have it, which is hard copy, digital e-book and audio copy. So please, Sabina's twins need to go. expensive school in America. Anyway, Sabina, you talk about these alternatives, and you say, I quote, the bouncing model and the cyclic models are, quote, worse than inflation. So first of all, I want to ask you,

can you define what these bouncing models are? You talk to one of the foremost proponents of them, Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel laureate in this book, who you presuppose, actually, this is amazing, Sabina. in the book written in 2019, 2020. You said, I can't believe he hasn't won a Nobel Prize. And then he wins a Nobel Prize in 2021 when the book is finished. Let me interrupt you.

I didn't just write this for the book. I actually wrote this on my blog before he won the Nobel Prize. You don't have to take it on my word. Sabina, can you tell me what the Powerball lottery numbers are going to be next week? I'd really like to know for the, to support the into the impossible. So he has this conformal cyclic model. He has these hawking points. I want to talk about this and also past guests, Anaegis, who has been on the show recently talking about cyclic models.

Why do you say it's worse than inflation? Is it like what Winston Churchill said about democracy, the worst form of government, except for all the others? Is it true that bouncing models are really worse than inflation? If so, how? Well, I'm not sure I said that it's worse than inflation, but it's worth than lambda CDM, like what you could call the standard Big Bang model, basically. And I would say that inflation is already tacked onto this model, right? And so the reason why I say it's worse is that you're inventing a more complicated story

that comes before the beginning, basically. So you're tacking on this whole story about an earlier universe which collapsed. And then, I mean, if you're with Penrose and I mean, you talk to him on your channel, then he gives it a story about supermassive black holes that radiate and that leave some kind of imprint in the cosmic microwave background in our universe. And the obvious question that you should ask, like, why? Why don't you just start with an initial state that have this imprint? Wouldn't this be much simpler than inventing this complicated story for how they came about? And so I think that all those models are running into this problem at some point.

That if you go back in time, the initial state becomes simpler and simpler and simpler. And if you want to attach a more complicated story that happened earlier, there's no scientific justification to do this. Okay, so on the bouncing model, the criticism that you actually say is that the problem with these ideas is that they have no explanatory power. They do not simplify the calculation of any observations. So I don't know, you know, if you follow closely the battle between, you know, people like Will Kinneys and the Paul Steinhearts and the Anegis's, but they do claim that they can make all predictions with actually simpler observation. They don't actually need the inflaton. They don't actually need to instantiate a singularity, and their bounce is purely classical.

So, yes, they need a pre-existing universe, but they don't need, or they need some space time, at least, but they don't need a singularity where there is perhaps no hope of computing anything that is built on such a shaky foundation. So what do you say to those new instantiations of that model? which suggests that you don't need a big bang at all, you just need this slow collapse from a previous universe.

It doesn't have to be that violent even. So I would like to correct what you said. You said that I'm claiming those models. That's not what I'm claiming. I'm saying they don't improve the explanatory power of Lambda CBM. So they just add unnecessary clutter to it. I was just quoting from the book. The problem with these ideas, yeah, I was just quoting the book.

actually says that they have no explanatory power, but I understand you're not making that strong acclaim right now. Yeah, right. So if you add them, so this is what I explain in the book, right? So you can always add an earlier story. And it's this earlier story that has no explanatory power. You could as well just take Lambda CDM and be done with it. And that's in practice, you know, what cosmologists do if they run their simulations. You don't have to start with a complicated story about this earlier universe. It doesn't actually aid any of your predictions. And of course, yeah, I mean, those people would disagree.

They would say, well, in some sense, this is actually simpler than inflation. And I don't know, maybe it is. But as I said earlier, it's not that I'm a fan of inflation, right? To me, it's just replacing one evil with another evil. We don't need either. So in terms of the competing alternatives between the conformal cyclic cosmology, the bouncing, the ex-pirotic model, there are some alternatives from Neil Turrock, who's an upcoming guest into the Impossible podcast. Actually, by this time, it'll be a past guest because that's coming out soon. So, yeah, I guess the comment that I would have is, how do I, as an experimentalist, what do I do?

I mean, what's nice about inflation is that it's making predictions. some would claim it does, and that one of the most robust predictions, in fact, the only one that is intrinsically robust, it seems, agreed upon by everybody, including Roger and including Paul and Anna, is that there'd be these primordial gravitational waves. But as you said, the amplitude of these waves is incredibly sensitive to the actual fourth power of the energy scale of inflation. Therefore, inflation could have happened at a very, very slightly lower energy scale,

race to the fourth power, anything gets very small. And therefore, we wouldn't see it. So it might be true, but unfalsifiable or unprovable, rather. So of the alternatives, what's nice about them is that you could rule them out, right? Because you could observe gravitational waves, which would, in some sense, or Arabonds or whatever Roger talks about, right? So is there any, at what point does the virtue of being falsifiable enter into your calculations as a, as a, as a theoretical physicist. Is that a virtue at all of these alternatives to inflation, that they can be disproven?

Well, in principle, yes. But in practice, I don't think it's going to happen. Because, I mean, you know how theorists are. If you come with your observation and say, well, I've, you know, I've disproved it. They're going to Twitter something about their model. And then this is what theorists do. So I'm not buying it. There's too much freedom in those.

Love it. So pivoting to the unobservable multiverse, now to the collapse of the wave function, my final question before we get to audience questions. And that is we talk a lot about what is knowable in this book. And actually, the conversation with Roger Penrose is not about his conformal cosmology. It's about the measurement problem, the orchestrated collapse. He calls orc-R. So I'm going to have him and Stuart hammer off his collaborator on the podcast coming soon.

So stay tuned for that. And you quote from this passage by Bert, Bertrand Russell, that the chicken is fed reliably every morning at 9 a.m. until one day the farmer chops off its head. More refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken. I want to ask you, I was dreaming about, you know, what would I ask Sabina that she's never been asked before? in this book, you talk about your favorite part of physics that does what we call outreach, and that's the minimized action principle, which I agree is pretty cool. But I want to ask you, I think the weirdest thing about physics, in my opinion, quantum physics,

now we're talking about collapse of the wave function, the chicken's head getting cut off. I think what's most fascinates me is that in classical physics, we can form commutation relations between position and momentum. And those can be used to construct the action, which can then be minimized in your favorite three. But my favorite thing is by adding just one number, an imaginary number, the square root of negative one, we get in quantum mechanics that P and Q do not commute, right?

Isn't that really weird, Sabina? How is it that? And that's sort of the most quantum of all quantum things, is that you can't, you know, measurements don't commute. what is this telling us? Is this significant that in classical mechanics, the commutation relation vanishes, and in class quantum physics,

it doesn't vanish, and in fact it involves the square root of negative one. Where the heck does that come in? This is always really troubled me, and I'm curious, what do you make of this strange behavior of a mathematical object? I'm totally with you. No, I'm with you.

I mean, so, But I'm afraid I can't answer the question. So I've always, though maybe I look at it from exactly the opposite direction. You know, as I've said a few times, I originally studied mathematics, not physics. And I've always found complex numbers to make much more sense than real numbers, which I dare to say probably a lot of mathematicians would have the same attitude. Well, because in the real numbers, you can't solve certain equations, right? it's not complete.

So in the complex numbers, you have all this stuff with the holomorphic functions. I dare to say it's beautiful, blah, blah, blah. So to me the question is more like, why do the observables only take on real numbers, like the values? Why are they real numbers? What happened with the complex numbers? To put it differently, why are all the measurement operators permission? I have no idea. I think it's in all the eye scope.

So it's basically the opposite to your question. Right. But I don't know. Yeah. Very good question. And then I guess I would ask, well, wouldn't you be more in love with the Quaternians and the Clifford Algebraes? I mean, at what level does it stop, you know, that it stops being beautiful or interesting? Okay.

Well, we've reached the end of, I only have one more question. And that's not a very personal question. But I want to ask, your YouTube channel is seen by half a million people on average on video channels. And I know you do make a nice income from it, and that's wonderful. But what is being on YouTube, what does it give you besides income or fame or attention? What does it fulfill for you? Why do you do it besides the money, as I said? I mean, that is important.

Well, I love science and I want to share it with other people. It's really pretty simple. It also gives me an excuse to learn a lot of new things. I mean, as you've probably noticed, it's like half of the time I talk about physics that I'm really familiar with, like, the Prince of Lofly section. It recently made a video about this. I have one coming up on the multiverse. I just talked about the block universe. So this is the kind of stuff that I know where I'm like, okay, I know it.

other people are interested in it. So I just shared with them. But I also talk about stuff like nuclear power, like how green is it? How much do we have to worry about air pollution? And I have one coming up on energy storage, like how does it change the carbon footprint? What do we do if the sun doesn't shine? The wind doesn't blow that kind of question. And I just learn a lot from it.

And then it makes sense, right? So once I've put in the effort, I shared with other people. So they get something out of the work that I did. Yeah, it's, it is really delightful. It's one of the few that I, you know, have a notification bell set for besides this channel. So you should all subscribe. I'll have a link to her channel down there or maybe up here. And that's called Science Without the Gobbledy Gook.

And it is delightful. I mean, you literally talk about everything, places that I would never fear to tread. you talk about transgender athletes, which was a favorite video that I was, I can't say I was surprised that you made it, but I was glad that you made it. It's very interesting and provocative. You did one. Does two plus two equal five, you know, question mark? So you're not afraid to tread into very interesting waters. And before we had started this conversation on recording it, you mentioned that, you know, sometimes you get people that unsubscribe or that send you, you know, email, oh, you should do this or that. How do you react, you know, as someone who's, you know, aspiring to grow an audience the way that you have, how do you handle the naysayers, the haters, the trolls and stuff? How do you do that with and maintain, I mean, you are known as a curmudgeon in some ways or a contrarian, but you're actually very cheerful and, you know, and I love that about you. But how do you handle the naysayers and, you know, does it get it and it hurt you in your heart at all?

Well, you know, what they say, Hedel's going to hate. I think if you reach a certain level of popularity, you have to expect that kind of thing. There will always be people who will try to put you down one way or the other. And I think I've just been doing this for too long to really be bothered by it. You know, sometimes I do get things wrong, but I think I'm like, I'm genuinely honestly trying to get it right. So, for example, the thing that where I talk about trans athletes, It was just something that I was wondering about.

I was like, what are people talking about? Why is it so controversial? What does the one side say? What does the other side say? And then, as I just said, I thought, well, you know, now I've made the effort and I kind of, I think I roughly understand what they're talking about. And those are the key points. Let's make a video about it because maybe other people find it useful. And I think what do you see from the amount of people who watch the videos is that, yes, there are a lot of other people.

people who find it useful. So that's how I think about it. I think I'm being useful. That's the bottom line. Okay. So now I'd like to ask you some audience questions. And then I have my patented questions that I call the quintessential quattro, the fantastic four, which have been updated since the first time you were on the show two or three years ago. Okay, first question comes from audience member who has a lovely name, which I would have reconsidered for one of my kids, and that's his name is Zero Skull. And he says, first of all, remember, it's Zabina, not Sabina. Okay, fine, thank you, Zero Skull.

But he says, I want to ask you, Sabina, what misconception about science do you see most often from your audience? I think in the denialist camp, you get a lot of people who are like, They're just in for it for the money, which I think is just ridiculous. Like if you know any scientists, right, in academia, money isn't the reason they're there. Right, exactly. You also ask about, do you read any science fiction? Not recently. I, on occasion, read some kind of short story, but recently I've been more into fantasy.

I've discovered, which I think is pretty cool. So, you know, they're the werewolves in London and they kind of stuff. And I think it's awesome. Okay. Oh, great. So a few more questions from my YouTube audience. And then we got some on Twitter. So a reminder, you can subscribe to Sabina's channel.

And then I always take audience questions. So I've got an interview with Roger Penrose coming up. So leave your questions on my channel. For those folks, I have an interview with Mutti Milgram coming up, Sabina, which you'll be interested in. talk about some of your ideas and in phase transitions and condensed matter, dark matter ideas, superfluids. So there's another question that's coming from someone named Scarlace. And Scarlace here, she says, I love her videos. I have a question for her.

She has repeatedly bashed theories like string theory for being scientifically lacking in their predictive power or provability. Yet she believes in super determinism. How does she rationalize this position? Well, because superdeterminism does make predictions. I mean, like, I've given talks about this. I've written papers about it. The problem is that the experiments are not being done. So I'm trying to get people to actually do these experiments.

I'm actually, I'm always surprised that people think I'm bashing strength theory or that I'm highly skeptical of it or something. I actually think that string theory does have quite some merit. It's based on a good idea and it was trying to solve an actual problem, which is the missing quantization of gravity. I think he kind of went into the wrong direction when they were trying to how to make things work out and so on and so forth. Maybe if they had been a little more intellectually honest early on, then it wouldn't have gone downhill.

Some interesting things that have come out of it. And the ADS-CFT stuff is certainly worthwhile. So that's all fine with me. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your oceanfront 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.

So Siznad Saitisitos asked, what do you think about the free will theorem? And have you seen John Conway's lectures on it, his philosophical arguments? I think if you look at it the right way, way free will theorem and super determinism will turn out to be equivalent. Now I always say, Sabine,

I believe in free will because I have no other choice. But what do you make about this? Free will, obviously, it plays it. And I think the main answer is by the book because she covers that in great detail and she has some videos on it. Buy it, listen to it in all three formats.

So maybe we'll move on to other questions. Here's a question. The nothing channel. Sabina is critical of the particle physics field, but is also against building larger colliders. I understand her points, but then how does she think we go forward? Should we just give up on particle physics until we get more clues to guide us? And how will we get those clues?

Thank you, Nothing, Channel. It's not that I'm against particle physics or something like this. I've been very specifically against building this super expensive future circular collider. because I just think it's too much money for too little benefit. Now, there are certainly interesting things that you can still do in particle physics. It's not that I'm saying, let's throw out all particle physicists. I'm not quite that bad. But also, I mean, I've extensively talked about what we should do instead, right?

I've literally written a whole book about it. I'm saying we should focus on trying to resolve actual inconsistencies. For example, the missing quantization of gravity is one of them, and there's the measurement problem. There's also dark matter, which he just said you'll be talking about with someone in a channel in the near future. So, which, of course, we're already doing experiments about, like, for example, the web telescope, right, is giving us better data as we speak. And there's certainly something that we will learn from it about dark matter. So it's not like we're completely stuck without building this huge collider. Good.

Okay. So now we're going to go to Twitter where Sabina is prolific and monumental in her questions and answers and hot takes on all topics. So her Twitter handle is S-K-D-H. Ask her, Paul Simeon is asking, ask her to explain why statistical independence in the Bell inequality test, is a stand-in for the desire of some physicists to have libertarian free will. Now, again, this is a major topic of the book, but I would just say, could you summarize that do these tests, the Zilinger test, the other thing, do they have any, have they influence you in any way, or do you think that there would be, you know, basically no point in really revisiting them? What's your take on these Bell inequality tests, the Zylinger test, etc? So I have no idea why Statisticate Independence was connected with free will.

I don't know if you saw that Matt, Matt, whatever, his last name from PBS Space Time, made a video about superdeterminism a week ago or something, and he made this pretty clear, and I think it's entirely correct. it has nothing to do with free will. I think the way that he put it, which I thought was pretty funny, if philosophers have decided exactly what they mean by free will, we can talk about it again, and it's not going to happen, right? So I'm afraid it's one of those cases where physicists

attached a certain label to a mathematical assumption, and people just took it to mean too much. So I think we'd all be better off if we wouldn't refer to statistical independence as the free will assumption or the free choice assumption. Great. Okay. Last question from the audience on my Twitter channel. We have many, many more 50, 150 questions across all my platforms.

People we could go all day. I think the last one I'll ask is related to something that past guest Don Hoffman said on my channel. and upcoming guest, Dr. Nima, Arkani Ahmed, who's promised repeatedly to come on, so hopefully he'll make good on that. I'm going to see him next year in the UK, so I'm going to bring my trusty recorder with me and act like Sabina on a journey to understand these heroes.

But anyway, Nima says that space time is doomed. What do you think of him? Actually, let me ask you a first question, Sabina. I've never understood this quote by your countryman, Albert here, Albert Einstein, who said that, here at him, after space time is doomed to never, to the dustbin of history, or something, I don't know, he said something about that.

He was wrong, you know, almost as many times as he was right, and it's too bad because he could have had a good career, as I always say. But anyway, what did he mean by time is doomed and space is doomed and only a union of the two will survive? What does that mean? Is that just hyperbole? And then what are your thoughts on NEMA's kind of echoing of the great, of the great Einstein. So my history might fail me, but I think it was Einstein, it was Minkowski,

because he introduced Minkowski, space time, and he made this statement about how space and time on their own are doomed to fade into whatever, I can't actually quote it. But of course, it was Einstein who actually figured out what to do with it, right? So this is where Einstein comes to now, now what strings theory is or what Nima mean with this today, I believe they mean that space time is emerging in some sense. It comes about from something else. It's like an approximate description and there's some underlying reality. And that may be. I'm quite sympathetic to this idea, but I also don't think that it necessarily has to be the case. It might just be that space time ultimately is the fundamental thing.

Einstein said so many things. He's like what Roger Penrose says about Stephen Hawking is that you should always have made a bet with him because he was either wrong or eventually he'd flip his perspective and you'd win the bet no matter what. And we didn't get into black holes and information. I'm sorry. We'll save that for part five. But Sabina, I've got four more questions.

If you don't mind, we'll try to keep it in under five minutes. Do you mind answering my fantastic four questions? I'll do my best. Okay. So the first question I ask is really revolves around your life and the brevity of life. The stoics say we should meditate daily on the fact that we're all going to die in the Bible. It has said that the righteous live to be 120 years old. So we're about a third or a half of the way there in my case, maybe a third of the way there in your case.

Anyway, I want to ask you, Sabina, when you do depart from this chunk of space dust, what wisdom or values do you most want to leave in what's known as an ethical will? Or in Hebrew, it's called a Zava-a. It's basically something that contains your personal wisdom for both your biological children and your ideological children. Oh, Jesus, that's a big question. So I guess what I'm trying to communicate a lot is that we're all in this together on this planet. We're not single individuals and we have to think about how we interact with other people on a global scale. And I think I would like to lead behind a little bit more awareness about how difficult it can be to make sense of human interaction on such a large scale.

Like we see it, for example, on social media, like I think this is something that has brought the issue to a lot of people's attention, but it's also something, of course, that we see in politics, right? Yes, exactly. Thank you, Sabina, for that answer. The next question revolves around

a far more distant future event, which is billions of years from now, perhaps, if you've ever seen the movie, 2001, a space odyssey by renowned science fiction author Arthur C. Clark, who is the namesake for the Institute here that I associate director of, Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Anyway, there are these monoliths and these apes and primates see them, and then they kind of go around the universe, and we're not really sure what they are. But I want to ask you, if you had a time capsule that would last for a billion years, and you want to put on it or in it,

not a CD-ROM or something, but you want to put something in it that summarized the grandiosity of humanity, of what we had achieved maybe in science. And you wanted to do so. What would you put on this monolith? What would you put in it? What fact or attribute of human accomplishment is most worthy to brag about some future alien civilization? So I guess I'm afraid I would go for something obviously high-tech. you know, whatever's available at the time, maybe a quantum computer,

something like this. If I don't have a quantum computer, maybe just a phone, just something that shows. Look, at least we got that far, right? Yeah, and we made newsletters, which you subscribe to. Great. Okay. Now, the last two questions.

That's right. We tweeted. Okay. Second to last question, Savina. Another quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark, who says, when a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, they are most certainly right. When they say something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.

I want to ask you, Sabina, what have you most recently changed your mind about, not that you're elderly, but what have you changed your mind about in science? Well, I constantly changed my mind back and forth on a couple of questions. One of them is like, is the modified gravity or dark matter? I think I've switched back and forth a couple of times. Another thing that we touched on is the question, do gravitons exist? Like, is gravity actually quantized? Or is it emergent and you really only have gravitational waves?

So those are a couple of things that I switch back and forth on. Yeah, I guess that during this whole pandemic thing, I've also changed my mind on some issues of science communication, if that counts. I see that there's a big virtue in getting things out in a simple form. I guess it's not so surprising that as a scientist myself, I are on the side of too much information, right? because I'm always like, they need to know all this in all the asterisks and the fine print. But I think I realize that there are situations where this just doesn't work. You know, you have to put out a simple message and just tell people what to do. Very good.

Okay, Sabina. The final fourth question of my existential questions, as I called them, even before you wrote this wonderful book, Existential Physics, is revolving going back in your own personal world line. And it is relevant to Sir Arthur C. Clark's so-called third law. And he said, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And guess what? That's how I got the name of my podcast.

Very creative, isn't it? I'm going back in your life, what mysterious aspect of your life perplexed you when you're a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old? And yet, looking back through the lens, the third-year-old, the third-year-old. telescope of time. Now would you tell yourself, you'd give yourself advice as a 20-year-old to give you the courage to do what you've done and go into the impossible. Well, so I don't, I'm afraid I don't really know how to answer this question. I think if I look back when I got interested in physics, it was pretty much through the impossible. It was it was through science fiction and, you know, hyperdrives and and all that.

kind of fancy stuff that they have in science fiction. And I wanted to know how much of it is actually true. Like, you know, how much of it is real science? How much can you actually do? And so, yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe for me that, that's the thing. I kind of secretly believe that it's actually possible to travel faster than the speed of light, not within the theories that we currently have, but that may not be the end of the story. maybe the aliens will tell us, right, Sabina? Well, Sabina, it's been a delight as always taught. Sorry, if I can just ask for this,

this is why I think it matters, because if there are aliens out there and they have further developed technology, they would be using the faster than light drive, right? That's right, exactly. That's the promise that aliens hold for us if it's not indeed religion, and it is an existential matter in any case.

And Sabine, I want to thank you for everything you do around the world, inspiring literally millions of people through your videos, your books, your blog, your newsletter, all of which I subscribe to. And you should, too, and get this wonderful new book, and her first book, Lost in Math. It's a beautiful companion to these two. Anything else you'd like to mention, Sabina, that you're like my viewers and listeners to know about?

No, I mean, this is just wonderful love talking to you. I think you have a great channel with a lot of super interesting interviews. Thank you, Sabina. That means the multiverse to me. And Sabina, I want to thank you for everything you do around the world, inspiring literally millions of people through your videos, your books, your blog, your newsletter, all of which I subscribe to. And you should, too, and get this wonderful new book and her first book.

lost in math. It's a beautiful companion to these two. Anything else you'd like to mention, Sabina, that you're like my viewers and listeners to know about? No, I mean, this is just wonderful love talking to you. I think you have a great channel with a lot of super interesting interviews. Thank you, Sabina. That means the multiverse to me. All right. I'll let you get on. Good night. Thank you. again soon, I hope. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from men. Well, that is a wrap on what was a delightful and funny and wide-ranging interview

with the really incomparably intellectually parapetetic Sabina Hasenfelder. And speaking of traveling, I can't resist this joke, which I was going to levy on her. You know, Germans are known for their sense of humor. But I just forgot. But speaking of traveling, did you hear the joke about a neutron who was traveling, got tired, walked into a bar and asked the bartender, how much for a whiskey? The bartender said, for you, no charge. Oh, it works on very many levels, maybe one level. And if that didn't turn you off and you're still listening, I do hope that you'll stay tuned for many, many more interesting episodes of the Into the Impossible podcast, including one, hopefully with Nima Akanehammed, as I mentioned, and with Nick Bostrom about the simulation hypothesis.

and many, many other delightful interviews coming up. And I want to ask you one question, which is to leave a review for yours truly. And you can do that on iTunes. You can leave a rating on almost any podcast app on Spotify, on iTunes, on Audible. So please do leave a rating. Advertisers look at those things and actually iTunes looks at it in order to promote the podcast to a wider audience. And I'm really only asking for your help to do that.

So here's an example of a review that you can leave on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, as it's now called. Cutting Edge. Amazing podcast. And this comes from Downanda in Australia, from Tim with an unpronounceable series of consonants. Amazing podcast. UAPs will push the frontier of the following fields. Propulsion, material science, physics, math, energy, consciousness, and space travel.

Keep peeling back the layers. It's very fun. Well, I find it really fun. Another one just said first-time listener couldn't be more excited to find a new podcast to dive into that focuses on many topics I have a desire to learn about. I've been through all of Minescape and Lex Friedman shows. And I'm happy to embark on catching up with The Into the Impossible. This is from Joe in the United States. So please do leave me a review. It will help so much on Apple Podcasts. And you can leave a rating on Apple, Spotify, et cetera, et cetera.

So for now, I want to leave you with that. And also, you can leave a question for me. On my podcast website, takes questions via what's called SpeakPipe. You can leave a little voicemail for me. And I listen to every single one. That's Brian Keating.com slash podcast. Find it there. I'm going to be doing an Ask Me Anything episode. By the time you hear this in early August, you will also be getting solicited for a special 70K subscriber on YouTube,

Q&A with BK, and I hope you'll submit some questions in various formats there. You can do that on Twitter, Dr. Brian Keating, YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating, and on Instagram, same handle. Anyway, for now, I want to thank you for going so deeply into The Impossible Me, Sabina Hossenthalder, and all the topics and friends we made along the way. We're now signing off, wishing you to all have a magical, magical week ahead. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th,

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