Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Sabine Hossenfelder: I Changed My Mind About Dark Matter! (#355)

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Welcome everybody to an existential edition of the Into the Impossible podcast with one of my favorite human beings and one of your favorite human beings too, judging by my comment sections on Twitter and YouTube – Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder! For those of you who don’t know Sabine, she is a German theoretical physicist, talented science communicator, bestselling author, and very successful YouTuber.  Today, Sabine and I talk about her latest book, Existential Physics, the current state of academia, whether we need to reform our educational system, why Sabine keeps changing her mind about dark matter, what the deal is with quantum computers and much more! As always with Sabine, it was a great conversation, so tune in! Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) Judging a book by its cover: Existential Physics (01:40) Should scientists promote their research? (04:32) Thoughts on the educational system (18:49) What excites Sabine the most in science (36:12) What annoys Sabine most in science (40:37) Brandolini law and MOND theory (42:19) The global mental health crisis (53:36) Muon g-2 (57:02) Audience questions (1:00:26) Outro (1:09:17) — Additional resources:  🥗 Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. 📝 With a MasterClass annual membership, you can take one-on-one classes from the world’s best for $10 a month with your annual membership, get unlimited access to every class — and even better, right now, as an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off when you go to MASTERCLASS.com/impossible. 🧑‍💻 Visit LinkedIn.com/IMPOSSIBLE to post your job for free! 🎤 Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 📚 Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://a.co/d/3AK10pI  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So if it's not dark matter, then what else could it be? Sabina Hasenfelder is one of the most popular science communicators on YouTube. You can't spell Sabina Hasenfelder without the letters NO BS. She's beloved for her no nonsense, no BS attitude towards science. I never had a chance to become an Olympic swimmer. Is that fair? And renowned for her ability to simplify the world's most challenging topics, to educate millions across the world. Join us as we dive deep into some of the biggest questions in science today,

such as, is the global mental health crisis real? Well, I was trying to figure out if there really is one. How old is the universe really? We use the word Big Bang to mean three different things. And does dark matter even exist? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Welcome everybody to an existential edition of The Into the Impossible podcast with not only one of my favorite human beings, but your favorite human being by judging in the comments section on Twitter and YouTube.

It's Dr. Savina Hasenfeld. They're joining us all the way from Baden, Baden or someplace in Germany somewhere, Heidelberg. Savina, how are you this evening where you are? Yeah, I'm good. It's about this thunderstorm about to come down. So you might get to hear it. And it's called Baden-Burtainberg. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'll get you to pronounce some Spanish names of places in San Diego. We'll see how it goes. Sabina, you were always welcome on the podcast. We love hosting you and having you. And we love watching your videos and doing so many of the cool things that you take us on your adventures with you. But today is a special day, or it's commemorating or recording this because your second book, this book here, Existential Physics, is now out in paperback, which for some reason they wait a

year after a hardcover comes out and they put out a paperback. That is the inciting incident. That is why we are talking today, although, as I said, I always love talking to you. So Sabina, as you know on this channel, we always love to do the thing you're forbidden by law to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. But I would like you to anyway, nevertheless, please take the listeners and viewers through the process of this mesmerizing books cover, the title, the subtitle, and the beautiful butterfly on the cover. I'll start by saying that the original title that I picked for the book was more than this, which was supposed to say, physics is so much more than what you normally learn at school. And, you know, it's touching on all those big existential questions.

But my editor wanted to have the word physics right in the title. So he came up with this existential physics, and I think it was actually a really good decision. You know, the title that I picked, you know, I have some personal feelings about it. But objectively, I think it was a better choice. And the butterfly, this was actually my idea. So I made a little draft, you know, kind of a sketch where I had a butterfly that was fading out into dots. And it was supposed to say the butterfly is made up of particles, basically. But it's also so much more than this. And so I insisted on keeping the butterfly, basically. And also if you looked at my first book, Lost in Mouth, it has this very dark cover with, these confusing lines on top of it. And I've always found this a little bit depressing. So I wanted to have something light, something friendly and colorful. Very good. And the subtitle,

A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions. Aren't scientists supposed to stick to the laboratory and the equations? As a famous scientist told me on Twitter, we need specialists. That was you. Well, again, this was my editors doing. It's basically, it's a summary of what's in the book writes. So every chapter is the question and then I have my answers. When we confront kind of the public's appreciation of science and their relationship between what a scientist does and what a layperson does, as they're called, last week I got a lot of vitriolic, you know, kind of hot takes on my hot take. You know, I claim that, you know, it's unusual that science needs popularizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson and, you know, Brian Cox and Brian Greene.

and Brian Keating and Sabina Hasenfelder because, you know, when you had like the movie Barbie came out, I'm sure you saw it. I saw it a couple times with my girls. But, you know, the actors are forced by contract to go out on the road and talk about the movie. And they are actually getting in public relations and had a charm and schmooze. And I said, why don't we have that done by scientists? And you said, no, it's not good. We should have people. in the lab, doing what laboratory scientists do. But I, of course, go to your reference material. So I went to your book, and I read the following. As Steve Fuller claims that academics use incomprehensible terminology to keep insights sparse and therefore more valuable. As the American

journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Nicholas Christoph complained, academics encode insights into turgid pros. And as a double protection against public consumption, this gobbledygook is sometimes hidden in obscure journals. I'm going to do a mic drop now, Sabina. Sabina, who's right? Sabina on Twitter last week or Sabina in writing in this book? First of all, this is the origin of the word gobbledygook. In the title of my channel name. I think this is a misunderstanding. What I said on Twitter wasn't that no one should do it. I said, not all scientists should do that. It's not necessary. And I think many of them just aren't good at it or they wouldn't want to do it. Like if everyone who wanted to go into science would be forced to go out on, you know, some kind of tour and schmooze with people,

we'd lose a lot of good people because they're just not interested in it. And also, I'm not any good at schmoozing. I might be good at something. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. 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. You are. You are one of the most in-demand speakers. I see you on the IAI channel, like every week. I see you in the media. But I guess just as I do with love and respect for you, I say, yes, it is hard to do it. But you know what? So is calculating nuclear recoil cross-sections or so is soldering a ballometer circuit. These things are not easy to do. And actually, I wasn't born knowing how to compute Feynman diagrams. And they're not fun when you're doing like 80 of them. So I would just push back with respect to you and say, a lot of things that are hard are worth doing only after the fact, like exercise and dieting

and stuff, right? Those are hard things to do. But my point is merely that if we relegate the cool script that Mother Nature has given us, the incredible magic that's real as you talk about in this book, you know, in your recent videos, you know, then you're left with just this class of people that just do popularization. And then our students don't learn these valuable soft skills. And I guess I wanted to just ask you about that. You're not. a professor, but you've been in academia, you know, almost as long as I have. And I want to ask your kind of thoughts on what is academia going to look like in a few years? How would you see the role of things like new media, like YouTube channels, like books and communication, AI, chat GPT,

avatars, multiverse, metaverse. Sabina, tell me, what are your thoughts about the future of education? Because surely it's gone on, you know, for longer than it should have in the in its current form. What are your thoughts about the future of education and our obligation to our students? So what I was trying to get at is that scientists at the moment, they're just asked to do too many things. They're supposed to do research. They're supposed to do teaching. They're supposed to do mentoring. They're supposed to write grants. They're supposed to review. They're supposed to organize workshops. And things keep being added to the list. And it just, it doesn't work and it doesn't make any sense.

So what I meant with my tweet is that I think science communication is worthy pursuit that some scientists should do, but it shouldn't be something that should be lumped onto the budget of everyone. So maybe we should have some people who don't teach, but instead do science communication. Why not take some of the burden off of our current workload as you do? Exactly. as I do. Yeah. So I wasn't saying that we have to keep everything we're doing now currently. But by the way, Sabina, you know, if I only knew that COVID was over because I went to the, you know,

string theory department of my, of my physics department, and I saw the string theorists were not back to work yet. So that was how I knew that COVID was over. We had returned to its pre-pendemic level of inactivity. No, I mean, some of these, I mean, unfortunately, I fight with my theoretical friends. You know, it's even harder for experimentalists because we have to travel these places. have to build these experiments. They're not located. We have to leave our hometown. You know, theorists can, so I always say a theorist should teach twice as much as experimentalist and I get a lot of punches to the face. But, but anyway, I wasn't suggesting that you just keep adding stuff on morely, more than that just to augment. I mean, Sabina, you, you make kind of light of it, but you're an excellent communicator. I don't know if you've had training. I haven't really had training. I'm kind of thinking about having more, getting vocal training maybe or how to interview people because I'm not that great at it. But, you know, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've put effort into it. And it shows. And my only point is for my students, this is incredibly valuable. I've had students from China, Thailand. I had one of my best friends now. He's graduated, so now I can be friends with. Praween Serra Tanassak. He's got the longest name of anyone.

He's a PhD now. He got his in my laboratory, worked on polar bear in Chile. And he could barely speak English when he started at UCSD. I forced him. I paid for him to go to Toastmasters, which is like a speaking club, where you just go and talk about like the weather, you know, whatever, it's not technical. And he emerged a much better speaker. So my only point is we know better what skills are going to be required when these young people are older. And I guess my question to you is, should it be part of their education starting early? It seems to me it would only be a good.

But, you know, I'll give you the last word on this. I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about now. Is it just that everyone should learn English or is it actually. about, you know, how you communicate, complicated scientific things. Everyone should have training as part of some of their education where they learn communicating not only for their own benefit, but the fact is the public pays our salary. You know, we're only talking because, you know, we were paid by the government and by our home nations to hopefully have some return on investment.

And so not only do I think it would be good for the students, eventually it's good for science, because if the public just feels like, oh, you eggheads don't care about me, They're going to say, why are we giving, you know, $20 billion to find water on the moon's south pole or whatever? Anyway, I'm asking you, the concrete question is, should it not, should it or should it not be part of their science education along, you know, scientific communication? You know, a basic understanding would probably be helpful. I mean, you never know in what position they'll end up in. You know, maybe they'll end up being the president of the university or something and constantly like to talk to politicians. star with a million followers, Sabine?

I mean, how could you possibly? You couldn't have known that. Your career took so many different paths and changes and so forth. Yeah, well, so you asked me, did I have any particular training? The answer is no. So I learned everything by doing, which, you know, I like doing that kind of thing. It is also, for the most part, how I learned physics. You know, I have to do things, you know.

Give me a paper. I'll try to figure out what they did in the paper. That's how it works to me. But when it comes to YouTube, I've actually been thinking about this recently. It's a much bigger problem because there basically isn't anyone I can ask. Like, who am I going to ask? Right. Yeah.

And so it's actually a little bit peculiar because if you look at science writing, like written communication, you know, there are associations and they have workshops and they have books that you can read. And, you know, I read some of those books. So there's something that you can build on. And there are some seminars and you can hire people to train students. But when it comes to YouTube, it's like, you have to ask someone else who does YouTube. That's basically the only thing you can do. Yeah.

And so getting it to a system and a team and you work with a small team, but it's hard. Yeah. I mean, I'm looking at you with a million. You'll have a million subscribers by the time this comes out. And, you know, congratulations on that huge accomplishment. I also want to, you know, I just love like teasing you, but one of the, you said, oh, it's so easy now. I thought it was so hard when I started, but now I realize it's so easy anybody could do it. Sabina, come on.

You have, I have a book around here. It's called The Unfair Advantage. And it's all about these things of points of privilege that many of us have. And I admit them. I'm a tenured, full professor at a top research university. That gives me a lot of credibility to get guests on my podcast like you. and so forth, that written book. You have tremendous gifts and you have tremendous work ethic.

And I wonder, you know, if you really were being serious or tongue and cheek about a million for me right now at 153,204, nobody's counting. But it seems impossible. It seems like it'll never happen. And I'm happy. I'm content with that little plaque in the back that's silver. You're going to get a diamond one, a gold one. Anyway, Sabina, are you serious? Is it something anybody can do, even a schmuck like?

me. So first of all, I have a video coming up on how you can get to 1 million subscribers. But I would, you know, I would really like to say a lot of it is organization and what you're willing to do. Like, you have to be willing to cater to your audience. You have to, you have to try and figure out what people want and then try to produce that content. And it's really a question of, is this really something that you want? Like, as you say, you're a professor. This is not the reason I'm talking to you, but we both know this. And so maybe you just have other goals, right? You have certain interests that you want to communicate and growing your channel to a large size is not the only thing you can do on YouTube.

You know, you can have a specialist interest group and keep that community alive and maybe attracting a huge number of people. It just isn't what you want. There are many things that I could think of that I could do on my. channel that will probably get me many more subscribers, but it's not a pass that I want to go down. How do you balance the many responsibilities and interests and family and stuff? How do you find that balance, the work-life balance? I mean, you're talking to me, it's about 5 or 6 p.m. there. Your workday is still going on, right? So how do you balance it? How do you outsourced? You get help from a team? What's your kind of goal to deal with, overwhelm? Because you put out two pieces of

content, video content a week. You put out a newsletter that I subscribe to. You put out multiple books in multiple formats. You speak in multiple conferences and other people's channels. Do you have a workflow? Do you have any kind of advice to say somebody who's just starting out, of which there are many, many people starting out in this field and want to be science YouTubers and so forth. So what's your advice to kind of avoid burnout as you do? Yes, that's a very good point. So first of all, it's half past seven. And not, no, Normally, I don't do podcasts that late at night, so I make an exception for you. But no, seriously, normally I say no to that kind of thing because I want to have some kind of private life, which I'm really weird about.

But I feel it's really necessary for my mental health, so to speak. Honestly, at the moment, my work-life balance is not working all that well. It's partly because there have been some people who have been dropping out when I do. didn't expect it. And so, you know, if someone isn't available when they should be, then in the end, it's always me who has to get things done. Sooner or later, I'll have to find a different way to arrange it. But at the moment, what we're doing is we have a very well-organized workflow that includes about 10 people and we have a task list that we check off every week because Whereas it's happened over and over again that we forgot one thing and then other things didn't work out.

And so, you know, we stood up late at night and tried to fix things. It's partly somewhat of a self-generated problem because, I mean, it's not like anyone is forcing me to do two videos a week. But once you've kind of arranged it with the agency and with the sponsors, they're expecting the videos to appear, not necessarily at a particular. date and time, but within a certain time frame. So some of that flexibility that you have as being one person who puts out a very every once in a while gets lost. And so I guess part of the reason I get it done is just that I've always been very organized.

It's my German genes, I suppose. And so, I mean, you know, right? You've been to workshops that I've organized. right? It's just exactly. So it's the kind of thing that comes to me naturally, keeping track of how things are going. And I guess, you know, I'm trying to make the best of it.

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softer side of our conversation, but I am really interested in getting your insights into education. You are not a professor, but I think you've probably educated more people or around the world than I have and many, you know, full tenured professors. And I know that that would have been a great, you know, career, you know, in the, in the, in the ever-ready in, you know, many

worlds branch that we don't live on, but that you would have been an outstanding professor. And I would love to have had you as a teacher. And I learn a lot from you. But what do you think about education, Sabina? What do you think, not just for the, you know, graduate advanced level, but at the undergraduate level, it's largely unchanged from the first university in the, northern Italy in the year 1080, you know, some dude scratching on a rock with another piece of rock, you know, on a chalkboard of doing whatever, except back then, Sabine, I don't know if you knew this, but the students didn't like the professor. The students would go on strike and the professor wouldn't get paid. So thank God that barbaric tradition has ended. But what do you make

of the kind of threats to academia and maybe the opportunities, things like avatars, AI, etc. What do you make of education? Is it okay? Am I off base here? Or do you think education at the undergraduate level needs to be reformed in any way? I agree that education is like super important because basically the only reason that human civilization got to this point is because we're really good at handing on knowledge to the next generation. So this is not something that we should neglect. I really think that schools and higher education are much more important for civilization than most people appreciate. I personally, I think that like this personal contact that we have with professors and so on is still necessary. You know, if you do everything online with huge

classes and automate everything, you're losing a lot of people because they really need this personal contact. And, you know, it's not as simple as just saying, well, I record my classes and then put it on, I don't know, YouTube or some other platform and people can check off their multiple choice test or whatever. And that's the end of it. I think that just won't work. It's like the human brain just wasn't meant to learn that way.

Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at opportunities for, you know, for growth. And I've actually been involved with a team here at UCS. that's making virtual reality avatars right now just on a computer screen. And we currently started just with Gandhi and Feynman. But the idea is that we have a picture, you know, a video of an interactive person. You would have a microphone and there would be a speaker. And you'd come up and say, you know, we digitize all of Feynman's work. And I put it on and we made something called a Finebot.

Right now it's just text. You can only text to the person to the avatar. I've always called them a person. And Feinbot will be animated Richard Feynman eventually. And my voice will be transcribed. Then it will be uploaded to chat GPT. Then it will be rendered as if he's talking and saying, you know, his answer. And it will come out in his voice because we can speech synthesize his voice.

And it just makes me think, you know, why learn, you know, relativistic quantum mechanics from Brian Keating or, you know, I won't say Sabina Hassan Phel. But I'll say from Brian Keating, why learn, you know, a basic astronomy. when you could have Galileo. And Galileo's words, I have access to, I don't have his voice, nobody does. But we have, we have access to a million of his written words and his thought process. He was an excellent educator. So why not have this? And basically, you know, shortcut the first couple of years of undergraduate education with the best teachers around the world, including maybe, you know, people like you and me.

Anyway, that's our goal is we're trying to make AI and actually have it do something useful in the education space. to get to an advanced level quicker. That's our goal. Yeah, well, sounds good. A lovely initiative, certainly. In your book, you talk a lot in existential physics, a scientist's guide to life's biggest questions. First chapter involves a lot of discussions of mathematics,

and we talked last time about your beef with Max Tagmark that, what did you say? You said, I listened to it again. you said, Max Taggart believes reality is all mathematical. That's fine, but it's not scientific. But in there you have Vigner's famous quote, the unreasonable effectiveness of math in the physical sciences. And I've changed that around. I've changed it now to say, this is Keating's maximum now. Keating says the unreasonable effectiveness of hype in the physical sciences. This past month, you made multiple videos about LK99 about all these new and fusion breakthroughs

on your channel. What is going on? Why is hype so prevalent nowadays? And maybe we'll start with the LK99 debacle. What was your take? We just lived through this. Maybe explain to people what was claimed. And if you think it was justified, the hype that was present both in the scientific circles, but mostly on Twitter. The LK99, I actually found this super exciting. You know, It was such a lovely public demonstration of how scientists think and work. You know, there were like, okay, this could be really interesting. Let's try and do it. And everyone rushing to try to reproduce the thing.

And I thought it was such a lovely view inside science that the public normally doesn't get. So this is why I talked about it. Honestly, I didn't really understand what they were trying to explain. explain in the paper with the, they had a particular theory for why the thing would work and so on. But in any case, so I thought that it really showcases why scientists are in science. You know, they're excited about this kind of thing. I wouldn't even count this as hype because surprisingly enough, most of the major newspapers didn't even report on it, right?

So this is, I think, why my videos did so well, exactly because the standard media didn't want to write about it. So I'm not sure that this is a good example of hype. There have been other cases of hype. You mentioned the second one. I've already forgotten nuclear fusion. Yeah, the fusion results from late last year, earlier this year, the earlier superconducting room temperature superconductivity claims. And then we'll get to some other. other claims.

Yeah. Here's one. But, you know, I mean, look at what happened with the fusion thing. So the first NIF shot, you know, was big news, like national news, press release, basically. And then the second one, everyone was like, oh, yeah, but this is the same thing they've already done previously, right? So no one wanted to hear about it. So I thought it was pretty funny, actually.

But, yeah, I mean, there's some real promise in that kind of thing. And also, I mean, when it comes to the NIA, There's a lot of national pride behind it, of course, which I understand. So this is why the American newspapers make a big deal out of it. I can understand that. So recently I had the opportunity to go on Joe Rogan experience, and that was kind of predicated in some sense because of some earlier hype that occurred this summer, which is when he kind of put out a tweet based on a single author paper from the University of Ottawa,

And it was by Professor Gupta there. And he had done some calculations and claimed that he could reconcile the JWST galaxy early evolution population due to a combination of an extended, a longer extended period, extended age of the universe. And he claimed it was 26 billion years old. And then Joe Rogan tweeted this out and he said, this is amazing to think that the universe is 26 billion years old, twice as old as scientists thought. And I don't know why like 26 would be more shocking than 13.8, but anyway, let's say it is. And then Elon Musk, our friend and proprietor of the X platform, he chimed in and said, yeah, but, you know, to me, dark matters the more sketchy or more sketch than, and this sent the Twitterverse into apoplexy. And they went nuts about both of these guys. Well, they talked about these jokers.

And so I talked about this with Joe when I was on his podcast and we'll put a link to that somewhere in the notes. But he clearly is very interested in this. But do these people like Musk and Rogan, do they have an obligation to not spread hype? And if so, how do they know it's not hype? I did a podcast with Allison Kirkpatrick, who was the victim last year. She's a professor in Kansas. And this guy, Eric Lerner, had put out a paper that said the big, or he put out, I think maybe you even appeared with him at the IAI festival. But he said that the Big Bang never happened.

And he's been saying this for 30 years, but last year it got a lot of attention. What do you make of these discussions about the age of the universe? And we cosmologists, especially when people like me doing observation, we don't know what the hell we're doing. First, describe that. Did the Big Bang happen, Sabina? Is the universe 26 billion years old or is it not? Well, first of all, so this Eric, what's his name? Lerner, Lera, something like this, whatever.

So I was about to look at this. And then I saw that you made a great video about it. And I thought, oh, great, Brian has done it. So I don't have to look at it. You could tell me when you're proud of me. I would really like that. Just send me a matter. Yeah, no.

I mean, it was a great video. Everyone should watch it. Yeah. So and then I didn't really have to think about it. I thought I wrote something about this for Nautilus magazine because part of the confusion is that we use the word big bang to mean three different things. There are some people who use the word big bank theory to describe everything that expands, basically. And then there is like this hypothetical first moment in time, which we can debate whether it actually happened or what it even means for something like this to happen.

And if we can never figure out, and they go on about this in my book. And then some people actually use the big bank theory to specifically refer to Lambda CDM, which is even more restrictive. I think part of the reason people get confused about it, it's just because we, as scientists, use the word confusingly when we talk to the broader public. Like, in the literature, it's not an issue, of course, because if people mean Lambda CDM, they write Lambda CDM, right? So that was that about the thing with the 26 years. I didn't even look at the paper, you know.

I read it the press release and I was like, okay, there's this one guy who's written a paper and he has some calculation, God knows, you know, do I even want to spend my time? Look at it. I mean, there are only so many hours in the day. Actually, I saw later that, of course, Dr. Becky, what's her name, Rebecca? Smithhurst. Yeah, exactly.

Did a wonderful video about it. And so I was like, yeah, you know. Of course, people ask me a lot about this, but I'm like, you know, I better. things to do. So I find it a little bit perplexing, actually, that you'd think that Joe and Musk, and so they should be able to figure out that just because there's one guy who managed to publish a paper in some journal, that the universe is twice as old, as everybody else said, it doesn't mean it's actually true, right? I mean, these things happen. Yeah, I did a video with Allison Kirkpatrick, because she had done, you know, when the, when the JDAVC data came out,

she's an expert in early galaxy formation, and she's an observer. She uses the web telescope, unlike me. And she, you know, she, when the results first came out, she is quoted in nature saying something like, you know, I'm in shock, you know, this just throws my whole world into disarray or something. And then learner used that to say, you know, cosmologist, oh, no, she said, I'm panicking at these results or something. And he used that as like panic, you know, people don't understand what's going on. And so I had her on. And then she and I talked for, you know, a while about it. And we went through thoroughly and different attributes.

And then the next day, Sabine, I get an email from Professor Gupta. I should say learner's not, he's not a PA. He works on like fusion and plasmas. And he has his favorite plasma cosmology. Wow, I just heard some plasma getting generated near you and Baden, Von, Vaden, Baden, over there. But Sabina, he wrote me, Professor Gupta wrote me the next day. he's like, and I was expecting him, you're an a-hole and how dare you and I'm going to sue you.

And actually, we'll talk about that from one of your friends, Professor Sarkar, in just a second. But anyway, Gupta, the author of the 26 billion year, he said, well, you know, I thank you. I still think I'm right, but I really appreciate what you did. And you should know that it's true. My media office at my campus was the one that really promoted it. He didn't want to like make this big splash. and they promoted it and it went to fizz.org and then they just print anything and then Joe Rogan finds it. But I wanted to ask, like, you are, you know, kind of very comfortable

talking about heterodox ideas. And in fact, you did a video with Sabir Sarkar, who really didn't like my first book. He really, he really, but we don't hear to talk about my favorite subject, which is me. We're here to talk about you. And when Subir, Professor Sarkar, you know, he's kind of an iconoclastic, you know, in that he's saying things like the cosmological principle doesn't hold. So how do you know, you know, if somebody is right, you know, like a Sarkar, I assume, you think he has, he's onto something. The cosmological principle may not be valid, versus someone like Gupta, who's also a professor, and a very brilliant person, and maybe you think this is not even worthy of your time. So how do you allocate your attention? That's your most

precious commodity, right? How do you know that Sarkar might be worth pursuing and Gupta not? For example? Well, I don't know. You know, it's just a totally biased, subjective opinion. So I'm afraid I have nothing intelligent to say about it. I would say that when it comes to the cosmological principle, like, why would anyone think that it's valid to begin with? Like, this is like literally an assumption that we just put into the model. Whereas, you know, the conclusion that the universe is 13.8 billion years. Oh, this is something that we extracted from the data. And yeah, it could be wrong, certainly.

But, you know, I wouldn't bet on it, I guess. I mean, the cosmological principle comes from people like Bondi and gold and, you know, Hoyle. They coined that term in kind of harmony with the Copernican principle, which I don't think you would reject. right. So they called this the perfect cosmological principle, and that was a motivation behind the steady state or what they called the quasi-steady state universe. In other words, that the universe shouldn't really care about where you are, who you are, or what you are, and that seems reasonable if you are a Copernican. So I guess that's why I would sort of treat the Copernican prince. Otherwise, you have to say there's something special about where we are, who we are, or what we are, I suppose. But I'll let you respond, and we can move on after this. Well, so certainly that's like the philosophical motivation for making this assumption, but in the end, it's just a mathematical assumption that we put into the models, and it might just be wrong. And so, I mean, there's always this question like, is the universe actually homogeneous on this particular scale?

This is what it comes down to. Like, at which scale does the universe begin to appear homogeneous on the average? And this is what Zuberi is picking out with his analysis. So he's just saying that, look, this assumption just doesn't fit with the data. And now the issue is that if you throw out the cosmological principle, it becomes very difficult to formulate mathematical models, as you certainly know, right? Basically, all those cosmological simulations and everything that we make, they kind of have this underlying assumption that the cosmological principle

is good. And if you don't have that, where you have to come up with something else. And some people are trying and well, we'll see what comes out of this. It's not something that I work on myself, but I think he's making a good point. It's peak pollination season,

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Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. I want to now pivot to things that excite you, that get you interested, as opposed to things that annoy you. So which of the most, you know, kind of recent 10 or so or five, maybe five, newsletters, and you should all subscribe to her newsletter. I get it. I love it every Wednesday. It's a little bit of sunshine to get me over the hump of hump day here in America.

I don't know if it comes out on Thursday over there. But anyway, Sabina, you detail all these great new discoveries, findings and stuff last weekend. Wow. All right. Thor has entered the podcast. Hello, Thor. Wow, that was powerful.

Or your microphone is really omnidirectional. Sabina, I was asking you, There was recently you had a really cute video. You talked about the bright wheeler process. And you said, I hope when they create matter from light that they will say, let there be matter. Maybe you can say it in your inimical voice.

But, but, Sabino, of your most recent few videos and newsletters, what things do you think will hope, or rather hope, I want to say, will hold up and be converted from,

you know, possible news to real news. What's excite to you the most? do the most. I'm terribly boring. I'm going to go with quantum computing. I think it's really exciting. It's also, it's like super interesting to see how much research there is and how quickly it's moving forward. People are trying all kinds of new approaches, as you probably kept track of this a little bit. Like there's now, photonic quantum computing is kind of moving forward very nicely. The topological quantum computing is back on the radar. Ironically enough, you know,

it was this weird thing that Microsoft was pursuing that no one really believed would work out. And then Google comes and says, you know, we made it work. And everyone was like, wait, what just happened? So I thought that was really interesting. And then I'm just, literally, I was just trying to figure out earlier today, what's with the optical tweezers. You know, there are people we used to work on the iron traps, but the thing with the ions is where they're charged, and that brings in a lot of problems. So now people are trying to use neutral atoms, hold in place with optical tweezers, and that has some advantages, and I'm trying to figure out what's going on there. That's really exciting. So I always joke that, you know, quantum computers are really good

at, you know, solving the everyday problem of, you know, the quantum Lagron. for a many-body system. Are they really useful? Talk about some of their applications and utility besides just solving Hamiltonians in quantum mechanics, as Feynman also mentioned many years ago. Yeah, well, I don't know if you saw this, but like one or two months ago, there was a big headline in the New York Times about IBM showing quantum utility. You look at the paper and what did they do?

It was the... Hang on, if you get this together. trotterized time evolution of the two-dimensional transverse field icing model. And so I'd say that this is not exactly what the average person means by utility. So I mean, don't get me wrong. It's like it's a super cute paper. You know, they actually, you can, you can just look at the map of the cubits and you see, oh, okay.

You know, it's a, it's a spin chain. So it simulates itself, basically. So, and I can understand why, why the people, People are excited about it, but it's a far away of being useful for any everyday applications, basically. But certainly the idea of quantum computing is just based on standard quantum mechanics, which is a very well-confirmed theory. And so for me, I think it's kind of a win-win situation. It's like either they get quantum computers to work, which will be super excited. because then you can suddenly solve certain kinds of problems much faster than we currently can.

Or they don't work, in which case there's something more on with quantum mechanics, which personally I would even find more interesting. Yeah, absolutely. So then I guess the other kind of side of this coin is, what would you say is like the most annoying trend in modern science? Is there anything that provokes you or irritates you most of all? I know you're known for being a, you know, very opinionated German woman, as it says, with crazy hair.

I don't know why they say that. But anyway, Sabina, what annoys you, if anything, about science the most or reporting on science the most? You know, science is a really broad subject. So, I mean, partly the issue comes from the press releases. Like, I find this just, like, really annoying for my science news when I put them out, is that the press releases, they often completely lack the context. Like, everything is groundbreaking and new, even if it's this tiny incremental thing,

you know, it's some pimple on a huge research field. And then you have to do the footwork yourself to try and figure out just exactly how much of this had been done previously. And more often than not, you find out whether this is actually not all that remarkable. And so it just creates a lot of knowledge. I think that's like 90% of those press releases shouldn't exist in the first place. It's like on a fish market where everyone's shouting, my fish is the biggest fish. You come and buy my fish.

It's kind of like this. And it's really, I haven't really found a good way to filter the stuff other than you're just looking at every damn thing, which waste a lot of time. And yeah, so I kind of basically, I'm the filter for other people now. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I want to refer you. Have you ever heard of the famous principle known as Brandolini's Law? No, I'm afraid not. Brandelini's Law is also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle.

It asserts that the time and energy to refute a false statement, particularly in the realm of complex topics like science, far exceeds the time and energy needed to create and disseminate that falsehood in the first place. Therefore, Sabina, the world. is full of unrefuted bullshit. How do you react to that principle? I'd heard of this. I just didn't know the name. It's certainly true if you look at what gets published in physics. I mean, we've all seen this, right?

I mean, there's just stuff that is really, really hard to get rid of. Like, one example that springs to my mind is the bullet cluster myth that I've complained about previously. So the idea that the bullet cluster rules out. modified gravity, which has been debunked over and over again. And actually, if you look at the paper, like if you look at the published literature, they're not even claiming this, but people keep repeating it anyway. Though in recent years it's died down a little bit, maybe I've complained about it enough. But so those are like typical problems, like zombie problems.

Or also, since we were talking about this previously, when Elon Mosque saying that he's kind of skeptical about dark matter. It seems a little bit sketchy. I'm not sure he actually knows what he's talking about. And so a lot of people who are not in astrophysics have this kind of reaction. Like they're just introducing some kind of stuff that we can't see to make the equations work out. You know, the only thing I can say is that they've actually thought about what they're doing a little bit. And if you know what's going on and actually does make a little bit, it's a little bit. And if you know what's going on, it actually does make a lot. lot of sense. And I say this even though I'm not a big fan of dark matter. Well, you should know that I actually cited you in reference by a teaching committee, a teaching evaluation committee comes to my cosmology class every year. And they want to check in on how good a teacher I am and what kind of stuff I'm teaching to my students. So the full professor happens to be a string theorist or high energy theorist came to evaluate me, and along with a more junior colleague. And he liked the lecture, I think. But then at the end, he sends me his evaluation, and he said, in your

discussion for the evidence of dark matter, is there a reason you didn't mention the bullet cluster? And as if that ruled it out. In other words, why did I, why did I talk about Mond? And I didn't mention the bullet cluster as disproving Mond. So this is a full professional, a brilliant, you know, scientist. I cited your, your article in Scientific American, is Dark Matter real? You can put that in the show notes. And people, present it and he kept pushing back on it as a total layperson. And he said, I don't know why Sabina talks about the bullet cluster as a statistical outlier. Statistical questions of how often galaxies collide don't seem relevant at all to the mass that they collide. And in fact, there are other things.

Can you say more about why isn't it good evidence that dark matter behaves like matter that just happens to interact without themselves? And I said, it's not what Sabina said, is what the authors say. So it's talking about, you know, how likely should you find a cluster like the bullet cluster versus how often would you find that in Mond? But the bigger question is, you know, they were basically criticizing my pedagogy because I didn't mention the bullet cluster. That's how pervasive this sort of myth is about the bullet cluster. But as you know, since we spoke last year, I had on Mordecai Milgram on the podcast.

And I wouldn't say that he was my audience's favorite. I had it on Stacey McGa also. and we talked about Mond. What would you say the status is from someone who is very interested and involved in this field, but it's not what you do day to day? But tell me, what would you say is now kind of the status of Mond? You seem to be more of a proponent of it than ever almost. Well, yeah, I mean, so it's difficult, really.

Like, I change my mind on this every other week. First of all, let me say, I think it makes total sense you wouldn't talk about the bullet cluster because it's just not, from what the evidence is concerned, it's just not very conclusive one way or the other, so why talk about it? Now, when it comes to the question, dark matter versus Mont, as you probably know,

we might have talked about this previously, that I've been kind of bullish about hybrid models, in particular superfluid dark matter, which is in principle some kind of particle, but it condenses and that it has a phase where it mimics modified gravity. And I've been very excited about this for several years. And I've been working on this with, well, partly with Stacey and with Tobias Mistler.

We did a lot of analysis. And in the end, it turned out not to work all that well. At least the model that we looked at, which is kind of the simplest model that you can think of, goes back to Justin Coorie and his collaborators. it has problems. So, you know, it doesn't work with gravitational lancing and has some other issues. So now I'm less optimistic about this kind of thing. It doesn't completely rule out the idea. Basically, I've more or less come to the conclusion that it doesn't make a lot of sense to take every single model and then try to calculate every possible single observable that you can think of and try to see how. how well it fits and so on, because you can do this until the end of time.

I'm hoping sooner or later someone will train some neural network, feed it with all the data, and there's a question like, is there even enough data? But in principle, I think you could do it and spit out some kind of equations, and we'll just see what kind of equation it is. And I would guess, but, you know, this is again my personal bias, that it'll turn out to be some kind of mixture of both Monde in certain regimes and more like the cold dark matter because that seems to work very well in other regimes. Sabina, as an experimentalist, I have to tell you, I have to stand up for my experimental friends.

We studied nothing all the time. And then sometimes nothing becomes something. And this happened recently in many, many varieties. It hasn't happened necessarily in dark matter. this not to say it couldn't. But, you know, we put out papers and we study things like axions and dark photons and particulate dark matter all the time. And just, you know, when I grew up as a young, you know, Ph.D. student, it was said to me by the eminent, one of the fathers of inflation, I'll just say that, one of the father, that we'd never detect the polarization of the CMB. Not just the B modes, which could be true. We never, in fact, we had many upper limits. My PhD thesis was an upper limit.

And so if you were around tweeting in 1999, 2000, you would have said, Brian Keating's thesis came out, more nothing. There's no polarization of the CMB. But these are important. It's important to have upper limits because not only because sometimes they lead to detections, but also because they really are doing what an experimentalist job is, which is to prove theorist wrong. I wonder if you can explain like when you have these tweets, these snarky tweets,

what exactly is going through? your mind. Would you advocate that we shouldn't be, you know, building these bigger and bigger dark matter detectors or C&B polarimiters in my case? What would you say, what is the meaning of what an experimentalist should be doing in your opinion? Well, so first of all, I write these tweets, not because I intend some grant message. It's just a brief summary of what's in the thing. So in by way of safety, a click. Okay. So this is what it says. It happens frequently. People read way too much into my tweets. But yeah, I guess you're familiar with that problem.

I've said this many times before. I just think it's not a particularly good strategy to go and hunt for every damn particle that theorists come up with because there are infinitely many of those. So I'm not surprised that all these experiments come back finding nothing because I'm not blaming the experimentalists. They're doing exactly what they should be doing, blaming the theorists for making up all those particles in the first place. But it's kind of, it's, you know, it's the cycle.

it goes around because the theorists can justify their work because there are those experiments. They can look for this with this experiment at this lab. And then on the other hand, the experimentalist justify the experiment with the theory because there's this guy who's thawed up this kind of particle, which has exactly this kind of interaction that we can measure in our experiment, isn't that great? And so then they make the experiment, they don't find the particle because there wasn't any reason for it to exist in the first place. I don't have a big problem with experimentalists who just like to measure things and try to figure out if there's something there in a new parameter range.

Just look at the result. You know, it's not going anywhere, right? Yeah, for things like axions and dark photons and all sorts of industrial strength, you know, theoretical campaigns, I agree. There should be some kind of moratorium at some level, but it does seem like the number of people that do these types of experiments is far smaller than the number of NBA players here or, you know, football, Munchen, Beren, Munchen football over there in Germany. So these are very small, you know, cohorts of people. And I guess, you know, from the perspective of trying to do something that's never been done, it's something I think we should do what, what people in the stock market do, which is to hedge. In other words, I think experimentalists should have on their portfolio

something that's really ambitious that might not exist like a dark photon. But they should also be doing stuff simultaneously, if possible, that is guaranteed signs. So, for example, we look for B-Mode polarization, which would be the harbinger or the imprimatur of inflationary primordial perturbations, right? And so that might not be there at all. They may be at a very low level. Inflation may not have happened. Inflation may produce a B-mode spectrum that's, you know, unmeasurable. But we also can look for things like the mass of neutrinos, which is a form of dark matter that exists. We know it exists. And we know we have the sensitivity to measure its mass are the two of the three neutrinos that may have mass with the exact same instrumentation. So therefore, we're doing something

guaranteed to work and something that might work. And if it does, it might be the biggest discovery of, you know, many, many years. So anyway, that's my perspective as an experimentalist that, you know, we should not be looking to prove these theories, but we should be looking for win-win outcomes, that we get a result out, no matter what the nature happens to hand to us. But it's getting late there, Sabina, but I have a million audience questions. I just wanted to ask a quick one about your latest video, which is very touching on the global mental health crisis. I mean, you do stuff on transathlet. You do, you know, it's two plus two, really five. You are not afraid. You're very courageous person. You're not afraid to take on controversial topics. But this one is not controversial, but I was

curious, what caused you to pursue, you know, a video, an in-depth video about the global mental health crisis? Well, I was trying to figure out if there really is one. You know, whatever happened to, you know, all this talk about how the COVID pandemic has damaged mental health. And I read conflicting things about it, you know, there were like big headlines saying, oh, we have a global mental health crisis. And then I read some papers, which I mentioned in the video, that said, well, actually the word went through the pandemic reasonably well, and we didn't see any big difference in mental health before and after. And so I was like a so-so, now which one is it? Right. Yeah. And I thought it's probably interesting, not just for me, but for other people as well. And so this is why we made the video. Very good. That's a great service. And do you think that in particular academics like you and me that we should pay attention to any signs, from COVID and the stress that that definitely did put, do you think that there are special kind of ways that academics can handle the stress of academia?

You've rattled off earlier, you know, a whole list of things that academics are expected to do. What do you think is your top piece of advice for young people? We have a huge audience of young people that listen to this podcast. So please tell me, what would you give advice to them to do to, you know, take care of their giant brains and their mental health? Well, first of all, I would say, don't be afraid to ask for help. There are actually, luckily, a lot of universities have places where you can ask for counseling, for students, in particular.

They'll be happy to help in most cases, I guess, because they're aware that these problems exist, especially in young people who are more susceptible to mental health problems. I think partly the problems that we see, especially among young academics, they're just baked into the system, which is exploiting young brains, often for miserable conditions. Like, I guess we've all been there at some point. You know, you stuck up some kind of job that doesn't even pay for the rent, what are you supposed to do. It becomes very stressful and you're not getting anywhere with your thesis and that kind of stuff. And your supervisor is always away. It doesn't listen to you.

It doesn't really understand you. Your parents are constantly asking, how is he going with your stupid thesis? And yeah, so it's just a situation. It's not very good. And, you know, I don't have any great insights other than, you know, watch out for your physical health in the first place. You know, do some other things. Don't get stuck on that one thing.

Watch out for your friends. Stay in touch with your relatives. if you still have any, and so on. There are other things in life that are important, not just that you finish your thesis. Yeah, finding the work-life balance, you know, but, you know, fortunately young people have, you know, the gift of health and, you know,

their time billionaires, they're going to live a lot longer, and their life is more than just, you know, the PhD. But I was there, you know, I wanted to be, get my PhD and be called the doctor and, you know, start prescribing medication. No, I don't do that. Can you explain when people talk about, as Joe Rogan asked me about this week, you know, what does it mean? Oh, they described a mysterious new force. So what is the G-minus 2 and how does it potentially imply new forces and new fields in any case? I actually think this is a fairly recent trend, like within the past five years or something that the media has picked up this phrase, the fifth force, which sounds like really mysterious. But normally what they mean is like it's some kind of new parts. particle maybe or maybe something else and we don't know what it is. So the G minus two, that's

the magnetic moment of the muon or actually the magnetic moment of the muon minus two, which is where the minus two comes from. Because if you don't take into account the full quantum effects, it should be two. And then all those quantum effects go on top of it. So this is kind of the interesting contribution. And you can calculate the magnetic moment of the muon G minus two from the standard model. And so it's a difficult calculation. It gives you one result, and then you can go and measure it. And now the problem is that the result of the measurement doesn't agree with the calculation. And this is actually, this isn't new. This anomaly has been around in physics for pretty much as long as I have. So for 20 years or something, 2001 or two around that time. It was

first measured at Brookhaven. But the significant was 3.5, or I don't know. And then at Fermilap, they repeated the measurement, but with a higher precision, and it increased to 4.1 sigma, and now it's, I forgot, something like 5 sigma or something. If you take, like, the previous value of this calculation, and so this is where the problems begin, because, as I said, it's a difficult calculation. Some people say that actually the problem is with the standard model calculation, we're not doing it right.

and then there are other groups which get slightly different results that are more compatible with the measurement. I think what's clear at this point is that the culprit is not the measurement. I mean, at least this is what I would say. I'm a theorist, but on this account I have full trust that the experimentalists and know what they're doing. Like, you know, two different experiments basically find the same thing that looks pretty sound to me. So then the question is like, what's going on? Is it that we don't understand how to do a calculation in the standard model? Or is the problem actually the standard model?

And we need to add something new. Could be, for example, new particles, which heavier particles and the LHC could produce, which the G minus 2 might be sensitive to, or it could be something else entirely, you know, some other kind of new physics that you might call the fifth force, but personally I don't find this a particularly useful term. Oh, yeah. And if those are interested in seeing Sabina's guns, she did a video called The Fifth Force, where she's flexing her bicep. My great bicep. I love it. Okay, Sabina, we've reached the portion of the episode where we ask audience questions. If you have five, ten more minutes, I would love it. My audience is so tickled and stoked that you're on. And I posted a question to the audience. What questions would you like, Sabina, to answer. And just a reminder, you can always ask me questions.

For me to ask my guests, Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, threads. I tried, but it couldn't. It's not available in your country or something. At least that was the case when I looked the last time. Yeah, it's just too annoying to have to. There's just be one mega app and, you know, Zuck and Elon can fight out, you know, who gets the money from it. But anyway, somebody wrote back Des Oxen, one of my,

viewers on YouTube wrote, damn, dude, everything is good. You're just crushing it and kicking off bucket items because this week I was on Rogan. And now I'm talking to Sabina. So here we go. We're going to talk about questions from the audience. Very first one comes from Marius Nabal. She says Sabina's channel is very informative and entertaining. It is also insanely humorous for the attentive and quick-witted. Question, how does she come up with those rapid fire comic twist that punctuate her videos, including her magic telephone. The magic telephone, it was my idea. So what happened was that I bought this desk, which you see, and I was thinking I have to

put something on it. It just looks too boring. And so I thought I put a plant on it, but I couldn't find a good plant. And so I went into the children's room, and I saw this red telephone. And I was like, that's it. I'm going to take the red telephone. And then I was like, okay, so I've got to do something. something with the damn telephone. And so this is where I came from. So I've been working with

several joke writers. It kind of works so-so. I actually do most of the jokes myself, because for the most part, I found that I'm funnier than the joke writer. But I do take some inspiration from other people every once in a while. I guess I'm a little peculiar about it. Hell's Gator, as would like to know of Sabina, if she got the funds to do any science project she wanted, what would it be and why? Well, I would really like to do specific tests on the measurement process in quantum mechanics. Because I'm convinced that there is something that we really don't understand in the foundations of quantum mechanics, that concerns the measurement process. and I think it can be experimentally tested and it would open a completely new avenue to quantum technologies.

Unfortunately, no one wants to give me the money. So, yeah, so great breakthrough. We'll have to wait. Well, we're going to be working with Sir Roger Penrose here and James Tag and others on a quantum quantum measurement problem experiment that you're more than welcome to be our theoretical advisor and tell Sir Roger what's going on. I'll keep you posted about that. Andre Mular asks solutions to the Fermi paradox.

Sabina, how do you solve Fermi's paradox? And first state what it is and then state your favorite solution to it. Fermi's paradox, where are all the extraterrestrials? Why haven't we found them? Well, I think we're just too boring. They don't care about us. They don't care contacting us. You know, I think about it basically, like we think about insects.

You know, they are like, okay, so I'm not a zoologist. I don't know. Don't ask me. Five hundred million species of insects, most of which we've never heard about. And most of us couldn't care less. Like, you know, there's one more species of, I don't know, grasshoppers. We're not going to look for them. And so I think this quite plausibly explains why aliens haven't contacted us.

The other thing that I like to point out is if there's any way to communicate faster than the speed of light, this is almost certainly what aliens are using. And since we haven't figured out how to communicate faster than the speed of light, we probably can't hook into their communication channels. So really what we should be doing if you want to communicate with aliens is we should try to figure out how to communicate faster than the speed of light, which I think is possible, but that's a completely different story. Very good. Okay, and this one comes from Twitter, and you can follow Sabina, of course, on Twitter as well. S-K-D-H. Are those your initials? Yes.

I never asked you. What does the K-N-D stand for? Karin-D-D-Stand-D-Sand-Feld. John Teets writes, have you read Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, which is a book about aliens? But I want to ask you a question instead. But do you think, what do you make of the recent, you know, congressional testimony and statements by past guest, Ryan Graves, a fighter pilot on this podcast, and David Grush, who claims that the Pentagon or the U.S. government is concealing evidence of the existence of non-human biological material, presumably recovered from a crashed UAP. How does your mind wrap around this? I don't know anything. Why are you asking me? What would I know about this?

Existing for a question. It's an existential question. I don't know. I mean, people have all kinds of weird ideas about all kinds of things. So God knows what's going on there. Okay. Again on Twitter, the artist formerly known, this is his name? How would you feel about a new particle being discovered and named the gobbledygook? Well, as my editor points out, it's a terrible word. It's long and it's clunky. and so I think the god particle is actually a much better name, but then someone has already tried to use that.

I think I know the answer to this from Jad E. My Wand. Is the multiverse idea a total gobbledygook? If yes, how come nature favors existence over non-existence? First of all, I don't think the multiverse answers that question. But also, I wouldn't call it gobbledygook. It's just I wouldn't call it a scientific. hypothesis. It's more a philosophical idea. So you can believe it if you want to. But since you

can't actually measure anything in those other universes, I don't think it's scientific. Okay. Last question from Twitter. There's many more. We could be here all night. And it's by Dinosaur K.E. who asks, why do you hate free will like Sam Harris, who has become nuts? I don't hate free will. I don't know where people get this from. I actually go on about this in my book, which I think is a fairly nuanced approach. Free word is just not,

it's not an idea that makes any sense to me. I don't know what people even mean by it. But, you know, I see that people are very interested talking about the topic. And so naturally I write about it and make videos about it because people watch them. So if everyone stop talking about free will, I'd also stop talking about it.

it. Okay, last one. This is from back on my YouTube channel, Cardurim do 43, which I almost chose for my, one of my kids' names, is the Everett quantum mechanical view the same as predeterministic interpretations? And then he or she asked, should every branch need to exist already? You want to say something you do, of course, cover in existential physics, you cover Everettian physics, but I get the sense it's not your favorite interpretation. So can you say a little bit about Everett and then why or why not you choose to think of it as in the way that you do? So I don't know exactly what the person meant with predeterministic. Possibly they meant super deterministic, in which case the answer is no, it's a different thing. So superdeterminism is not an interpretation of quantum

mechanics. It's actually a modification. It's a different kind of theory. It's actually more similar to a penrose's collapse models. But I digress. So the average interpretation, no, I'm not a fan of that because I don't think it solves any problem. I don't have a big issue with it. You know, if people want to interpret the mathematics that way, that's fine with me. But I don't really see what you gain from it. Okay, Sabina.

We've reached the end of the conversation. I could go on for hours with you, but you're already braving a headache and a thunderstorm, and it's been just lovely chatting with you. I'll ask you one of my final four questions, which come from Sir Arthur C. Clark's famous quips. And this one is one of the favorites that I've really latched on to lately. I like to bring it out on my colleagues. He said the following, when an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible, he or she is very likely to be right.

But when he says something is impossible, he or she is very likely to be wrong. I want to use that to ask you a question. What have you changed your mind about recently? What have you been wrong about, if anything? And how would you respond to Sir Arthur C. Clark's quip? I already said that I've changed my mind about the feasibility of those hybrid dark matter models, right,

which I'd been quite excited about for some years. and I talked about this, read papers about it. That would be the first thing that springs to my mind. I think it's, broadly speaking, I like this quote a lot because I think that we dismiss too many things as impossible too quickly.

For example, the possibility to communicate faster than the speed of light. I think we're throwing this out too easily and it would deserve some more thought. Very good. Dr. Sabina Hasenfeld, proprietors of the channel by the same name, now at one million subscribers, just an enormous accomplishment for someone who aspires with the logarithm of your number of followers.

And the author of many books Lost in Math and more recently in paperback, existential physics, a scientist guide to life's biggest questions. And I urge you to read the warning in this book because it will make you think. and sometimes, you know, as I always say to my kids, thinking makes my head hurt. But you want to be careful because these are questions on which science can finally have some applicability that was previously purely philosophical. So Sabine, I want to congratulate you on your great success. I wish you much more to the stars. And I hope we can chat again.

Thank you. Good to talk to you. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank.