Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Sabine Hossenfelder LOOK FOR INCONSISTENCY! ​(#198)

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in physics and is presently a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS). Sabine works on physics beyond the standard model, phenomenological quantum gravity, and modifications of general relativity. Hossenfelder has also been researching since at least 2008 on how technology is changing researchers' ability to publicize, discuss, or publish their research, when she co-organized the Science in the 21st Century workshop. She has written more than 70 research articles, mostly dedicated to quantum gravity and physics beyond the standard model. In her channel "Science without the gobbledygook," Sabine talks straight about science: No hype, no spin, no tip-toeing around inconvenient truths. New video each Saturday. Hossenfelder's first book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, released in June 2018. A review in Nature described it as "provocative", and Frank Wilczek recommended it as an "intensely personal and intellectually hard-edged" book. https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder Sabine blogs at backreaction.blogspot.com Audible is hands-down my favorite platform for consuming podcasts, fiction and nonfiction books! With an Audible membership, you can download titles and listen offline, anytime, anywhere. The Audible app is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. Audible members don’t have to worry about using their credits right away. You can keep your credits for up to a year—and use them to binge on a whole series if you’d like! And if you’re not loving your selection, you can simply swap it for another.Start your free 30-day trial today:  Audible.com/impossible or text “impossible” to 500-500 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:59 Is philosophy dangerous for physicists? 00:02:22 Is there more "hype" in physics than in other sciences? 00:04:23 What do you think of the optimism aimed at future experiments such as LISA? 00:07:42 How did you arrive at the conclusions you did on your most recent paper without knowing initial conditions? 00:11:30 What if James Cleark Maxwell could tweet? Would he have been discredited? 00:13:42 Why is there so much attention on UFOs ? Is it just bayesian inference? 00:16:00 What visual evidence counts as data? Especially where UFOs are concerned? 00:17:30 Can you reiterate your thoughts on the mulitiverse theory and its' relationship to dogma? 00:24:15 What do you think of string theories claims to explain so much with so little evidence, leaving it to others to measure initial and boundary conditions? 00:29:20 You're a critic of big experiments. Where do you think physics is going/should go? 00:35:40 How did you become a youtube science star? 59:50:00 What do you think of the doctrine of "fine-tuning" of the Universe? 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Please join my mailing list; just click here: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Please contact [e-mail] to sponsor the show. Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Produced by Brian Keating and Stuart Volkow P.G.A Music by https://yetitears.myportfolio.com/, Theo Ryan _ http://the-omusic.com/) Story Blocks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is in distinction from magic. Some upbeat music to start what will undoubtedly be an upbeat episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with my friend, my YouTube mentor, Dr. Sabina Hassanfelder, joining us all the way from Germany. Sabina, how are you doing today, doctor? I'm great. Good to see you, Brian. It's good to see you. I see you every Saturday night here. I don't watch, you know, internet on the Sabbath, which we'll get into.

But there's so much that's been going on since you made your last appearance. And I can't tell if you are getting more optimistic about physics, more pessimistic about physics, or more of the same. What do you think about philosophy and is it dangerous for physicists to engage in it? Well, it depends on what you mean with dangerous. So is it dangerous career-wise? Probably yes, because as you say, a lot of physicists are quite skeptical that it's worth the time. So if you spend a lot of your time on philosophy, they would consider it a waste of time. And that's not good if you want to get ahead in your job.

But personally, I would say every good scientist, not necessarily physicists, but scientists in general, needs a solid philosophical background just to understand how science works in the first place. So I really think you can't do without. And if you don't have those bases, it comes back to haunt you because you'll be confusing what you actually know with what you just believe. What do you make about the upsurge or the propensity that physicists have for hype compared to the other sciences. Do you think physicists hype potential results or

newfound discoveries more than another fields, for example, like biology or chemistry? Well, I think it really depends very strongly on the field. So if you're looking at the foundations of physics, I dare to say the answer is probably yes, especially if you compare it with fields like public health, medicine in general, cancer research, that kind of thing. And I suspect that part of the reason is that it doesn't really matter. You know, I mean, you get something wrong when it comes to health. People may die, right? So everyone's like super, super careful.

I mean, at least they should be super careful. Okay. But I mean, you say something wild about the multiverse or I don't know, some particle that no one will ever see anyway. What does it matter? Right. So I kind of fear that physicists, you know, take a lot of freedom because they figure it doesn't hurt anyone and it helps their own career. And one apology that I've also heard is that people just think, well, it's inspiring and it might young people to get into science. and that kind of stuff.

Right. And of course, the biggest scale things that we talk about is nothing less than the size of the universe on its biggest scales. And then, of course, the smallest elements of nature, elementary particles, and maybe what happened at the boundaries of the origin of time, the origin of space, if such a thing took place. I wanted to ask you,

I recently saw a paper that you put out a couple of weeks ago about averaging processes and general relativity, and I want to get into that. Before I do, I wanted to talk about, you know, what we've learned in the last few years, both since Lost and Math was published three years ago, and where that knowledge is coming from. I see a lot of, you know, references to new experiments and discoveries, even in your paper. You mentioned Virgo and LIGO and implicit observations from gravitational waves, from black holes, et cetera. And yet, it doesn't stop people from kind of maybe being overly optimistic about what future experiments

could do. For example, I've heard a lot of talk recently about Lisa, a gravitational wave observatory in space that could do for cosmology what LIGO has done for astrophysics. What do you make of such claims that you could perhaps detect, you know, primordial tensor perturbations that you could detect these averaging processes that we're going to talk about in your paper or the effects of these of perhaps observables related to your recent paper. Do you think that this is another example of people kind of overestimating the power in this case of experiment, not math? So the thing with the gravitational waves is we kind of know they have to be there. And we've already seen them in a particular wavelength range. And so what the new experiments can do

is that they would be looking at larger distances. That's why you want to put them in space because it makes it easier to use lasers over long distance without getting a headache from the noise and so on and so forth. And it makes sense to me. I mean, of course, no one knows for certain how large the amplitude is in which wavelength regime you can only estimate it. And that's exactly the same thing that they have done for the solar mass black holes, which were now seeing the gravitational waves off. And of course, they were off with the estimate for a long time, which is why all the earlier experiments didn't see anything.

And at some point I thought everyone was like, oh, my God, we'll never see it, right? Because you get all these null results. But eventually they did see it. And why is that? Well, it's because gravitational waves were a great prediction, right, coming out of a very well-confirmed theory, general relativity, and it would have been inconsistent if we had not seen them at some point. And it's certainly true that if we see these gravitational waves from supermassive black holes

or from the early universe, that would teach us something really new about the cosmos. Right, because there's always the notion bigger is better in experiments too, and I'm as guilty of that as anybody with my cosmic micro-ray background experiments now participating in the largest, most ambitious one ever funded, although there is one on the horizon called CNB Stage 4, which is even bigger, more expensive, but that's in the proposal phase still. We'll see what the Decaturable survey comes out with. But I wonder, you know, a general question I've always wanted to ask you, when we look at something like cosmology, and in your recent paper, you, you talk about these memory effects and so forth. But you start with the standard model of cosmology. But it sort of strikes me as unusual in that cosmology, we don't really have a good, solid sense of the initial conditions of the physical system. We have boundary conditions, but in physics, as I understood it, we always need to have initial conditions.

How is it possible to do the types of analyses that you do in this recent paper, of averaging, of course, graining, and then highly nonlinear sense? system of GR, when we don't even know how the initial conditions led to the Friedman-Rubritson LaMaitra Walker universe. How is it okay to do such a thing? Well, it's a model, right? So the way I look at it is you make certain assumptions, then you derive the consequences and then you look at what the data says. Does it work or does it not work? I mean, you can always ask this question about the initial conditions. Where do they actually come from? How do we know? And it creates this chicken and egg problem, right?

Because there's always an earlier state that gave rise to your initial condition. Where did that come from? Well, it came from an even earlier state, right? So eventually, we just treat it as an assumption that goes into the model. And I mean, in this paper, which is a fairly short paper, that's making a teeny tiny contribution to a huge problem, what I think is a huge problem, we just use the simplest example just to show it's possible to do it and hopefully also to stimulate some other people to look at it because the math gets complicated very, very quickly.

General relativity, the theory that we currently use for cosmology is a nonlinear theory. So that's the kind of theory that has chaos and all kinds of difficult things. And what happens in this kind of theory is that you can, can't just average over the equations. It's in general very, very difficult to average over nonlinear equations. And this is something which people do all the time if they use climate models, for example, and also in condensed metaphysics where the equations are nonlinear. And this always made me think, like, why aren't we doing the same thing in general relativity?

And so there's a long story in the literature where people have argued, we don't need to do it because the corrections would be teeny, teeny, tiny, and it doesn't really matter. And then there are some other people who have said, well, actually those arguments don't really work. And then there are some other people who have said, well, actually they do work. And so there's a constant back and forth between theoreticians arguing. But there are very few mathematical techniques by which you can actually calculate it. And so what we did in the paper was to say, well, let's take one of those techniques that people use in condensed metaphysics and just try to apply it to cosmology as a whole. And that way you can actually calculate some correction terms.

And unfortunately, we have not been able to calculate how large they are, but we were able to calculate their functional dependence on the Hubble rate. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay.

Explore Google Fire Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Yes, and you address the Hubble tension as a potential participant. hint in some of this. I want to ask you about these kinds of papers and, you know, a critic of yours. And I understand there's a couple of people that criticize you, Sabina, but not me. But, you know, a critic might say, well, what are the testable predictions of this new, you know, course-graining? And even you and I have both engaged in, you know, discussions of what counts

as science and falsifiability. Is Popper the final word? Is he like girdle? No. But I want to ask you to do a thought experiment. So imagine you and I go back to 1864. There's a young Scottish mathematician named James Clerk Maxwell, and he comes up with these four equations that will later bear his name. And in so doing, he comes up with a physical model for how these equations support the propagation of electromagnetic radiation. And it involves this wonderful thing called the gear and a whirlpool and a vortex and all this nonsense. And he goes on Twitter, because let's say in this example, Twitter exists 160 years ago,

and he tweets about it. I've got this great idea. Would we not have said, look, not only is your theory crazy, it's already demonstrably wrong, you know, that we don't, you know, we use these microscope, we don't see any gears or what have you. And is there such a thing as requiring falsifiability too early, in your opinion?

Is that a mistake? I wouldn't call it a mistake, but it's, certainly not conductive to the full development of an idea, right? I mean, though I'm not entirely sure that I understand this example correctly, because Maxwell, after all, did predict something that was also falsifiable. And then you could have said, did you actually need all these gears? Or wouldn't it have been sufficient to just start with the fields, which is exactly what we do now. So I'm not sure that Maxwell is the best example in this case.

But in general, there's certainly a risk that you prevent a promising idea from ever being fully developed just by yelling, it's not falsifiable because no one's figured out how to falsify it. Right. And I see this even with things like the Hubble Tension and even things as diverse as aliens. You know, we have in the U.S. this recent report released by the Pentagon, you know, which is like our military headquarters. And it's kind of ambiguous and a lot could be read into it. I wonder if you've been following this. I know you did a video about, you know, credibility and believability and Bayesian inference in low signal, high noise, environments. Can you say something about this as applies to things like the problem of aliens existing, which has a lot of attention, both in the U.S. and in Europe? What do you make of such

things? Why is it happening now? Well, why is it happening now? I don't think that it just only started happening now. Like, this has been around for a long time. Like, people have always yelled, I mean, not always, but for the past 50 years or something. And there have been lots of reports of, you know, unidentified flying objects and that kind of stuff. And every once in a while it bubbles up and then it comes down. And so there are just unexplained things in nature. And I think there will always be. And of course, it's perfectly justified to ask, like, what is it?

Can we look at it closer? We want to know what it is, right? So I think that that's perfectly fine. I mean, that's how I want society to be. There's something we don't understand. Let's look at it. That's perfectly fine. Where I get a problem is when people jump to conclusions

that are not really supported by the data. In regards to the UFOs and with data, astronomers, as my friend Sarah Skulls, who wrote a book about alien sightings and so forth, pointed out, you know, astronomers have a vested interest in discovering aliens and spacecraft and so forth. In part, it was instant tenure, probably a Nobel Prize,

although you know how I feel about that. And then secondly, you know, we could shortcut 20 centuries of learning about physics, perhaps. So we have the most incentive to discover it. You think there'd be a confirmation bias. Plus, we have all the tools. We spend every night looking at the skies with high cadence and frequencies from megahertz

to, you know, to well into the, to the gamma right. So every night we're studying it. And yet we've never had a credible peer-reviewed, you know, paper published about it from the astronomical community. And so when people ask for data, I just, I guess I wonder, what are you looking for? I mean, data that confirms that they exist. Because, I mean, I don't know if you agree with this, Sabina, but the Hubble Deep Field, you've seen the image, correct?

So that's data, I suppose, but it's really just a pretty picture. To get the data, you need the calibration, you need the flatfielding, you need the dark current, you need all the stuff that went into making the image. And even the image only allows you to maybe do a count or maybe some rough histograms. But what do you mean by data? Like for people to see data, what would count as data even and something as abnormal or maybe one-off as a UFO or alien encounter? So given the huge potential payoff, it's certainly something that we should invest in.

and I would go so far to say that we're not investing enough into it. So I don't have a big problem with people who want to see more alien searches, to put it this way. But I also think that what a lot of people really have a problem with is to say, we just don't know, right? We have this video or we have this data or we have, whatever else, you know, a blip in a curve, something like this, we don't actually know what it is. They have this urge that they must find an explanation, which sometimes just isn't possible. And so you end up with more guesswork than science. Right. One other area that always reminds me of this is when we talk about the multiverse,

and I know you've written about this as a form of religion. I wonder just for my audience that's not familiar with your, with your comment on it, could you recapitulate or state what you've written in the past about the multiverse, sort of as a form of religious dogma, even though you yourself are obviously declared secular and not practicing religion, right? Yeah, right. So what I've been trying to get across is that if you assume that something exists which you can't observe, that's not a scientific type of existence. existence. And that doesn't mean it's wrong, but it means it's not the subject of science.

You can, of course, believe in it. So, you know, if someone wants to believe, there are infinitely many copies of them out there in a multiverse living life in all kinds of way that you can think of. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I get a problem when people say that this is science. Like science told me there's this multiverse. Science told me there are infinitely many other universes because it's just not correct. And that brings us back, by the way, to what you asked in the beginning. Like, why does philosophy matter? And that's one of the reasons why it matters, because scientists who argue this way, they assign reality to some mathematical structures that pop up in their equations. And the question is like, how's this justified?

To which my answer is, well, it just isn't, right? So, I mean, if you're speaking of the scientific kind of existence, like we've proved it must exist, that kind of thing, you just can't do it if you can't observe it. And so what about things that are in principle, I agree with you, but what about things that are in principle, unobservable, like a singularity in a black hole. No one actually believes that that's what really, what's it really inside a black hole. But maybe more importantly, no one, I mean no one, maybe there are some people probably who believe it. But I've worked on black hole physics for like 10 years or something. And I would say pretty much no one in the community thinks that black holes are really eternal. So the

black hole horizon just doesn't just stay there forever. But the black hole evaporates. This is what Hawking predicted. And so the black hole shrinks. And at some point, it's so small that, and this brings us back to the problem, the horizon has shrunken into the quantum gravitational

regime. And so we don't really know what happens. But presumably the horizon disappears. And so this region inside the black hole does not remain disconnected from the universe forever. And this

is kind of what Hawking meant when he said black holes don't exist. What he really meant is that these eternal black holes that we see in general relativity don't exist because in the end they are gone. Now you can ask of course, do we actually know this? To which the answer is no, we don't because we've never seen a black hole evaporating. So it's pure speculation. But I think that given that the theory actually tells you, you should be able to observe it in principle, it's not completely disconnected from the world. It's scientifically well-funded, I would say, to talk about what's inside a black hole. So if that wasn't the case, you know, if it was really completely disconnected and we could never observe anything inside it. I would say exactly the same about the inside of black holes than I say about the multiverse.

I would say, well, we can never observe it. So why talk about it? I mean, the other thing is, of course, that in principle, if you cross the black hole horizon, you can very well observe what's inside the black hole. You just can't come back and tell us about it. So, Sabina, I wonder if you've had a chance to read this wonderful new book called The God Equation by Michiore. Kaku. No, I haven't read it, but I've heard of it. So at the end of it, he concludes with the exact same words of Stephen Hawking, which we were just talking about in the context of Black Hole

Evaporation, he concludes when we get string theory, we'll have a theory of everything, and we will know the mind of God. And first of all, I think there are a lot of, you know, people that use the word God a little bit too cavalierly, not for religious reasons, just because I don't think they really know anything about God or like Western philosophy and or Eastern mysticism at all. But anyway, leave that aside. Mityo is a good character. But the thing that really troubled me about his statement was that I asked him, I said, Mitcho, you know, recently we had G minus two results. We had the LHC beauty experiment results. We have Hubble tension. We have all these things. Never once did I hear a string theorist. Tell me, look out for this particular deviation

of the muons magnetic moment because it's right here in string theory. So that's number one. Number two, I had Cameron Vafa on my show. And I said, you know, come on, Cameron, Cameron, what, you know, what does string theory ever predicted? And he said, no, no, no, you're wrong. So there are many things about string theory that can be predicted. We have many encouraging results. The work of Beckinsin-Sign Hawking, which you just mentioned, Sabina, they make a prediction. And here's the prediction. These predictions are, for example, if you take the electron, it has a mass, And if you compute the mass of the electron in the fundamental units of physics, which is the plank mass, it's a very tiny mass, something of order 10 to the minus 23, a very tiny number. Do we have any prediction that the electron mass should have this in mind without knowing there is an electron, just knowing there is electric charge? And by knowing there's dark energy in the universe, you find a bound on the electron mass from string theory. You find a bound that the electron mass should be bounded by 10 to the minus one plank mass on the upper end. and above 10 to the minus 31 on the lower edge.

First of all, what do you make of this, I mean, if I made a prediction that was, had an error bar of 10 to the 30th magnitude, I would be, I would be a little bit embarrassed, but technically he's right. It could have been 10 to the minus 32, but it wasn't. Anyway, what do you make of these claims that it's incumbent upon other physicists to establish boundary conditions and initial conditions? And then once you do, shrink theory has everything in it, including G-minus-2 and fifth forces, et cetera. Maybe he means something else by prediction than what most people mean.

But for most people, I think that you predict something before it's measured. Okay, so I would say what he's shown is that at least the theory is compatible with observations. if you look at that particular feature, I mean, let's aside the issue that it has some dimensions too much and some moduli too much and has a host of other problems, like all those supersymmetric particles, which we haven't seen in all that kind of stuff. And so, look, a lot of people think that I'm a string theory hater,

that definitely isn't so. I think string theory had a very good motivation. You know, people were trying to unify gravity with quantum theory. That's the exact problem that we just talked about with, sorry, the singularity in blackholds and all that kind of stuff. And string theory looked like it could get the job done because it has those graviton excitations. but it didn't really pan out, right? They never actually proved that it solves the problem and instead it has degenerated into this wild accumulation

of different ideas that it don't really fit together and that you can use to fit pretty much everything. And at this point, I'm afraid I get a little bit cynical because I've spent too much time with theorists. If you give a theorist a sufficient amount of time, they will fit you everything. So maybe the first 10 times they did this calculation. They got a result that was actually ruled out by observation. But they kept on trying.

And eventually they found a way to make it work. I'm not saying that this is what actually happened. I'm just saying I've seen exactly the same thing happening over and over and over again. You know, you fumble with your theory long enough, you get everything done. And of course, for a philosopher subsides, that's not a new thing. That's exactly what they want about. So, you know, I'm kind of sorry for string theories, I have to say. You know, I wish it would have panned out, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

And, I mean, about the G-minus-2, I mean, you can... This is a long-standing story. You can try to explain the discrepancy between the standard model prediction and the observation by adding some kind of new particles. And a lot of people have played around with this. The problem is that it's kind of a rather unspecific prediction. It could be all kinds of particles. And they all would make some kind of contribution that could be in about the right order of magnitude. So it doesn't really tell you all that much.

And when you wrote your first book and you have another book coming up, maybe we'll talk about that and just a bit. But Lost in Math, a lot of the characters in it are very much pro-prose string. Do you have a delightful interview with Stephen Weinberg, who sadly passed away recently. And I recommend everybody read that wonderful book of yours. If nothing else to hear the kind of Gulliver's travels, you know, Sabina and Wonderland travel log, where I called it the first time that you were on the heroine's journey, this famous archetype of Joseph Campbell, the hero with a thousand, the hero takes on a reluctant challenge and travels the world and then finds the magic elixir and saves humanity. And that's kind of what you did in your first book.

So one can only guess what the next book will bring. But in that book, of course, yes, there are a lot of commentary on, you know, kind of how math has led physics astray as you talk about in the subtitle, et cetera, the beauty is led to astray. But I always, feel like physicists have a certain type of envy of mathematicians in that mathematicians have at least have girdles incompleteness theorem so they can know the limits of an axiomatic system which is testable or not or consistent or not but physicists don't have that so we always fall back on falsifiability which is just something popper came up with and it's not necessarily written in stone at the same level girdle his friend girdle had girdles in completeness theorem but you know nevertheless

what what else do we have and so when i look now nowadays at all these kinds of, you know, hopes for new projects and where physics might be going, I see a lot of hope in experiment and a lot of hope in observation. But even then, sometimes I feel you're somewhat of a critic of big projects, of big science, maybe, you know, these future circular colliders, obviously you've spoken about that, the lunar collider you think is lunacy, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, at some point, I was reading recently, I want to get your reaction to this. There was a claim of the tetrachark. You know the tetrach quark, famous tetrachork. And that was discovered. And it, you know, it was not really intended to be one of the main

goals of LHC or the instruments that detected it. But because it had enough energy, it could make this bound state for a femtosecond of, you know, four quarked. So let's say we had said, oh, we don't need such a big collider like that. And we certainly don't need a bigger one. wouldn't we have missed out on this and these types of discoveries? In other words, what do you say to those that say bigger is always better? And we've always learned something. We went from the first cyclotron Sabina here in California was 27 centimeters. And now LHC is 27 kilometers.

It's just enormous. And that's in less than 100 years. So who's to say if we make one 30 times bigger, 40 times bigger and put it on the moon? Maybe we'll discover even more things. Yeah, maybe. but most likely not. I mean, that's exactly the problem. How do you evaluate

if it's a reasonable risk to take because we build this big thing on the moon? There are a lot of other things that we can't do. And so I want to try and defend myself a little regarding, for example, this tetrachwark story. So I've certainly never said that if we build a bigger collaboration, we won't learn anything.

We would certainly learn something more about nuclear physics, right? For example, those bound states, and there are all kinds of properties of the hadrons and mesons and the couplings and the structure of the proton itself and so on, that we would learn more about, and we would also almost certainly be able to measure more precisely the masses of some particles, the decay rates, and so on and so forth. That's not nothing. The question is, is it worth several dozen billion dollars? Right.

And it comes with a problem that particle physicists usually try to find some big questions, you know, about the origin of the universe or dark matter or something to sell their machine with. And that's where I get very uneasy because I feel like I have to tell people, look at that we have no reason to think that this machine will actually see something like this so that's my problem I actually think like this trend of experiments to become larger and larger

is quite pathological and indicative of the problems in the foundations of physics in general because what's happening is basically I mean, if you look at the history of physics, for a long time, what's happened is that there has been some discovery that led to some insight, some scientific insight, that led to better technology, that led to better experiments, which led to new insights, which led to better

technology and better experiments, and so on and so forth. And that cycle broke, basically, sometime the 1970s, 80s, and since then, the primary mode to get better data is just to make things bigger. It gets more and more and more expensive. And at some point, it just becomes an economic problem. You know, does society actually want to invest that much money in something that might not help us all that much at this moment and time? You know, theoretically, ideally, we would be able to do everything, but that's what we do. Yeah. Although, you know, critics, and just to be pushing back with respect to you, as I have, that the, you know, the Tokyo Olympics cost about three LHCs.

And so when we canceled the superconducting supercollider here in the U.S., although I claim that was actually really good for Ligo and Barry Barish in particular, and my friend, my friend Gary Sanders, who's the new project manager for our executive project manager on Simon's Observatory, they wouldn't have won their Nobel Prize if the SSC had kept going because we know it happened when the Higgs was discovered. No experimentalist won the Nobel Prize. And we also know that they ended up building the LHC without needing the American money. Now, could have been better, of course. And did we lose a generation of, you know, experimental particle physicists? Yes. And those are big things. I'm not trivializing that. But Sabina, that money didn't just go back and now now we cured cancer thanks to canceling the super collider.

In other words, I don't think money is as fungible. Like when we cut the budget, we didn't get like 80 million postdocs from canceling the SSC. It just went into like now we've got like the Robert Burr, you know, whatever. We've got some senator has some highway named after him or her. You know, we didn't get a return back to physics. We got it back to the budget, which, you know, you can estimate or you can, you know, assign whatever value you like to that. Anyway, I want to ask now about another channel, which I see you doing literally a YouTube

channel called Sabina Hasenfelder. We'll put a link to that. And it's a wonderful channel. And I have been delighted to sponsor, support your work. And I will continue to do so because I think you have a unique mission. You know what you're doing. And there's a very technical term for what you're doing, science without the gobbledygook that we learn in quantum field theory.

Where did you, speaking of quantum field theory, Sabina, how did you learn to do this? Because when I talk to my friends and they say, oh, you got a YouTube channel, you're not like a real scientist or, you know, like, I can't do that. It's too hard. It's too hard for me. And I say, oh, yeah, I know you were born knowing quantum field theory or you were born knowing cryogenic engineering at 100 mil Kelvin. Like, yeah, you just were born knowing that. Like, you didn't have to work at that. Of course they did. How did you come to be, you know, so proficient to grow in less than a year, factor of 8 to 10? followers now a third of a million people are addicted to your videos every Saturday morning. Sabina, did you study it? Did you work on it? How did you come to be this at this level of YouTube success? An outreach success. I mean the brief answer is I don't know. I mean you know I'm super excited people like my channel but it's not that I have a big secret or something. I just talk about what I think is interesting. And so I hope that people notice that I personally look into it

and I try to communicate what I've learned. And so the audience is kind of part of the story, right? I look at what comments they leave, what they are interested in, and I have a list where I take notes and try to address questions. But I mean, I think I've just done the obvious. I mean, I go on the internet and I look at advice that other people had. And I've tried to follow it to the extent that I could. There are always just limitations.

Like, for example, I think my channel would be much, much more interesting if I wouldn't just stand in front of a green screen all the time. But I have no one to do my camera work for me. I'm just one person. and that's as much as I can do. So, you know, I'm trying to work with what I have. And basically, I'm just learning by doing, right? I try to look at what works, what does not work.

And I also, I mean, there's always, you must know this yourself. I mean, the YouTube algorithm isn't always that easy to swallow, you know. So there are a lot of things, for example, videos that I cared a lot about that just sank to the bottom of the sea. And, you know, I'm trying to not take it personally and not try to get discouraged and I stick to what matters to me. But on a very, you know, pragmatic basis, there are limits to what you can do. Like, and now I have to pay to other people. So I have to think a little bit about what works and what doesn't work. and so their trade-offs to be made.

But in the end, I feel like, you know, if I don't enjoy it, if it doesn't make sense to me, then I wouldn't continue to do it. So I try to listen to myself to some extent. And it's very successful. And of course, you need to learn a lot of soft skills that aren't any relationship to your day job as a theoretical physicist. And those include, you know, promotions, click-through rates,

thumbnails. Are you completely self-taught in those regimes as well? Or are there tips you can give to aspiring YouTube stars like me? I really don't have any secrets. You know, I just Google the stuff, and then I look at what other people recommend. And I try to follow this as good as I can. I look at the statistics.

Though, honestly, I'm trying not to overthink it, because, as I just said, sometimes it just doesn't make sense. You look at it and you're like, why? This video not work, right? And sometimes I feel like it was just something stupid. Like maybe there was just a big headline and no one was interested in watching this particular thing at this particular time.

And then the way that YouTube goes, if the video doesn't really take off in the first one, two days, you can forget about it, basically. Yeah. That's the end of the story. It's lost in Hassanfelder evaporation instead of hockey evaporation. Let's get back to some physics. What do you think nowadays is sort of drawing most of your attention, whether it's positive attention, negative attention, is it things you've written about determinism, super

determinism? I want to get into your paper from last year about that before we end up. But free will, simulation, hypothesis, AI apocalypse, fifth forces. What do you think is like getting most of your attention? And what do you think deserves even more attention? And it's getting. Well, so I'm afraid I'm terribly boring in that I actually try to listen to my own advice. And if you remember, I mean, the way my book came about was that I was trying to decide what's a promising research topic.

And so maybe I thought about it too much that I ended up writing this book and interviewing all these people. But in the end, I came to a conclusion. And I can honestly say this was not a conclusion that I had when I wrote the proposal or when I set out writing the book, which was that we have to pay more attention to inconsistencies. And by this, I mean both inconsistencies between observations and theory. That's kind of the obvious inconsistency that everyone is thinking about, but also internal inconsistencies in the theories. whereas a lot of the problems that theoretical physicists and foundations presently look at are not problems of inconsistency. They are aesthetic misgivings. That's the way that I put it in the book.

And I mean there's an obvious big inconsistency between the predictions of general relativity and the standard model and our observations, which is dark matter. So I basically switched to working on dark matter because at least in this area we have observations, right? We have plenty of observations. And I'm trying not to do the same thing that everybody else has been doing, you know, with inventing new particles and just trying to guess something. I'm going at it, at least I'm trying to, you know, going at it more from the more general side. you know, what's the kind of theory that we would need to resolve this discrepancy? And I arrived at the conclusion that we need something that's kind of a hybrid between dark matter and modified gravity. And this is why I'm working on this superfluid.

Super fluid, yeah. Yeah, you had a wonderful video a couple months ago that was maybe a million views. It's called Dark Matter, the situation has changed in which you advocate for kind of a comitist or kind of a synthesis between methods of condensed matter physics with methods of traditional, you know, particle instantiations for solutions to dark matter. So has a situation changed further since that video came out? Are you more kind of excited about superfluid? Maybe you could say a little bit about superfluid. I find that so fascinating. Talk about this idea, how it came up and what the implications could be. Because superfluidity, just to take a step back as an experimentalist,

fascinating subject related to superfluid, superconductivity, same mathematics, et cetera, in a lot of ways as they bulk properties of correlated phenomena in solid state systems or condensed matter systems. What does that have to do with the cosmos as a whole? I mean, the cosmos is at 3 Kelvin. It's not at, you know, how does superfluidity come into play? Yeah, what does it have to do with the cosmos? That's exactly the problem, right? So you see the issue with dark matter is, and we've known this for a long time, that it works better in some regimes than in others. And then we have this alternative explanation, which is modified gravity,

that also works better in some places than in others. And these are kind of complementary to each other. And what's been going on for a long time is that each side of the argument said, no, this is right, or no, this is right, and you are wrong, and so it's been going back and forth, and it didn't really need to anything. And so I think the obvious answer, I dare to say, is where you need them both. You need dark matter in the regimes where dark matter works, which is like cluster scale, CMB, that kind of stuff, and you need modified gravity, mostly on the scale of galaxies, because where you have these flat rotation curves and Tully Fisher Law and all that kind of stuff.

And this is not originally my idea that you can do it with a superfluid, but it's something that I learned from Justin Coory, who I'm sure you also know. And, you know, I remember reading this paper. And at this time, I was working on superfluids, but for an entirely different reason. You know, I just read this because I thought maybe it will give me some inspiration. You know, it's close enough that I would probably understand some of it. and I just thought this makes so much sense, right? So you can put it both together and you can have the best of either side and not worry about the worst of both sides.

Then, of course, you know, if you start looking a little bit more in the details, it's not quite as simple, right? And the biggest problem that I face is that this is really condensed metaphysics, which is something that I wasn't trained in. And what you do, sorry, I've been talking too much, what do you do with a superfluid in a curved space time? I really don't know. And most of the people who work on it now are pretty much everybody, I guess, they come from the general relativity astrophysics cosmology side or from the particle physics side. And none of them is really a condensed matter physicist who might. have some intuition as to what is going on or could actually, you know, look at it and say, look, this is a problem, you need to fix this. Or actually, you know, I've been playing with

this kind of theory for a long time and this assumption doesn't work with this. Or there's an example that you could use which is this. And so we don't have this. So we're kind of, you know, poking in the dark, trying to figure out a way to make it work. But there has to be a way to go about it more systematically. So you said you saw my video about it. It was kind of a call, you know, really to condensed meta people to say, look, that's an opportunity. We need some condensed meta people to figure out what to do with those superfluids in galaxies,

which sounds really weird. But, yeah, so I realize I forgot to explain how the whole idea works to begin with. So the idea is that you have the stuff that. kind of behaves the same like normal dark matter, cold dark matter, just the particles are light, but basically that's it, on the large scales in between the galaxies and so on. But in the galaxies where you have fairly deep gravitational potentials, I mean deep compared to the rest, the stuff can condense into the superfluid phase where it can, it has quantum coherent

effects spanned through the whole galaxy which is like really mind-boggling You know like correlated like Cooper pairs that span the you know but solitons or whatever that span the correlation link to the galaxy yeah so we don't deal with Cooper pairs

actually but yeah in principle yes yeah yeah so we just we just use scalar fields you know there's a simple that you can do as a theorist, it's just a skater field. And that may actually be the problem with it. So maybe scale field is just too simple.

And in the superfluid, the phonons, so the excitations over the fluid, they generate an additional force. And it's this new force that adds on top of the gravitational pull and makes it look like a modification of gravity. So it turns out that this additional force, it has pretty much the same behavior as gravity already, which is why it just adds on top. And so this is really neat. So you have naturally, I dare to say, you know, if I'm allowed to use the word, you have these two regimes of the equations that explains why sometimes the cold dark matter stuff works better and why sometimes the modified gravity stuff works better.

But, you know, the devil's in the details, right? I mean, yeah, for example, one completely unsolved problems, like, what do you do with the solar system? Yes, exactly. There's always some kind of magic. Yeah, it'll work out somehow we just don't know, basically, yeah. The only place we know that superfluids exist for sure in the solar system. That's, yeah, very fascinating. I'll put links to that in the show notes as well, that wonderful video.

You mentioned Justin Curie, who's a friend, and I've known for a long time, especially in the context of what was called originally the ex-piratic, universe, which he worked on with his advisor, Paul Steinhart and Neil Turak and others. And now he seems to not be as intimately correlated with those folks. And now we have Anna Aegis, who's a who's a scientist. Actually, I think she's in Germany now as well. And she's working with Paul Steinhart. And they have come up with what's known as bouncing cosmology. And it is not connected to this colliding membranes and so forth. And it makes a testable prediction that we shall not see, any B modes, unfortunately, of primordial character in my Simon's Observatory or my former

colleagues and the B-Sep team, we will not see primordial B-modes because they don't exist, because inflation didn't take place. And I wonder what kinds of reactions you have to that, to theories that are becoming more and more frequent. There are theories of Sir Roger Penrose, which also, you know, he played big role in pointing out issues with inflation, obviously, in the early days. And Paul obviously was responsible for new inflation. and solving a lot of the problems that Linday and others took on. What do you make of this, of this flourishing of alternatives? I'm not asking you to say, is it right, is it wrong?

But they have the virtue. Both Rogers theory, which I pointed out to him, Sabina, last week on his birthday, that his theory is unique in that it's the only new cosmology that is cyclical, but also doesn't have a scalar field and makes a falseifiable prediction. In other words, the Curry and Steinhart and Anaegis, their theory predicts a, or at least Anaegis and Paul Steinhart's does, predicts that there should be no primordial beamones, as I said, but also needs a scalar field. But Roger doesn't need a scalar field in his theory.

He needs his wild curvature, but whatever, there's no scalar field. I think that's the most virtuous thing, right? Because if you're trying to kill off inflation, which has a scalar field, you'd like to not have to have a new theory that has a scalar field. So how do you react to conformal cyclic cosmology and bouncing cosmology? So what's with his error bonds? His, his, his, his, his, his, his his erobons. Oh, for dark matter. Yeah, that's his solution for for dark matter. Yeah. I think you can have conformal cyclic cosmology with without error bonds. The error bonds are sort of his, his, his, his kind of formulation to explain the dark matter problem. But I think you can have it with just

talking points and so forth, you can have it with just these eons, which doesn't, you know, which, which doesn't make use of a scalar field. Eribons are more like particle instantiations than scalar fields, I think. Well, okay, so I mean, I'm not deeply familiar with this, so I'll just take it as you say it. So this brings us back again to this question like, what's with the philosophy. And by the way, all these different theories for the early universe is one of the topics I go on about in my book, like how did the universe begin. And I think that there are two problems with what people are doing. One is that too many people in theoretical physics and the foundations tend to think if a theory makes predictions, if it's falsifiable, that means

it's a good scientific theory. Right. Astrology makes falsifiable predictions, right? Is it good science? Well, yeah, right, exactly. That's the problem, right? I mean, tomorrow, I don't know, you will win the lottery. That's totally a falsifiable prediction. We don't call it scientific. And so I really think a lot of people have to think much deeper about why your theory is scientific.

And a big problem I have with all these tales for the early universe is that they make a lot of a science. which you actually don't need to get the predictions. And this is also why you have this huge degeneracy among models that pretty much make the same predictions, right? I mean, there are some models who say, well, we see the B-M-M-Oes, and then there are others to say, we don't see them. But, you know, we will see if we see them or don't see them, and then we will have a number. And that will not allow you to tell which of the theories was right. Why? Because they just have way too many details that don't reflect in the actual predictions.

And I mean, this is already the case for, you know, inflation. You basically, whatever data you throw at inflation, you can fiddle it around somehow to make it work. And so I'm pretty sure, you know, if you don't see the, if you do see the B modes, and that runs into conflict with whatever model it is that Curry is currently working with, you can probably fix it somehow by making it a little bit more complicated. You know, it's the same problem that I was already talking about earlier. And it's, I mean, it's a difficult question. Like, is this something that's specific to the origin of our universe that will forever

prevent us from really figuring out what went on? and I suspect that as long as we stay with the current type of theories that we use which require an initial condition, we'll never be able to really solve the problem because there will always remain this problem. Like why this initial condition, right? And the other problem is also that if you have a model like you have a balance or something, generically what happens is that you have an intermediate phase, you know, which is, close by what we think of as the Big Bang, where everything was simple.

But actually earlier, in this previous phase, it could have been much more difficult, more complicated, should have been the word. And that's a problem, because our entire scientific methodology is based on making things simpler. So if the universe came from something,

that was more complicated. Even if that was right, our scientific methodology wouldn't allow us to actually figure out if that was really the case. I look at some of the virtues of it. And by the way, I think it's healthy to have other approaches rather than just a monolithic monopoly that inflation and even the standard model have become in particle physics. But I wonder, what do you make of the fundamental objection? I think Sir Roger pointed out first was this, you know, know, extremely unlikely, you know, low entropy condition in the early universe that, you know, had to be instantiated either via what Alpert, I think, calls the past hypothesis or in some other

instantiation, versus having some mechanism to establish that. So in Steinhart and Aegis, they have very small contractions, very large expansions, and those do cycle over eternity, but they avoid the entropy runaway problem of Tolman universes, et cetera. But, but, in Sir Rogers is manifestly because the universe dilutes and all that's left are photons and the entropy at each eon can be quite low. Do you think this is a big problem, the problem of entropy? And I want to connect that, you know, the low entropy starting points so that we could have an arrow of time.

Or do you think that's another example of hype? Well, I wouldn't say it's a problem in that it's not an inconsistency. As I said earlier, I think people should focus on inconsistencies just because the That's historically where progress has come from. But you can certainly ask, is there an easy explanation? So maybe to give people some context, no one really knows why the universe started in a state of very low entropy. You just have to postulate it.

Without that, assumption, theories just don't work. For some unknown reason, it wasn't low entropy, but why. So Penrose's theory is a way to explain it. And that's, I think, what was his motivation to connect the final state to the end state and basically erase all this entropy. But you have to ask, like, isn't the cure worse than the disease? Like, is it actually simpler to do all this stuff with the wild curvature hypothesis and error bonds and then gluing there to the

isn't it easier to just say, okay, it started at low entropy. Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the carpet underneath

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looking for his hooking points. And I mean, in principle, that's good. But I mean, you know how it goes. I mean, if you have sufficiently many people analyzing data in sufficiently many ways, eventually they would find something. So, you know, I'm not saying it's wrong, but there are many things you can do with trying different methods of analysis. The last thing I want to finish up with is

relates to a conversation you had with Luke Barnes and Justin Bearley, unbelievable a few months back. And that has to do with fine-tuning, et cetera. And there's this resurgence of interest in the claim that producing entropy or low entropy states require a mind, you know, organization, codes, et cetera. Those are all always traceable in our experience to an intellect, a mind. Now, obviously what they want to do is correlate that to a God, right? Which I know you don't affirm a belief in. I think if you had evidence, maybe, I don't, I don't, I don't want to get into that, but I want to get into, is this a problem? In other words, is the, you know, the instanti, like when Lawrence Krause talked about a universe

from nothing, it's not really nothing because there's a Hilbert space and maybe the cure is worse than the disease, as you say, you know, there's a, you need a Hilbert space and you need certain mathematical operations, you need quantum physics, you need the Wheeler-Dewitt equation, you need the board booth-flinin criteria. Anyway, all these things seem to suggest that there was, since there was a low entropy state, the universe is somehow finally tuned. And then obviously the genetic code of DNA is another example that's often used as an example of something that is highly organized and ordered and not flawless, but that perhaps provides evidence for in these intelligent design people's minds for a creator. What do you say to such people? Is fine-tuning an issue?

You and I talk by Twitter DM, which is the most efficient form of communication about a paper by Fred Adams, saying, no, the universe isn't very finely tuned at all. at least if you just look at star formation, which is but one ingredient. So what do you make of fine-tuning? Is it a problem? Is it not a problem? And first of all, what is it? What do you think of when I say fine-tuning? What does it mean to you? Yeah, so I'm a little bit confused because normally the fine-tuning arguments that people talk about in cosmology and also what I talked about with Barnes are not about the entropy being small, but they're talking about small variations in the constants of nature that would just, you know, ruin one or the other process that we believe has given rise to life on Earth.

Like, for example, stars wouldn't shine or galaxies wouldn't form that kind of thing. And so that's what they're usually talking about. Is that a problem? I would say no. And actually, I go on about this in my book, right? Because I don't know what it means for a small change, for change to be small to the constants of nature. I mean, after all, they're constants because they're constants. You can't change them. So why would I worry about it? So to me, this is really a metaphysical problem. Again, I would say

it's just not scientific. People are worried about some property of the theory that has just no relevance for observations. So, which is why, you know, it's not that I try to prescribe people what they should spend their time on. But personally, I think nothing will come out of it because there's no inconsistency that needs to be resolved and people are just worrying over nothing.

And I definitely appreciate that. Now, another kind of criticism that I hear often is alternative theories. You know, when you talk to a string theory, I talked to Kakou, and he was like, well, loop quantum gravity can't even incorporate fermions and he kind of went off on that.

And then, you know, Lee Smolin seemed to kind of, I wouldn't say agree, but he did seem to be less, I don't know if you've detected, a little bit less sanguine about, about loop quantum gravity lately. In other words, he sort of has maybe realized that things like variable speed, constants, vary speed of light, varying alpha, those are not really being borne out in any data. And those were sort of predictions and delayed arrival time for high frequency. versus low frequency photons, you know, seems to be ruled out. I had Carlo Rovelyon twice this year, and he's still very positive about it. What do you make of alternatives to these, you know, kind of theories of everything,

or at least quantum gravity? Well, for one, I suspect there would be a lot of people who work on a luke quantum gravity who would object that those were actually predictions. You know, it's, as you probably know, it's very hard to actually calculate something straight from the foundation of the theory. You know, it's a very heavy mathematical. It's a very similar problem to string theory, by the way. So if you just take the fundamentals of the theory,

you can't calculate anything from it. And so what people do is they build some kind of effective model. And there are different ways that you can do it, and people have done it different ways, and that way you can arrive at predictions, but then your predictions depend on those additional assumptions. Right. And so you can, in the end, you will always only rule out those models, but not necessarily this underlying structure. That's not a problem that's specific to loop quantum gravity.

So I'm not sure that I fully understand the question. So you're asking, do I have any opinions on different approaches to quantum gravity? Yeah, I guess my conjecture is that we are putting the toe before the gut. In other words, we're all fixated on a theory of quantum gravity, but we don't even have a grand unified theory that everyone agrees with, unless I'm wrong, and please correct me if I'm wrong. But so people are kind of skipping the line. And, you know, it's kind of hard to think about, oh, let's discover the Yang Mills equations before we discover Maxwell's equations. Well, yeah, so is this another example of something that's misguided or is it a sign of a healthy field? that's looking for a thousand flowers to bloom. Well, I would say it's actually good because that we're missing a theory of quantum gravity, that's an actual inconsistency. Whereas there's nothing inconsistent

about the three-fifes in the standard model not being unified. I mean, you can say, well, it's kind of ugly. But I would argue, well, that's not a scientific argument. And so I think it's actually more worthwhile to try to solve the inconsistency between general relativity and quantum field theory. Now, of course, the question is like which one is the right approach. And so it's also something that I go on about in my book. Mathematical consistency alone is not sufficient. You always need experimental guidance in the end.

and this is why, you know, I'm always dismayed, let me put this way, if theoreticians who spend a lot of time on loop quantum gravity or string theory or something else don't seem to show any interest in what you can actually experimentally do in the laboratory. And ironically enough, that problem, you know, if I may extrapolate the next 20 years or something, seems to be so from the side of the experimentalists who just don't care that the theoreticians don't get that together. And they're well on the way on actually testing, mind-boggling as this still sounds to me the weak field limit of quantum gravity. You know, they're actually experimental groups who are pushing towards this. And I think this is super, super exciting.

And I really wish that the theorist, you know, the strength theories on quantum gravity people and what have you, would actually make a prediction for an experiment before they make the experiment. That's right. Not the retur addiction, right. Yeah, exactly. People are like, well, Einstein did it with the perihelion of Mercury. I'm like, but he also had a few predictions, and it wasn't just a retur addiction. I want to close, Sabina, because I've been told that you're working on another book, which I can't wait. I hope that you'll come back onto the end of the Impossible podcast when that's out, so we can sell millions of copies of that book, I'm sure. But can you talk about this issue that you wrote about last October called super determinism?

How does it relate to free will? Is this all an illusion? Because I find that with your predilection for looking for inconsistencies, I find this like almost hopeless because, you know, according to some people, everything has consciousness, the electron and, you know, and you can talk about free will as participatory or not. But anyway, what is this super determinism? What is this wonderful paper?

And how does it feature maybe perhaps a preview of your upcoming book? Okay, that was a wild question, Brian. There was actually five questions. You can handle it. So my book doesn't actually have anything to do with super determinism. I'm afraid. Or free will. Yeah, I do go on a little bit about free will, but free will has nothing to do with

super determinism. So maybe let me start with this. So I think people get a little bit confused about the word superdeterminism. because it has this phrase to determinism, right? So how can something possibly be more deterministic than deterministic? To which the answer is, well, it can't really. So super deterministic theory is just deterministic in the normal, boring sense. And determinism has always been a problem for people who believe in free will.

And there's like a 2000-year-old history to this. And superdeterminism doesn't really change anything about it. If you were fine with talking about free will in the context of determinism, you should still be fine with it in the context of superdeterminism. Superdeterminism really refers to a peculiar assumption in Bals' theorem. That's called statistical independence. And the statistical independence assumption says that if you have a theory in which the measurement outcome is determined by hidden variables,

so that's the kind of thing that Einstein believed in, then the outcome of the measurement is correlated with the detector settings. And a lot of people have taken this to mean that the experimentalist is kind of prevented from twiddling the knob or whatever way they please. and I look at it in exactly the opposite way. You can twiddle the knob whatever way you please, but you affect the time evolution of the state that you're trying to measure. So, you know, in my mind, it's far more innocent than what people try to interpret into this equation.

I actually have a paper coming out like next week about the interpretation of the statistical independence assumption that explains another problem with this common interpretation. Oh, wow. But you call it hopeless. Personally, I think that's the most promising thing to work on, which is why I work on it, of course. Really? Because the measurement problem has been such a longstanding issue. And after working on quantum gravity for a long time, I've pretty much come to the conclusion

that the reason we're not solving the problem with quantum gravity is that we don't understand quantum theory in the first place. And we have this update of the waveform. as you certainly know, which kind of happens instantaneously everywhere. And general relativity can't cope with it. It'll never work. So we have to get rid of this instantaneous measurement update and find a theory that respects the symmetry of general relativity from the bottom up. And superdeterminism can do it for you.

So you have a theory like quantum theory that violates what Bell called local causality you can make it locally causal on the expense of violating statistical independence. And so that's why I'm excited about it. Okay, great. And so can you tell us a little bit about, a tease a little bit about the book that's coming out in 2022? Yes. So the book's called More Than This. And it's about what physics says about the big questions of our existence.

That's the beginning of the universe. we briefly touched on this, but also free will or questions like, does the universe think, does the past still exist, and are electrons conscious, you know, what you just brought up, can we create a universe? Is human behavior predictable? That was the worst chapter. It caused me a big headache.

So every chapter is a question, and then I have answers to it, and broken down into more specific questions, basically. Well, it sounds like a beautiful book, which is ironic compared to your subtitle of your last book. Sabina Hasenfelder, proprietress of the Sabina Hasenfelder podcast or Sabina Hasenfelder YouTube channel, Science Without the Gobble Gook. You can find that everywhere that fine science videos are sold and bought. Proud to be a sponsor, I will never cancel you.

We love you so much here in the States and around the world. I want to thank you for spending so much of your time with us today. Well, thank you for having me. Good to talk to you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is distinction from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating.

That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon. at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

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