Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Sean Carroll: Quantum Mechanics and the Many Worlds Interpretation

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

In this episode, I interview renowned theoretical physicist Sean Carroll to discuss his book Something Deeply Hidden. Sean breaks down complex ideas in quantum mechanics and cosmology in his popular science books. His research involves theoretical physics and astrophysics, especially cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. Sean takes us on a journey through the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, a theory that suggests every possible outcome of a quantum event actually occurs in its own separate universe. He explains how this theory changes our understanding of reality by connecting to other areas like gravity and cosmology. We discuss experiments that could test this mind-bending theory and why abandoning classical assumptions is key for scientific advancement. Listen to this episode now and expand your understanding of the universe. Tune in!  Key Takeaways:  00:00 Introduction and background 01:30 New ideas and theories in Carroll's latest book 02:51 Structure of the book and its focus 04:20 Many Worlds and its implications 07:56 Shut up and measure philosophy 12:04 Quantum mechanics and classical assumptions 18:59 Carroll's interests outside physics 27:04 Teaching creativity in science 39:06 Carroll's career journey 45:34 Explanation of Many Worlds 51:26 Falsifiability of Many Worlds Additional resources:  📕Something Deeply Hidden book ➡️ 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/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ 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/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nature doesn't do that. Nature doesn't start with a classical world of quantizing. And my strong conviction is that that's why we haven't quantized scrap. Because we stubbornly insist on starting with a classical theory, whether it's general relativity or string theory or anything else, modernized it. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

Today, it's a great pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for coming to meet me. We're at the campus of the beautiful Loyal of Marymount University, located in the travel district of Los Angeles, not far from LAX, convenient to all major freeways. And it's a great pleasure to interview. I've had the pleasure of reading your books for many years. I think you've autographed every copy I've had,

except for the most recent copy, because that I've read an audiobook or listened to an audio book. Do you have an opinion on audiobooks? Do you think you get as much out of an audiobook to get more out of an audio book? I think you've read it at this. You get things out of an audio book. You might not get the same things. Interestingly, there's a bunch of people who have written in to say that they get both.

You know, they get the audio book. And then they, if it's because my books tend to involve, you know, complicated things, right? You know, mind-stretching things. So then you want to go back to certain parts of the book and get it. So get both. Get both. That's the advice. Get all three.

Kindle, hard cupping. Yeah, absolutely. I know a lot of people. A lot of people like to read the, you call that. Legrongian at the end. That's a big picture. That was a standout. This one, this latest book, your latest opus, I thought your previous book might be used up all the words you could possibly use in your vast brain. But this one, even more, I think deeply, truly does involve new ideas, new theories, new kind of modes of thinking about reality in the universe. And although, you know,

I remember when you mentioned it on Twitter, you're going to write a new book. in the coming years, it was a couple years ago. And you said, you know, this book's going to be at quantum mechanics and it's going to solve everybody's problems. I'm sure everybody's going to understand. And certainly we come away with a much better understanding quantum mechanics. But I think the book is this deeply misleading because it's really about gravity. And I felt that it was a very, very interesting and beautiful turn of events that only sort of

partway through the book after the, you know, the requisite explanation of. how quantum mechanics has been interpreted and could be interpreted that you turn to a much more kind of exciting frontier, at least for a physicist like myself and my colleagues, of course, is a popular book? But really, is this the book you set out intending to write two years ago when you made that famous moment this tweet? You know, the book has a very natural structure of the three different parts. The first part is explaining quantum mechanics, the basics of it, and including a little light

introduction to many worlds. And then the second part is a deep dive into many worlds, what it means, why it's difficult, what the alternatives are, et cetera. And the third part is, as you said, an expiration of gravity in the emergence of space time, an argument that one of the things holding us back from quantizing gravity is that we don't understand quantum mechanics very well. And in particular, the thinking about things in the many worlds way helps us quantize gravity. So I actually bounced back and forth when conceptualizing a book and when writing it, should it be just about many worlds or should it be many worlds building up to this particular view of quantum gravity?

And literally, with a very short period of time, actually literally after I had written the first draft of Part 3, I said, let's take it out. Let's just stick with just many worlds because it's a nice, compact, complete story just by that. It's a smaller book, more easily digestible, right? And my editor said, you know, that he really liked the idea that we could show it inaction in modern physics and research bubble stuff. You know, he said, it's nice, but when all of your dates are 1960 or before, that's not as much fun as when some of the dates mentioned are 2016 and 2017. Right.

And, yeah, reference to modern results. But I think, yeah, really coming up with a way to hook the reader's natural curiosity by quantum mechanics. And there have been a plethora of books, no short books. Yes, as you point out, which is unusual because, you know, that's for something that's not well understood. And I'm not going to use a famous line by the man who hold you now hold his desk. Richard Feynman at Caltech. You have a Feynman desk. Some professors are chaired.

Some are desks. Some are, yeah. But in this case, you know, I think. with all these books. And as you said, in your famous, you know, sure everyone's going to understand my version of it. This is really the first one. I mean, there have been other books,

but they tend to kind of have a concomitant description of the multiverse, and you get into it. But specifically with regard to Everettian theory, this is, you know, one of the more notable ones that goes into the actual meat and potatoes of that theory. As I said before we sat down, I don't like podcasts for, you know, the host interviews, the authors,

He'll tell us, you know, what is a reader going to get on your book? Because it means that a host did not read the book. B, he or she is trying to undermine your sales. And, you know, I know that's the cat food budget. Although I want to point out, this is the first time, I think, in human history. In your last book, you quoted Bill and Ten. And that was excellent. In this book, you found a way actually to save Shrdinger's cat from ultimate annihilation.

No chance for harm. Any public experts. Hence the PETA endorsement on the back of the book. So I want to get a little bit outside the realm. But let me just, you know, on that note what you just said, you know, there are many books on one mechanics, and not every single one of them, but the vast majority have the philosophy that isn't this weird.

We'll never understand it. It's a mystery, right? And whether or not you believe in my world, I wanted to undo that particular thing. That's why I did think that another book on quantum mechanics list. something that had a place in the world because I want to say, number one, it's not ineffably mysterious. It's just science, right? And number two, here's a possible way to make sense of it. Now, you might not believe a possible way to make sense of it, but it can be

made sense of, and that's the more important message. Yeah. Yeah, I was questioning whether or not, if I were in your position, would I advocate that a young, you know, science, popular science author write a book about the foundations of quantum mechanics, you know, as a means to, you know, funding profit. I'm not sure I would. And in the book you point out the fact that nobody writes books about the interpretations of classical mechanics. I mean, you've touched very deeply on interpretations of statistical mechanics in the origin of time. In the previous books, the origin Higgs boson, the park of the universe, etc. But I think it's unusual because in our classes, we never sit down. We kind of get pulled a fast one if your physics grad student

or even an undergraduate. You don't need to know the foundations of new. Newtonian mechanics, as you point out, baseball is going to travel, or we call some baseballs travel. And it's actually true that you probably should spend some time on the homily interpretations of quantum mechanics, adaptations of quantum mechanics, but we never do. We never teach it to our students that way. So I found this useful, you know, for the professionals in the audience,

that this is actually a useful tool for even, you know, advanced or first year graduate students that are curious about quantum information, cubism, things like that, but also to understand what they're doing because there's a Merman quote that you use often shut up and calculate. He was not saying... No, I know he was. He said, and calculated. Right, I think.

That's right. Yeah, that was sort of the intern. And I actually have the distinction of being told by none other than 2019 Nobel Prize laureate, Jim Peebles, to shut up and measure. When I start asking him too many questions, he does the ultimate. He's the ultimate gentleman, of course. So he laughed at the colloquium and told me to shut up and measure the CMV. And that's what we're trying to do. And I think what's so interesting about this book and the connections that you make within it is this connection between the small things in the universe, the ultimate quantum things, and the largest thing is the universe, which we study.

And, you know, to first order, it might be curious for the listener to hear why they should be related at all. I mean, why should the very small things be related to the very biggest things? That's maybe question, you know, one, part one of the question. And part two is how can, you know, space time itself, the framework in which Newtonians, mechanics is played out upon, how can that emerge from quantum mechanics? And I think that's a key philosophical point you make in the book. And I think it'll be interesting to hear your thoughts on that. How do we get around this notion that this very small things have almost known?

We don't have to influence ants in the basement on the biggest parts of the universe. So to what do you attribute this fascinating connection between the ultra small, maybe plant scale structure of space? time and the grandness of the cosmos so we see that. Yeah, I mean, I would say that quantum mechanics is not a theory of the very small. I think that sometimes we say that. I've said that. Everyone says that.

But a more precise version of that statement is quantum mechanics becomes necessary when you think about the virus. When you think about the very large, when you get a rocket to the moon, you don't need quantum mechanics. I just do Mutuioi, you need general relativity to get a rocket to the moon. So quantum mechanics is a theory that has a limit, which we call classical. So in certain circumstances, under certain conditions, when things obey certain parameters, then classical mechanics is a very, very good approximation. But that's the puzzle, right?

The puzzle isn't why we need quantum mechanics for the very small. Puzzles why classical mechanics works at all, because classical mechanics is so different in quantum mechanics, in a fundamental way. And this, I mean, part of the reason I wrote the book is this is what I'm doing research on right now. Like, why is there a classical limit and where does it come from? you see, but you do look at the literature on this is everyone cheats. Everyone knows the world is classical, so they just find that the classical mechanics in there, but they don't show why it's necessary or how it could have been the other way. They take certain features of the world

for granted, like the existence of space, right, like three-dimensional space, up down, left, right, forward, backward, they just put that in, right? And as you know, as a physicist, when you learn physics and you want to learn, okay, learning quantum mechanics, let's start with, the harmonic oscillator, what do you do? They teach you the classical harmonic oscillator, and there's a process called quantizing each time, right? Quantization. And again, nature doesn't do that.

Nature doesn't start with a classical world and quantize it. And my strong conviction is that that's why we haven't quantized gravity. Because we stubbornly insist on starting with a classical theory, whether it's general relativity or string theory or anything else, and quantizing it. And I think that if we just start with a quantum theory, we're real purely quantum theory from the start without assuming any classical superstructure, we might be able to show how gravity emerges from. But guess what? That's really hard. It's not at all clear how do they progress doing that.

One thing that is seemingly clear, but even there I'm going to hesitate is the laws of physics need to be pretty special to get a classical world emerging at all. So why, or do the laws of physics have that property? I really don't know. I would like to know that. In my more speculative moments, I wonder, like, if you had a random, generic, truly unstructured set of laws of physics, could it somehow break up into different sectors, all of which had classical limits or something like that?

But I don't really see how that could happen. Yeah, it seems like, you know, this consistent, you know, fools errand, which is, you know, to find gravity and have it be quantized. but to do it the other way around seems profitable, and of course you explore them that they're part of the book. And I think that is a unique, you know, not too often to, to my knowledge, I haven't seen that explored before. So to propose, you know, new modalities of think, I think is very commendable.

I mean, there's mention for the people who are not experts out there. You know, one of the things we talk about in classical mechanics is position and momentum, position in velocity. Like momentum, classically, is just the velocity times the max of the particle. And that, in Newtonian physics, that's the, the state of a part. You need a position, the momentum, I can tell you what it's going to do.

But clearly they're not on an equal footing, right? Like the way that we teach it, the way we conceptualize, the position comes first, and momentum seems to be derived right at it. But then you go to this more advanced supercharged version of classical mechanics called Hamiltonian mechanics, and the distinction

becomes a little blurrier, right? Like position momentum now seem to be more equal. And in quantum mechanics, in the formalism of quantum mechanics, They're completely equal. You know, there's an operator P for momentum, is an operator Q for position. One might ask why those are letters, but okay, they're the letters.

And all the equations they appear and they feel symmetrical. And that really sort of begins to poke at you and say, why is it like that? Why is there a difference between position and momentum? So I have a chapter in the book about that. Right. I'm sure there's no other books that have chapters. No, that's right.

For all. Hello, students of the Impossible. It's Professor Brian Keating here with just a tiny little, little homework assignment to interrupt your podcast. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast or following us on your podcast app of choice. Get some research and actually only about 50% of you are actually following or subscribing to the Into the Impossible podcast. And really mean a lot if you could subscribe and keep up to date with me with all the greatest content. I'm putting out tremendous amounts. Podcast has grown in popularity, but it can be

better and bigger with your help. Do that. Please. Do it now. Don't wait. You'll forget. If you're looking to really boost your position on the grade curve for some extra credit, make sure to leave a rating or review of the podcast. It really helps. Thanks a lot. Now back to the show. All you add aspiring, Cornynian, that's popular science. And I think, you know, even in my popular books, I want to say something, something. I don't want to just say, here's the stuff we've discovered and presented pedagogically.

That's part of it. But I also want to make an argument that people can potentially disagree. I think also the fact that there's a frontier. This is not a dead subject. It's not for people that lived 100 years ago. I mean, it's been said by people. I think David Gross might have said, well, you know, we need interpretations of, you know, or maybe he said something like this. Particles need particle physicists the same way that birds need ornithologists.

I think funnment against something like that. Yes, that's right. So in this case, I mean, do we need it? I mean, as you said, classical boss on brackets, Lagrangian theory. and then promoting it with quantum commutation relations. That's about all you get in Sakharai, are the classical text for those of you know, nonprofits out there that we use in first-year graduate student classes.

But nowhere in there does it say, well, there's a whole panoply of different ways you could interpret what is fundamental and what is the actual entity under which, you know, reality is to be ascribed. And I wonder, you know, in the many worlds interpretation, which obviously you're an advocate of, You've been a lot of the proponent of. You mentioned many times in the book how it's not only appealing to physicists,

but it's also made it to way into popular culture and films and so forth. And, you know, to what do you attribute the sort of very dominant kind of, I have to be honest with you. I don't know it's always like bias against the ever-ready in many worlds interpretation, favorite of the standard, which every physicist in almost every book you have read and I have read, I would say, we know this isn't right. Here's there all the rules. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, I think that, of course, most physicists, if you ask them about their favorite group, phage and fun mechanics, they would just say they don't care, right? They don't even want to think about that. And I think that's bizarre and weird. I mean, I've had professional physicists tell me, I don't care what actually happens in reality.

All I care is what the measurement outcomes or the observational predictions. I don't think that any 12-year-old gets excited by science, by saying, someday I'm going to make some observational predictions. I don't care what happens in reality. I think that you get excited because you're actually curious about the real world and what happens in. And somehow we managed to beat that out of our students. So there's this thing called the Copenhagen interpretation, which traces back probably to Heisenberg on anyone else.

And no one ever explicitly says what it is and it's kind of very fuzzy. But it has this, it follows this idea that what we're supposed to do is just make predictions, not ask what's happening. underneath the hood. And if you believe in the real world, there's something happening underneath the hood, I want to know what that is. So I don't think we should be satisfied with that. And I think that we should let our students not be satisfied with it. Right. And, yeah, we always have this image of the old ones, you know, go into this field once they're productive career. Once they're done with serious.

Right, yeah. As you point out, you know, Einstein, when he was thinking about spooky action kind of distance and EPR paradox was at the right old age of 48, which is my age right now. So I feel, you know, I should have a more kind of respectable beard and mustache and hairstyle. I want to talk about, you know, some of the criticisms that the many world theory does have. But before I would do that, because I think that's standard. But you probably haven't asked that one. Maybe. I want to know more about you and what excites you, what fascinates you about life.

I know that you, you know, are a very cultured man and you're very erudite man. Obviously, your interests are highly peripatetic. They range from theology to deepen the heart of astrophysics, cosmology, fundamental physics. But I also know that you're an ordinary person. You are fascinated by many different things. But I know my name's one leg at a time. One leg at a time. I've done it twice with two legs.

I know you're interested in time. I know that you are an avid, have an avid fascination with watches because I once watched you at an auction putting a thousand-dollar bit in a G-shock. I found that very unusual, but to each is a no. So I know that you're in a different world. I do own the G-Sach. You guys do I? I own a couple because they're not. You have a bunch of little kids running.

But outside physics, what is Sean Carroll up to? What kind of things do you do that make time? time passed by without your another symbol. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm lucky enough that there are things that I do that other people might think are work that I think are fun. Like I have my own podcast, right? Mindscape. And I write books.

You know, I, it's interesting when you write books because I know many professional science writers. And that's what they do for living. It's right. But they write articles for magazines or websites or whatever. And many of them hate writing books. and I hate writing articles, but I love writing books, because I'm like, give me 100,000 words,

set people's trade, and that's really what I run, right? And, you know, one of the reasons why I start the podcast is because I love reading other people's books, but it's very hard to find the time, right? I had a big stack of books, and I'm like, I'm never going to read these. But if I need to interview the author,

then maybe I'll at least skip it. You're here today, and I said, for your book. And that's why, yeah, exactly. That's why the podcast is very eclected. I'm not like a thrill seeker in terms of skydiving or rock climbing like many of our friends are. I like eating good food, drinking good wine, just got back from our annual vacation in Las Vegas where we eat in enormous many food. And I play poker, right? Which is another kind of thing that is not surprising near businessists playing poker.

The basis the room comes up. That's right. Very, very often. But yeah, that's what I like to do. You know, rewrite, talk to people. Make good good wine. That's what I like. What about speaking and kind of the classical speaking versus debating versus being on podcasts?

Some people shy away from them. They don't like they're more comfortable behind a computer screening or notepad. Where do you fall in that spectrum? 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 speeds. 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 GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Yeah, you know, I was as a kid, one of these people who thought, you know, debating was really fun. I joined the debate team, called the speech team in high school. And I was terrible. Like, I, in fact, over and over again, I got the same comment that, you know, what you're saying is somewhat interesting, but your delivery is sucks.

It's just that you can't give a talk to save your life. And, you know, I worked at it. And I, there was like a little phase transition. You know, the moment I can pinpoint my senior year in high school where I became a good public speaker. And but I love being on the debate team because it did help teach you logic and argumentation and speech and so forth. But I actually don't like debating as such anymore. I mean, I think that... Do you have some notable debates with people like, really...

I've done it. I've done it. Beemently, you know, respectful, but... Yeah, but I just want to on Life and After Death, for example. And, yeah, I do think that it serves a purpose, but, you know, people on Twitter, for example, are, like, debate me. I like Twitter is...

I love Twitter as a medium, but not for discussions. It's just for... just pure. Yeah. But, you know, debating, it's a performative act. You know,

I'm happy to debate with someone like William, and Craig, or Stephen Alexander, if I debate on life after death with, but not because we are

advancing human knowledge, but because we're sharing some existing human knowledge with the audience, right? I think that if you actually, you know, there's a different thing you do, if you have two people

with the same goals of understanding the world, they don't debate. They sit down, talk, right? They discuss, right? And that's much more like what I do on the podcast, right? Like, even when I have people on the podcast who I disagree with, um, my goal is to let them have their satty and maybe, you know, note my reasons for not believing them, but then move on. Like, I'm not there to

show why they're wrong or anything like that. That just to get you right. And a similar kind of canard leveled against, uh, science authors, popular science authors is that it's not really something a serious scientist does. And, you know, I got some criticism along those lines in my book, which you were kind enough to blur with the phrase readable, which I thought was, you know, a little overselling it. It was readable. Now, I think you were much more effusive in your praise, and I'm very grateful that you were so. But, you know, kind of you get comments that, oh, well, you know, you're spending your time writing votes and I'm in the laboratory return the

rules. I'm in the throes of the calculation. So how do you react to that? How do you have the day job and the night job? And what do you view as the responsibility or maybe lack of a professional scientist in terms of communicating? I think it's not just scientists.

I think academics more generally have this weird point of view that says, oh, you are spending your time making what we do for a living accessible and interesting to outsiders. Therefore, you were trash.

You are helping taxpayers fund me, therefore I sustain you. Although they want to verbally say that, but that's sort of, that's the functional end of their criticism. I think that's exactly right. They love overtly say. But then when you say, well, what they'll say is we love popularization or outreach

or things like that. And then you say, okay, if this person who does it, they're like, yeah, they're not that. It's not a serious. It could realize, they should really spend their time doing research. So, you know, what can I say? I spend my response to that is to not care.

Like, you know, just to do, you know, it has hurt my career in various ways. It has helped my career in various other ways. So what can I say? It's what I want to do. So as long as I can do it, I'm going to do it and they can live with it. Right. And it brings you joy, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that's not as you. And you also mention about the responsibility aspect. I mean, I would be not completely honest if I said that I did this out of some sense of duty your obligation. I like it. I do enjoy it. And I enjoy, even if no one read it, I like the writing. Like I said, I really do enjoy that sort of puzzle solving of getting the pieces

together. And you learn things. You realize you understand things much better when you've written a book about that. I don't think that individual scientists have any responsibility to talk to the general public. I think the field has a responsibility. There's many scientists who I think would be terrible talking to the general

public. And that's fine. I should say deeply hidden. That's perfectly fine, but I think that as a field, you know, we rely on the public, and especially the kind of stuff that you and I do, which is not going to cure cancer, right? We're really in it for curiosity, curved research, understanding how the world works. And if the world, taxpayers and citizenry of the polity comes up with money to pay for you to discover things about reality, and then you don't tell them what you discovered, like what is the plan of that? Yeah, my late colleague Hans Parr at least in San Diego, used to tell me.

We serve at the pleasure of politicians who currently aren't engaged in any serious war that requires physicists or astronomers to engage their mental capacities into, right? And that Miller Grass-Tuygens written about that, the partnership between alliance between astronomy and big military industrial campaigns. I want to talk a little bit just about kind of the places that your mind has taken you. And I think a lot of, as I see you, in the role of a popular science writer, as well, that's one of your many abilities, but also as a teacher. And I know that your teaching is very important to you at Caltech and your kind of day job, so to speak, although I think you probably do it at night, and I think you're right during the day or at Feynman's desk.

But in terms of that axis of pleasure and obligation, I mean, where does teaching fall? Is it something that, one thing we're concerned about at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination is can you teach imagination? Can you teach creativity? And as you know, and as I know, and many of our colleagues know, science is eminently creative. I think to think of it as this purely analytic and quantitative aspect of human nature is not respecting its role as a part of culture. I think science is culture. And yet, you know, some people, there is sort of a distinction between whether creativity, like, you know, brilliance can that be taught? And then where do you fall on that kind of access. Well, I think, you know, something I've come to appreciate that there was a weird

thing that he said to me the very first time I told my own course, which is when I was a postdoc, actually, one of the professors at MIT where I was a postdoc who was scheduled to teach general relativity, went on sabbatical and never came back. So they were stuck without anyone teaching the course. So they asked me as a postdoc to teach general relativity. But better for worse, I said yes. And that ended up turning to the lecture notes, which ended up turning to a book. Right. It affected me in the world that way. But at the time, I was living, you know, poor postdocs living in someone's house,

and I was living from the top four of a house owned by this couple of those psychologists. And the guy learns that I'm teaching. He was a professor himself of psychology, and he said, you know, whatever the subject matter that you're teaching, what your students will actually take away from you, most importantly, is your moral example. And I'm like, maybe that's true. you're teaching psychology. I'm teaching

general relativity. Whether you're going to take away from me are the symmetries of the Riemont cancer, right? But years later, I realized he was right. And maybe moral example isn't how a scientist would say it, but I don't know if you can teach brilliance or creativity or imagination, but what you

can do is show it, right? I don't know how to articulate how to be a good scientist, but I can be an example of a good scientist. The way that you teach, are you willing to say, I don't know? Are you willing to do things in real time? How careful are you about doing different things? How much are you in explaining why things are one way rather than the other way?

How much do you care about? How these students are doing, et cetera. All of that is at least probably much more important than the actual subject matter, which after all, they can get in the book. Yeah, I mean, I've kind of noticed throughout the questions to many different experts, you know, from Pulitzer Prize winning poets to Nobel Prize winning physicists, that there is sort of a notion that you can teach. You can teach certainly well and you can inspire, but potentially creativity has to be something else, something else that's perhaps emergent once they're exposed to these things. It might be like some of my artist friends say, when I meet a young person who wants to be an artist, I say go and paint the masters.

First do that. First understand where it can, who are the masters in our discipline? Learn the rules and then bring it. Yeah, that's exactly right. So I think, that that is kind of maybe holds true across this aspect of culture. And that same dear colleague of mine who passed away, unfortunately last year, Hans Bar used to say that general relativity was the crowning accomplishment of Western civilization. I'll just leave that there. I want to add one other thing to what you said a few minutes ago

we're talking about taxpayers and so forth. Science, you know, quantum mechanics, I would say, in astronomy in my case, is something that's apolitical or it should be. I would say, you know, there's no Republican constellation over there, a Democrat comet over, you know, it's necessarily. And yet we see nowadays people waving into politics. And I think sometimes I think there's a little bit too much of the halo effect. This first Albert Einstein was very smart. He understood the speed of light.

So let's ask him about, you know, what should there be in terms of how many nations should it be on Earth. I know that you have multiple online personalities, not my own thing, not your psychologist's friends, but you have a political Sean Carroll account and a not. Do you believe there is an obligation for scientists to be political? And if so, is there some sort of scientific, you know, litmus test or whatever that, you know, an authentic scientist should hold? Or do you believe that you can have, you know, in front of a full spectrum of. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's a little bit of an exaggeration to say that science is not political. The universe is. Yeah.

The universe does what it does, what our political beliefs are. But science is a human activity that is embedded in politics and psychology and hopes and dreams and loves and fears just like everything else, right? And admitting that I think is important. I think that there's no necessary connection between one's science and one's politics. I don't think that there's any responsibility on the part of the individual scientists to get involved in politics. I don't think that being a scientist gets you any special expertise points when it comes to politics. But I also don't think that you should shut up about politics just because you're a scientist. And I think that, you know, I completely agree that, you know, someone's a famous scientist.

They're expounding on politics. That doesn't, there's no reason why the public should spend that much time with seeing them, even if they're Albert Einstein. Likewise, if they're a movie star or a singer expounding about politics, and yet they do. But I kind of blame the audience for this, right? Like, let the movie star expound all they want. I'm not going to blame them for expounding, but if CNN wants to report on their, what is the noun form of an expounding? I don't know, yeah. Expostulations.

Expostulations. And that's just crazy. Why should CNN do that? And you see it quite frequently. Oh, there are so many no-melt-frizzan winners that are in favor of this treaty or should vote for that. And there is, you know, sometimes there is an overland, right? Climate change, obviously, a place or arms control might be a place where there's no development scientific expertise and political equities.

And again, I think that scientists should be outspoken about politics if that's what they want to do, but they should be judged and how sensible their statements about politics are, not because they have a PhD in atomic physics. Right. That makes right. Any more so, you know, people who ask me to give a talk about cosmology and then at the end, it's an ethical someone to ask about climate change. And I always say, you know, I hope when you have a talk about climate change,

Someone asked them about cosmology, they say, you know, you should consult a real practicing cosmology. There's like Ruffold and Bill Foster, who are physicists who shifted into politics. So there's no incompatibility there, but there's no necessary connection. So we talked a little bit about what you do outside of physics and outside the lab and writing. I want to get back into the book in just a bit. I do want to talk just, you know, more broadly speaking about your, as we say in the biz worldwide. you know, how you got to, you know, here today, not, maybe not here. The four of life.

That's right, which is more complicated than all of the cosmology and quantum mechanics. But can you explain for the listeners who might not be familiar with your unique path to becoming a atheist, sorry, I should say, a naturalist, as you say. For one example, I'm being a physicist. I don't believe that you weren't originally intending to be a physicist when we started off in college and Bill and all that. If I recall correctly, perhaps I'm wrong. But you had other intentions.

No, I definitely wanted to be a physicist. I was one of these lucky kids who decided when they were 10 years ago. They wanted to do it. So I was reading books about the big bang of black holes. My favorite book was a completely unknown book, simply entitled High Energy Physics. They talked about all these particles being created with the Bevatron in the 60. So I was reading this in the late 70s.

And I wanted to do that. I had no idea what that meant to do that. And I even quickly figured out I wanted to be a theorist. I'm a theoretical physicist. Right. Because I was like, you laugh at it. No one. Yeah.

No one wanted me in the lab. I had a chemistry set. I kept you out of the lab. It's surprising that I kept all my clothes and fingers. I got the one. I got the money set that I had. But, you know, I was from, I think, the long line of steel workers and went to public school. No one in my family had any idea of what this involved.

So I got a full tuition scholarship to go to Villanova. So I said, yes, because it was great. So that was nice. And they had a very good astronomy department in the Illinois. It's probably not that great, but it's good enough that I could just do research. and, you know, I got published papers out of my undergraduate research and astronomy, but I also got introduced to a lot of interesting topics and politics and philosophy and literature and things like that. So I became a philosophy minor that became very interesting to me,

and because a former Villanova alumnus was a research scientist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, I got rejected by the Harvard Astronomy, but physics department, but the Harvard Astronomy Department took me. So that's why I stayed an astronomer, even though I'm not an astronomer. Like, you know, I'm not an astronomer. People out there, like, are confused by this. Constellations are not an astronomer. I've collected data. That's right.

Yes. So I was in an astronomy department, but again, I got lucky enough to be matched with George Field as my advisor. And at the time, I mean, George is a super famous expert in the interstellar medium, galactic physics and things like that. My needle hydrodynamics, again, that's what I don't do for a living. But he'd become curious about particle physics and cosmology. And so we wrote papers together and we learned together. And then I got lucky again because people at MIT, Eddie Fari and Alan Poe found me and asked me to work with them on general relativity and things like that, then hired me as a postdoc.

MIT, I went to the Institute of Theoretic Physics in Santa Barbara. Met a lot of brilliant people like Joe Volchinsky and so forth. I made, even though, you know, I should have left behind the fact that I came from a long line of steelworkers. is like I never got either never got good advice or never followed. Probably I got some good advice in there. What kind of an example of advice? So just to set the stage for the non-expert, so I graduated with my PhD in 1993.

So if you're on the cosmology side of things, that's right after we discovered the CMD, I saw it, it was COVID, right? If you're on the particle physics side of things or the particle theory side of things, that was just before we found dualities in superiors. person in the string theory. And gearing up to help the SSC, that's right. But the point is, when I was in grad school,

nothing interesting was happening in my field. It was the desert. So I was a hot property in the job market just on the basis of promise. Three years later, when I was on the job market again, millions of interesting things were happening, and I wasn't doing any of them. So I was not a hot property in the job market anymore

because people really good at CMB or super symmetric d-greens and things like that, string theory. and no one, you know, like, no one explained to me that I couldn't just putter around doing whatever I wanted to do, even though no one else cared about. So I made a huge mistake. Even when I moved to Santa Barbara, my second postdoc, I never wrote any papers with any development in Santa Barbara, which was just dumb. Like from the network connectivity. Just learning and learning new physics, right?

Like I knew my little area of physics, but there's so much expertise and brilliance there. I'm doing my thing, right? Now, the universe saved me because I was like, you know, by that point I was like, you know, if I want to get a job, as a physicist, I need to be the expert in something other people care about, right? But what am I an expert in? You know, not that many things. There was one thing I was an expert that no one cared about, namely the accelerating universe because they hadn't discovered it yet. But then in 1998, they discovered the accelerating universe. I had written a theory paper on models of dark energy.

I had written this well-known review article in the Cosmachian Constant. I was best friends with people in both groups. You know, Brian Schmidt, Adam Reese, Saul promoted. I was someone who advised. I was mentioning acknowledgments of the very first paper Saul wrote on Superdating with Ariel Lubar. And I collaborated with Brian Schmidt and Adam Reese and the group on the first paper on the Ecclesia State. So suddenly, even though I didn't do anything, I was a hot property of job market again.

The universe changed so that what I did was interesting. I mean, it didn't turn. You were a professor at Chicago, right? No, I got that professor should be because the universe started accelerating. So that was discovered in 1998. I was hired in 1999. I was secondly, the boy away. Now it came that finally they said the

said the acceleration of the universe isn't good for anything, but at least in that case, it turned out to do useful work to get you full employment. So I want to turn back a little bit more. So I want to turn back a little bit to the book, as I said, I don't want to steal too much thunder from something deeply hidden. One of a new book published September 10th of this past year. And it's a great Christmas present up for many awards,

including Amazon's best science book for the year and many other awards, words on the back from the most eminent folks in the fields of philosophy, physics, mathematics, astronomy, etc. So pick up your copies, plural. And speaking of contributions to GDP, some people estimate that quantum mechanics contributes 30 to 40% of world GDP, if you consider all things like computers, the internet. As I said before, as we both kind of maybe hinted in the refinement set of it or grosser. Does quantum mechanics need us to understand it? And in one place, do the foundations of quantum mechanics, are they important?

or is it just to kind of establish your bona fideys? You're a true, you know, physicists used to be called natural philosophers. And you've spoken about this in the past to the extent of that physicists will utter the word philosopher. It's in utter disgust and derision. So how do we handle that? 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. Yeah, I think that, you know, you don't need to care about the foundations of fun. It's like if you want to calculate the scattering cross-section of electron positron pairs, or if you want to build a better superconductor or whatever, you don't need to care about the foundations.

The only reason you need to care is if you care how nature works, if you're curious about that. Personally, I am curious about how nature works. Like, when I'm not thinking about quantum mechanics, I'm thinking about what happened at the Big Bang, which is also not going to build a better smartphone or anything like that, right? But it is, you know, there's a tiny fraction of us that have this enormous privilege that we're paid to think about the deepest mysteries of the universe. And philosophers are abundant, right? Like, there's not a bright line in between physics and philosophy. There's a strong overlap, but continuing between them.

And I'm going to take help wherever I can get, whether it's from physicists or mathematicians or philosophers or whatever to try to understand you. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the Impossible Tizai, your fearful host. Professor Brian Keating here with a tiny little homework assignment before we get back to the episode. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, either following it or subscribing to it, depending on your podcast, catcher of choice. I did some research of my own and found out that only about half of you are actually following or subscribing to the podcast. So please do that. And for some extra credit, if you're looking to boost your position on the grading curve, please leave a rating or review. It really helps us out tremendously.

do it, do it now, before you forget. Let's go back to the episode. Another interesting aspect of the book is that you talk a lot about the reality of the ever-ready interpretation of many worlds and splitting the wave function. So maybe for the non-experts, if you could just delve a little bit into what does it mean to split the wave function, what are many worlds? Even though it is not, I would say it's not the core aspect of the book. And that, I mean, it's an important part of it takes up most of the first two sections.

But still, it's not the ultimate conclusion. I think a lot of the conclusion depends on that, obviously. But can you first say a few words about what is in many worlds interpretation? And maybe explain what is an interpretation? Yeah. So it's not an interpretation, by the way. It's been called that. Everyone calls it that.

I call it that. It's a theory. Like what we're dealing with now, like maybe back in 1960s we're debating different interpretations of one. But as I say in the book, like it's not debating interpretations of war and peace or governments, right? It's a different scientific theories with different variables, different experimental predictions in many cases. And many worlds is one of these theories. And the idea is simply every version of quantum mechanics says an electron can be in a superposition of spin up and spin down, right? And when you measure it, it's either spin up or spin down.

But when you're not measuring it, it's both. It really can be a combination of both. And Everett, if you ever, ever, was a grad student in the 1950s who invented this theory, said, well, Look, you are made of electrons and also protons neutrons, but you are made of particles which you certainly believe obeyed rules of quantum mechanics. As we started the podcast with, everything should obey the rules of quantum mechanics,

so you should obey the mechanics. So let's not do the Copenhagen thing, which is treat you as classical and imagine that you look at the electron. Let's treat you as quantum mechanics also. So that's a sort of move that he makes, which if it didn't lead down a certain road, everyone would be happy with, right?

And Wheeler did approach that question before Everett. I mean, he was interested in the wave function of the universe. Everett's thesis topic was quantized graphic. And then, but he realized, you know, that no one stands outside the universe to observe it. So I need to do it a little bit better. But anyway, he said, look, if you obey the rules of quantum mechanics, then you can use positions. Let's ask what the Schrodinger equation, the fundamental dynamical equation,

quantum mechanics, let's ask what it predicts when you measure this electron. And again, everyone agrees on the answer to that question. The system, U plus electron, evolves into a superposition of the electron who spin up and you saw it spin up, plus the electron who spin down and you saw it spin down. And Everett's really second move was to say, and that's okay. It's more therapeutic than, you know, physicists. He's like, just believe that. Don't bend over backwards to deny the reality. This is what the equation says.

What if that were just true? And he argues that we're just true. We would interpret that as two separate worlds. Because what happens in that one part of the weight function and the other part, once they're created, they have nothing to do with the thing. Nothing that happens in one part of the way function ever affects the other part. So it's as if they are completely different copies of reality. So the point of many worlds is that he never put in a bunch of worlds.

The world's role is there. All he did was say, let's accept that the worlds are there, ask whether or not people living in those worlds would see the kind of world we see, the kind of events we see. And he says, yes. To be fair, that is an interpretate. I mean, that's sort of an interpretation, right? I mean, saying, let's assume it's okay sort of giving, you know,

in Promontor that it's okay to treat them for the purposes of this exercise, right? For now, we have not actually come up with a, you know, to this point in this particular question. We have not come out with something specific that was an experimental test of many worlds or something that you would observe differently were many worlds to be accurate description of reality. Well, it's a theory because it's a set of mathematical structures that evolves in a certain level. Now, that's just like classical mechanics, with their relativity or whatever. And of course, you have to point to things in the world and say, this is what is being represented by that mathematical structure.

You have to do that in any theory. And Everett has a way of doing that that is more problematic than classical mechanics where everything is pretty straightforward. So that's fine, and we can argue about that. But it's eminently falsifiable because all Everett says is there are weight functions and they obey the short degree. All you need to show me is a weight function either a weight function not obeyed the short period or something in the world that is not a wave function. If you do either one of those things, you have falsified many worlds interpretation. But one of those apply to Copenhagen interpretation too? Who knows what the Copenhagen interpretation is? I mean, Copenhagen is a certain. I mean,

certainly says that quantum systems do not obey the Schrodinger equation when the way functions. Sure. Never says they always. Smooth and uniform behavior and that collapse and there's a final sort of a one. Right. Okay. So for somebody that did want to, you know, as you talked about in the book, in a very acute conversation between the daughter of physicist and the father philosopher, maybe a philosopher,

maybe a philosopher, she talks to her father and says, you know, imagine you're a billionaire billionaire llama. I'm interested in both because, you know, my experiment right now, the Simons observatories in Chile, there's no shortage of llamas that we could eventually obtain, and there's a shortage of billionaires. I mean, maybe one of these lobes was worth. So you're a billionaire llama, and I want to know, how would you go about actually creating a test that you could endow, you know, the Carroll Institute of Technology or the Simons of You know, we're taking, we're accepting donations. It's the season.

What kind of experiment could you do? It's unlimited resources. People are doing it. It's not an experiment. People are doing this experiment. Get a bunch of atoms together. Get them cool them down. So it's like a boson sign condensator.

There are theories in which, very explicitly, the weight function undergoes spontaneous. Without even looking at it. Without the shortening group. So it's an explicit violation of the shortening period. And you can calculate, that that basically dumps energy into the system. So it will ruin the Bose-Einstein in the southern, right?

The fact that it's a condensate, right? So it's very rare for any one particle to undergo one of these transitions, but if you have enough particles together, it would eventually happen. So the rate per particle is something like once for 300 million. So you need a bunch of particles. So it's not an easy experiment to do, but it's a very clear signal that would rule out many worlds. How close would you say we are to that type of – and it does – I want to take one other step back. Previously, you and I have spoken about Carl Popper and the things, demarcation, you know, supposition that, you know, Popper suggested that something is not scientific if it cannot be falsified.

And you and you and I have talked about this and his original targets. And you discuss a little bit in the book as well, you know, were things like Marxist dialectic materialism. And I always point out there's a lot more Marxist dictatorships on Earth today than, in Popper's time, so even he's been falsified. But physicists take that as sort of a sacrosanct law of nature. I personally think that that owes to a deep sort of envy, a philosophical envy of the girdle's incompleteness theorem in mathematics, which says that you can't make sure that a formal system of mathematics is self-consistent.

And so to obtain a parallel structure in physics, we kind of rely on this Popper's definition. and it leads people to say some pretty hostile thing, but to say things about the multiverse and even many worlds that is not scientific because it cannot be falsified. Now you're talking about a falsification and, you know, due respect to my experimental colleagues

who made bozine, Steincom, it's all over San Diego. You know, my laboratory is not the coldest part of San Diego. It's pretty close, but six millicelven currently. But they can get a lot of cold. So why have, you know, When will this occur? I mean, we've had bosauny-in-synchondises for 30 years, and more. So what are some of the practical impediments behind this? Is it a matter of time? I mean, are there things that come into the way it function,

splitting, the time scales for that. You mentioned 300 million years. What kinds of things could we do just to accelerate the discovery pace? Yes, let me just mention parenthetically. We already agreed that listening to physicists found about politics, shouldn't give them any more credit person on the street. Likewise for philosophers, right? Like, likewise for physicists founding about philosophy. Like, physicists love to think that with 15 minutes of thought they could solve all the

philosophy problems in the world. That's not true. So when you believe, when you listen to physicists or other scientists talk about the scientific method or what is where it's not science, just, you know, it's a free country. They can go ahead and do that, but they have no expertise whatsoever. And, but yeah, but even if you take Popper at base value, many worlds is perfectly falsifiable

for exactly these reasons. And Popper said good things about many worlds. And I had to put no... He didn't agree with it. He didn't like it. He said it was much better than Copenhagen. He was amongst Strasson. He was like the study state universe.

Yeah, he had his own weird interpretation. He was a lot of the case. Not that prevents me. Not a physicist, right? But, you know, he thought in many worlds is fine in terms of philosophy, and it is very falsifiable.

Now, this example of getting the bozines, and condensate and looking for spontaneous collapses is an unusual one just because it's so good. It's like so crystal clear. If you found this, it would be ruled out. There are other alternatives to many worlds, such as epitomechanics, which is much harder to see how to rule them out.

In fact, there's plenty of people who believe that they cannot be ruled out. They're experimentally indistinguishable from many worlds. I'm not so sure about that. I think that this is part of the ramifications of the fact that these haven't taken the foundations of one mechanic seriously. So we haven't really thought as hard as they can about these questions. It's interesting to see now at colleagues at UC San Diego and Dr. Andrew Friedman and David Kaiser and Booth that are working with me and others on so-called cosmic bell tests. And some of these have really ruled out as many loopholes or the face-based available loopholes that could plausibly explain.

using invariable. So, you know, it does seem there as a resurgence, and they're not the only, the Chinese groups are very national academy, very interested in this type of work, quantum information. Maybe we're at the, you know, precipice of a revolution when these types of experiments will be taken, you know, with the seriousness that perhaps they deserve. So I think it is interesting to note that this is something that is potentially falsifiable. It sounds like you're willing to grant falsifyability as having some measure of, you know, or contributing to a metric of success of a theory,

maybe not the definitive one, as Popper might have argued. Well, I think it's sufficient but not necessary. If you can say that it's falsified, falsifiable, then what's your complaint, right? You just have to falsify it. You know, one thing I took away from the big picture, your previous book, you know, is sort of this contention that the only that which can interact with the core theory and is real or can be considered real. So therefore, you know, poltergeist, astrology, and maybe even God and things like that, that cannot be, you know, there's no God particle despite the Enlighterman terminology for it.

That's right. Yeah, it's like, got to move your books. But the question of, you know, whether or not these many worlds, I mean, is there an interaction with them with the core theory? I mean, can you overlay the superstructure of many worlds itself and ask, does. it interact with the core theory? Or can, and you might want to explain, what is the core theory? Frank Wilczak's definition for what if you would have explained. Yeah. And so, well, just to answer the question, of course, they do interact. I mean, they slipped. They came from the same place, right? We shared the same past. The world came from the same place. There's a very physical, tangible

interaction between them in the past, just not in the future, right? So the core theory is this way thinking about the laws of physics that govern our everyday lives. And that's a very expansive definition of our everyday lives to basically include almost every experiment ever done here on Earth, right? So the idea that the world is a bundle of quantum fields, describing electrons and parks and neutrinos and so forth, interacting through the rules of quantum field theory and the forces of nature of electromagnetism, the strong force,

and even gravity at the quantum level is included here. Because as long as you're within a weak field, weak gravitational field, far away from black holes or the Big Bang or whatever, we understand one gravity problem. So literally, everything you've ever seen with your eyes, touch with your fingers, et cetera, is well-defined, well-described by this core theory. And people continually misunderstand what I say in the book, I don't think you do, but other people do. So I'll say it out loud. Like, they think what I'm saying is that this existence of this core theory either proves that God doesn't exist or prove that life, after death, doesn't exist. exist or prove that collectivity doesn't exist, but none of that is right. What it proves is that if you want to believe on any of these things that somehow affect the world in a way that we show up in your everyday life,

then you're saying that this core theory, which I give the equation for in the end of the book, you buy a T-shirt. You're saying that's wrong. You're saying it has to be modified with someone. It's insufficient. So this theory has been tested six ways from Sunday. So if you're going to say it's wrong, fine. tell me how it's wrong, tell me exactly where it goes wrong. Forget about God and all that stuff.

If you think that consciousness is something other than a manifestation of physical stuff, tell me where this equation goes wrong. That's your burden, because we established the equation is pretty good. And could one not say, well, in the future, we didn't know what the weak force, and the core theory of 1929 is very different in the core theory of 1939, et cetera, so are you just thinking of the sort? Could one say, well, we don't know how the soul,

part, you know, the solon or whatever, the crouton interacts with the core theory now, but you're shortchanged against criminalized little teacher. Could one not say that? One cannot say that. That's the thing, because the wonderful, it's a special feature of quantum field. There's different ways of talking about it, but in the book I explain this idea of crossing symmetry, that if something can affect an electron in some way, then you can rotate by 90 degrees, and you can make that thing by smashing electrons together, right?

fields that talk to each other and have an influence on each other can be created or destroyed by each other. So if there were things that affected the quantum fields of the theory, we could make them. They either are just not there or they interact so legally they have zero on our everyday life. And no discoveries in future physics will change that unless those discoveries say quantum field theory is entirely wrong. What about in the other's direct? So obviously, a soul is something human-centered would have to be a low energy phenomenon. What about those who'd say, well, we haven't reached high enough energy. You know, when you reach 10 to 16 GED, you know, looking at the early quantum universe, perhaps,

you might see evidence of some part of us. What about the other end? That's not our everyday life. Yeah, so outside of our everyday life in the very, very early universe, of course, the theory is nowhere near a position. In one of your talks, I think it was in Oxford on the philosophy, theology, you have a talk about God is not a good theory, but not God is not theory, but God is a good theory.

They just printed the title, actually, so I'm joking about that. And in the talk, you type, yeah, right, that's true. And in that talk, you give a few different arguments, and one of them, which I took issue with, was the notion of, you know, you show the Hubble D.C., and he's like, yeah, what's the point of all these galaxies

if there is a creator? So I wonder if you can maybe re-capitulate that argument, but, you know, I can say, well, there's 116 elements on the periodic table, you know, and maybe God's advocate in this case, would say, well, what are the purpose of any of those? You know, why do we need it? We're only made of, you know, maybe three dozen different elements in the body.

So aren't you being too, you know, anthropocentric? When you talk about what's the purpose of these galaxies out of who knows? I mean, what is, so as an argument against the existence of God is a good theory, not existence of God itself, but why is that sort of a persuasive argument in your opinion? Well, because good theories make good predictions, And we're thinking about this as good basements. So we have different theories of the universe. Theistic models, atheistic models, whatever,

and then those subcategories within there. And then you ask yourself, the whole job of testing theories is you say, if this theory were true, what should I observe? And then you update. You have a prior probability for all of your theories, and you update that, say, depending on the likelihood, would you have observed that? So if all you knew was that,

God created the universe and God loves us and God has some special place for us in its heart. What do you predict should be the large scale features of the universe? Well, we've done that experiment because there were people thousands of years ago who had this belief. And none of them predicted 200 billion galaxies spread uniformly throughout the world with no human beings on them, right? Completely irrelevant to us. If all you needed was to make humankind, there's much easier way to. to do that than you create these universes.

So either, let me just finish it, either you say, well, I have no idea what God predicts, or you say, well, God wouldn't predict it that, therefore I lower the possibility. And if you say, I have no idea what God predicts, you're saying God's not good here. Right, okay, yeah.

So I would say, just the same, it might be to paraphrase, what you're saying, the existence of the extra 108 elements or whatever on the PR table is further justification in a non, maybe perhaps parsimonious God. But, you know, to use a trivial case, I have, you know, eight colonies in San Diego who study the Hubble Deep Field who study every one of those galaxies.

And, you know, it might be a guy advocate. The purpose of those galaxies, you know, is for human curiosity to understand the universe. Again, I think when you overlay on top of it, the notion that, you know, these attributes of God, that's another thing. but perhaps it's, again, just speaking, trying to summarize the excess of these elements and things that we can't interact with or see no purpose for, you know, it's not clear to me that that entirely invalidates the notion of even a personal god, but certainly taking away the personal aspect of the God entirely a God of a creator that created the universe perhaps.

I don't know that that necessarily invalidates it, right? Because it's just a tribunal. I want to say, come on. I mean, of course, you can, after the fact, invent some ex post facto justification. Oh, God would have wanted you do exactly that. And this is the entire history of theology, discovering new facts about the universe and go,

that's just how God would have wanted to do it. And never did they say ahead of time, God will want it to be this way, this fairer than have predicted. That's why it's a crappy thing. Okay, good. So I want to conclude in the last few minutes. with the plug zone.

I want to go and refer people. I will put a bunch of links to that talk that we just mentioned. I want to talk the links to the book. Any other things that are coming up in Sean Carroll's universe that would like the audience? No. I mean, subscribe to the podcast, but it's the usual thing. It's a mindset podcast.

After a book comes out, it's back to science book. So, like, I'm feeling very chagrin. This is a very low publication. year for me because I got the book out and everything. I have like three or four publications that are within Epsilon being written. Another one. But I want to get these papers done. So, you know, if there are any businesses out there, yeah, by all means,

look for papers. I think it's coming out on one mechanics, cosmology, and one that I'm really very excited about, about statistical mechanics and causality, why the past, or why you've caused, have causal influence over the future but not past, right? remember that's true they can do sort of jay of pearls ideas about causality and things like that so it's something that people have mumbled about i think you can make a bit more than okay last question dream guest for the podcast alive people who are alive today

you can't violate the core theory show all right people who are alive um you know i've been asked this before and i've never given the satisfactory answer and part of it is i've done pretty well with getting my dream guests And I have a few more coming up for pretty good. And I have a long list of people I have not invited, but if I did invite them, they might say yes. So, you know, I'd love to have Martha Nussbaum on the podcast. I'd let have Barack Obama on the podcast, actually. I have a rule against current politicians or candidates. Because I think that they have the vested interest in trying to get elected, not telling the truth, right?

And Obama probably also has that even though he's out of office, so he probably wouldn't either. But I'll have you on his Netflix version. All these people, you know, recently passed away. I mean, Nome Chomsky, did we think that I have in the podcast. Yeah. David Doidge. David Doidge, I do want to have.

Jennifer is one of the business. She's a writer. She wants to say, you know, she's a government of the business. She wants to stay there. We've had her down for a matter of America. You can coax, or isn't it, but you're much happier at home with the cats, right. All right. Let me show you the book one more time out there in Hilbert's space.

Hilbert Space is real or not? Totally real. Okay. Well, the universe is real and it's now one. Get the book. Audio, visual, Kindle, any form possible. Something deeply hidden by Dr. Sean Carroll, physicist at California Institute of Technology. Thank you, Sean.

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Thank you.