Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Best Guest I Never Had: An Elegy for Steven Weinberg ​(#203)

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

This episode is sort of "fan fiction" conversation with a dead man who will cast a shadow over physics, philosophy, and theology for decades to come: Steven Weinberg, co-recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize. Long before audiobooks and podcasts were a thing, in 1992 I took a night train from Cleveland to Buffalo to Binghamton to meet my girlfriend. To while away the hours, I brought with me Weingberg's epochal popular science book, "The First Three Minutes". A few months later, as a graduation present, I received from Lawrence Krauss, CWRU's incoming physics department chairman, "Dreams of a Final Theory". “Weinberg” is the most mentioned name in my The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast notebook where I keep thoughts on possible/upcoming guests. I never got to host him on my show. I did try, most recently in February 2021. For a long time, I held off, insecure in my ability to bring anything new to the table. Weinberg was a brilliant scientist but as I show, had overly simplistic thoughts on religion and practitioners. Often he claimed science, at its best, SHOULD make religion less plausible. Using quotes drawn from his many interviews and lectures, including one in his own voice, I bring you this slightly combative interview with a very complex individual. For the record, Stephen Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow, and Abdus Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for his work on Electroweak Symmetry Breaking or the, so-called, ‘Standard Model for particle physics’. He also made many contributions to both particle physics and cosmology. With respect to the latter, the question addressed is whether or why our universe is fine-tuned for our existence. Past guest, Lenny Susskind explained that Weinberg calculated that if the cosmological constant was just a little different, our universe would cease to exist. This paper is behind a paywall, but see a public lecture (with advanced math): https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Weinberg/Weinberg3.html. Weinberg believed the Anthropic Principle may be appropriated by cosmologists committed to nontheism, and refers to that Principle as a "turning point" in modern science because applying it to the string landscape "may explain how the constants of nature that we observe can take values suitable for life without being fine-tuned by a benevolent creator".  I cover some of Steven’s ‘greatest hits’ including: "I can hope that this long sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas, will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute … it may be the most important contribution that we can make."  "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." "In our universe we are tuned into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them."  And my personal ‘favorite’:"It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?" So, let me know what you think of this episode. Should I do more solo episodes like this, or make this my one and only 😀? Resources:  Stephen C. Meyer “Weinberg and the Twilight of the Godless Universe” Dan Falk: “Learning to Live in Weinberg’s ‘Pointless Universe’ “ Find more quotes from Weinberg here: Please leave a rating and review of The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast: Simply click here, scroll down to the ratings and leave a rating and review: 👉 Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel, just click here 👉 Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Please contact [e-mail] to learn more about sponsoring Into the Impossible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, out. Hey friends, this is a first in the Into the Impossible podcast history, a solo episode with yours truly opining on something important to me, which is the passing of perhaps the one guest that I most wish that I had had on the podcast in years. And now, sadly, I'll never get him on the podcast because Stephen Weinberg passed away at age 88 this past summer in July. And although he did overlap with past guest Shelley Glashown in a wonderful, quite delightful series of interactions ranging from their growing up together as kids in Bronx Science High School, the famed Bronx Science High School, where so many Nobel laureates came from, I think it's second only to. a few different countries in Europe as to Nobel laureates that came out of that wonderful school. And Stephen's passing closes the door forever in a way that affected me such that I really had some

regrets about how I take the direction of the podcast and the people I'm choosing to interview. You know that I, you know, have prioritized laureates who won Nobel Prizes, not just because they have won these prizes, but because of the human beings. that they are, and what they mean to society, what they represent, not the least of which is because many of them are getting old. And if you have read my latest book, Into the Impossible, you will know that the impetus behind recording these interviews really stem from the passing of snubbed laureate, a man who really truly did lose the Nobel Prize.

And that was, of course, Freeman Dyson, my first guest on the Into the Impossible podcast. And his death led an urgent sense to the podcast production and to actually turn the interviews with these laureates into a book, which I am happy to say I did do this past year. But still, time waits for no man or woman at Tempus Fuget. We must seize the day and all sorts of other platitudes, but they're platitudes for a reason. And then the end of the year, December,

it's natural to think about these things as we turn the corner from December to January, the God of portals, doors, Janus himself. Causes us to look back and look forward, and I look back with regret at the fact that I didn't try harder to get Stephen on. I shouldn't say that I never tried. I did try. I reached out to his colleague, Katie Freeze, his professor at UT Austin, where he was up until the day that he died, a professor of great renown and contribution.

And it's not like he didn't really, you know, make him. an effort to ever do podcast. He did. And you can find many interviews with him. And I wanted to walk you through the, you know, the fact that I would do such a podcast primarily not to just bag, you know, another notch of my belt of Nobel Prize winners. That's not really what I'm in this, in this profession, so to speak. It's really a hobby to do. It's not just to not rack up as many Nobel Prize winners as I can. And so what would I bring that's unique? I think, you know, asking him how he came up with the standard model, you know, in a lecture week unification and what it was like to work with Shelley

and their co-loriate, Abdes Salam, and what that whole thing, that's been covered a lot. And even the things that I'm most interested in perhaps most uniquely qualified to discuss, I think even those things, like his perspective on religion, I don't think that that would be only the subjects that would make an interview with me worthwhile for him. So I did reach out.

to him to get him to come on the podcast. And Katie helped out stupendously. And unfortunately, I think he was, you know, suffering some effects or just far too busy. And he was cordial in his reply that he couldn't do it. And he said no. So that's the way it goes. I've been rejected many times with many guests on the show. And I assume I'll be rejected many more. That's the great Nobel laureate of hockey. Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. So I keep taking those shots. But I want to walk you through what I would have talked to him about. I'm going to call this episode my never before recorded interview with Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg. And I wanted to focus on mostly his writings, his philosophy, his perspective and

outlook on physics, ranging from his really incredible breadth of contributions. He was a philosopher of a sort, and he was a great writer. And I first became connected to him back in 1992. So I want to take you back into 1992. I had just returned from a fruitful summer working at the College of William and Mary, where I had been an REU student. R.U. is a program that the National Science Foundation runs for undergraduates. In that case, I had just finished my junior year,

So I had been applying to these programs and I got accepted to one and it took me to Virginia, where, of all places, I got to work at NASA, NASA Langley Research Base and Air Force Base down there. And it was an exciting time. It was before my senior year, I was getting excited, looking into the home stretch. I'd finally decided that I had wanted to go to graduate school for physics and that I would take the graduate record exam, which is no longer required to get into graduate schools these days. We'll talk about that some other time. But I applied and I began studying and I met some really good friends

and had some really great contacts that year. And I was offered a job at NASA Langley. Continuing the program that I worked on, which is using infrared radiation to scan aircraft and spacecraft for microscopic cracks in their skin. And I learned all sorts of cool things about airplanes like the airplane skin and your Southwest airline jet is held together, not by the rivets that you see,

but instead by the glue and the rivets are meant to hold the glue glued panels in place as they cure. I'd never known that, and they were interested in looking for delamination cracks in that glue that would lead to a situation where the skin of the plane could rip off, and that had some severe downsides, as you could imagine. It was only a few years after this Aloha Airlines, I think it was. It came apart in flight, and tragically some people were sucked out of the plane. I think at least one person felt her death.

And so it became a priority for the FAA and for the airlines. And so NASA began working on this. They're partially, their aeronautics is in their title. And so I worked on this and developed some techniques and helped to write some papers and work with an amazing man. I wonder if he's out there anywhere. Sometimes I do get people listening to this podcast, including one of my friends that I met during this program, Joel Savillo, who just got in contact with me after many years after hearing this podcast. So Elliot Kramer, if you're out there, please shoot me an email.

You made a huge impact on my life, my career, and I wouldn't be doing this without you in some sense. So thank you, Elliot. But Elliot offered me a job at the end of the summer being what would be called a, eventually leading to what we call a civil servant or long-term permanent, basically like tenure for NASA. And I was flattered, but I was very resolute. It was very set on going to graduate school. And part of the reason was to work on these exciting discoveries. It was only a year or two after Alan Gooth had come up with the model of the theory of inflation. And it was at the exact time when the Kobe satellite had come out with its phenomenal results that previous April of 1992 in the cosmic microwave background radiation that, that

discovered not only the spectrum was exquisitely measured and faithfully reproduced a black body spectrum, but the antisotropy had been measured to exquisite precision for the first time. So the universe was not isotropic, that it had departures from complete uniformity, and I found that fascinating. And the theory of inflation perhaps purported to explain how that could come to be. And so it was an exciting time for cosmology, and little did I know I would someday have on John Mather, who was the leader behind the FIRAS, the far-infrared spectrometre experiment, that he would come on this podcast and be in my book. Thank you, John.

And so looking back, that year, that summer was a real turning point. And it was especially so because that was the summer. I had my really first serious girlfriend who was in the math program of this R.U. program at the College of William and Mary. And I won't name her. Maybe she's listening. She'll know who she is. I hope she's moved on from the devastation of dating me.

But we were very serious for several years and so much so that in 1992 in the fall, I went to go visit her and she was at one of the state universities of New York, in this case at Binghamton. And I was in Cleveland, Ohio, home of the Spartans of Case Western Reserve University, as those of you who followed me for some time. know, also one of my former dorm mates contacted me or I contacted him recently. Hey, Jay, if you're out there listening. So it's amazing what this podcast is done for me, really enhance my social

life in ways that even Facebook could not have accomplished. And in that lovely kind of interstices between the end of my junior year summer research at College of William Mary and then starting up in the fall and what would be my last. Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the Carpet underneath looks brand new, while the rest of it looks, well, not so new. It's time for a carpet upgrade. At the Home Depot, we have stylish choices at simple prices from all the top brands. Best of all, we can install it for you, starting at only 49 cents per square foot. So all you have to do is pick your perfect floor.

Start your carpet project today at the Home Depot. How doers get more done. Exclusions apply for licenses. See Home Depot.com slash license numbers. You're at Case Western. I was dating this young lady, and she was at SUNY Binghamton. I would commute from, not commute. I would travel from Case Western, which is in Cleveland, via Amtrak, President Biden's primary mode of transportation.

And fun fact, I recently, when I was in Washington, D.C., if you follow my mailing list, and if you don't, please sign up. It's very easy to subscribe to. Just go to Brian Keating.com. It'll be flooded with invites to join. It's very easy to join, very easy to leave, and I send out messages about once, twice a month. What kind of cool things are out there in the universe? I call my Monday Magic Message in honor of Sir Arthur C. Clark's statement about sufficiently advanced technologies being indistinguishable for magic. Anyway, I had a wonderful summer and fall, and I was visiting my girlfriend.

And the only way to get there was by train, and the fun fact about the train that I want to mention is just a month ago. I was in none other than Wilmington, Delaware, hometown of Amtrak, Joe Biden, on an Amtrak going down to Washington,

D.C., to give an award to pass gas, Mitch Ocacu, from the Arthur C. Clark Foundation for his lifetime achievement. So all these cool things

come together. And I just remember one fact about Amtrak, which was that the train from Cleveland to Binghamton took me through Buffalo. And this is,

you know, 1992. So this is long before smartphones could keep us busy. I think I had a Walkman, Maybe I had a Walkman for music, maybe not. But I had a book, and we'll get to what that book was in just a bit.

And I was trying to sleep and getting back and forth, and I kept remembering this fun fact that I learned not too long before, that Amtrak takes as long, if not longer, at that time, to get from Cleveland to Buffalo than it did 100 years earlier. I just found that, you know, bizarre. And it's really not cutting too much better. The train from Penn Station, where I took it to Washington, D.C., the Xcela. The speed version got there 20 minutes before the local version of the Amtrak

corridor line would have gotten me there for twice the price. Anyway, we have a lot to do when it comes to logistics, and I hope Mayor Pete Buttigieg will address that. Anyway, on that night train to Binghamton, I do believe I had a Walkman because I remember listening to some songs that I had really fallen in love with. And one of them was called Can't You See by the Marshall Tucker band and I would play that on repeat.

And I won't sing, I don't have the greatest voice, not terrible, but it's not great. And I don't want to ruin my first and maybe possibly only ask me anything. It's just a solo episode. Don't get too afraid.

If you don't like it, there'll be regular episodes with Nobel winners and losers including Jocelyn Bell and other phenomenal guests coming up very soon. And Reinhard Gensel, winner of the Nobel Prize, coming on soon. Anyway, getting back to the night dream, listening to Marshall Tucker through the late fall going from Cleveland to Binghamton,

passing through Buffalo, and reading a book that wouldn't allow me to sleep. And that book was called The First Three Minutes. It was written, of course, by the famous Stephen Weinberg, who this episode is dedicated to. The guest I never got. The guest I most wish to have had on. And it was really an incredible book. It was first published in 1977.

And even though it's coming up on, you know, 45 years old now, 46 years old, this book really was an incredible tour to force in that it was still, it is still relevant. And it had many, many, many, precursors to the things that I would later get to get to study. And I want to read just a clip from my friend Dan Falk who wrote an obituary, maybe a eulogy,

this is kind of a eulogy, about Stephen Weinberg. He said his most famous or perhaps infamous statement can be found in the second to last page of his popular book, the first three minutes. Having told the story of how our universe came into being with the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago and how it may end untold billions of years in the future, he concludes that whatever the universe is about, it sure as heck, isn't about

us. And then he said, quoting Stephen, the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. And I found that quite shocking at the time. I do remember reading about the subject of the first three minutes is really what we know about the early universe, which is really culminating with the formation of the light elements. And going earlier than that is really leading towards speculation that we, in some sense, are trying to unravel and reveal with the Simon's Observatory, the Bicep Array experiment, my former collaborators on that project, and trying to hopefully unravel the prediction that would be made in 1980.

I might have said 1992 earlier, so scratch that. 1980, Alan Gooth had this spectacular realization. And that was two years after the publication, or 1979, it was two year after the publication of this great work by Stephen Weinberg. And I can't help but think there was some influence. As we'll see, as we go on, the influence of Stephen Weinberg on the understanding of the first three minutes naturally begged the question of what happened before the first three minutes. And could we come up with a plausible theory that would eventually be cemented by data

at the same level as the as the CMB and the abundancies of light elements would provide. Now, in this book, the first three minutes, again, published in 1977, this is 12 years after Penzies and Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, a 2.7 degree Kelvin radiative glow that permeates all of space and time, local time at least. It was hotter in the past. But that signature was discovered and then awarded a Nobel Prize for Penzine Wilson the year after the publication of the first three minutes. And then just a year before Stephen Weinberg himself would win a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the standard model and so-called a lecture week unification, among many other things. And one of the things that Stephen came up with is sort of some of the deepest motivation for what we call an anthropic explanation, a non-phobic explanation, a non-pure.

purely rational or purely physical reason that the laws of nature instantiate in such a way is to produce a universe that has cosmologists within it. So he worked on this for later, about 10 years later, and this book has been through many publications and many printings, and you can get a copy for a couple bucks. Even to this day, it's one of the most popular books, and for good reason. It really does describe what we knew at that time, and in some sense, we've added on a lot of precision in the ensuing 40 plus years since the publication of the of this first three minutes. But there's also, you know, kind of a depressing amount that we haven't really unraveled. We don't really have a strong enough motivation for the understanding what kicked off the first, you know, milliseconds, three seconds, three milliseconds, three milliseconds, three milliseconds, four trillions of a second.

And after the Big Bang, what does that mean? And in this book, Stephen Weinberg also discussed the notion of the cyclic model. And a lot of people like to say that the CMB's discovery in 1965 was the death knell for the standard, for the steady state model. But Stephen points out very clearly that it wasn't, that it was not by any means the most definitive evidence that we now in 2020 hindsight year look back on it as having. It's not at all clear that the universe at that time could rule out the possibility of having existed in some sense in a quasi-steady state. And they went to great links to, he went to great links to kind of motivate why that is true. And in fact, he says at one point, maybe earlier than this, he had a book on cosmology in the early 1970s. And I searched through my notes and I keep Apple notes basically as my second brain, as Tiago Forte and David Perel, past guest on the podcast call it.

refer to them for more information. They say everyone should have a second brain because our brains, our squishy, wet brains are really good for having ideas, but they're not good for holding ideas. They're not good for keeping ideas. And I agree with that. So I take billions of notes. I store them just on Apple notes. Now, that's kind of my workflow. It has hyperlinks. I can do all sorts of cool things, embed pictures. But the one thing I can also do on like a handwritten note is I can search. I can search different terms. And when I search on Weinberg, I get the most number of hits, both kind of telling myself to invite him.

Don't forget to invite him. It could be too late to invite him. And also, you know, how I can get to him, you know, through what channels, what friends, what contacts of contacts. One of his former graduate students is now a colleague of mine at UC San Diego, Raphael Flaugger, a renowned young cosmologist, winner of a breakthrough New Horizons Prize, I think they call it. But as I'm saying, the notion that the universe was completely ruled out from being a steady state,

as you know from past guest Giant Narlocar, even today there are people like Giant and Fred Hoyle and my late great colleague Jeff Burbage who took to their grave the notion that the Big Bang was more or less preposterous. And so we're not going to get into that. We've talked about that a lot. although it is cute to note that we are still discussing in great depth in the works of Sir Roger Penrose and in the works of Paul Steinhart and even in Robert Brandenberger, my former professor at Brown University, models of the universe which are not inflationary, they are not singular. They avoid singularities

and attendant issues that singularities bring up. And so I think it was good that we had an alternative as Weinberg said, the quasi-steady state had virtues. And the biggest virtue of that was that of this quasi-steady state, was that it could be falsified. It could be ruled out. And he said the ruling out would come from a precise measurement of the thermal spectrum of a black body. And that was very difficult to obtain in the context of a steady-state cosmology. Of course, that didn't stop Hoyle and Burbage and Narlocar, as you'll note from the interview I did with him, almost exactly a year ago, Narlocar. that they tried and tried

and they actually came up with ways you could get a thermal spectrum from the interstellar dust and intergalactic dust, pervasive throughout the cosmos, which is plausible, it does exist, and when asked, you know, which is more plausible

that there's dust in the universe throughout on all structures and all scales from my toddlers, all the way up to clusters of galaxies and interstitial regions between the galaxies, and an infinitely hot, infinitely dense, infinite high pressure, singular origin of the universe, one might say that,

well, we have no examples of singular origins, singular quantities, singular physical entities of infinite anything, so that on its face should just be ruled out. There's no evidence for that, whereas there's copious, literal, literally littered is the cosmos with dust. So there's something to be said for that. Again, we're not going to relitigate that. But to note, the virtue of these things as being falsifiable. And even the new instantiations or incarnations of the steady state by my friend Paul Steinhart, Anna Eges, who will be a guest someday on the show, they have a notion that the universe can avoid a quantum mechanical phase. And that's good because not only does it avoid a singularity, it avoids the whole need from a cosmological standpoint of having a quantum

theory of gravity. So I think that that is quite fascinating and amazing. And I, I'm I'm very excited to see where that goes, and I've done many videos about that on my YouTube channel. Check that out, Dr. Brian Keating. And we will talk about that in future episodes. I hope to have Paul Steinhart on, as I said, Anna Aegis on, and we've had on people like Sir Roger Penrose. All those models are falsifiable precisely by the exact same experimental apparatus that my colleagues and I are building with the Simon's Observatory. namely, if we see primordial B modes that are a cosmic background, represent a cosmic background of primordial gravitational waves,

that will be nailing the coffin proof that those theories of alternative cosmologies, alternative to inflation, are wrong. Won't prove inflation. It won't cast no more doubts on inflation. There will still be questions about the validity of inflation. However, they will rule out these other models. So they're very much in the tradition of the Stephen Wall. Weinberg proposal that there's a virtue in these models unlike the Big Bang, which is,

according to him, not falsifiable. And all the more so when it comes to the inflationary universe. So I think that's fascinating. It's a theme I'm going to keep exploring. And that was touched upon after the successor to the first three minutes was really Stephen Hawking's brief history of time, where he spoke about the issues of what would come before the first three minutes. And in that, it was

slightly before even the notion of the inflationary universe had become popular. And sort of the successor to a brief history of time, which is a successor to the first three minutes, was Alan Gooth's book, The Inflationary Universe. And I hope

to get Alan on the show at some point and Andri Linday as well. But that will be a topic for a future time. I'm always reluctant to say who I'm going to have on, who I've had on. A lot of you don't like it and say I'm name dropping. Well, I mean, what else am I going to do? I feel like I can't offer you the totality of cosmological knowledge that has been acquired by my Titanic colleagues and collaborators. So if I don't name drop, you're going to

assume it's me coming up with all these things, which it certainly is not. So my job is kind of like I always like to say, I'm like, you know, the person that they say in the old joke, what do you call the person who hangs out with musicians, you call him a drummer. I hope, you know, I can be kind of the person that hangs out with these theorists. And it helps that I'm an experimentalist, I suppose. And so getting back to this kind of the follow-on, the successor to the first three minutes was this book, A Brief History of Time, in which he also, Stephen Hawking, now, different spelling of the word Stephen.

Stephen Hawking takes on Stephen Weinberg's notion of pitilessness, meaning that there is no dominion, there is no need for an all-powerful, omniscient, omnipotent being. And we'll get into some of the statements that Weinberg made, but that truly was a torch that was passed to Stephen Hawking 11 years later. And Stephen clearly took up this mantle, again, baton passed or mantel. I don't know, what's a mantle?

How do you pass a mantle? But anyway, the laurels, it was a clean, clean transfer of power, so to speak, between the two Stevens. And even more so perhaps with Alan Gooth, and we'll talk about that in a later time in the inflationary universe, although Alan speaks less, much less about theology and theism than do either Weinberg or Hawking. I mean, Hawking says if we do come up with a theory of everything, which he suspects will come from M theory, And he already did pretty much presuppose even prior to Kobe that the inflationary universe was correct, that he noted that there would be some sense of a new era in which we wouldn't need God. We wouldn't need an all-powerful omniscient, omnipotent creator. And Dan Falk, my friend Dan, who interviewed Stephen in 2009, he said that Stephen told him that that sentence about the pointless universe led to a number of negative reactions. sometimes taking the form of, wow, why did you think it would have a point?

Others say, well, this is outside the province of science to decide whether it has a point or not. And I think, and then Stephen Weinberg says, I agree with that. I don't think that science can decide that there is no point, but it can certainly testify that it has failed to find one. And that's one of the things I really take issue with. Again, his atheism, as Dan says, on a par with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, in the later atheism of Lawrence Krause, who certainly has taken the first three minutes in the inflationary universe, and to some extent that a type of no boundary proposal

that leads to the non-existence of an origin of time in the classic sense that Krause takes upon this new mantle that the universe can come from nothing i.e. no thing, not necessarily no laws, not necessarily no quantum fields, but utilizing this Bordeaux-Guth-Lincoln theorem and other conjectures that Lawrence, past guests on the podcast, has come up with a notion that the universe can come from nothing. And that's hotly debated, even the notion of what nothingness entails is not so clear as Lawrence and I talked about this past summer. And I'll get back to Lawrence in just a minute because he does feature in this. And so this notion of God as sort of this all-powerful, you know, all-caring, you know, being, that is one aspect featured not necessarily in the Jewish tradition that Stephen and I were sort of brought up in.

But certainly in the Christian sense ability is that he, you know, he recognized that there would be this lacuna, this gap in our sense of meaning. And the fact that I've maintained many times throughout my career and on this channel and elsewhere in my interviews has been that to look to science for meaning or a point as somehow a fool's errand. Because I think that, you know, to think about the notion of belief coming from evidence, I find that very simplistic. And in fact, a lot of what Stephen was turned off by, you know, was the fact that, you know, was the fact that, you know, many of his family members were killed in the Holocaust. And of course, that's something you can't really argue against. But this is not exactly new. This is the notion of theodicy in which a question is rightfully posed as to whether or not you can believe in a God that is good. And that's what the word God, you know, derives from. In German, good, God, and they're very similar.

And whether or not God's goodness can be reconciled with the allowance of evil to take place in the universe. Well, you know, and that's this classic prom. Again, this is not new. He can cite, you know, Aquinas and all sorts of other sources, both Gentile and Jewish and elsewhere. And this is, again, a very simplistic notion. So one of the notions I would have loved to get into and explore is exactly what he thought about God. Because, you know, many, many times he would say things, Stephen Weinberg this is, he wouldn't appeal to God in the same sense that Michi Okaku does and his God equation or Stephen Hawking does in the end of the first three minutes where he says that if we do discovery, a theory of everything, which he assumed would come from M theory, to give us laws

of nature and a, but no boundary explanation for the origin of the universe itself, that we wouldn't need a God, but we would instead know the mind of God, literally is what he said. Weinberg never really mentions that. He doesn't lay out, it's certainly in the first three minutes, which is not a philosophy book, but the sort of notion that we don't really matter in the universe, and therefore that somehow provides the lack of evidence is evidence of lack. Again, these are grand questions. These are things that go back to, you know, thousands of years, and we're not exactly going to make great triumphs. and Thomas Aquinas has a pretty high H index, right?

So it's hard to think about how we're going to really supersede what was done. On the other hand, I can speculate and I can ruminate on what it would have been like to encounter Stephen Weinberg and ask him these questions and what we would talk about. And with my typical sense of respect, but always wanting to be, you know, at least ask the questions that you all would like to ask the person

that I have the benefit of interviewing, I think it is, it's incumbent upon me to take these questions seriously. And I think a lot of the notion of what Stephen would say is not really as sophisticated, certainly as his physics. And so from that perspective, I get a little uncomfortable, obviously talking about what a person who's not here to defend himself. But nevertheless, I don't have the opportunity to talk to him. And so I would like to go off on this fan fictional discussion, not knowing what he's, would say, but sort of using what he has written to suggest perhaps directions that I could have asked him. And again, this is the biggest regret of my podcast career, such as it is, to date,

and I'm sure I'll have many, many more regrets to come. So with that, let me take you through the next segment of comments on religion that Stephen Weinberg is famous for having made, and my response is to them. I wish I had his voice for some of these. I do for some, but not for all. So there's one famous segment where Weinberg is being interviewed and he talks about religion. And this is pretty mild for him as you'll hear. This particular quote betrays none of the underlying hostility that I will review from Weinberg about religion and practitioners of religion. This one's pretty mild. So here's an audio recording of him.

From an interview, it looks like it was done from the video in the 70s, probably 80s. It's not quite that old. So enjoy this. And then we'll get back to his greatest hits or misses right after this. There is no necessary conflict between being a scientist and being religious. I suppose I have to agree there. Even now, there are very fine scientists who are deeply religious. I know a few.

But I think what happened, and it only began to happen with Galileo and Newport. So it took a long time to mature. What happened was that much of the early basis for religious belief was dissolved by science. It wasn't that scientific discoveries made religion impossible. It's that they made irreligion possible. It became possible to understand how things worked without the religious explanation. And particularly, I think more important than anything any physicist did was what, Darwin did. So that's about as charitable as good old Stephen was towards religious practitioners,

as you'll hear, not in his own voice, unfortunately for you, but in my voice. And now we will go into some of his comments about religion and its ultimate corrosive, pernicious, denigrating effect on human beings and on science itself. Okay. So now I'm going to go off a little bit and editorialize in my own fashion. And those of you who are Weinberg worshippers may wish to tune out right now because I don't think it will be quite as favorable to the position of reverence of hagiography that you may hold Weinberg in. And I think a lot of times we have this notion of the halo effect, which is where one's perception of something, somebody proceeds and transfers their affection, their authority from one field, in Weinberg's case,

from physics, to another field, which in this case is atheism or commentary on religion and or religiosity. And again, I never like to proselytize. It's actually forbidden in the religion that I practice in Judaism, not proselytized. We also actively will try to dissuade people from joining our religion because we have it in our mind that we may be chosen for some very unpleasant missions in life. As Eli Wiesel once said, that God told the Jews he had a mission for them. He just didn't say it was a suicide mission. So Weinberg certainly deserves our credits, our accolades, and esteem for all that he did accomplish as a scientist. But quite frankly, I believe many of his comments, especially on religion, are very simplistic.

And although they're held up and they're quite pithy and he had a way with words, very good wordsmith, I don't think he was a very serious person. I don't take his ideas very seriously, at least when it comes to religion. And I want to illustrate that by some of his more famous quotes about God. And of course he was Jewish and he would use that on occasion as a bludgeoned or cudgel to attack the notion of religion, not just Judaism. Didn't say much about Judaism as far as I know it. He would transfer his ire from, you know, the basics of religious fervency or belief. And he would kind of paint the religious with a very, very oversimplified view of religion.

And it really makes me think that he knew very little about it and really dismissed it at an early age. And so having this incredible esteem that he did have in physics is really no free pass to comment, especially when you're almost willfully ignorant. I mean, some of the things I'm going to read to you is quotes, which are held up in such incredible, you know, to such incredible fanfare by fellow atheists, are really quite simplistic. And I want to maybe start with one of those right now. So he said in a very famous quote, and we'll cover the highlights or rather the low lights. And again, it's really not fair of me to do this. I mean, the man's not here to participate. He didn't, you know, I can't fault him for not coming on my podcast and the waning months of his life.

That would be pretty hubristic of me. But he seemed to be on a mission for at least much of his commentary that he had about the the notion of religiosity and the scorn disdain that he really had for religion. It wasn't this kind of benign approach to it where, you know, kind of non-overlapping magisteria of Stephen Jay Gould, also an atheist, or, you know, perhaps even Carl Sagan, or even to some extent, you know, the modern atheist. But he was really the first in a breed of what would be called later on the militant atheist. These are people like Lawrence Krause, past guest on the show, and Richard Dawkins, of course. And, you know, I've really been troubled by some of their

relatively sophisticated analyses of religion. And I did confront Lawrence about this on the show when he was on, to some extent, commenting that, you know, he wasn't even aware of the basis for the very name of the religion that he was born into, and the other name that Jews go by is the nation of Israel, the B'nai, Israel, the children of Israel. And I asked Lawrence, you know, I actually said, I believe Lawrence Krause that you are an Israelite. I said, what do you mean?

And he said to me, and I told him the word Israel in Hebrew means fights against God, struggles with, fights against God. And it seems to me that you spend a lot of your time, occupying your time by arguing, fighting with, wrestling with God, which is actually ironically very much in the Jewish tradition. So you're an Israelite. But it troubled me he had no knowledge of even the basis of the knowledge of the basis of one of the major world religions. And I think also, you know, to the extent that Weinberg would cite Judaism, as he will, and this quote that I'll read in just a moment, again, it was a very, very simplistic

aspect of what we call theodicy, that it seems to me any, you know, 10-year-old in a religious school, in a parochial school, would have confronted at one point or another. So I'll read it. And he says, at one point, it seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans. But even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for cancer? for cancer tumors to be specific. So obviously that's, you know, kind of this dark humor playing up on the connection that he had, his relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Of course, that's a great tragedy. But it was not specifically his ire about Germany and later in life. He had railed against or invade against atomic weapons and how deadly they were and how almost ruminating that they maybe should never have been invented or used. And, you know, that's somewhat, again, troubling. When you think about the outcome of World War II and how that could have played out differently had we not invented the atomic bomb and utilized it in American, we're not going to get into a history and discussion about that. But to invoke the kind of Jews that died in the Holocaust, which is kind of unique form of evil. And then a count,

that says that, you know, that would be unfair and that God is somehow, you know, giving in order to give an opportunity for free will to the Germans who are the Nazis who killed Jews during the Holocaust, that the necessity of free will, that you also have to have free will for tumors. So, you know, this is kind of a very, very silly thing to say, in my opinion. Again, it's credited to great fanfare, and I'm quoting all these quotes I'm going to get are from these inspirational quotes, A to Z websites. So these are websites that not only traffic in his quotes in physics, but 90% of them were about atheism and kind of condemning religious theism for perniciousness and for

its corrosive effects, as you'll see in just a bit. So he had a really deep antipathy towards religion, and yet he had never obviously confronted the most basic aspects of theodicy, the question of how an omnipotent God can allow for bad things to happen to good people or good things to happen to bad people, which is worse. And I think this is kind of, again, the notion of free will is not necessarily the germane factor

when you talk about the evil perpetrated by individuals. It's not necessarily that God has to give free will. If you look at the biblical interpretation, there's many points in the Bible itself where God expresses the intent to give free will and then effectively regretting that he gave this power to mankind. And again, I'm not a biblical literalist. I'm not going to, you know, pretend that I am a fundamental Bible beating Jew in my case. But nevertheless, it's clear when God quotes from, and I'm sure Stephen was ignorant of this, as Lawrence is as well. and Dawkins is, I'm sure, as well, these notions that God is somehow this celestial butler, who is just supposed to make everything turn out great and never let bad things happen, even overlooking the fact that it's a totally different category class where the Germans

committed evil, which is very different from what cancer can't, you know, I'll speak about someone getting cancer and then saying it's evil or COVID and say it's evil. There's a nature to the universe. We have things like cancer cells and mutations, and those are completely devoid of intent, purpose, teleology. So it's very simplistic. And then to say that, you know, God is somehow responsible for the affairs of man and violence and evil, true evil, against other men in the case of the Holocaust or any one of the genocines of the past hundred years, or hundreds of years in the case of the Jews. and other persecuted minorities.

So I think this, including my conversation with Stephen Pinker, who's very cheerful about the progress of humanity over the past hundred years. And along certain axes, of course, it has improved tremendously. But that the Holocaust occurred in the memory of some of the guests and occurred to some of my guests on the podcast, Rose Schindler, my close friend from San Diego. She wrote a book and was on my podcast, two who survived about her surviving Auschwitz. So it's not like some distant thing in that way back thousands of years ago, man was treating other man evilly and now or so much better.

It's literally this happened to my friend Rose and has a tattoo on her arm permanently to testify to that. So I think this notion that we're inexorably getting better, and that's all thanks to science and the progress of science, as wine. Berg would also say, science is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing, too. And I wonder how, again, how smart a man could really postulate such a thing and be taken seriously. And again, of course, it's something, you know, there's no evidence. There's no, there's nothing that he's saying other than, you know, in fact, the statement about Germans just a minute ago is a religion free, almost a devoid of religion. The Germans had their symbol a twisted cross and not a cross in itself. They were racist.

They had the Nazis were racist, but they weren't back to and professing any religious doctrine behind that. In fact, they were the most secularly advanced scientific society in the planet's history. Let's not kid ourselves. And in fact, many of their great contributions, their noblest, were not only great scientists like Weinberg, Nobel Prize winners, but they went on to participate. participate actively and take over, you know, the mantle of using the scientific breakthroughs. I'm thinking of Fritz Haber and chemical weapons in World War I, which would then be used on his own family members,

Zyclan B and World War II in the concentration camp. So let's not pretend that a society that's secular is somehow, this perfect paradise without any evil perpetrated by man on man. It just happens to not have a God center to blame. And I think, you know, to the extent that Weinberg was hostile to God really comes through on some of these quotes that we'll be discussing. So I want to turn next to perhaps his most famous of all quotes about religion, which is the following. With or without religion, you wouldn't have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.

but for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. This is like on the masthead of many, many atheist websites and publications. And this, mind you, I've spoken at humanist societies, in fact, the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago I spoke at this past summer, and it was quite a great experience for me. And I love talking with atheists or humanists as they've rebranded themselves for reasons that somewhat elude me, except as Michael Shermer has told me, you know, atheism professes the belief in what it is by its opposite, whereas humanism supports the notion of

humans as somehow agents of the fundamental atomic entities and therefore centered on human progress. And I think, and I've talked with others like Travis Pangbarn, and I've spoken at the Sunday Assembly of San Diego, many times what I'd call it, an atheist church. I'm very happy to do it. I have no problem talking about it with honest people, honest atheists or humanists. We can have very hearty and enjoyable conversations. But I think to use statements like this, these commentaries on religious people, not just on religion itself, because he really probably had a very shallow, as I say, interpretation or knowledge about religion.

And I always point out, you know, he would never have taken a refutation of a lecture week unification from a 13-year-old. He would have to say this 13-year-old who's conjecturing that he or she has found a flaw in my brilliant reasoning is just not knowledgeable enough, needs to hit the books more, and come back. And yet they were all too willing, as is Krause, to abandon their religion in their cases. And that's the two of Krause and Weinberg, to abandon religion at age 12 and 13, after they did their bar mitzvah and then never approached again. And so they're really left with a 13-year-old's understanding at best of religion. And to say something, as he did, basically to want to intentionally weaken religion. Explicitly, he says, anything that we scientists can do,

to weaken the hold of religion should be done. And may, in fact, in the end, be our greatest contribution to civilization. That is borderline, you know, kind of, I don't want to say heresy. I think it's abject stupidity. And again, I would not refrain from, you know, having, I wouldn't say he's stupid in front of his face. But were he on the show, I would certainly like to debate this point with him. No, I mean, he would not want to debate with me. I mean, he has better things to do with his time. In fact, he did. And hopefully he had a very benign ending to his life. But to say that religion, is a contribution that should be extirpated from civilization. I think that is borderline, you know, mendacious and perhaps even on its face evil. As I point out, most atheists that I know and most humanists that I know, they claim to practice the golden rule, they claim to adhere to basic moral principles. In fact, they might even say that, you know, they abide by most of the 10 commandments. You know, they're not murdering anybody. They're not committing adultery or

or covetousness of their neighbor's ass, or as some say, their neighbor's wife's ass. But in any event, they, you know, kind of hoping that they're, you know, they've made their kind of assessment, self-assessment. They've done their little, you know, little check. Their COVID on their soul kind of check. And they come up clean, of course. I mean, who thinks that they're actively evil? Even the most evil people on earth don't think that they're evil. And I'm not saying Weinberg was evil. But to say that they can go through life and that the contributions of religion have not been a net benefit, even disregarding the great scientists, every one of which who is religious pretty much the last 400 years, even ignoring that fact that Newton claimed

his greatest contribution in his life was not the Principia, not his optics, not his many treatises on calculus and mention of it, but that he died a virgin like his idol, Jesus Christ. So these are deeply religious human beings. And to say that, of course, you know, you might say everybody was religious back then, even though that really wasn't true. Nevertheless, you could say, well, that was just the way things were. But to ignore the present day benefits of religious life, which even atheists, like there's a guy Phil Zuckerman here in Southern California, who talks about living the secular life and how you can do it. And you can do it by basically copying and aping the religious practices,

namely giving charity, Sadaka, as we call it in Judaism, you know, doing some kind of service work and so forth. But effectively, they're just imitating what religions do. They get together at the Sunday Assembly on Sundays to sing. You know, they sing Peter, Paul and Mary. They don't sing Gospels. They don't read from the book of Luke or, you know, they're reading from Philip Roth. Literally, this is what happens at these meetings.

And they do a service work and they have some, a kiddish, you know, like a gnaw, afterwards. So they exactly are mimicking it. And why are they doing it, if not for the fact that it has tangible, practical, measurable, discernible benefits, happiness, the amount of charity given by religious people is far dwarfs what secular people do. And to think about, you know, getting your fulfillment from science as being the greatest contribution to civilization, I think that's really conflating the two things that I most

inveig against, which is conflating knowledge with wisdom. Clearly, Weinberg had tremendous knowledge, but I think in this case, his wisdom was found wanting. And, you know, to think about some of his, you know, the grand desires, that science should work to take down religion rather than try to enhance the flourishing of mankind via the contributions to our knowledge, which is the only domain in which science can really operate. I think it's pretty, again, hubristic and immature and illogical. So, not to say that you can't be an atheist.

Of course, you can be an atheist. You can be agnostic. Many of my closest friends are. I've called myself a practicing agnostic and that I actually go to religious services. I go to a temple. I study the Bible. I read Aramaic and I taught myself it later on in life. I know the Christian canon because I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church.

And you can read my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, to learn a little bit about my strange and ecumenical upbringing. But nevertheless, I've been exposed to it. I haven't been exposed as much to Islam. I have many good friends, obviously, and many of my students in the STEM profession and those on whose thesis committees I've sat on over 25 at UCSD, who are either from Muslim majority countries or active practicing Muslims themselves. and that's always very much a delight to participate when a student gets his or her PhD.

And Stephen Weinberg talked about his friend, his deceased friend, Abdis Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states. And Abdis Salam was a Pakistani by birth, if I recall. And he told Stephen that he had a terrible time because although they were receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief. There's that word again, corrosive. First, that religion is corrosive. Now, science would be corrosive to religion, and they were worried about it.

And damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too. So again, this is not a promotion of science for its own sake. This seems like he has an axe to grind against religion. And, you know, it might be ecumenical of him to comment on multiple religions, and not confine it to just Judaism, which he almost never talked about, but mostly it was Christianity, although in that one case was Abdisah, he did mention Islam, obviously. Again, no examples, just these blandishments that were supposed to take seriously that, you know,

that people in Muslim countries would not like science. It's really preposterous, that they only care for technology. I think, you know, this kind of thing that would get him canceled. But had he said it today, and, you know, I don't think cancellation is a great thing. I'm not saying he should be, but I'm just saying that, you know, to say an entire 1 billion, 200 million people just care about technology and don't care about science is really kind of preposterous. Again, on his face, but it's, again, a part of his worldview that I would have loved to explore with him on a podcast. I think we could have taken it deeper, gone into directions that people wouldn't ask him because they held him in such reverence, ironically. hey geographically worshipping the science, the scientist, in part because of these incredible,

you know, like haymaker punches that he would throw on on religions. And one of them is, again, this is now speaking primarily about Christianity as America's predominantly Christian country. I said, I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity. That's all around us. Perhaps more in America than in Europe. And not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that series, but just, you know, after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations, and you feel, haven't we all outgrown this? Do we have to listen to this? This just seems like a petulant little child in a sense. And again, you know, he's not here to offend himself. I feel really bad. I guess this is like very simplistic, you know, because people

are celebrating. We live in a country who's founded by Christians. I'm not Christian. He's not Christian. And we have Christian holiday. Christmas has just come upon. in America. It's a, it's a Christian holiday, but we're, you know, founded by Christians. Doesn't mean the only Christians can be here. I love America. It's the greatest country in the history of the world. But the majority of my fellow countrymen celebrate Christmas. So I wish people on Merry Christmas. I think it's a beautiful thing. I think, you know, instead of looking at it very sarcastic cynically, and to look at it and like that it is beautiful thing that we do live and we do get together in the most organized efforts to bring the greatest sacrifices to, through

our fellow human beings in America are really directly come from the biblical Judeo-Christian tradition. I think that's wonderful. And he obviously didn't. And he also, you know, ultimately will get to a level. You know, he was genuinely poetic and beautiful. He did say some things like the effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. Okay, come on, that's a great line. I don't believe that are very few things that lift a human life. I think there are many things, and I think that's ultimately the canonical refutation of his world view.

And I think I want to get to that. I'll close. I have to have one of his most famous quotes, which is, science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God. It just makes it possible not to believe in God. Now, clearly, he wanted to kind of rule out the existence or any motivation or mandate to believe in God. And, you know, to some extent, it was behind one of those most brilliant insights into what we call the anthropic principle predating the discovery of the cosmological constant or so-called dark energy that he predicted, you know, in some sense, on, you know, the various parameters of it back when nobody thought it was a possibility that had been thoroughly rejected by Einstein himself, calling it his greatest blunder. And to have Stephen in one of his greatest papers make an estimate of how big the dark energy should be in order for us to have a universe like the one we inhabit is really a triumph. And it has, according to folks like Krauss and others, provided a reason for a universe without God.

I don't believe that. Many scientists have tried to kind of suggest that. It does also tend to beg the question of how did that cosmological. constant come to be, might push back or push forward some of the infinite series of turtles that will inevitably arise and fundamentally be unanswerable about, you know, what was the nature of the beginning of time, as we have talked about many times in this podcast. And I think, you know, he has a couple of other ones. Again, this is a series of about 100 quotes, and 90% of them are about atheism and mocking religion.

religion, including one, you know, again, he is really invading against in many of these quotes. I can hope that the long, sad story, this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulama's and imams and bonzes, I don't know what a bonza is, and bodhisattas will come to an end. I hope this is something to which science can contribute. Again, it may be the most important contribution we can make. I would be terribly depressed. The most important contribution would be, again, the devastation of religion because not only of the benefits in which religion is conferred upon humanity historically and continues to do to this very day, the deep moral questions that it forces us to answer if we take it seriously, and again, I'm not proselytizing.

It's not something I'm going to do. But that this was really driven by this kind of wish fulfillment that he had, you know, had this negative conception, again, a very, very strong denigration of the notion of what religion was doing to the world. And it's just, it's very difficult to see that, other than this really occupied him, basically more or less, throughout his career. Maybe it inspired him. And, you know, all the accounts I've seen of him, again, I never met him. I've read many accounts by him, none of them ever portrayed him as a particularly cheerful or happy person. I mean, the interviews that I've read preparing for this podcast are, you know, downright depressing. And, you know, again, these quotes, these pithy, these pithy quotes.

And I think, you know, that they sound good, sound bites, but they're really simplistic. I think, you know, in the end, I want to conclude with the quote that I think is perhaps most refutable, which is that if, he says, if there is a God that has special plans for humans, then he has taken very great pains to hide his concern for us. To me, it would seem impolite, if not impious, to bother such a God with our prayers. That's basically, you know, counting on the question and undoing. that notion of prayer, obviously. And I think, you know, obviously someone who doesn't believe in God thinks that prayer is pointless. But here he's even saying that there wouldn't be a point for God itself, a God itself. And of course, that undermines the very notion of a personal

God inherent in both and all of the Judeo-Christian religions, you know, that God not only is responsible for the creation of the world, the creation of the universe, rather, the laws of nature and the instantiation of a moral and order and a code for people to abide by, but also that he cares and intervenes in our existence. Now, that's much harder to prove that the sea was split or that, you know, Jesus arose from the dead and then died for our sins. And these are not, you know, very easy questions to wrestle this scientifically. But of course, I don't believe that the science and religion have to necessarily be reconciled, not that I have to believe or, you know, that you essentially, it's all or nothing, at least in Judaism,

there is a notion of, you know, picking and choosing. There's some level of that you, you know, you can't eat pork and say that you're a practicing Jew, fine. But there are commands, the command to, you know, believe in God is not really a Jewish notion. That isn't a commandment. You can't command thoughts. There's only one commandment. that deals with thoughts, but it's thoughts that can connect it to actions, and that's coveting. Coveting is an imprecation against coveting, you know, really wanting not only what your neighbor has, but the very thing your neighbor has. So, you know, you not only want a lovely wife or husband or partner, you want the exact partner. You want to take that away. And so it's really a thought

coupled with an action rather than just a thought. So it's not an imprecation against a covet as a thought crime, and nor is the first commandment, a commandment to believe in God. Commandment is a statement. And in fact, in Hebrew, for those of you who may not be Semites, the 99.7% of you out there, maybe, weren't you? In Hebrew, the Ten Commandments aren't written as commandments. They're not called the Ten Commandments. They're called the Ten Utterances.

And so that kind of displays a little bit different notion behind, say, the First Commandment, speaking colloquially. And so I want to close with, again, this notion of his most famous religious quotes, anti-religious quotes, one of which wasn't really centered on atheism, but kind of betrays his worldview. As I say, quite depressing. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. And I think that that's an extremely depressing. And it's not, you know, polyanish of me to say that you should not have to confront things that make you upset. I think it's kind of depressing, as I say, on its face, that there is no point to our existence. I think that there's a very, you know, keen point and very crisp point to the existence.

And I think you can have that point without God, even. But the same that the universe is pointless. And for me, it's connections. And I plan to speak about this at more depth, although I did talk about it. Depending on when you're listening to this, I talk about it with Tom Bill Yu on his impact theory and also with Lex Friedman on his podcast. What is the purpose and the meaning of life? And it has to do with the connections that we make, not necessarily just with love, but the connections that we make in life allow us to teleport not ourselves, our bodies, but our ideologies, our ethical. wills, as I all speak about on the podcast. And I think that it's quite, you know, interesting to

think about how to spread this out requires not the teleportation of our bodies, which, you know, might have supernatural overtones, but of our values really means connections and fostering connections and fostering connections between our connection and how that can grow almost like neurons in a developing baby's brain. And I think it's quite, it's quite, it's quite, uh, it's quite lovely to think about. And, uh, for me, I thank Stephen for giving me these wonderful things to think about, uh, even though, uh, we didn't agree certainly about this. And I would have loved to talk to him about cosmology and particle physics as well. I want to close with the final statement. That really does encapsulate the, the very sharp difference than I had with Stephen. And that's, he says, I don't need to

argue that the universe, that, let me start again, I do not need to argue here that evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer. Here I see him as a very closed-minded scientist, actually, because, you know, often we say, oh, we need to listen to the poets and the painters and the artists. It's nice to listen to them or the spiritual, you know, dancing wooly masters. I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say, we need to listen to Maxwell and Yang Mills and Weinberg and Glashow. We need to listen to the beauty in the theory that they created and realize that it could have been otherwise.

And for those of you who aren't experts and color theory and Yang Mills and the lecture week's symmetry breaking, Let me just make a simple analogy. There are many, many creatures. Maybe most creatures, my biology, friends and listeners out there in the world can correct me if I'm wrong. But there are many, many animals that don't see color, that don't have colon cells in their retinas. And so they can't see color. And yet we can see color. We can see an infinite variety of colors.

We sense and we could exist and subsist as many bacteria do. on just one type of nutrient or as plants do. We can just photosynthesize all day long. And I've always seen it as the resplendent, extravagant nature of science and the universe is almost like that. Like we could live in a very simple one-dimensional universe or whatever, Hilbert space, as Sean Carroll would say. I could live in such an environment,

and we could persist and, you know, There could be some entities living in flatland and look for a treatment of flatland, hopefully coming soon on this podcast, is one of my favorite, if not favorite, popular science books. I really had the deep influence that made me into a curious young scientist in my early teens or late tens, or late not a single digit. And it could be different. We could have lived in a very boring, trivial universe, much the way, you know,

ants live and they don't really experience the third dimension. We live in this resplendent, extravagant universe. And it's a delight in that we have these great features. We taste, you know, four or five different dimensions on our tongue and salt and sweet and hot and not spicy, et cetera, et cetera, and umami. It could be very, very different. 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 Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government

fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. And likewise, and so we should have sort of reverence for that, when we see a rainbow in Judaism. We're supposed to say a blessing. We meet a brilliant person or a head of state. Even if you don't agree with that person's politics, you're supposed to say a blessing, invoking the name of God himself. And again, I'm not proselytizing. Don't send me any email about that, okay? I will never do that.

I will get kicked out of being. No, I won't get kicked out. But the point being, the universe is, I don't want to say designed, because I don't believe in the very concrete definition that is a socialization. with intelligent design, as you know, from my conversation with Stephen C. Meyer, on the publication of his book, The God Hypothesis, Return of the God Hypothesis, I want to say instead that if you looked at it and you see the beauty of the natural world from color to taste, to sound, again, we could just hear monochromatic, monotonic sounds and exist. I mean, there are creatures that do that. And they don't have music. They don't, you know, you don't have bats. The bats use, you know, sound waves and they have

different properties of echolocation, but they're not singing the way that birds or humans do. So I think it's quite beautiful that we have this really over the top, almost as if there is someone saying, like, you've got it really good. It's very benevolent how our universe is. Of course, benevolence implies the existence of a benevolent with a capital B entity. And so you're kind of assuming the conclusion. Nevertheless, when you look at that and then you have a brilliant, an intellect such as demons. And you couple it with the deep, you know, kind of creations that he

came up with with SU2, Electra Week, Unificate. And you say it could be very different. And yet it wasn't. And it has this beautiful, beautiful, symmetric appearance. I say that's benevolent. It's benevolent for our brains in the same way that umami and salt and sweet are benevolent for our tongues and that different colors for those of us that aren't colorblind. can see these beautiful colors and sounds from a, you know, a five-hertz, you know, whale song to the cries of a newborn at hundreds and thousands of hertz. It's incredible. So to say that there are no signs of a benevolence and that almost a designer is really, I think both, even from a layperson's perspective, is, again, a very trivial, simplistic, sophisticated, no

that I would have thought better of him. And so, you know, I have many different feelings about him. I loved him as a mind, as a physicist, and inspiration and his story and just how dedicated his workflow was, that he could just concentrate until the days before he died and just what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. On the other hand, I think we have this tendency to associate, you know, greatness in one field with greatness in another field.

then I think that's simply not true. You don't look to, you know, LeBron James as, you know, probably the greatest basketball player who ever lived and say, you know, like, tell me your theory about Romanian poetry of the 16th century. You don't expect that. And likewise, we shouldn't expect scientists to have any special knowledge or insight into religion. And that I think now, I think in the past it was the religious that wanted to preserve this notion of, you know, this eternal battle between science and religion. religion, but now more and more, in thanks in part to Stephen and the influence he's cast

on his fellow militant atheists, you know, I think that that is now more in the domain of what the atheists are trying to promulgate in order to maintain their relevancy, not that religion has somehow superseded science, or, I think it's a meaningless question. It's like, you know, why is electromagnetism better than, you know, than cooking or something? something. It's irrelevant. I think that there are pathways. If you want to see the, you know, the hand of God and the organization of information and, in the creation of the genetic code and then the creation of the conditions necessary to have the beryllium resonance of, you know, that leads to carbon, you know, being formed. You can do that. And, you know, but you should be

very careful, I also do chasten my religious friends to not put too much emphasis on science to prove the existence of God, because that undermines the whole notion of what we call in Judaism, Amuna, our faith, which is where you get the word Amen in English, comes from the Hebrew Imuna, to profess belief. So I think it's a perilous slope for religion to try to rely overmuch scientific advances and that there should be a peaceful coexistence and that scientists could do well by learning a lot more about the religion and not kind of having these tropes of religious, you know, Bible beating, anti-evolution, creationists and so yes, those people exist, they're very rare. I've almost never met anybody and I am an active participant in religions, spoken at churches,

spoken at atheist events, spoken in synagogue, spoken in Israel. spoken at the South Pole. I don't know what relevance that house. But anyway, the point being the two groups, if they want to have a dialogue, should really be a lot more respectful in the sense of wanting

to understand the basis before you get into an argument, before you get into a debate, trying to win, to understand the limitations of your own argument, and also to have respect for the non-earned, you know, kind of overlapping magisteria, as Gould called it, and that you may have zero

things to say, especially if you don't study it, either as a scientist or a religious person, you know, just, you know, opining about the nature of science, that would be ridiculous. But for some reason, we think of, you know, these notions of the existence of God and our belief in God, and I've spoken about, I don't believe, you can believe in God, I don't think that makes So nevertheless, I think in this waning moments of December, I want to share these ideas with you saying, I do miss Stephen. The ultimate irony is if he's in heaven, but who knows if that's really true. I think it would be kind of fun to see his reaction. But he's clearly a reductionist, a materialist, and humanist, and a real brilliant, but somewhat, somewhat, overreaching atheist, and I would have loved to talk to him. I want to thank him for his books, including his book that I read on that night train to Binghamton. Oh, so many years ago when I was young and in love, and I had no idea how my life would turn out. And if you're listening

out there, my senior, junior, senior girlfriend, I say hi, hope you had a good life. her last name is very close to Weinberg but I'm not going to say what it is of all things I've gone on to to have a wonderful life I hope you have to and I hope all of you out there will have a wonderful life a wonderful 2022 and this is the last episode of the year in 2022 we have many things coming up in the universe of Into the Impossible including interviews with as I say Nobel Prize winners and losers and um Maybe I'll do another solo episode. I don't know.

Leave a review because it's only going to be an audio podcast. So please just, you know, in your review, say, I hate these solo episodes never do another one. You're an arrogant jerk. Or say, I really, you know, found it interesting and hope you'll do more solo episodes in the future, whether they be about religion or cosmology or something completely different. So for now, I'm signing off wishing you a wonderful, healthy, happy. Wholesome, wealthy, productive, and wonderful 2022. Your fearful host, Brian Keating, signing off for the last time in 2021.

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