Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Known Unknowns: Exploring the Humbling Universe | Lawrence Krauss | Part 2 (#315b)

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Lawrence Krauss is an internationally known theoretical physicist, bestselling author, and acclaimed lecturer. He is currently President of The Origins Project Foundation, and host of The Origins Podcast. In this episode Professor Krauss discusses his 10th and most recent book: The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos. The book challenges readers to explore the limits of what we know, and possibly what is even knowable! Can science ever explain the mysteries of time, space, matter, the origin of life, and the nature of consciousness? Lawrence addresses these challenges head on while also celebrating how far we have come in understanding the universe. Professor Krauss reminds us tha not knowing implies a universe of opportunities with the possibility of discovery and surprise.  In the episode Dr. Krauss has much to say about the risks of AI, astrobiology, the pursuit of a theory of everything, and where science can take us. He reveals his motivations for writing this latest book, and his deep concerns for the current state of academic freedom.  As an accomplished scientist with over 500 publications, Lawrence Krauss has focused on the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, including the origin and evolution of the Universe and the fundamental structure of matter. Among his numerous important scientific contributions was the proposal, in 1995, that most of the energy of the Universe resided in empty space. Krauss previously served as Director of Arizona State University's Origins Project, and Foundation Professor for a decade from 2008-2018, and also as Chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from 2006-2018. During his career Prof. Krauss has held endowed professorships and distinguished research appointments at institutions including Harvard University, Yale University, University of Chicago, Boston University, University of Zurich, University of California at Santa Barbara, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), Case Western Reserve University, Australian National University, Arizona State University, and New College of Humanities. He has written 10 popular books, including the international best-sellers, The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing.   https://originsproject.org/ https://www.lawrencemkrauss.com/ https://twitter.com/LKrauss The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos: https://t.co/BD18qnTxtq The Cosmological Constant Paper by Dr. Krauss: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9504003 Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join To advertise with us, contact [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Much of the hype in astrobiology, which is a field which has a lot of hype, as well as unfortunately a field with mixed scientific credentials, I guess, or I don't know how to put it, is that we know so little that most claims are highly suspect. But that's okay because it means there's so much to learn. And unlike, say, quantum gravity, where we may never learn what the universe is like at those scales, What's great about astronomy and what will eventually be, I think, interesting about astrobiology is we have all these tools. We have tools that are going to allow us to explore not just our solar system,

but look at extra solar planets and explore their atmospheres looking for biomarkers. So the next 20 to 30 years could be replete with data, which will change our picture, and that makes it exciting. Welcome back to part two of this two-part, fast-paced episode of Into the Impossible, featuring Lawrence Krause discussing his latest book, The Edge of Knowledge, Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos, and much more. An accomplished theoretical physicist with over 500 publications, prolific popular science writer, outspoken science communicator, and iconoclast. Dr. Krause has a lot to say about the state of higher education, the pursuit of a theory of everything, and where science can take us. In part two, Lawrence expands on his views regarding the search for life beyond.

earth, the nature of consciousness, the risks of AI, and if physics can explain human experience. We also get some recommendations for scientists from the Talmud. If you haven't already, don't forget to listen to Part 1. If you're hungry for more sincere, in-depth, open dialogue into cutting-edge science, and want to know what great minds are thinking, please keep into the impossible in your feed by subscribing and following. For some extra credit, head to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Heed, that's DR Brian Heating and subscribe there too. Remember to click the bell to receive alerts on new episodes as they drop and get in on the live chats. If you feel your personal intellectual universe expanding, please remember to add a five-star asterism to ours and paid forward with a share.

We love hearing from you. Please let us know what you think of the show with a review like this one from Audible. From DM Brenco. This podcast with its questions and deep conversations is a great contribution to helping us become more insightful, open-minded, consciously aware, and fundamentally better human beings. And now, let's go beyond the edge of knowledge on Into the Impossible in Part 2 of this episode with Brian Keating and Lawrence Krause. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the body door, please, how? Describe this what happened in 1997, I think it was, and the White House lawn, which is depicted in the movie contact.

Many people think that this is nonsense, CGI. No, no, no. Bill Clinton is really there. And he's really saying this discovery, if confirmed, will be the greatest discovery of all time. He was talking about the discovery of allegedly microbial life found in the Allen Hills meteorites, which was a project. Originally, there's the Anzement program that you probably helped participate in at Case Western. it's still alive and kicking. And they found this meteorite sitting on a piece of ice chunk in Antarctica, where I've

been a couple times. You've been there a couple times, too. And when you... The edge, I've been to the South Pole. Yeah, you've been to the South Pole, hoping that they would take me, but they never did. Yeah, well, the meteorites not found in the South Pole. It's found the Allen Hills. I know, I know.

I know. The Allen Hills. So they zoomed in on it and they found... So I want to run this argument by you. You talk about in the book in the chapter on life. You say, what is life? Is life elsewhere in the universe? And harkening back to that press conference, which by the... the way was the basis of not only a refereeed and published paper in science, but also the subject

of the NASA Astrobiology Project led by Dan Golden back in the late 1990s. It led to a lot of funding for NASA astrobiology. Okay. So that was never retracted. Some good and some bad. Yeah. Yeah, that was never retracted that paper. It was never officially a Mayacolpa. Well, I think the point is, yeah, well, you know, so the point is that it, yeah, I think they made a, it's interesting that wasn't retracted. The question is what the claims they made, if they made this, the claim that this might be, then

no need to retract. If they made the claim that it was then it would be need to be retracted. Just like you're too young again, but you won't remember, you should remember, you probably do. My good friend Blas Cabrera, who discovered... The Valentine's Day event. I have a video where I enact the Valentine's Day Monopoly.

And that paper, I'm sure, hasn't been correct either because, you know, it was a weird anomaly observation and at the time it looked like it was exactly what was expected if a monopole existed. And it wasn't. So sometimes they're a weird and ominous results. So anyway,

there's reasons to retract papers. But if a paper provokes things and doesn't make claims that are, you know, strong claims that are not wrong, and I don't mind if it's, you know, if it's in. I didn't know, I didn't know that they never, that they never tracked it. But again, I didn't read the, I never

read the original paper. So. Yeah. The paper is generally regarded as, you know, drawing incorrect inference, but at the time it was the best. Obviously, it led to this huge attention and so forth. It's not as bad as a paper that suggested phosphorus replaced, that arsenic replaced phosphorous. Yeah. That's right. And that's right. And that, I don't think, I don't know if that paper has ever been retracted.

And that's just not. It has not been retract. So this is replete. And actually, I should say that my own experiment, you know, Bicep 2 paper was never, we never retracted it. We did a follow-up observation with plank. We showed the conclusions were consistent. consistent with dust, but we didn't say, Mayaculpah, we shouldn't have claimed the first direct evidence for inflation.

So my hands are no cleaner as your friend, Jesus. I've always been a big defender of it, as you know, because they asked me to write the companion piece when it came up. Yes, I know. It was unlucky, but that's about it. My claim is that we should have a publicity budget for papers in an academic media hype complex that I call it. We should also have a budget for retractions, but let's not go there right now.

I want to talk about that Martian meteor right. Let's get back to the publicizing. It's going to the university spend most of their time doing it to try and get money. And so unfortunately, I think actually. They should have an equal, they should have a 10% reserve in a lockbox for for retractions, Lawrence, because it gives the wrong impression that science is. I still get people telling me, Lawrence, oh, you were part, you discovered gravitational waves from inflation? Like today, I get asked about that by scientists. This isn't just by my mother's dry cleaner.

I'm talking about something that happens among scientific elites. Anyway, Lawrence, get back to this meteorite, which, by the way. It's all part of saying we don't know. And we're wrong. And that's all, and you're right. And part of the reason that universities need to do that is they're so low to say they're wrong about anything nowadays. Anyways, they're going on. That's right.

So let's talk about meteorites. So first of all, I want to say that if you're listening to this on Lawrence's podcast or you're finding it somewhere, if you have a dot edu email address and you go to Briankeetting.com slash list, I will send you a chunk of an actual meteorite. And the reason I do that for dot edu is because I'm trying to have a connection between all these young people that are in, college and hopefully influence them to the good to understand, appreciate the positives, as you were pointing out and celebrating rightfully about science, but also as Lawrence is saying, the cautionary tales, when we should have that piece of paper in our pocket that says we're dust, this is a piece of space dust. Anyway, Lawrence, if I told you that my friend down the hall, Shelley Wright, or one of her colleagues here at UCSD, who's on the NASA panel led by David Spurgel to look into the phenomenon

of unidentified aerial phenomena, anyway, if I told her, her colleagues, have found a planet. Okay, there's a planet out there, and it's next to a planet, and that planet is rotten with life. That planet is just completely overrun with life, and it's actually this other planet that's neighboring that planet is in the habitable zone of its host star. It's a type G, you know, sub-giant, and it has liquid, it has liquid water vapor on its surface. It's had flowing rivers on it. It's had on many different climatary changes. It has carbon dioxide in it, which is a biomarker potentially. So if I told you all that ones, and I said that it's been exchanging material as the Earth has, you know, for millions of

years with that life-giving planet potentially, what would you say the odds are that that neighboring planet also has life? Would you, could you say anything? I'm not asking you, don't tell me the exact odds, but would you, would that increase the Bayesian confidence that that neighboring planet has life on it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know. I mean, if I don't know if you're going to get Mars and Earth. Here we go. Yeah. So now I say it's Mars and Earth.

So the fact that we don't see life. Can I say anything as I'm just a dumb experimentalist? Okay. Don't be too harsh. But can you say anything? What? No, go ahead. I'm going to bite my tongue.

Go on. Okay. Can you say anything about the facundity arguments that life is abundant as as Carl Sagan and Anderrian say, if there's no life in the universe, it's an awful waste of space. Well, I've been to Antarctica twice. there's an awful wasted space down there too on one-seventh of the Earth's habitable continent. So, Lawrence, the non-observation of life on Mars, given it's next to a Fassan, fertile neighbor that's pumping out kids on a daily basis, can we not say anything about the difficulties in

establishing life in the cosmos at large? No, I don't think so. I mean, we can find. First of all, it's extremely difficult to extrapolate from a single case, right? we all know that okay even mathematicians generally need two to do an infinite regression but um so to to to uh what we what we can say it seems to me and i try and say in the book is that is that because we know that mars and earth exchange material and because mars appears to early on have been more amenable with the conditions to the life like we know it that it's not impossible that

when you want to look, see what a Martian looks like, look in the mirror, that life first arose on Mars. But we also know that Mars as a planet had certain features that ours doesn't and evolved in a way that made it inhospitable. And so what will be very important is actual data. I know as an experimentalist, I assume, you actually like data. I love data. What are you talking about?

Like data. Come on. Exactly. Well, I'm a theorist who happens to like data. Yes, you do. usually rare, but I'm an old-fashioned guy. And what I would like is data on either extinct or extant life on Mars, which would give me some ability to extrapolate, but more interestingly to me,

and as I described in the book, would be data from a system that hasn't been able to exchange material with the Earth, like the oceans in Europa or Enceladus. and if there were discovered to be organisms, microbial organisms in those regions, that would be much more powerful evidence that there could be a second genesis of life, even in our solar system, which would have profound implications for the abundance of life in the universe. But right now, we know almost nothing because you know of one example of life, which is part of the problem. I wrote a piece, as you know, recently on astrobiology and problems.

And much of the hype in astrobiology, which is, which is a field which has a lot of hype as well as unfortunately a field with mixed scientific credentials i guess or i don't know how to put it is that we we know so little that most claims are are highly suspect but but that's okay because it means there's so much to learn and unlike say quantum gravity where we may never learn what what the universe is like at those scales what's great about astronomy and what will eventually be, I think, interesting about astrobiology is we have all these tools.

We have tools that are going to allow us to explore not just our solar system, but look at extrasolar planets and explore their atmospheres, looking for biomarkers. So the next 20 to 30 years could be replete with data, which will change our picture, and that makes it exciting. But we shouldn't pretend we know now when we really don't know almost anything about life. about life in the universe. One wonderful aspect of the edge of knowledge,

your latest epic tome, is you talk about the Drake equation, and you kind of slip it in, but I was appreciative of it. You basically say it's, how do you describe it? You describe it as sort of like a talisman or, you don't even call it an equation. It's a mnemonic.

That's right, yeah. And I know Frank, I used to know Frank Drake, but it's not an equation. 62 years ago, he came up with his eponymous equation, and it's used replete, you know, you can buy t-shirts with it. But I always point out to my students is actually just kind of like Hubble in a sense. Like Hubble, if you look at his 1929 paper, he's got this plot and it's a plot of distance

versus velocity. The units of velocity are given as kilometers. You know, it's kind of unbelievable. And this is in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, right? The distance is overrated. Okay. Well, yes, that's right. But yes.

So, so, and then, but the idea was, was right. He was wrong. the data were inconclusive. They had no error bars on them, Lawrence. Come on. What would you have given me if I submitted to you a lab report? It was wrong by a factor of 10, too. It was wrong by a factor of at least seven. There are multiple popular. Anyway, but the idea is right. So how do you handle that as a theory that that? That there may be people who have the right ideas or maybe the wrong data or something like that, but still lead to, I mean, where else does that happen? Where else do you make like, I accidentally made a car? I mean, or I accidentally made a transistor. That doesn't happen. serendipitous discoveries, penicillin or whatnot. But it's very different from an engineering solution. So how does that occur? I mean, how does the human mind?

We're going to pivot to consciousness next. And then we're going to get to some audience questions. And then we're going to finish up with my existential final question. Okay. I'm glad we have time. We thought that I thought is wonderful. Yeah, if you have time, we'll keep going. Okay, good.

No, no, no. No, I pushed it off. I told my students, you know, office hours are canceled. You're on your own for the midterm. And Lawrence. Priorities. That's good. So, um,

Is that unique to the human mind? The reason I'm getting to this, when we talk about consciousness, you have a quote, you have two quotes that I love, and I'm going to retweet them. I'm not going to give you credit because you didn't say it, but these two people said it. You said, no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. And going back to artificial intelligence, do you remember what Einstein said was his happiest thought? Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199.

And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay, West Grove's seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Lawrence. Well, the one that I'm thinking about, was when it was, well, I knew the one that gave him palpitations was when it was when he discovered

that the perillion of Mercury agreed with his calculations, which is, which for me is really important because people think, you know, it was this act of magic of work sitting in his room alone imagining what the world looked like. He was driven by data. Yes. And anyway. Yes. So his happy, I'm going to give you a mononic. I can never pronounce it right. That and and coax or coax, I always get wrong because I'm an experimentalist. Okay, here's a, here's a hint. Here's a hint. You see that? Yeah. You see what just happened to him? What happened to Einstein there? What happened to him here? He free fell. What? He went into free fall. So his happiest when he realized that free fall was the same as weightlessness. So can I ask you, Lawrence, in the future,

will this device or something like it, this device that we're communicating on, can it A, have a happiest thought, and B, can it have a perception at the edge of knowledge of what it's like to freefall if it's bound up in a quantum Lagrange system? Well, no, in fact, actually, if you read my book carefully, you'll discover that I talk about that. And again, and these are not due to me, but I think it's incredibly important. And I think I find it plausible. And I think that's all we, as I say, that's all we can do.

with consciousness right now, but highly plausible that an integral part of the development, of the evolutionary development of consciousness is feelings, is being able, is the time, is a necessity for homeostasis, which means you have to have sensors that probe to see how the body is behaving, and that goes all the way back to bacteria. And ultimately, being able to do that in a more refined sense, required a central processing system. And it has been said, by at least one well-known neuroscientist and maybe more, that if a system doesn't have basically a body that can sense the outside environment and feedback on itself,

that it can never really be conscious. That's a central part of the development of consciousness. And it sounds... And sorry to interrupt you, Lauren, sorry to interrupt you, but your good friend, Noam Chomsky seems to have, you know, this notion of a generative grammar, which in part, when I talked to him on my podcast, he said it was very unlikely that you could develop a language system without a body, without an embodiment.

So is that, is that, do you share those same skepticism? Well, I mean, I share a lot with no, not everything, but I certainly, I, I, he was like many things, he's taught me a lot, or at least caused me to think about the world differently than they had before. And one of his statements that really, and I forget if I talked about it in the, in that conscious chapter, is that language, which is for many people, synonymous with consciousness. No one has argued that language isn't for communication at all. It's for internal, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's part of our cognitive being, but, but communication was really secondary that language isn't developed for communication.

And that's amazing when I first, when I first, when I first heard him say that, it really took me back. And, and it sounds, again, it seems plausible. We, I don't know, and, and this is the hard part, this is why, this is why, I, I first, when I first, I said in the book that studying consciousness is like studying quantum gravity or studying the universe because we're stuck in our universe, so it's pretty hard to get outside of it, just like we're stuck in our heads, and it's pretty hard to get out of it. At the same time, we can't probe quantum gravity because we don't have those damn experimental tools.

And you can never, at least at this point, know what I'm thinking, other than me telling you, which is a lie, you know, which is a lie that myself has created as sort of this picture of the universe that I have. That's right. So it's not lying directly. But so I think that, but one thing that I have, and maybe you have the same, is that I cannot imagine thinking of something without language. I mean, I think about things pictorially, but it's so integrated in my own mind to that internal dialogue that I'm having with myself. That's right. I don't think I can ever get around language.

Now, it's chicken and egg. Is that just because I learn language that I use it or is it because it's an egg? And it's hard to know. But, as I said, because I'm such an admirer of experimentalists, quoting another statement of our mutual hero, I suppose, or one of the, certainly mine, Richard Feynman, who I wrote a book, you know, is he said, you can build nothing knows nothing. Actually, what he really said was if you can't build it, you can't understand it. He once told me if you can't build anything knows nothing, but I've never seen it written down, but he did tell me that. His famous statement on the chalkboard of his office when he died, which was later occupied. You don't understand it.

That's the statement that the world knows he said, that I know the statement he told me. But anyway, but if you can't build it, you don't understand it. So I'm reasonably just as reasonably convinced that the only way we'll understand consciousness is if we can build it and have that AI that everyone is so afraid of. But as you just pointed out, we may not be able to do it in the directions people are taking because it's as no was pointed out among others chat gbt and everything else as much as it impresses people is not it's not thinking it's not understanding the world he's just he's just classifying information and data it's auto complete it's an auto company and that's great and it's wonderful it can do that but but it may need a body and it may need many more things it's a wonderful that's why we may need systems that are much more like the systems that another person who I'm happy to say wrote something nice about my book which is unfortunately on the printed version of the U.S. one, but Ian McHughan, who's a friend of mine and a wonderful author,

wrote a great book, and it was called Something Like Me. What was it called? It was about a robot, an AI. Human like me or something? Yeah, and I'm tempted to Google it while I'm talking to you, but go on. That's okay. So, yeah, so I agree. Actually, again, quoting my late father, you know, who used to say, well, machines like, ah, okay, good, very good. So. my late father used to say, yes, we can get a computer to act like us when we make it feel pain. Because I think a lot of is pain aversion we've shown from psychological experiments to whatever extent they passed the replication crisis hypothesis that past guest, Huito Inbenz and I have spoken about in earlier this year. But the point being that we feel pain, like when I'm in a simulator like learning how to fly a plane, I've often thought that it'll be great if there was a little election.

that would like shock me because it's really fun to like fly into a bridge on the simulator but i wouldn't try that with my kids screaming in the back right so but if there's some disincentive you blow their you blow a transistor inside the computer or you do something in it to have it have not only the approbation of you know of its user which says no that it was a stupid prompt or that was a stupid response to a brilliant prompt by me chat dbt instead you you actually panelize it you know and punish it perhaps that's a way forward to the truth. But let me get you to react to the great Irwin Schrodinger, who said the following. Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. You talk about in this book, some discussion by David Chalmers, who's past

guest on this podcast, where I talked to David, and I said to him, you know, he's from Australia. And I said, David, look, if I don't ask you to define the hard problem of consciousness, it's like I'm interviewing ACDC and I don't ask them to play back in black. I said, we got to do it, okay, buddy? So he did it. But I came away feeling like the same essay that was written the year I was born, I think, 1971 by Thomas Nagel. What is it like to be a bat?

Conclusion? I don't have any freaking clue. So isn't this hopeless? Isn't a Schrodinger's interpretation to be hopeless? And furthermore, what if life, as you say, it takes end of two for a mathematician, what if life is only on this planet? Can we ever discuss what is life and what is consciousness? Two seminal questions of this book,

the edge of knowledge. Well, look, we don't, again, the answer is we don't know, but we can try and and that's wonderful. But we can ask the question, we can try and understand exactly what it is we don't know and try, and that'll help guide us to try and get the answers. And that's what I, that's why I frame those questions and talk about it in each chapter. I think the life question is so much easier. The conscience is one, I'm, I'm not optimistic about that because I think it's so, it's such a hard, it is such a hard problem, but not in the sense of trauma necessarily, but there is a hard you know

actually Nome said to me I don't know if it was in a podcast but that you know we may just give up trying to have this you know like Maxwell had this picture of Maxwell's equations and it was with any rules and all this stuff because he needed this

mechanistic picture we dispense with that now we just have the equations and it could be in the end we dispense with this notion well we have to have a picture of how conscious emerges maybe we'll have it some level of mathematical description or something like it. And we'll dispense with this quaint notion that you have to understand it by being able to compare it to things you already know.

And it was, it was, once again, Feynman. It was, it was Coleman who reminded me of this in this great interview, you know, that he did, where someone asked him to explain the force between, you know, magnets, like compared to the force between, you know, you're sitting on this chair. And he said, you've got it exactly wrong. because the force sitting on the chair is not fundamental. It comes, it arises because of the same kind of forces between magnets. So asking me to explain the force between magnets in terms of you sitting on this chair is exactly asked backwards.

And so, you know, that may be the case, you know. Yeah, exactly. So, Lawrence, we have a bunch of questions from the audience and then I'm going to pivot to a few questions of my own. First of all, I've been told as a podcaster, one should at times ask the, author and the guest, if there's anything that I have not covered and you would like me to cover in particular, Lawrence. Well, since I don't go on your program or generally any, well, sometimes I do, but generally, I don't go on any program with an agenda.

And to try and be reasonably entertaining and informative. So, no, there are many questions. There are many, no, there's nothing you've, you know, I think we, you know, in a limited around a time, it wouldn't be nice to spend more time on the things that we, you know, time and space and matter the physics. We'll do that this fall in San Diego. Yeah, I'm hoping we'll do that in San Diego. And I should point out, you have many other...

I don't see ideas. It's a little time that we should... I know. Yeah. But that's delightful. ...out side trying to come in. But anyway, you banished them out of my room. They hate you. That's right. Well, you know, it's not worse than what I did to Nome. I actually like almost yelled at Nome when he was on three years ago. I could not hear. My eardrums had exploded after his dog went nuts in the... Anyway, he'll hopefully have... forbearance and maybe he'll come back on the show if I if he's forgotten you know my am i temeritus

you know kind of hosting abilities which i'm going to be the first um i was going to say the first long but i mean in a sense this is well anyway the first event public event that i want to be doing on the book um is is with noam in in in right uh where and it's going to be a strange experience because at least as it's planned he's going to be my interlocutor he's going to be asking me questions At least that's what the plan is. And I've done many things with Noam where it's worked the other way around. So it'll be intriguing to me to see. But if it doesn't work out that way, that's fine.

Anyway. No, it's great to be getting back to live events and... Well, it'll be live online. I won't be actually be physically in London. Okay. To Academy, which I've done live many times, but has now moved mostly online. I will be doing an event in Vancouver, right? I'm doing Vancouver.

And I'm actually doing... That'll be the... Through my foundation. The only events I do live in North America are worked through my foundation. In fact, if we do one together and believe San Diego, it will be that way as well. But in England, I'm actually doing at least two live public events. Well, one is the Hay Festival for a book festival. And there will be a live event in London with Richard Dawkins and a few others.

And so that'll be nice. But I generally do those only outside North America. Anyway. Yeah. All right, great. So let's pivot to some questions from my. audience here of which there are many and the first one has to do with consciousness Chris from Felice me I'm just gonna see if one of my dogs wants to

come in the one who doesn't okay levy levy only only tribes of Israel can be admitted into the public yeah yeah exactly you should be happy to have Levi come in better leave me but he's downstairs barking for dinner I think go on all right okay so Felice super which I you know was a name I chose for one of my kids but was rejected by my wife he or she asked, what are your thoughts on qualia, namely the subjective conscious experience of the world? We kind of touched upon this, but when you experience the color red, or I guess you don't

because you're colorblind or maybe you don't, specifically, do you believe it's possible for physics alone to explain quality? No. I mean, no, I know, physics is a necessary part of, to explain chemistry, and chemistry is necessary for biology, but I think the human experience is, it's just like, you know, So is physics alone going to explain love? Well, at some very basic level in terms of understanding the neurochemical processes that are electric, that are largely electronic in the brain, yeah, you can say it's physics,

but to understand the deep phenomena, it's not going to be very much help. But qualia is exactly that problem of consciousness, that your subjective experience to the world, which we all wonder, does everyone see the same red as we do when we see, although, as I say, I'm colorblind. But in fact, it is an eye-opening experience that those of you who are not colorblind should have because this is one area where you can experience it. You can go look at books where they show the picture

as seen by a person who isn't colorblind and the same picture as seen by someone who is. And when my friends have seen such things, they're shocked, because me, they look identical. And they are just shocked about it. And so it is one example where you can get in the head of someone else. but that that that that your subjective experience and to realize is is the hard part is why as I used to I forget if I said it in the book but I certainly said it and people always think I'm joking when

I'm in stage maybe when I've been on stage with Richard Dawkins I always say I'm a physicist because it's so easy and it's so easy compared to you know like neuroscience is so hard because it's a it's a much harder problem but that's right but what I talk about in that chapter, which is to me fascinating is one of the things that some neuroscientists have discovered, is how we even fool ourselves about our consciousness. We make up stories about what we think we're seeing or feeling and why we're doing it that we can prove our fallacies. And the split-pane experiments of Gizanagan and others who have shown that it's really amusing

to see how people will rationalize why they're doing what they're doing, fully thinking that's the reason why they're doing it. And so it's very humbling because it makes you realize that, you know, well, as a hume, I think said, you know, reason is a slave of passion. And it certainly seems to be. Yeah, as Einstein said, he's not sure about the universe being infinite, but human stupidity. And perhaps that means bias. You know, we have a bias towards our own subjective experiences. And so therefore, qualia is impossible. I just hate personally, you know, when, you know, And you start off talking about, and I brought this up with Carl Zimmer when he was on to discuss, Gus Life's Edge. I actually got him on the podcast because of an intemperate, you know, snarky tweet where he tweeted out like, you know, we can't even define life or consciousness. Can you imagine if astronomers couldn't define what a planet is? And I'm glad for you to see that that you believe Pluto is a planet, as I do. Neil can go, you know, where on that front, but we love me.

I'll have to. I'm sorry to interrupt, but you can't, it also remind me of one of my favorite quotes. from Charles Darwin. You probably know this quote. At the end of his famous book, he talks about how evolution doesn't relate to the origin of life, and it doesn't answer the question of the origin of life. He says that, he said, look, and he says,

despairingly, will no sooner know the nature of the origin of life than we would, the origin of matter. Matter. And so I find that very amusing. I like that. Yeah, you talk about that in this book, The Origin of Matter. I love these these you know kind of bloopers from from the past and science but you know it's too bad because you know Darwin could have had a good career if he didn't say that Lawrence if there if there if there been social media they would have made fun of him in on that anyway same with Maxwell right okay so let's go back to Newton would have never made it out of the St. Asylum so it's oh yeah he would have been canceled many times over okay so here's a question that you can answer with one sentence probably but I can't cancel it put away yeah okay so here's a question that you can answer with one sentence probably but but V-L-D-T-Z or V-D-L-Z-T-T asked,

what are your thoughts on the logical universe, Grand Unified Theory? And it's okay to say, I have none. On the logical universe, Grand Unified Theory? I've never heard of it. I don't know. Okay, let's move on. My theories are, I don't know.

So my answer is, yeah, I don't have any thoughts on it because I don't know what it is. But I suspect the fact that I don't know what it is makes me strongly suspicious. of whatever. That's right. Okay, user 1990 says, is fusion power achievable or just pseudoscience? Well, we should say it is achievable, but is it practical?

And I want to layer onto that. What if chat GPT gets a hold of fusion reactors? I mean, are you worried about the potential for some form of danger to come from AI and nuclear fusion in particular? Or fission? Well, look, let me answer the second question first.

I was, as you know, for a dozen years ahead of the Board of Sponsors, the Bulletin Atomic Scientists and precipitated and unveiled the doomsday clock every year, which was a great honor followed in the footsteps of actually Oppenheimer Einstein, who were the first ones who lead that organization. But one of the things we were, and I'm still concerned about, is if you ask me about the dangers AI, or at least machine learning control, is the control of nuclear weapons. There already is a hair-trigger. Precisely because of this ridiculous fact that our nuclear weapons are our remain on hair-trigger, in spite of every single president, including the Democratic presidents,

who've all said they would change that and get them and take them off launch on warning status, they haven't. And therefore, as you, anyone. In fact, what's his name? Great Daniel Ellsberg. He wrote a great book, which is terrifying, as did a few other people. Command and Control is another great book. Talking about all the near misses where we've almost had Armagedon because we've come so close to launching on a warning.

And so one can imagine a machine learning algorithm. And now, having said that, it could be the, machine learning algorithm is better than people at judging whether to launch on warning or not. So who might as say? But it is, if you're a human being, and most of us are, I know some who aren't, but if you're a human being, most people kind of intuitively feel that at least there should be some human making that decision, perhaps not least because ultimately it'll be humanity that'll be suffering for it. But it is an issue. It is an issue. However, as fusion is concerned to get to your listeners question.

Yeah. Well, the answer, we used to say that fusion is very promising. It's what Frank Wilczek used to say about string theory. It's very promising and it keeps promising and promising. But it used to be, we all say, the 25 years in the future, and that's a time invariant statement. And it's always been 25 years in the future. It'll always be 25 years in the future.

I don't think that's the case. I don't see it as being. playing a key practical role in affecting our human energy production in the in the foreseeable future by foreseeable in the near-term future in the time scale which is relevant to say address climate change it is also worth pointing out the lie that was propagated by that of course by the false media but by all media and by the organization the Department of energy itself which announced it When Livermore Labs achieved what was a key goal, which is finally with their laser system,

at least producing more energy on the pellet. The pellet, not the total laser, right? So more energy came out of the pellet than was received by that pellet. First of all, that was not in any way a practical system. Secondly, it wasn't designed for energy production. in the first place. It was designed to be able to test nuclear weapons. But there is a technology in the Takamak in France, the I think we'll get that breakthrough. But it's a $10 billion system that, you know, it's so it's such centralized technology

that it, I do think it will be able to produce a fusion reactor, potentially even in my own lifetime, at some level. But is that going to be a game changer? No, not in the near term, specifically because the technological requirements are so great. Now, you know, experimentalists are smart people and maybe they'll change that, but I suspect we'll need to rely on other things well before that. Yeah, I agree. Okay, next question is from H-H, listener, H-H, what can we do about Michi Okaku? He's clearly out of control. I shouldn't say what I call them and not on the air anyway

okay next question what do we do on them I suppose you know if you can do like you can do to me or you can do it anyone else you can just choose to not listen if you don't want to that's the great thing so I'm fully I'm fully

in favor of people being able to spout nonsense and that's a great part of free speech because you're free to if you think they're spouting nonsense to explain why And I've done it on stage with Micho. It was a charming man, by the way. Yeah, he is, yeah.

But I do think he spots nonsense a lot of the time. And it is unfortunate that people, you know, I can say, and I've said this before a long time ago. I mean, that's the problem, the responsibility of a scientist and the responsibility of a scientist who has some public platform is great. Because it's okay to mislead, but not to knowingly mislead. We all mislead unintentionally. And I first realized that when I wrote my first book again when you were a baby. And I got people right back to say, I love this book because I understood, explained this, this and this.

And I knew it never, I didn't, I didn't have touch any of those things. But then I thought, well, this is motivating that person to get excited. And that's fine. But we shouldn't knowingly mislead. And I've on stage hit Michaud because I believe sometimes he knowingly misleads and has misleaded. and that's unfortunate. He says what people want to hear.

And the intention is good because his intention is to try and get people excited by science. And I understand that. But I still don't think that gives us license to go. And we all tend to do it, right? Go beyond. It's really hard when you're talking to journalists and they want to hear something to say, nah, you know, it's not the case. Or it's we think maybe, but it's not.

They all want to hear absolutely. They don't like to hear perhaps or with the, this level of uncertainty because it's not something a journalist like to hear. And so scientists are often say things they really shouldn't because, you know, they really want to please the person who are talking to. Yeah. Unlike me, who has no desire to please you. What's like?

Well, I want to, I want to quote from a book that was written when you were a baby called the Torah, the Old Testament. It says, thou. When I was young, yeah. Okay. It says, thou shalt not put a stumbling block in front of a blind man. And then it ends because I am the Lord your God. Now, Lawrence, you and I study Talmud frequently.

Whenever I get you on the show, I can't resist. I love talking Talmud. You would have been what's called the Talmud Haacham, like Einstein would have been reputedly by the God al-Hadour, the leader of the generation of his time, said that Einstein should have been in Talmud. Anyway, you could have had a good career, Lawrence. But anyway, that statement, the statement, I am God, is very interesting because it's added. The first half that statement was good.

It was the second half that seemed. Well, let me explain why. I know you're not serious. The reason that. it says that. It also says it many other times. It says it, in another instance, it says, when you see your enemy and his donkey is overburdened, help him out because I am the Lord your God. Now, that sounds stupid, right? But it's something that you could. Just use reason. I think if you're a place, I'm the Lord God with reason, which is the right thing to do, then I think you come to the

same conclusions. But go on. I'm sorry to interrupt. But not exactly. Okay. Yeah, I know. I know. It's fun to do this. Our banter is, you know, legendary when we go on tour. this fall. It's going to be really fun. But the reason that it says that is because, but for that statement, there's no way a blind man would know you put a stumbling block in front of him. In other words, it's making a claim that you could do something like hate your neighbor in your heart, which is another commandment. How would I know that you hate me in your heart seriously hate me? Because I have, yeah, yeah, I mean, because. But no, no, but the point is you could get away with these things. And the point is what you just said about Michio and others is, I think,

apropos of that statement. In other words, you should not knowingly mislead the public, because the public doesn't know. So replace God with science. Yeah. I could just say that I think it's reason. I think it's amazing. And if I said it, people would, you know, at some level. You'll sell a lot of books, right. You'll sell some books, but, and you can't be falsified. They do what you want. And that would really sell books. Okay, but go on. Right. So anyway, that's the point. I think that's buttressing yet again the book, the Torah, that you are just obviously so committed to since you wrote the greatest story ever told so far.

I did. I right. Yeah. It was the greatest story. The Torah was up there. But mine was... 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 ocean front 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. All right, Lawrence, we've reached the end of the regularly scheduled broadcast, but I do encourage you to answer one final question. We started the show with Sir Arthur C. Clark's famous dictum, followed by a live magic show that any sufficiently advanced technology is in,

distinguish from magic. Arthur said many things. He also said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And lastly, he said, the only way to know the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. That's the name of my podcast.

I asked you that question last time. I've started a new tradition, Lauren, since you were on last year. And that's to ask a following statement of good old Sir Arthur. The following statement, I want your reaction to. He said, when a distinguished but elderly scientist, now I'm not calling your elderly.

I know you're retired, but I'm not calling you elder. He said, when a distinguished but elderly scientist, scientist says something is impossible, says something is possible, he is very likely right when he says something is impossible. He is very likely wrong. Lawrence, I want to ask you, what have you been wrong about? I mean, it's hard for me to, there are multitude of things every day that I'm wrong about. Seriously, I was, I'll tell you one thing. I'll tell you two things, one that's sort of more physics-wide and one that's related to someone you spending time with, I guess. The finished one was, is I, when I was a junior faculty member at Yale, a distinguished

colleague of mine in astronomy, a very distinguished astronomer, said, we would never be able to measure the fundamental constants of the universe, like the Hubble constant and things like that. Because because astrophysics would always intervene. Every time someone to make a statement about omega, the density of the universe, and it would always show be wrong because you'd find out that there were loopholes for it. And it seemed to be the case. Okay. And he would, and that, and so I, you know, because he was wise and I thought, well,

okay, I learned to be, of course, skeptical. And I'd still remain skeptical when people tell me that, you know, there's some fundamental contradiction in the Hubble constant is measured by the CMB versus supernova. And somehow that means the crazy things. Well, I generally, my general feeling is that experiments tend to be wrong a lot of the time. And you have to be careful. Not as much as theorist. Yeah, yeah, I know.

I know, but exactly. But anyway, so I think that that, you know, I certainly changed my mind about that with the, I think many of us, and I'd run a meeting at Yale, I taught there about the Cosmic War Background in 89 or just before. Kobe, yeah. Before Colby, maybe sometime around then. Yeah.

And it just seemed impossible that we'd ever be able to measure the fundamental microwave background properties that dust and other things. We're just getting the way. It was beautiful. If you could. That would never happen. Dust would never mess up a CMB experiment, Lawrence. And this is, it's a fascinating bit of sociology, if you don't mind me taking a minute of

clients in your own field, which you may have talked about. But it's hard for people to appreciate this. So the Kobe satellite suddenly, for the first time, was able to show, amazingly, that there were primordial fluctuations that weren't, that you could disentangle from our galaxy. and what is so remarkable about that is within months, of course, it was realized that terrestrial experiments had already been able to see much of that stuff, but it always assumed that the noise was in the background,

because they couldn't control it in the same way that a satellite could, you know, above the atmosphere. And then they'd assumed that they weren't seeing it. But within, you know, boom, boom, boom, all these other experiments started to be able to see it because it was assumed that you'd never be able to measure this fundamental thing, and that was a real. It's like the Bannister effect, the Bannister effect.

When Roger Bannister beat the four-minute mile, everybody doesn't. I was wrong about that in the sense that I think I assumed that, and in fact, I assumed, I've always underestimated, well, no, I haven't always, but I've often under, I've learned not to underestimate the tenacity and ingenuity of many experimental physicists. I kind of thought gravitational waves, oh, it's fine, that they're wasting 30 years of their

life, friends of mine working on it, you know, it's great, but yeah, come on, you're not going to be able to do it. And of course, they did. So I've often underestimated what experimentalists could do. And I think it's really important. We talk about quantum computers or other things or even fusion to realize that, you know, it's fine to look at all the problems. But, you know, but humans are really ingenious.

And then the, and then more personal version of it is, you know, you talk about Jordan Peterson. And I have to admit, I'd largely dismiss him as an intellectual, or at least. as a person worth talking to, before I had my first chat with him on his podcast, where I learned that he was actually interested in learning about things. And that, you know, and he still says things I vastly agree with every now and then. But anyone who's at least interested in asking questions and learning is someone I have an innate respect for at some level, regardless of whether I agree with him or disagree with them.

I think, I mean, you know, you talk to a Trump. I mean, I have no respect for the man for many reasons. But one is, it's clear he has no interest in learning. about anything. Yeah, the curiosity factor. I think, yeah, Jordan, you know, I was a little nervous to go on his podcast and, and I was warned by people, you know, your fellow countryman Gad's ad, who I know you know and love and we all love Gad, but, you know, be careful because he's going to talk a lot and he's going to, you know, kind of just don't let him monopolize the conversation. And I didn't find that at all. You know, when I was on the conversation, he, I spoke three quarters.

In fact, so much so, Lawrence, that I was planning to have him on my podcast. And then I said, well, maybe it be better because he has, you know, these 6K cameras and he has a crew flying into San Diego. Maybe I'll just ask him some questions as if he's on my podcast. And then I don't need to do a podcast. I'll just chop it up. And I found he was, he was just asking me too much about dust, about the properties of the electromagnetic radiation, about the plank length. And I was like, oh, shoot, I'm not going to be able to ask him questions to make a fake podcast. Anyway, he agreed to come on the show.

as you have your fellow Canadian. When he was with me, it was just something in his house. But yours has a million views, and you have a million views on that. Yeah, yeah, no, it's true. But I don't, and many people condemn me for this, but I don't try time who's talking. If it's an interesting conversation, that's all that. I learned that from past guest Neil deGrasse Tyson, who right before he called, right after he called me a racist. Or he said, I'm going to play the race card on you because I said, you know, how did you get to be such a good, you know,

conversationalist that you plan on. Is it something that you've worked on or, you know, were you born with it? And he said, you wouldn't ask a white person, you know, why there's such a good, I was like, I just asked you if you worked on it. And he said, no, I actually worked very hard on it. I timed the guest of my, my host and I see how many weeks. I've known Neil since, since he before he was Neil. Yeah, right. We're used to come. No, I know. pictures, he once told me to see how I did stuff. But yeah, Leo more than anyone else. And I admire that in this, in some ways, admire this. Me too. Anything else is, concerted single-mindedly

directed what became Neil. I mean, he had a plan and a conscious plan for doing exactly what he's done. They said on a podcast, and with, yeah, and sometimes surprisingly, and some people might like certain of the ways

he'd done that, but he achieved exactly what he wanted to do. And I, yeah, he thinks about these things very carefully. Very deeply. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he said he never says something in public that he hasn't written down.

which I find very admirable. Anyway, Lawrence, this has been... People say never, but anyway, we'll see. Exactly. I think he probably talks to his wife, you know, and it doesn't write it down from it. I've gotten to say things on, either on stage or in our podcast that he hasn't mentioned. Very good, Lawrence. This has been a lot of fun.

I'm going to run to office hours. It's been a wonderful conversation. Get the book in all editions, Kindle, and print, and audio where I hear Lawrence's malefluous voice. Lawrence, thank you so much. And tune into the Origins Project podcast. donate to the Origins Foundation, and we'll see you next time in person in San Diego.

Yeah, we'll see in San Diego. Thanks for that. Nice things you were about to say about the book when your camera went down, and I hope you can repeat them some other times. We'll edit it in, yeah. I'll figure out a way to get that. I look forward to being with you live,

and thank you. It's been a pleasure, and I knew it would be. Thank you. Likewise. Thank you so much. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to Part 2

of this two-part episode of Into the Impossible featuring Lawrence Krause and his new book, The Edge of Knowledge, Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos. And if you haven't already, don't miss part one. Keep in touch and inspired by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday magic email at briankeetting.com slash list.

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