Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Problem With General Relativity with Prof. Brian Keating and Event Horizon Host John Michael Godier: Part 1 of 2 (#288)

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Do We know if Einstein's General Relativity is right? Can We Ever Fully Solve General Relativity? There are Issues with Modern Science and Prof. Brian Keating has a unique point of view on themIs Science Ever Settled? Part one of a two-part discussion with Brian Keating. Event Horizon links https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnMichaelGodier YouTube Membership: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3q... Podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-michael-godier... Apple: https://apple.co/3CS7rjT Connect with Professor Keating: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. 🎙️On Spotify it’s here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2G3PRMUhxGQkyQzLiiCqlf?si=8656119458df4555 🎧 On Audible it’s here : https://www.audible.com/pd/Into-the-Impossible-With-Brian-Keating-Podcast/B08K56PXJX?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShar 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So I think a variety of levels, it should be highlighted way more often than it is, that science is never so. And the fact that it isn't is a good thing. Welcome, dear listener, to part one of this two-part co-lab episode of Into the Impossible with Event Horizon host John Michael Gaudier. Brian and Michael delve deep into Brian's personal concerns with the state of science and his politicization. You're going to get some rare insight into the philosophy of science and how some sort of science really gets done. Is science ever settled? Can we ever fully solve general relativity? Is freedom of scientific expression at risk? What ethical standards should scientists uphold? Is graduate science education becoming obsolete? Could ideas as radical as Einstein's were in his time

survive today? Is the Nobel Prize fairly awarded? While you ponder the depths of these dilemmas, send us your thoughts in the form of a review and grace us with five stars. Now, prepare to stretch your scientific process as Brian Keating and John Michael Gaudier go into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the Bob Bay doors, please, how? Dr. Brian Keating, welcome back to the program. It's always a good day when I'm on the show with you, John. This is like the fifth time, isn't it?

The fifth time this year. Yes, we just keep doing it. Now, Brian, I am. interested in general relativity because that that theory is weird. It's not like quantum theory where you have all this sort of, I mean, we use that all the time, but we also use general relativity, but surrounding general relativity is a sort of cloud of questions still, even though it's observationally proven to be the case, there seem to be discrepancies. So in the history of general relativity, the very beginning, it seems like Einstein was not the

only scientist very close to formulating this sort of way of thinking about the universe, this description of the universe, and that there were others. And that the general trend at the time over 100 years ago was that we were moving towards this theory. So, and yet here we are a century later, and we're still questioning it. What exactly is the weirdness surrounding the both theories of relativity? Well, I think there's a notion that one scientifically kind of verified information or evidence comes in that it somehow is born complete and is established in perpetuity. At least that's the way it sounds. We get a notion that these scientists usually loan geniuses in the theoretical framework or teams of thousands in the experimental context that

I'm more conversing with will provide a measurement and or a claim. And then the question is not are what are the kind of accurate aspects of that claim, but where are the deficiencies? And more than that, what sort of lacunae or gaps or flaws does this correct in a previously accepted theory or paradigm? And yet, it will have to raise other questions that are intrinsic to its own, the new novel theory or new observation, will inevitably raise new questions itself. And that's healthy. But I think the general policy, will always think, well, that's settled science. You know, we hear about, and that's, you know, one of my, one of my complaints about, you know,

calling anything settled science from COVID origins to global warming by anthropocentric human activities, to say something is settled forever is just the height of hubris. And it actually does a disservice because it shuts the door to a potential young Alberta Einstein or, you know, someone else, oh, I can't make a contribution because this is settled. So there's, there's nothing left for me to do. It's just stamp collecting. So I think a variety of levels, it should be highlighted way more often than it is. That science is never settled. And the fact that it isn't is a good thing. Never settled science. Now, as a scientist, you are always subject to revision. But the thing is, is that I've noticed a lot of scientists can be very reluctant to revise. In other words,

once a theory gets established, there can be pushback on any sort of questioning of that theory. Do you see a dogma within science, or at least some scientists in this regard? Oh, absolutely. I think scientists, for all their atheism, and I'm not speaking personally and myself in this context, I call myself a practicing agnostic, which I think is probably the most economical. way a scientist should behave, but we can talk about that later. But the dogma is something you typically associate with theology or religion, or at some level political parties or maybe sports fanaticism. But it's every bit as rampant in science as it is in those other realms, from politics to sports. And it's sort of ludicrous to expect on the one hand that we claim that

scientists are just ordinary average people. In the other hand, we want to portray us, you know, myself and my fellow colleagues, as ineffitable, you know, kind of the boffins that never make mistakes and therefore can't be doubted, right? If you're ineffable, as the Pope used to be considered, then you can't be questioned. That's the scary thing. And I think as I think it was Feynman or Sagan, I always conflate these two guys, but they said something like I'd rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned. But when you have something that's settled science, then by definition you can't question it because it's like questioning evidence for gravity when you drop an handle on your foot. Like, you'd have to be

kind of ludicrous to question the existence of something that's settled after all. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have extremely well-vetted, well-tested, indeed peer-reviewed, replicatable, scientific facts that we can learn from. But to not account for the gaps, the lacuna that I spoke about, is a belief in the ineffability of scientists, which smacks, as you say, of dogma. Do you think politics confounds this? In other words, do you think that when science becomes politicized, the politicians can actually play into this and create even more of a dogma? Yeah, I think scientists allow themselves to be used as pawns of politicians at their peril for many reasons. I made a video for, it happens to be a conservative media outlet called,

Prager University, and also have a version of it on my own YouTube channel. And it's called Follow the Science. And it's all about the science, TM, you know, trademark, where there's one version of science. And my original title for that was going to, I was going to call it political scientists, meaning that, you know, we cosmologists sometimes, we biologists, we physicists, we get enthralled by the rapturous attention that the general public pays to people like us with advanced degree. because we do cultivate a air of authority that cannot be questioned. But as Feynman said, if you want to have a scenario where you can question authority, you can question the answers, say, he was saying it obviously in the context of church

or some religious organization. Well, there is no, like, one powerful religious organization, really, that people look to for ineffability. That may have been true in the past of the Catholic Church. It was certainly never true of my religion, Judaism. We never had an analog of a pope. And, you know, generic Christianity doesn't feature that either. So where exactly are these answers coming from that can't be questioned?

I think in large part it's coming from the, you know, binding together, the alliance of politics and science. And in fact, Eisenhower warned about this. He's famous for his military industrial complex. I recently had Jay Poticharya on the podcast. He's an eminent MD PhD at Stanford University. And he was the one co-authored of the Great Barrington Declaration that basically advocated for common sense, not locking down, working on vaccinating the most vulnerable people in society. And he was shut down.

He was investigated. He was brought up on suspicious charges by his home institution, Stanford University. And it was really a political witch hunt for someone who was approaching it purely scientifically as just answering the question. what do we know about the efficacy of lockdowns, not the vaccine, not where did it originate, and we can debate all those things. And it was really terrifying to know what he went through, which eventually culminated with a email, which was unraveled by the FOIA process, Freedom Information Act, in which Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, a director of the NIH and the chairman of the COVID Task Force in 2020,

colluded and conspired to, quote, take down this lunatic fringe element, which sadly includes even a Nobel Prize winner, which was postulating that we shouldn't just have random massive lockdowns. And so Collins was asking for a coordinated takedown in the media, in government, and in academia of a scientific researcher. And this is just unconscionable to me. And the fact that he had to endure that, he had to endure that, he had dozens. of death threats against him, his family, he's finally emerged from it, but that that took over science should terrify everybody. And this quote from Eisenhower, his farewell address at the same time when he, when Eisenhower spoke about the dangers of the military, industrial complex,

he also talked about the corruption of the scientific process and the implementation by the federal government of holding scientific discovery in so much respect that we would ignore the equal and opposite danger that public policy, in other words, political decisions could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite. Now, thank God, Joan, that, you know, cosmology doesn't usually offer these kind of existential crises, but that's maybe a symptom of maybe the irrelevance of what I do, you know, if you think about it, if, you know, at some point, dark energy becomes really important to your life. I have a couple of good psychiatrists to recommend to you. On the other hand, if you're locked into your house because of the threat of a virus with a 0.0002% kill rate in your age demographic,

you have a right to question the very facilities that are organized to construct such such situations. So it's a scientific discipline by scientific discipline consideration. We need to assess it. But it doesn't stop the conflation of sort of knowledge for wisdom that is ultimately dangerous, not only to society, I mean, it's bad enough that it couldn't impact society, but it's dangerous to the scientific process itself. Because eventually, say, you're a Democrat and you like Fauci and you like Biden, well, if you think there'll never be a Republican administration that you ceded all this power to, then you're just diluting yourself. So I think everybody, of all political stripes, should be very cautious of scientists who engage and and weigh in on things completely out of their area of expertise. It's called the halo effect.

We don't look to, you know, Grammy Award winners to tell us who to vote for usually or Emmy Award winners. We look to scientists every four years they come out and say, which are the Democrats they most like to see be president. This includes cosmologists and colleagues and people I've had on my podcast. So this, to me, is a very dangerous novel kind of thing, but something that even Isaac, Eisenhower was aware of in the 1950s. Yeah, it does seem to me that things sometimes never change. And in certain ways, it hasn't changed since the time of Eisenhower now. Let me ask you this.

Do you think that the key in getting out of this sort of conundrum is to get back to the philosophy, put the pH back in the D and go and look at pure philosophy, the original underpinnings of the scientific method, and say, look, this is how we need to do it and reiterate that to everybody within science? I think that's a very good question. I've noted that colleagues who teach in the medical school here at UC San Diego, thank God we don't have a law school, just kidding. But the lawyers, and even with our business school, they teach classes on ethics. We don't have any mandatory classes on ethics at any of the elite universities I've attended from Case Western Reserve, where I got my undergraduate degree to Brown University, my Ph.D., Stanford, Caltech, where I postdoc, and now here at UC San Diego. There might be some kind of ethical training addictats that we must adhere to. And every couple of years, I have to take a two-hour online course where the mouse movements of my cursor are monitored to make sure I take the whole two hours to tick off all these boxes of different ethical

and kind of moral conundrums that could come up, including valuable things on sexual harassment prevention training and anti-racism training and whatever. But there's nothing that's visceral as being in a classroom. Now, why do we prioritize teaching relativity and we don't prioritize teaching ethics? What do you do in the situation when your research advisors trying to claim credit for work that you did? Or what do you do when you catch one of your colleagues as a graduate student cheating? Or how do you behave if you're not sure if you're going to be able to get a good postdoc? If you don't kind of maybe fudge some of the numbers, I'm just making all these up.

But the point is you never encounter ethical training as a young person. you're just expecting and relying on people's own self-interest in the pH of the PhD to kind of do it the right way. And I think that's dangerous. Certainly medical schools, business schools, and law schools don't do that. So why don't we do this in the physical sciences? I have never gotten a satisfactory answer to that other than, well, you should do it. And I'm like, thanks a lot. Like, I just have a new required class. But you obviously prioritize what you want to improve. And you measure what you want to manage. And university, are not doing the job of this, unfortunately.

Now, as I recall, Einstein himself during the rollout of Special and General Relativity also faced politics and got a bunch of angry letters from scientists, or at least one that I think was signed by 30 scientists saying, you need to get rid of this theory. It's bunk. And yet, it survived observationally. So do you see a difference between the politics of what Einstein faced within science? Now, I'm leaving outside actual. national politics, which were really bad in Einstein's time, obviously. But within science,

do you still see this? So somebody comes up with a seemingly crazy new theory. Do they still face the same challenges Einstein did? Well, they do and they don't. So what you're referring to as this famous book, it was called 100 scientists against Einstein, to which Einstein famously quipped, if I was wrong, all it would take is one scientist to be against me, to prove me wrong, which is actually pithy and funny, but it's true on some level and sort of some platonic ideal where the truth always comes out, but that's not often the case. You have people, as I mentioned, that have been promoting in the biological and the epidemiological and the vaccine debate that we've all been hearing about, ad nauseum for its 2023 almost, and the COVID variant has a 19 on

it. So, you know, it's spanning four years. It's kind of, wild, but this debate is ranging with more and more intensity. You know, the longer this kind of goes on, the longer that we find out what was kind of obscured from public debate and dissemination and what was kind of counter to our own logic and facts that you could get on an airplane and you had to wear a mask unless you were eating on that same airplane. Or you could walk into a restaurant and you could have to sit down at your table and not wear a mask. So COVID had this magic ability to know when you were six feet off the ground versus three feet off the ground. And it would counterfactual to every single thinking, logical, rational person's knowledge of basic reasoning, not biology.

This is just ludicrous or that you could protest in a protest, a very important racial justice, but you couldn't get together for Thanksgiving for more than an hour and 20 minutes here in California in 2020, even if it was with your own family. So you had a stage of protest in order to have more than just your immediate family and be together for more than 120 minutes. So that's insane. And it's, and again, it goes and hurts the public's impression of science. And that's obviously a lot lower down. I worry more about my freedom, my physical freedom, my my freedom of speech and thought, more than I worry about being a cosmologist. And even despite how important scientific contributions are to my identity as a human being, you guys know this from all the people you've spoken to.

that when you're a scientist, it's like I'm also a pilot. I fly small little planes around California. And that's part of my identity. I have many identities. We all do, father, the son, brother, a husband, all these different identities. One kind of outsized component of the Brian Keating homonculus is my core identity as a scientist. And I'm even saying I'm willing to kind of subjugate that compared to my identity as an American, as someone who wants to be free and practice and enjoy fundamental human rights.

And I think from my perspective, that's the most dangerous thing that scientists are waiting in on, sacrificing their credibility for no good reason and undermining the very credibility that humankind and our society will have in science. I think there's been irreparable damage to science in the last few years. And I'm kind of scared about the brave new world that, say, my kids or your listeners' kids are going to enter into. And I'm one of the greatest STEM champions that I think about. that I know about because it's such a big component of who I am. And so it pains me. And I don't know that there's a real good solution to counteract it. So for those reasons, I think we have to be very, very concerned. I think what you're doing and what I'm trying to do on my channel is to get voices out that don't always agree. And this, by the way, we can move away from COVID anytime you want.

But one of the things I've been getting into is related to what you asked in terms of fringe theorists, which are considered fringe, but may be correct. And I get a couple emails a day from listeners or viewers of the podcast, and they're saying, well, I've come to this flaw in Einstein's theory, and I need your help because I'm not good at math, and we'll share the Nobel Prize together. I don't mind because I trust you. Or I get, you know, I saw aliens in 1973 in back of my Ford Thunderbird and Canyon, Ohio. And, okay, great. You know, this, so just, just because you say something and your fringe and everyone's against you and nobody believes you doesn't make you right. The syllogism doesn't hold that just because people thought Einstein

was wrong, those hundred scientists, therefore you're going to be as right as he ended up being proven to be. So we have to be careful. I don't want to over-dramatize it. It's not like science is incomplete free fall, but there are reasons to be concerned and there are reasons to listen to members of different branches of the academy that hold alternative viewpoints. You guys have posted Gary Nolan. He's an exceptionally qualified biologist at Stanford, a cancer immunologist, therapist, named chair professor, started six companies. You guys did an interview. I did a co-interview with him and Avi Loeb. He was also a named chair professor at Harvard. These guys are working on fringe topics. I mean, topics that weren't even to be whispered about a few years ago.

Alien objects, artifacts, sightings, studies, and so forth. First person encounters. The military adversarial encounters. These are fascinating things. Guess what? Three years ago, they were considered total lunatic fringe and only to be kind of trafficked in by people like Tom DeLong and who I've had on my podcast, but not to be taken seriously. And to give Tom his credit, he actually stimulated a lot of interest in this field, which I can't say for sure I know where it's going to go in the future. I'm not involved with any other research. But I want to amplify voices that are seeking truth and sort of not be on the side of those who would want to censor or suppress. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot.

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Now, I want to point everybody towards Dr. Brian's podcast into The Impossible with Brian Keating and the YouTube channel is aptly named Brian Keating. And I want to say this and run it by you. Polarization. And we live in, I think, perhaps the most polarized society in a very long time because everybody's on one side or the other. And I don't think that's very healthy. I wish we could go back to a time, and I lived through this time, of a much, much more open dialogue and with mutual respect and all these sorts of things.

Do you think that the polarization is, whether it's science, politics, whatever, do you think the polarization is the real problem where people pick aside and stick to it, whereas maybe we should try to say, look, let's just have open dialogue and talk? Yeah, it's frustrating because I'm not actually a proponent of what are typically called debates. You know, you hear about these debates and I've hosted a few. They tend to cause people to revert to their priors and they tend to therefore entrench in sort of a confirmation bias slash some cost fallacy bias, one's own positions that they go into ahead of time. And it also kind of portrays science in an inaccurate way of being settled by debate. I can debate Christopher Hitchens about the cosmic migraine background, and I'm sure, quite sure, I would lose the debate to him, you know, whatever it is, because he was a much more skilled, artful practitioner of rhetoric than I am.

So I think the process of debate in kind of a live action format that I've sometimes engaged in on my channel is not ultimately useful. It's kind of fun, and it gets attention, and if it can be done civilly and with comedy and comedy, that can be useful, and I try to do that. But ultimately, I think you're right. I think people revert to their priors, the distributions narrow and more centered on the preexisting conceptions that one went into. And therefore, I think it's quite disheartening. I don't think that we can really expect science would sort of benefit from such things. I mean, ironically, that's the way a lot of original peer review was done in the Royal Society Great Hall, where I hope to be lecturing next year, as a matter of fact. But if you go and do a live experiment,

it's really the process of storytelling versus the actual story itself. And that can obscure the details and the data. So I think there's a place for it, but I don't share kind of the sanguinity, if that's a word, that it'll actually cause people to change their ideas. I mean, just look at politics. I mean, have you ever gone into watching a political debate, say for president and changed your mind? I've never done that. And so it's very rare. And in fact, nowadays, we can vote 30 days before the election and therefore you won't even see some of the debates. So people just vote and the debates are kind of just like for television ratings. I don't want signs to kind of devolve to that level either. It seems dangerous. That's when you get into situations where you could have another nightmare happen on the world stage. and looking at what's happening with Ukraine,

we're getting very close to a nightmare, you know, and maybe we need to pull the debate back and start just having a dialogue and invite everybody worldwide. Yeah, I mean, well, one such debate has been proposed by we frequent guest Eric Weinstein. Dr. Eric Weinstein is a mathematician. He's got a theory of everything,

which is called Geometric Unity. He's been on my podcast more than anybody else. and he last spring advocated for the resumption of above-ground nuclear testing to kind of shock and awe the human beings that there really hasn't been a test that was witnessed since some tests in the bikini atoll in 1952 or something like that. Yeah, it all went underground, and I don't think there's been a test since the early 90s. Yeah, it's all underground. That's right. So his claim, and there's some issues with the safety of doing such thing because you do need a vision bomb to initiate the fusion bomb. So there could be fallout. But the point is that we're kind of blasé about the horrors of what a nuclear conflict could look like. And I've read

things very serious defense reports that speculate on the survivability and even the tactical ability of the U.S. or Russia to win, quote unquote, a nuclear war. I mean, how insane is that? It's like, I want to be the last kind of human beings fighting against the cockroaches that that still can inhabit. Now I know the whole Earth wouldn't be immolated and humans even would survive and certainly life would survive and the planet will survive. The same is true of global warming. I mean,

maybe we should have kind of a biodome, you know, some, just let global warming go critically insane and really verify and just make it shocking on. Hopefully no people would be there. But I had Tim Palmer on my podcast who shared the Nobel Prize for global warming with the IPCC

and Al Gore to be. 2007. And he's called for like a CERN for climate change, you know, basically dedicating the most powerful computers in the world, some of the most advanced technology. But what's better than kind of simulating global warming and making it more visceral? Because what do humans like? As you know, you're a master's storyteller. And I've learned a lot about how to weave a story from you. And I can only aspire to be more like you in the future. But the point is you do something that humans have done for thousands of years. You recognize the fact that humans learn six to 60 times faster with visuals than just hearing or reading or seeing data on a chart. So you perform visuals and

actually inspired me to do more of that in my chart. Anyway, the point is, could we apply that to nuclear war safely? Could we apply that to global climate change safely? Could we apply that to AI and see the effects of a runaway AI and somehow firewall it and air gap it off? I don't know. I'm just totally spitballing here. But I think along the ideas, humans like to to be shown, not told. Maybe it's something we should think about. Well, within storytelling, yeah, there is something to that. But at the same time, you can't really, I would say this.

I would say this. We need to revisit Hiroshima and describe the horror of actually dropping such a bomb. Yeah. And remind everybody that this is going to be terrible for 90% of humanity if we do that. And that was trivial compared to, you know, the largest weapons. That was a thousand times less potent than the largest fusion device that we have capabilities of. Yeah, Tsaramba, you know, just a 50 megaton blast. But you're right, John.

I never thought of that. That's a great idea. You know, we talk about, and obviously my culture being Jewish, the Holocaust plays a huge role. And there's been tremendous amounts of kind of characterization interviews, Schindler's List, the butterfly project. And for good reason, six million innocent people were killed, including 1.5 or 6 million children. And why is it so visceral? Why do we say never again? Well, because those stories have been told in a beautiful way.

And I have a Holocaust survivor, Roe Schindler, on my podcast about two years ago, and she and her husband survived Auschwitz. And it's very visceral. She's gone around to 20,000 people around the world and talked about her story. Well, why don't we do that for Hiroshima? I'm just thinking now, as you mentioned it, we should have. similar things. Now, the issue is that Japanese were the bad guys and the Jews weren't actively killing millions of Chinese, raping Koreans and doing all the stuff that Japanese Army was doing. So maybe it's a little bit more tricky. But I think you're right. We should revisit the stories.

There are some survivors left, not many. But maybe that will make it more visceral, John. Maybe you're right. Maybe that's the way to do it. And I have struggled over the course of my life. Not Brian, I'm from the same country you are. And thinking about the, thinking about the Holocaust. to me is horrifying because it was horrifying, obviously. But just how do you let things get that bad where hatred reigns? How do things get that bad? And how do we avoid it? Well, I think there's a notion that human beings are naturally good or intrinsically good. And I think that's an assumption that's never been kind of worn out by reality. I think individual humans are wonderful, but humanity as a whole is extremely checkered past as every bit as ruthless and red and tooth and claws and the other animal

species, maybe more so because we've killed off so many species. And this is why, John, you know, to come back to our kind of bread and butter and how we paid the bills around our podcasts, you know, this is why I'm very skeptical when I hear people like Lex Friedman, who's show I was on last year, hopefully go back for round two this year, saying that, you know, the discovery of alien life would change everything and it would just revolutionize and it would, you know, Lex's favorite word is, you know, bring love to the world. I don't think there's any chance of that happening.

I mean, you and I, you know, I can go down to the beach here in San Diego and scoop up a glass of Pacific Ocean's finest water, and it'll have not an insignificant amount of microplastics in it and maybe some dead fish. In other words, we just crap on the environment. Well, we know there's an abundance of life. I mean, Elon wants to go to Mars and,

There's far better chances of making the undersea environment habitable for humanity to become intraplanetary rather than interplanetary. And I think we kind of overlooked that and kind of make too much of it. So I don't know to answer your question. How can we make the individual? And I think this is a byproduct of science. I think I had a video come out recently called the worst Nobel Prize ever. And it's about Fritz Haber, who invented the Haber-Bosch process, which, makes ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer, which allowed you and I to eat every day of our life.

And he's been called a person who killed millions but saved billions. And this might dovetail nicely into other subjects because what Fritz invented was a way to make at scale massive amounts of nitrogen. And that is a good thing because it allowed for fertilization. On the other hand, he then took the same tools, technology, learnings, and processes and used it to make and perfect chemical weapons, which were supervised by him and six other Nobel Prize so-called shock troops. The German army had shot. Now, France was a German Jew. This is World War I.

And he won the Nobel Prize in 1918 after the chemical weapons that he helped to pioneer at scale were used to kill tens of thousands of Allied troops in direct violation of treaties that Germany had signed on to. So it wasn't like, you know, the U.S. the U.S. never signed on. We won't use an atom bomb before Hiroshima. We can debate the morality. I happen not to find that very interesting.

But we hadn't sworn that we would never use nuclear weapons before we used them. Germany did swear that they wouldn't use and attested to the fact they wouldn't use chemical weapons, and then they used them. And it was all because this guy, Fritz Haber, who ultimately, and tragically, he lost a tremendous amount because of his knowledge. Not his wisdom. He had very little wisdom. him. And his wife committed suicide. I believe one of his children committed suicide. They were wracked with guilt. And he remained proud till his dying day. He died in 1930s. And just seven years later, the mass industrial devastation of the Jews of Europe, in which, you know, five, sixth of the Jews of

Europe were killed. Many of them were killed by a product called Zyclan B, which was made by his factories in Germany, including members of his own family. So I always ask the question. well, do the billions outweigh the millions, so to speak? In other words, what is it true, John, that no one else would have ever come up with the Haber-Bosch process? It's not like the Mona Lisa. There's only one Mona Lisa, and if, you know, Liena didn't paint it, it wouldn't exist, right? Or is it Michelangelo? Now I'm doubting myself.

Anyway, we'll let it down. The point being, an artistic creation, there's only one creator of it. It's unique. It's completely non-fungible to use, you know, kind of modern language. But a scientific discovery, there's only one representation of scientific truth. So it's natural that many people will come to discover the same scientific facts. They may not discover it on the same day as Einstein or Haber, but in many cases they will discover it immediately afterwards,

and perhaps even in a better incarnation, and certainly without perhaps the loss of human life that was permitted by the activities of Fritz Haber. The Nobel Prize, Alfred Nobel, who famously was the inventor of dynamite, but also the founder of the prize, somewhat seemed to have regretted his development of dynamite explosives because of their use in warfare and how bad they were. So he sort of thought about it and then rethought it and it was overall bad. So what are your thoughts there? And this is how I work in a book plug, losing the Nobel Prize by Dr. Brian Keating. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

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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. Perfect. That's great now. now my kids will be able to finally get into college and pay for it. So I think the Nobel Prize is a mixed blessing.

It's certainly true that Alfred had many regrets, some of which were precipitated by the fact that he was wandering around Paris in the late 1870s. And he walked upon a news shop where he saw a newspaper that said, Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death, is dead. And the article was less an obituary than a celebration. and not mourning him, but reveling in the fact that this guy who'd killed more people through his inventions than any other had finally met his ultimate doom. And it caused him to reevaluate like Ebenezer Scrooge or kind of reevaluate his role only by seeing what the counterfactual history would have been like if he had died. It was actually his older brother Ludwig who was dead.

So it gave him an opportunity for redemption. And I think he then turned, his entire fortune he was not married. he had no children, and he gave the essence of his fortune to prizes, which in his words, should be given to the person, as I always point out, it was always in the singular. He only wanted to go to one person each year for each field, who made an discovery or invention in the field of physics that had the greatest benefit to mankind. So he was politically incorrect. He said, mankind, now they've changed it in Sweden, now they say humankind.

But anyway, so the greatest benefit. What does that mean? Well, let's look at the first one. He eventually wrote down his will in 1995, and then he died less than a year later in 1896. And so I would say, make sure you make your will out before you die, because who knows what will happen if you don't. And in his will, he kind of seemingly had in his mind a paradigm for what these awards would go for. And the most important part of the award is not the monetary value. It's that the award was given to the discovery that had a benefit. So it's called what I call an ethical will. It has an ethical or moral component to it to agitate towards making the world better rather than just purely being financially munitive.

So he took this opportunity and what prompted him. I think it was the discovery in 1895, a couple of days around the time he wrote his will by Wilhelm Rentgen, who was working in Austria, of Germany and came upon an astonishing fact that when a cathode ray tube was generating high enough electronic energy and those electrons were smashing into a target, that there'd be these mysterious rays that would come out of this collision and that the rays would then propagate and they could actually penetrate through wood and human flesh and they would reveal through their exposure on a phosphorescent screen or later a photographic film, the interior contents of any object that had some penetrated amount of these later known as x-rays. So did that have a

benefit? Of course it had tremendous benefit. It revolutionized tremendous numbers of human lives and made it incredibly better and had an unquestionable benefit on humankind, which is exactly what he wanted to do. And since then, there's been many benefits to humanity. not just in medicine, but in many other fields, thanks to physics discoveries, MRI, as I said, the x-ray, CAT scan, all sorts of incredible inventions that were purely physical inventions, as well as discoveries in nuclear medicine. So that's pretty amazing because you don't see a lot of medical Nobel Prizes that somehow revealed the mass of a neutrino or something like that. So it goes from physics to medicine rather than the other way around, which is fine. So that was kind of the paradigm.

And so for that, he is to be lauded because he did make the world better. And the question now is, does the Nobel Prize committee steer his kind of largesse in a way consistent with his values, but also to truly make the world better and benefit humanity? And there, I think there's some question. Thoughts on Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg was an interesting character. He more than others kind of saw the power and the impact of the revolution that Einstein's and Hilbert had started earlier, which is that basically objects in pure mathematics could have instantiations that would make them, in the words of Eugene Vigner, unreasonably effective. In other words,

that you could have a mathematical structure, purely mathematical operators, matrices, and that they would then have a kind of application via this instantiation or representation of fundamental elementary particles, quantum mechanical particles. And he realized that and sought to unify the laws of mathematics with the laws of the physical world that were just kind of coming in vogue. And he was kind of a character. I mean, he famously came up with these ideas and avoiding his hay fever in this island off the coast of, I think it's off the coast of Norway.

And Carla Rovelli wrote a wonderful book about it just recently. And I think it's, you know, he is kind of an inspirational character in that he was incredibly grounded and played kind of a foil to Schrodinger, who was much more kind of spiritual. And he would investigate a physics of sexuality and all sorts of other interesting topics. But he wasn't kind of the kind of pure seeker of connections between the mathematical reality, which had been, as I said, launched by Einstein and Helbert and others, you know, scarcely. It's three decades beforehand. So he is quite an impressive figure in the history of physics, for sure. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Own it all.

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